Tilly ~ was Successfully manipulated by a wizard

Out of the blue, in mid-April of 2021, Leigh posted a series of notes on Shadow & Bone on Goodreads, including the following:

This comment was immediately latched onto by antis, who held it up as irrefutable evidence of that old chestnut which is consistently weaponised to attack Darklinas - that the Darkling is based on an unknown abusive ex-partner of Leigh's.

For obvious reasons, the post does not contain a lot of details about the relationship or the other person involved. We as readers have no right to expect or demand that Leigh share her trauma with us. I wholly believe that Leigh has experienced the abuse she has told us about on more than one occasion, and that her experiences have had a significant impact on her fiction.

Nonetheless, if we read the comment carefully, we can see that it refers to Leigh's experience of feeling scared, of feeling trapped in a bad situation, but at no point does it mention any specific traits of an individual person, nor does it mention the character of the Darkling.

I have no desire to speculate too thoroughly about Leigh's experiences and how they may or may not relate to her books. To do that would be to put words in her mouth and make assumptions in bad faith. It only seems right to limit commentary on the connection between her personal life and her books to things that she has very clearly and provably stated.

I've heard many, many times this story that "in an interview"/"in a video"/"years ago" she had stated that the Darkling was based on an ex-partner, however I have never been able to find the evidence of this.

(If anyone has a copy or a genuine, verifiable citation for the statement, please, please, please share it with the class).

If true, that statement would have been in contradiction with every other time she has answered this question. Over the years, she has clearly and consistently stated that the Darkling was inspired by a number of other fictional wizards, and she has never made mention of any real person:

Now, as someone who (for better and for worse) had the same teenage taste in fiction as Leigh, this is ob-vi-ous. I haven't read ASOIAF so I can't speak about Sandor Clegane (Yet. I know I can't run avoid those books forever), but all the other books and films on this list I have read or watched many times, and obsessed over in certain periods of my life.

It's certainly the case that Leigh and I don't have the same interpretation of these characters and the stories they're in, but there'll be plenty of time to get into that later.

Interpretations aside, the line joining the dots of this ancestral chain of wizards culminating in the Darkling is drawn in great big rainbow crayon, you can't possibly miss it.

And yet, so many people do.

The fandom has grown exponentially since the announcement of the show, and it's been wonderful to see so many talented artists, writers, editors, cosplayers (and more) falling in love with Alina and the Darkling, and letting Alina and the Darkling fall in love with each other (as they should).

But sadly, in this fallen, post-vld world (never forget), wherever there are shippers, antis are sure to follow. It's so sad to see that the kind, creative, hilarious Darklina fandom - one of the most welcoming I've ever been in - is constantly beset by antis who come unbidden into our spaces, send death threats over fictional wizards kissing, pressure Darklinas into sharing their own traumatic experiences only to then claim that they must be lying, and accuse Darklinas of "disrespecting Leigh's trauma" (which, it must be said, she chose to put into the world in the form of fantasy fiction, rather than autobiography).

This should never be allowed to happen, in any fandom, but those with the real influence over the audience - Leigh, the publishers, Netflix and the showrunners - remain wilfully blind to the problem of toxic antis in the fandom, and have done the absolute bare minimum to defend and support Darklinas. Leigh's cutesy comments about "all ships being welcome in the harbour" do ring rather hollow at this point.

One day (I very foolishly say again) the masterpost will appear. But every journey begins with a single step.

For my own peace of mind, in an attempt to do something, anything, to try and correct the record on this issue, I've decided to reread and rewatch every single one of Leigh's inspirations (as for ASOIAF, we'll see), and write about each in detail, for the purpose of proving once and for all that her words are true, and that immortal wizards with dark powers, world-ruling ambitions, traumatic childhoods, and a reluctant fondness for pretty sunshine girls are, in fact, entirely fictional (an absolute travesty, I know), and therefore cannot commit murder and abuse against real people.

