Homosexuality, not Pedophilia
The protagonist of this trilogy subverts fantasy novel hero conventions by being openly homosexual. That would be problematic enough, of course, but the difficulties of dealing with this reality is compounded by the fact that so many in his world—as in ours—automatically equate homosexuality with promiscuity and promiscuity with pedophilia. As a result, a common recurrence of imagery throughout the novel is Vanyel having to persistently reject this assumption even to the point of reassuring his own underage cousin that he does not expect any “favors” from him. Not only are the assumptions simply off the mark, however, they could not be any farther from the cold shower of reality:
“Dear Father seems to think I've been seducing every susceptible young man from here to the Border, and I've been damned near celibate. The last was—when? The weeks, the months, they all seemed to; blur together into one long endurance trial. A brief moment of companionship, then a parting; inevitable, given his duties and Jonne's.”
Before and After
A lot of imagery in this novel is directed toward describing the before and after. The book opens as the hero has returned home after a long absence fighting a military campaign against the kingdom’s bordering nemesis. He is not immune to this before and after, constantly being greeted with the assertion that he “looks like hell.” But it is not just he who has undergone alteration:
“This Hall had been a reception area - lit by chandeliers and wall sconces, hung with tapestries, lined with dark wood tables and chairs polished to mirror-brightness. It was demolished. The chandeliers had been torn from the beams, tapestries ripped from the walls. The walls, the floor, the ceiling beams themselves were scored and gouged as though with the marks of terrible claws. The tapestries had been shredded, the furniture reduced to splinters, the wreckage scattered across the floor as though a whirlwind had played here.”
Tashir
A young prince named Tashir is at the center of the plot mechanics of this entry in the trilogy. One could well describe the novel on its own as primarily being about how Vanyel helps Tashir prepare to take his rightful place on the throne. The reason this requires an entire book’s worth of narrative is that Tashir’s route to the throne is pockmarked by one hellish experience growing up:
“He told me that his father hated him - that knocking him to the ground that night was only out of the ordinary because Deveran hadn't knocked him about much in public before!...He's afraid to let women between the ages of eighteen and forty even touch him - assume the story he told you is true - Ylyna [Tashir’s mother] alternately beating him and loving him, and then trying to seduce him.”
Magic
One doesn’t decide to write a trilogy in which the word “Magic” appears in the title of each entry unless magic is going to be of supreme importance. And where there is an element of supreme importance in a story, one can be sure it will show up as imagery that is of equal significance:
“This forest-unnamed, so far as he knew - had frightened him to the point of near-hysteria the first time he'd traveled this road. Now he knew why; there was magic here, old magic…The magic was still there, but it lay even deeper below the fabric of the forest than it had the last time he had passed this way…Yes, the magic still slept, deeper than the taproots or the trees and harder to reach - but it slept uneasily. All magic was akin, and all magic touched all other magic - an affinity that made the Gate-spell possible. But close proximity meant stronger ties to magics that neighbored one another; disturbance to one site frequently disturbed another.”
