The Word Goblin

Opinions needed!

"I've tried my hand at playing god before," the Traveler said to no one in particular. I'd seen him here before, though I couldn't recall how long it had been since he'd passed through. His thin silvery fingers, all twelve, strangled the mug he'd spent the better part of the last hour lost at the bottom of. "I don't recommend it. Sure it's fun at first, the praise, the gifts, the adoration. But after a while, the ungrateful little shites forget you." As he spoke, his voice grew louder, drawing the attention of several patrons sitting nearby. The Abalone wasn't all that crowded of a place as it was, catering to the select few capable of finding it in the first place.

A voice creeked from the space beside him, melodic and cold. "I'll trade you for the story."

I recognized the voice straight away. It belonged to Nym. I'd seen them here plenty, but only out of the corner of my eye. While most of The Abalone's patrons could at least be said to have two legs, two arms, and a head all attached to something vaguely resembling a torso, and more importantly, flesh and bones, Nym was closer to an idea than anything corporeal.

The twelve fingered Traveler considered the proposition, still staring into the mug. I had to guess he had been able to glimpsed Nym this entire time, if only in the edges of his vision. They're the memory of a silhouette, midnight black and flecked with starlight, all fuzzy lines and vague perhapses.

"What'll you trade?" The twelve fingered man asked into his mug. Though he'd dropped his voice, I'd shifted far enough down the bar to continue listening as I polished the shelf of glasses. Like water and bread, I exist on these sorts of stories.

There was a long pause before Nym responded, voice butter-soft and melodic while edged with razor teeth.

(I had several line breaks here which I normally do when I mean to go back and add...something??)

"I was out wandering in the mists. I was newly freed of my training wheels and roaming seemed the natural sort of thing to do.

Idea One (original plan): Wynrie had been afforded all of the privileges of a royal, and all that it cost was her shadow. Hailed a miracle, the lone survivor of a Shade attack on her village, she's adopted by the crown and raised along side the crown princess. But as she grows up, it becomes evident that her lost shadow has granted her something in return, the ability to manipulate shadow and even become one. While she plays the part of a royal ward in public, behind the scenes she's spent years acting as the king’s keenest ears and eyes. For all its complexity, Wynrie enjoys her place at court.

(image is costume concept art from the TV show Emerald City done by Andrei Riabovitchev)

But her nearly perfect life is thrust into upheaval when the crown princess is stolen from her bedchambers in the dead of night by a monster made of shadows. Wynrie, along with the princess’s betrothed, a Light magic wielding retired soldier, a scholar on the Shadelands, and a lieutenant of the royal guard, set out to rescue her from the Land of Shadows. But what, and who, they find at their destination may be more than they’d bargained for.

Idea Two: Ilyana left home over a decade away having run away to study in the capital when she was sixteen. In that time, she earned a place of esteem serving in the king’s bestiary after accidentally bonding an elusive great winged wolf, the herald of the royal family. Now, over a decade since she'd left, Ilyana is called back home after her father and only family, passes away. But what was meant to be a short trip home becomes more than she first bargained for. Something dark is looming in her childhood home and she determines to do something about it. Pairing up with a local trapper, Ilyana delves into the forests where creatures of unimaginable horror wait.

(illustration done by J C found on ArtStation)

(I kind of love the idea of this starting out jn a sorta Hallmark movie fashion, with the big city girl returning to her small town roots and falling in love with a rough and tumble guy but also being steeped in fantasy. Cozy fantasy mystery vibes.)

Third Idea: The story opens with a caravan of sauropods crossing the plains, being led by the siblings Hammond and Geera. Though they're young, they're two of the most successful caravaneers for hire. They reach a waystop along the route that seems abandoned but they find a new born sleeping in a crib and after much deliberation, the siblings agree to raise the babe.

(illustration by Shaun Keenan found on Instagram, creator of Dinosaurs of the Wild West)

Now 20 years later having grown up roaming the prairie, River aches for any clue as to what became of her. And when she finally finds it, she's determined to follow it until she finds her answers or gets her revenge. Along the way, she's helped by several interesting characters including a hermit who lives peacefully alongside the deadly theropods, a salon girl who trades in fables, and a backwater sheriff's deputy in well over his head.

(This one is somehow the most and least fleshed out of all. Inspired by Dinotopia and the old westerns I used to watch with my grandpa, i have a lot of ideas mapped out about the world and characters but not much of an actual story yet.)