Here's the list of texts and characters we'll be discussing, in order:

Dragonlance Legends: Time of the Twins, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Raistlin & Crysania

Legend, Ridley Scott - Lord of Darkness and Princess Lili

Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King - Randall Flagg

Dragonlance Legends: War of the Twins

Labyrinth, Jim Henson - Jareth & Sarah

The Stand, Stephen King - Randall Flagg (again) & Nadine

ASoIaF, George RR Martin - Sandor Clegane

The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice - Lestat

Dragonlance Legends: Test of the Twins

The Dark Tower, Stephen King - Walter O'Dim/Marten Broadcloak (alias, you guessed it, Randall Flagg)

There will be copious, unmarked spoilers for all of the above, so keep that in mind if you're planning to read/watch and spoilers are something that bothers you.

The "draft" version of this series will be cross-posted from Twitter; you can also follow along there @Nightbloomwitch

The version posted here will be tidied up and expanded, and will include proper citations.

This analysis will be limited to the books only, since the show's creative team have cited different influences for the show and don't appear to have referred to any of the above texts. I have a lot of thoughts about the relevance of S&B (books and show) to Jane Eyre (both the novel and the 2011 Fukunaga adaptation), but those will have to be the subject of a separate post.

Contents

Part 1 - Dragonlance Legends: Time of the Twins, Introduction and The Meeting (prologue)

Book 1

Chapters 1-4, 6 - POV structure, genre, themes, Robert Graves' The White Goddess

Chapters 5, 7 - Forests as liminal spaces, use of worldbuilding for foreshadowing, Alexander the Great, Jane Eyre, The Language of Thorns

Chapter 8 - the volcra

Chapters 6, 9 - the mage Test and DitW (backstories), immortality, combination of dark and holy powers, legendary wizards and magical macguffins

Chapter 11 - Journey to the Palace/Tower, seduction

Chapters 12-14 - Worldbuilding with light and darkness, symbolism, advocacy for the 'villain'

Book 2

Chapters 1-3 - ego/shadow/Outsider plots

---

If you remember, Caramon’s purpose for traveling back in time was to kill Fistandantilus, so that he could save Raistlin from being possessed in the future.

Let’s see how that’s going for him:

“Creeping up to the side of the bed, he paused, the dagger in his hand, listening to the quiet breathing of his victim, trying to detect any change in the deep, even rhythm that would tell him he had been discovered.

In and out...in and out...the breathing was strong, deep, peaceful. The breathing of a healthy young man. Caramon shuddered, recalling how old this wizard was supposed to be, recalling the dark tales he had heard about how Fistandantilus renewed his youth. The man’s breathing was steady, even. There was no break, no quickening. The moonlight poured in, cold, unwavering, a sign…

Caramon raised the dagger. One thrust – swift and neat – deep in the chest and it would be over. Moving forward, Caramon hesitated. No, before he struck, he would look upon the face – the face of the man who had tortured his brother.

…

Caramon’s hand stiffened, growing white and cold as that of a corpse as he stared down at the face on the pillow.

It was not the face of an ancient, evil wizard, scarred with countless sins. It was not even the face of some tormented being whose life had been stolen from his body to keep the dying mage alive.

It was the face of a young magic-user, weary from long nights of study at his books, but now relaxed, finding welcome rest. It was the face of one whose tenacious endurance of constant pain was marked in the firm, unyielding lines about the mouth. It was a face as familiar to Caramon as his own, a face he had looked upon in sleep countless times, a face he had soothed with cooling water…

The hand holding the dagger stabbed down, plunging the blade into the mattress. There was a wild, strangled shriek, and Caramon fell to his knees beside the bed, clutching at the coverlet with fingers curled in agony. His big body shook convulsively, wracked with shuddering sobs.

Raistlin opened his eyes and sat up, blinking in Solinari’s bright light. He drew his hood over his eyes once more, then, sighing in irritation, reached out and carefully removed the dagger from his brother’s nerveless grip.”

did I fool you, did I, did I, were you fooled, were you tricked

I didn’t lie at all in the last chapter – there really was an entirely evil, almost inhuman wizard called Fistandantilus who lived hundreds of years ago, and who intended to use Raistlin’s body as a vessel for his spirit to return and wreak his evil deeds on the world. But thankfully, Raistlin got to him first.

