One of the joys of writing fantasy is that you make the rules. If your characters use magic, you decide how. Great Cosmic Power! Sort of. It’s one of the great challenges too. Fantasy readers are smart and sophisticated. They expect your rules to be intriguing, with internal consistency. Readers bring with them experience, too. If you use what they’ve seen before, or what’s rooted in any mythology at all, they’ll gladly leap ahead of you to guess what’s coming. For that reason alone—but I’d others—the magic system for The Gossamer Mage had to be original. No spells, magically imbued objects, etcetera.
Why? Because the magic in this story is not simply a force of nature flowing through the world and those who use it. It’s a Gift, provided by The Deathless Goddess, and only to a few.
To use such magic, I wanted a scholarly process, in which knowledge and experience mattered. At the same time, I wanted the experience to be intensely visceral. Those who use magic are driven to do so again and again by an appetite they try but ultimately fail to control. Why bother? Because the cost of doing magic would be something physical and permanent. Her magic allows a mage to create made-creatures. Living things with a specific function. For each creation, the mage must pay that life back.
At this point, I’d a good chunk of what I wanted, but how did a mage do magic? Fortunately for the story and my imagination, I happened to flip through a catalogue and found myself reading about the parts of a pen.
The words were wonderful. Ferrule. Nib. Body. I looked up inks, almost immediately discovering history replete with examples of the struggle to control key ingredients. Then there was the making of parchment—
Writers love research. I pulled myself out, blinked at the real world, and knew I’d found my system.
Mage scribes, as I called them, receive Her Gift. They are able to write the words of The Deathless Goddess, a knowledge possessed and shared as needed by Hold Daughters. (Words, moreover, of no language known to woman or man.) To do magic, a mage scribe focuses on a sequence of specific words, forming what’s called an intention, and writes those words one atop the other. The result is whatever they’d been paid to create. A made-horse able to see in the dark and run for days without food, water, or rest. A made-ox able to pull incredible loads. A made-grain resistant to disease. Something of use.
Or a gossamer. A mistaken word, a moment’s distraction or whimsy that creates a wild, free creature instead.
Gossamer or successful intention, each act of magic is recorded by a little bell braided into the mage scribe’s hair. Each act, more importantly, takes its toll: some of the mage scribe’s life is taken by The Deathless Goddess, aging the mage prematurely. A student with twenty bells still appears young, but a master with 100 bells, barely in his thirties, will appear—will be–twice that age.
The consequences to Tananen’s society? Despite the cost to mage scribes, made-beasts have become vital to the economy as well as status symbols. As you’d expect, those able to afford the fee ask for what is less than vital. Frogs to sing in fountains like canaries. Roses to bloom in frost.
You’ve probably noticed by now I’ve referred to mage scribes as male. They are. At puberty, boys who receive Her Gift must become mages. Girls who receive it? They become acolytes and Daughters. They understand Her Words. They speak with Her authority. In Tananen, only a Hold Daughter may own property. And only Daughters pass Her judgement. A Hold Lord who governs unwisely will not for long, for as the fount of magic in Tananen, The Deathless Goddess not only gives Her Gifts, but can act directly. Should She be summoned by a daughter to cleanse a hold, one of Her acolytes is the sacrifice to provide the means.
I’d mage scribes, who trained at a school. I’d magic with a price. I’d daughters and rules everyone in the story know to be true. A place and a magic system, but not yet a story.
Ah, but I’d questions.
This is the way life is in Tananen, but why? Why are males the hapless conduits of Her magic and females caretakers of the land? Why must a mage pay for each use of magic and why does a goddess need their lives anyway? Why do even well planned intentions sometimes produce a gossamer?
One more. The question I’m asking in The Gossamer Mage.
Why have magic at all?
From an Aurora Award-winning author comes a new fantasy epic in which one mage must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic. 
Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.
Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer: a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.
For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.
To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.
The Gossamer Mage publishes on August 6, 2019 from DAW Books.
About the author:
What is magic? As imagined by Julie E. Czerneda, it’s wild and free, a force of nature and source of wonder. She first explored this theme in her Night’s Edge series, starting with the award-winning Turn of Light. In The Gossamer Mage, Julie goes further, envisioning magic not only as integral to landscape and history, but well aware what we’re doing with it. That tie between us and other, the profound changes we make by connecting, have always informed her work, be it fantasy or science fiction.
The Gossamer Mage is Julie’s twentieth novel published by DAW Books, and she couldn’t be more proud to belong to this esteemed publishing family. For more about Julie and her work, please visit czerneda.com.
I always enjoy seeing your sketches within your writing process.