Originally posted to my Wordpress journal on June 8, 2023

We all know the old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” And while withholding judgment can prove true, especially when meeting new people, I find the opposite approach far more useful when hunting for a new read at my local thrift store. Case in point: Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom for Sale – Sold! The cover caught my eye for one particular reason: a dog. But this was no ordinary dog. No, this classy canine, a Wheaten Terrier, wielding a pen and overseeing a ceremony while sporting green robes and eyeglasses. I had to know why

Truthfully, the cover art (done by Darrell K. Sweet, who famously illustrated the covers for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga) is what really sold me on this book. While it didn’t hurt that I’ve read some of Terry Brooks’s other works, namely the original Shannara Chronicles, I really enjoyed the feel of the cover and the nontraditional approach to the title. Much like the pivotal advertisement that sets the story in motion, the cover does a great job of selling the story. The aforementioned canine scribe overlooks a ceremony being performed by a Gandalf-esque administrator, while a rather average-looking man with an unusual talisman around his neck looks out at the reader. I had questions that needed answers.

I’ll admit, the first few chapters were hard to get through. Had it not been for my curiosity and a trust that Brooks would provide a worthwhile story, I would have put the book down. It’s not that the opening is poorly written, but I do think Brooks shines best when writing the fantastic. Opening in the Chicago apartment of the novel’s main character, Ben Holiday, the first chapter is a slog of exposition. Ben has felt depressed since the loss of his wife, drinks too much gin, and feels disillusioned by the practice of law, all while being comfortably wealthy from family money and his thriving law practice. As main characters go, there was little to make him feel particularly relatable, and it was almost enough to make me put the book down as Ben spends the first twenty or so pages wallowing in doubt, gin, and self-pity.

Thankfully, the allure of Landover, being advertised in a wish book from a prestigious department store for the surprisingly low price of $1,000,000 (about $2.7 million by today’s measure), was too much for me to ignore, much like it was for Ben. A sense of whimsy takes over the narrative as Ben contemplates the very idea. Highlights like the mysterious Mr. Meeks, who facilitates the sale of Landover to Ben, and his pragmatic best friend, Miles, who tries to convince Ben to forgo the purchase, were pleasant interruptions against points where the narrative delved into the finer details involved in giving up one’s adult responsibilities to pursue a midlife crisis.

Once Ben is transported to Landover, the pace and tone of the story quickly adopt the whimsy promised by the initial wish book advertisement. Ben has had plenty of time leading up to his travels to think about his future in Landover, considering the special effects and actors that must be required to make such a place possible. While he expects to be duped, and he certainly is, it happens not at all the way he imagines. On his way into Landover, Ben is attacked by a ferocious dragon and saved by a mythical knight. He meets the court wizard, Questor Thews, the Gandalf-esque gentleman from the cover, rides in a self-sailing boat, and is taken to his castle, which has larders that never run empty and baths that keep the water warm all on their own. But hints that all is not quite as advertised in Landover appear right from the start. Questor may be a wizard, but he’s not particularly adept, as he managed to transform the court scribe, Abernathy, into a dog but can’t figure out how to turn him back. The kingdom has been without leadership for twenty years, and Ben has no army, servants, or money. On top of it all, while his castle is alive, it has been slowly and painfully dying ever since the last King of Landover passed away without an heir two decades ago. It becomes clear that owning a magic kingdom won’t be a walk in the park.

Perhaps his first true test as King comes at his woefully under attended coronation when he learns the reason no one else who’s purchased the kingdom has stayed on to rule for long. Landover, being a valuable kingdom for it’s proximity to the fairy realms, is desired by a demon lord who has ensures none of the preceding 32 claimants to the throne have ever chosen to stick around. But this never ending cycle of barely kings had done a great deal of damage to the land and it’s people. Unlike the others, Ben intends to change that and he makes an effort to do just that. He first travels to the Lords of the Greensward who only agree to recognize him as the king if he slays the dragon, Strabo, who plagues their lands. From the Greenswards, he travels to the Lake Country and meets with the River Master and asks for his allegiance. While he is again denied, he strikes a deal to bargain with the other lords in order that they should stop polluting the earth and rivers of Landover. The only pledge he’s able to earn is that of two gnomes, perhaps the lowliest of species in Landover. As Ben himself puts it, he’s building his kingdom on a house of cards.

