The Sound of Castle Combat
This is a fantasy novel in which battles are conducted in close quarters through hand-to-hand combat with swords and stuff. A novel populated by those calling castles their home. The author directs metaphorical imagery toward creating the visceral quality of such battlefields:
“The pale stone of the keep echoed the sound of the exchange, a racket like a madman loose in a smithy.”
Darkness
Darkness is the metaphor that defines the age of genocide and totalitarianism so it may seem out of place in a fantasy novel with castles and sword fighting. But the fantasy novel was written in the modern age and the perspective belongs in the here and now. There is simply no escaping darkness in the post-19th century novel regardless of when and where its story may actually be set:
“There is such potential there - he frightens me. And such darkness of the soul-no, Wingsister, not evil; there is nothing evil in him. Just darkness. Despair is a part of it, but denial of what he is and must become is another. Self-willed darkness; he wills himself not to see, I think.”
Pain
It’s kind of funny how pain—which is such a uniquely visceral literal sort of thing—often requires the use of figurative language to put the depth of its intensity across. Even more intriguing is how often this metaphorical description relies up the comparison of type of literal pain to another type:
“Then there was pain; unfocused, but somewhere near at hand. Like the touch of sun on skin already reddened and burned. It got past the drugs, somehow; he tried to push it away, but it continued to throb in those half-healed places in his mind, promising him more pain to come.”
Personification
A very special type of metaphorical image is the one which endows non-sentient entities with human attributes. Similes that give the natural world the seeming ability to do things that so far we think only humans do is quite effective for conveying the social construct of feelings of alienation:
“He was alone, completely alone, as he had not been since he left Forst Reach. The only thing breaking the silence was the whisper of the breeze”
Personality in a Sentence
A more difficult thing to do than some readers might imagine is creating a metaphorical image that sums up an entire personality of a character in a single short sentence. And without that metaphor being a cliché that could just as well describe any of millions of people. To get at the very heart of a single individual that expresses the foundation of his being is a type of magic that makes causing the Statue of Liberty to disappear look like child’s play:
“He paced gracefully across the pounded dirt of the village square, taking each step as though he walked on a carpet of petals strewn especially for his benefit.”
