I'm not where I wanna be today.
For one. It is Mother's day and I am traveling go support my siblings.
Second, chapter 9 is not where I want it. I have come up with three entirely different versions???? One will probably be cut to introduce later. The other two can actually be rearranged in a way I think is emotionally satisfying if nothing else.
On their own, 7-9/10 are little snippets about the magic system. If I can nail the edit right, you get a lamentation about how the divine creativity with deities as the muse and practitioners as the inspired spellweavers are having their work compiled en masse and shoved into unchanging stones.
The magic system is supposed to change you. Astraea, Cerya, and Theriya clearly have visual shit going on. Horns. Colored skin. Moth features. Extra arms. Beautiful lesbians.
But that's not the magic system this story is going to use.
Ayre is host to one of twenty one parasites feeding upon one of the divine muses.
The emotional resonance of magic is bound to gemstones and affixed to implements to limit direct exposure. The closest Ayre gets to an act of creation in these chapters is being the one to harvest all the emotional pain that some guards are feeling that might have once been used to weave something compelling.
Ayre hurts them further in order to meet their quota. Backpeddles away and chooses self harm instead.
Only for Snapdragon to sweep in and recontextualize all this. Stop hurting yourself? Please. These stones may be filed with pain, Despair, and self loathing but the cast worked offscreen to prepare resonances you would feel comfortable wielding. These wretched things were made to protect you in the coming days.
Maybe one day you will find need to fill them with your own pains and heartaches. But maybe don't make that today? Instead, allow yourself to feel the weight of what is going into their creation. Share that emotional burden. Allow it to resonate with you.
You'll get more out of the magic system than just causing more trauma for the purposes of meeting a quota to fill the gemstone implements.
In my mind these chapters are so much lesser than the Astraea pov chapter. But they find a value and meaning in the cruel remains of what has been done to the magic system of the world anyway. And I think that's beautiful.
But it might take me more than today to really bring that home. It's a cobbled together realization of what these chapters could say instead of whatever straightforward meaning was intended.