During all this, perhaps my biggest complaint with the story cropped up and that was in the lack of female characters. For the first half of the novel, the only women of note are Ben’s deceased wife, Annie, the receptionist to Mr. Meeks office, and Nightshade who is only a name throughout much of the story. All three of these characters lack any real agency or characterization. Annie is dead by the start of the novel though Ben thinks about her throughout the narrative while the receptionist takes up only a few paragraphs of space in the story and is then gone. Nightshade, a classic evil witch archetype, is no more than a potential problem on High King Ben Holiday’s already heaping plate. As a woman, this is a gripe I often have about older fantasy stories. While it doesn’t make them unreadable by any means, I often find it harder to connect to the story. Given my previous experience with Brooks, while I wasn’t expecting a host of female characters, I was looking forward to meeting another strong, determined woman like Eretria or Amberle from the Shannara trilogy. And while Willow, a beautiful sylph who periodically shape shifts into a tree, appears about halfway through the novel and eventually joins the cast of misfits in Ben’s court, she definitely lacks the dimension and characterization of her predecessors.

Willow is, in fact, rather single-mindedly set on belonging to Ben, insisting that she was bound to him by prophecy, to the extent that she follows his company even when he insists she not. While there’s a sort of charm in her stubborn resolve, especially because her presence ends up proving beneficial, it doesn’t make her particularly relatable. She does have moments where she shines, like her second meeting with Ben when her parentage is revealed and when she single-handedly infiltrates a camp of Crag Trolls to save the Court of Fools. But between her almost stalker-like obsession and non-human status, there isn’t much about her that I find relatable or even admirable. By the end of the story, she falls victim to becoming the damsel in distress as well. Given that there are five other books set in the Kingdom of Landover, I hope that Willow’s character eventually sees more development

Later in the story, the fearsome Nightshade does finally make an appearance, and while the consequences of meeting with her lead to an enormous moment of growth for Ben, it is really only the catalyst. There’s very little actual time spent with Nightshade, and her realm, thick with mists and marsh, proves to be nearly as much of a challenge to the King as the witch herself. Similar to Willow, there’s very little depth to her character.

Nightshade feels like a poor imitation of the White Witch of Narnia. She’s part of the oldest magic in Landover and more powerful than virtually anyone or anything in the kingdom, but she’s also a solitary enemy who commands respect only out of fear. When compared to Lewis’s White Witch or to Ben’s next challenge, the dragon Strabo, she is just a bump in the road.

On the other hand, Ben’s confrontation with Strabo is delightful in a way I didn’t expect. Up to the point of meeting the dragon, we are led to believe he’s nothing but a savage monster who thinks with his stomach. Instead, Ben finds a rather polite and, for a bit, even quite talkative dragon. But similar to Nightshade, he isn’t anything original. In fact, he feels a lot like Smaug without a mountain or a horde of gold. Given Ben’s past experience with law, once it’s revealed that Strabo is an intelligent being, I expected the two to face off with words. And while Ben doesn’t subvert expectations so wildly as to best the dragon with a show of strength or skill, he does so instead with a bit of trickery, which was a refreshing surprise.

After managing to defeat the dragon, the final challenge standing between Ben and the kingdom is the demon lord called the Iron Mark. Knowing the confrontation is before him, he asks the Lord of the Greensward and the River Master to attend, hoping to make one last plea for their fealty, but once again he is denied. While his present company is impressed by his victory over Strabo, they aren’t convinced that he has command of the magic that belonged to the crown during the time before the Old King’s death, that of the mysterious Paladin. Once considered the most powerful force in all of Landover, he hasn’t been seen in the Kingdom for twenty years. That is until Ben arrives. Throughout the story, the Paladin appears on several occasions to save Ben from trouble. Similar to the medallion that promises to return him to Earth should he wish it, the Paladin feels like a reassuring bit of plot armor for Ben, who can use any help he can get. But the mystery of who the Paladin is and where he’s been all this time, as many presumed him dead, lingers over much of the narrative.

Thankfully, the identity of the Paladin is made clear to Ben in the nick of time. The revelation is nothing that hasn’t been seen in fantasy fiction before, but as Ben grows into a more complex and lovable character, the reveal feels fitting, and the foundation leading up to it has been properly laid. In the end, Ben wins the pledges of the River Master and the Lords of the Greensward. While he’s honest with himself about this being only one small victory on the journey ahead, he also welcomes the challenge. In the end, he finds the adventure he was searching for, and Landover gains a king.

On the whole, I enjoyed the story. Written in Brooks’s familiar voice, but packed with wit and humor, it felt a bit reminiscent of Pratchett’s Color of Magic, which was released three years before the first Landover novel. While the story had a slow start at first, I’m glad I pushed through. By the time Ben had met the Lords of the Greenswards, I knew I was in for the long haul. Admittedly, this happens probably 1/3 of the way through the novel, but the allure of Landover is strong. It’s loaded with familiar and near-familiar tropes: dragons, witches, bumbling wizards, gnomes with sticky fingers, and of course, a talking dog. All of these lend a sense of whimsy that makes the novel feel familiar, while questions and mysteries surrounding the fairy mists, the Paladin, and the very nature of Landover’s magic keep things from feeling stale.

I found that the story’s biggest failings came about with the pacing. With few exceptions, nearly every chapter falls close to 20 pages long, but there are definitely a few that could have been shortened, broken up, or even lengthened in some cases. This led to multiple points throughout the story where I felt things were dragging out or being rushed along. I think this contributed to some of the characters feeling less fleshed out than they could have been, especially Nightshade and Strabo. And while I almost disliked Ben at the story’s start, with so much time spent focusing on his losses and sadness, by the end, I had been completely won over by his cleverness and determination, even against such stacked odds.

Originally posted to my Wordpress journal on February 14, 2023.

When I first picked up Violet Made of Thorns, I wasn’t expecting anything particularly groundbreaking. On first glance, it had all the staples of a familiar YA fantasy novel. The titular Violet possess a unique talent which has bestowed upon her not only a position at court and the ear of the king but also a terrible burden. While the story rings of notes similar to that of Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen series or the Folk of the Air books by Holly Black, Gina Chen delivers memorable twists on some familiar tropes in this fantasy debut.

What really hooked me at the onset was the blurb from the back of the book:

“Violet is a prophet and a liar, influencing the royal court with her cleverly phrased—and not always true—divinations.”

In particular, those first seven words got my attention not only for their contradictory nature but their bluntness. Though any well-rounded character has flaws, most authors will try to mask their protagonist’s less desirable traits by highlighting their loyalty, cleverness or plucky attitude. But Chen is upfront from the get-go that Violet Loon isn’t a particularly likeable person. She’s cut rough around the edges, pugnacious and a bit of a cynic. Orphaned as a child, she uses her gift as a seer to gain a place at court but she never truly feels like she belongs there. She has no qualms about keeping her divinations vague and even outright bending the truth if it means maintaining the comfortable life she’s made for herself. It’s a refreshing change of pace in a main character.

Although Violet was a breath of fresh air, the setting of the story was a bit more stale. The Sun Continent feels like a pretty typical YA fairytale setting, lost in a blended, time-period mishmash of knights, court drama, and ladies in pretty gowns. At the same time, other elements felt out of place, most glaringly, a pistol that appears once and is never mentioned again. And it’s made all the more frustrating when the same character later uses a knife that could have at the very least made the pistol’s inclusion earlier in the story feel warranted rather than a huge misfiring of Chekhov’s gun. While it wasn’t enough to ruin the story as a whole, the lack of vision within the world building definitely didn’t earn the novel any memorability points.

As the plot relies heavily on Violet’s visions, I did feel like there wasn’t enough time spent exploring the rules behind her powers. One of the first conflicts encountered in the story exists in part because she used her foreknowledge to save a life and change the future, in effect “stealing” him from the Fates. On the other hand, a large part of Violet’s daily routine involves reading the “threads” of her patrons to glean insight on their pasts and futures and provide them with guidance. And while she usually keeps her readings vague and implies the mutability of the future, it’s never made clear as to how much influence she’s allowed to exert on the future or why that particular event was different. Once things were explained, quite close to the novel’s conclusion, the overall reasoning felt sound enough when paired with the revelation that it accompanied. But because so little is ever explained about Violet’s powers and the rules surrounding her visions, it left me feeling like the stories conflict was being manipulated into existence.

And while Violet makes it clear from the get go that she has only the most surface level understanding of her powers, she seems disinterested in changing that, even as questions arise in connection to her visions. Chen does her best to justify this lack of knowledge with the reasoning that Seers are far and few between, highly sought after and sometimes traded between kingdoms. But Violet’s home, a tower of enchanted vines and perhaps the most memorable part of the setting, was home to:

Centuries of Seers built up clutter, and people are too afraid of committing accidental blasphemy to throw anything away. I did the next best thing and stuffed everything I didn’t need into the cabinets to never see light again.

And indeed, the clutter of her predecessors is almost entirely buried away, used only once to help along a rather small plotline. Perhaps in the future, Violet will better explore the relics and knowledge left to her by previous Seers but with this first novel so full of questions, it seemed like a natural place for anyone to start looking and I felt a bit frustrated that Violet never did.

Normally, I find that characters like Cyrus, the romantic interest of the story, fall flat, relying too heavily on the idea of the fairytale prince exemplifying virtues of honor and chivalry. And while his personality does play into these tropes, his outward dislike of Violet who represents his moral opposite, makes for an engaging dynamic. And the motivation for his treatment of her feels more authentic then most. Instead of relying on infighting between classes or political derision, it’s Cyrus’s guilt over his feelings of responsibility toward the type of person Violet became.

A girl comes from out of nowhere, pulling him away from certain death like a blessing from the Fates. A dirty, lovely thing. A miracle. He brings the girl home to his hungry father and his hungry court. They place her in a tower, whisper promises that sate her own hunger. He watches her become everything anathema to him. He hates what she becomes, silver-tongued and sly. He hates everyone else more for making her that way.

Although the foundation for their relationship felt solid, the execution felt a bit messy, especially towards the novel’s end. They have a very on-again/off-again romance due to their past dislike of one another and the current political situation but there came a point in the narrative where their arguing felt like it was being forced for the sake of splitting them up again. The author tried briefly to shoe horn a potential love triangle into the mix too when Violet starts to fantasize about her friend Dante which felt like it came flying in out of left field and it then ended just as abruptly. Towards the later half of the novel, this did result in the story feeling rushed and left me feeling like we were missing out on what could have been more than just their physical romance. By the stories end however, Cyrus and Violet find that not only do they care about one another but to a large degree, need one another if they plan to survive.

Originally posted to my Wordpress journal on January 31, 2023

Spoiler warning: The following contains discussion about the world’s explored in Tress of the Emerald Sea and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, Dune, Star Wars and Children of the Whales along with the themes of these stories. You have been warned.

Since the start of the new year, no book has perhaps caused quite as much of a stir online as the first of Brandon Sanderson’s Secret Project novels, Tress of the Emerald Sea. Announced last year, Tress is the first of four novels Sanderson fans have to look forward in the coming months.

The story itself pulls inspiration heavily both from classic fairytales and high seas adventures to regale audiences with the tale of a girl who lived upon a rock in the middle of the titular Emerald Sea. That is until she ventures away from home to rescue her prince (well, technically, he’s the son of a duke) who was kidnapped by an evil sorceress. Of course, this being a Sanderson novel, the story is filled with a litany of literary twists, subtle foreshadowing, and a smattering of Cosmere related Easter eggs thanks to the stories loquacious narrator. But perhaps one of the most unique aspects of the novel is its setting, a planet called Lumar, who’s 12 moons releases a deadly rain of aether’s onto the planets surface.

For a more in depth idea of what aether’s are, check out this entry from the Coppermind wikia. But to explain it simply, within Sanderson’s novels, an aether is an object containing investiture, the Cosmere equivalent of magic. Throughout Sanderson’s works, investiture comes in many varieties and usually requires some form of bond or trade for them to activate or manifest. In the case of Lumar, the aethers rains down on the planet in search of water, creating seas of dangerous spore-like dust upon which people have adapted to sailing on. Though each moon, it’s spores, and the colorful seas that they’ve formed aren’t fully explored during Tress’s adventures, she and her companions sail the Emerald, Crimson and Midnight Seas, and Sunlight, Zephyr and Roseite spores are utilized on board the ship. And while people have been able to find ways to make use of the spores, the story makes it clear that, no matter the variety, spores pose a grave threat to those who meddle with them. When exposed to water, each pose their own unique dangers. For instance, Emerald spores sprout into vines that grow with unnatural speed while Zephyr spores release gusts of air and Crimson spores explode into needle sharp barbs.

When discussing the worldbuilding of Tress of the Emerald Sea, Sanderson has said he’s been inspired for some time to create a world with, “a fantastical ocean, a different kind of place that you can go where people sail in something that isn’t water.” Of course, he had already done this before in creating the Cosmere’s spiritual realm where the ocean is made of glass beads. So what is it about these unnatural oceans, these alien seas, that make for such compelling story telling?

To understand this, it’s worth exploring some other examples of worlds similar to Lumar. In March of 2018, Netflix released season one of the series Children of the Whales, the first episode of which opens on a funeral, immediately painting the story in tones of gloom and mourning. As the deceased is sealed within their coffin, they’re carried off to the edge of their island home, called the Mud Whale, and cast into the seemingly endless sea of sand that surrounds them.

And while it visually resembles a traditional desert, it’s explained that the use of magic is needed in order to keep from being sucked beneath the sandy surface. Only strange fishlike creatures survive within it’s depths. And while life on the Mud Whale at first appears idyllic, if a bit uncivilized by modern comparison, it quickly becomes clear that life on the island isn’t as picturesque as it at first seems. While the inciting incident of the story is centered around them finally making contact with their first outsider in nearly a century, it is later revealed that there exists a whole world that the Mud Whale has not only been lost from but deliberately exiled out of as punishment. And while the majority of the island’s residents have access to a form of magic called thymia which is inextricably tied to the island, the price for this magic is an exceptionally shortened life span for it’s users that in return leaves most of the island’s children as orphans. Although the use of magic allows them to travel short distances from the island, the inhabitants of the Mud Whale have no control over where the currents carry them. In this instance, the unnatural ocean acts as less of a threat then it does in Tress but instead serves as a jailer.

When it comes to similar worlds that pose a more direct threat to their inhabitants, the two most well known examples are also quite similar to one another: the desert planets of Tatoine and Arrakis, of the Star Wars and Dune franchises respectively. Within both universes, finding yourself on either of these planets usually represents a downward turn of fortune. As C-3PO says of Tatooine in A New Hope, “What a desolate place this is,” and it would be hard to argue against the observation. Tatooine is made up almost entirely of an uninhabitable desert waste. And Arrakis’s reputation fairs no better. In the novel Dune, we’re first introduced the very idea of Arrakis as Paul lays in bed contemplating his families upcoming relocation to the planet. “Arrakis — Dune — Desert Planet” refrains ominously through his train of thought narrative like the beat of a distance war drum.

Of both Arrakis and Tatooine, the planets are described as nearly uninhabitable. Though neither ones sandy expanses are technically considered seas or oceans, the magnitude of their size serves to create the same sense of isolation that the vastness of an oceans casts on an island while simultaneously providing all new dangers for their residents. Brutal sand storms, predators evolved to thrive in the waste, “outsiders” who threaten the boundaries of their communities and the constant lack of life sustaining water. And yet on both these planets, humans do persevere and make lives for themselves on these plants. They do not thrive on either planet by any means, struggle and poverty seems to be the norm for inhabitants of both Tatooine and Arrakis, but humans have none the less found ways to survive on both, given enough reason. Tatooine is said to be located along important trading routes while Arrakis provides the invaluable substance called spice to the rest of the universe.

A common building on Tatooine

While the people of Lumar aren’t necessarily forced to confront their seas of spores as directly as the people living on Arrakis or Tatooine, for those who do chose to sail the spores, the danger they present is all the more real. Not only is life sustaining water a limited resource while at sea but as the story’s narrator reminds us, human beings produce plenty of water on their own, “considering the number of wet things that leak from human bodies even when they’re healthy.”

“Breathe in a burst of verdant spores, for example, and your saliva would send vines growing out of your mouth—or in more interesting cases, into your sinuses and out around your eyes.” Read the first 5 Chapters of Tress of the Emerald Sea here.

All of these stories rely heavily on the classic conflict of man versus nature and Tress of the Emerald Sea is no different.  With this story, Brandon Sanderson has created an ocean that defies our normal expectations of a maritime adventure. Sure the spore seas ripple like water and boats can sail upon them, but unlike a traditional ocean, the “water” is a substance far more volatile and each sea presents its own unique challenges to those who sail it. We see this over the course of the novel as Tress learns to face her fear of the spores and in doing so gains access to even greater power and abilities.