I’ll let him tell it:

“But the fear grew in his eyes, even as he spoke, for he read my thoughts. ‘Yes,’ I answered his unspoken words, ‘the prophecy did not work as you hoped. You intended to journey from the past to the present, using the lifeforce you wrenched from me to keep you alive. But you forgot, or perhaps you didn’t care, that I could draw upon your spiritual force! You had to keep me alive in order to keep sucking out my living juices.

…

And, when you were finally ready, you intended to enter the shattered husk of my body and claim it for your own’.

…

“So he thought to keep me weak and frail. But I fought him! I fought him!...I used his spirit and I lived with the pain and I overcame it!”

Isn’t it wonderful how heroically this is framed? Of course Raistlin is talking himself up, but he has the right to be proud about winning this battle.

Raistlin’s bravery and tenacity are the qualities that come up over and over again in the series – everyone underestimates him because he’s physically weak, but he never gives in, he can endure anything, and that’s what makes him so terrifying as an opponent, but it also makes him so heroic, and inspirational as a character.

In the Annotated Chronicles, Tracy Hickman says he thinks Raistlin’s line, “Power is what I have long sought – and still seek.” is the “essence” of his character. That’s not a bad indicator of who he was in the original trilogy, but “I lived with the pain and I overcame it!” is (I think) one of the best lines that summarises the complete circle of his story from beginning to end.

---

Before we move on to the obvious, I want to focus on the first scene.

This isn’t the only time in the story that Caramon will come close to murdering his brother, but he’ll never be in the right for it. The story is always very emphatic about the fact that for Caramon to kill Raistlin would be the same as killing himself, not just psychologically but physically as well. This is why when he realises how close he’s come to unknowingly stabbing Raistlin, it’s his own hand that becomes like “that of a corpse”, and he screams and falls down as though he’s the one who’s been stabbed.

As the personifications of one another’s ‘ego’ and ‘shadow’ selves, Caramon and Raistlin are completely indivisible, physically and mentally. Like Alina and the Darkling, they have a psychic bond that sometimes lets them sense one another’s thoughts and emotions and physical presence, and no matter how many murder attempts or dimensions of time and space come between them, their souls will always be linked. This is Par-Salian’s second attempt to cut them off from one another (because he doesn’t understand ego/shadow dynamics, as we saw in B1.14); it didn’t work the first time, and it’s not happening this time, either. For either of them to kill the other would result in self-annihilation. Even so, as much as they (Raistlin, mostly) hate it at times, it’s this bond that keeps them both alive and sane, even through the seemingly unsurvivable.

Dragonlance really, really commits to this idea in a way that TGV doesn’t. Nothing actually happens to Alina as a consequence of murdering the Darkling – the loss of her powers happens before that, when she kills Mal for the third amplifier. ‘Sankta Alina’ symbolically dies with the Darkling, since they share a funeral pyre, but this is only to make way for Alina’s (allegedly) happy ending where she is free of him forever (at least, until RoW, where they no longer have any connection).

Other than that, this is the first time in Legends that we’ve seen Raistlin be truly vulnerable – prior to this whenever he’s had one of his coughing fits, he’s been faking it (or at least overplaying it) as a ploy to gain Crysania’s sympathy.

He wasn’t pretending this time, he really was asleep, and he’s….back to normal. By traveling back in time, defeating Fistandantilus and absorbing his life energy, Raistlin has solved all his problems – he’s broken the curse Par-Salian put on him which gave him the hourglass eyes that forced him to see everything decay, he’s broken the curse Fistandantilus put on him which turned his hair white and his skin golden and ruined his body, and now he’s healthier than he’s even been in his life. For the rest of the scene, he just acts like himself – his old self. He’s cranky and sarcastic and bossy and frighteningly intense, but Raistlin has always been like that.

This is Raistlin as he always should have been; this is physical proof that pre-Evil, pre-curse, pre-Test Raistlin (flaws and all) still exists, and can be saved. More than that, he must be saved, otherwise Caramon will die as well, and so will Crysania, since she’ll be taken to the afterlife with the other clerics. And, as we’re reminded a couple of times in the preceding chapters, Tika will be waiting for Caramon to come home, forever.

The only times we see the Darkling like this and are allowed to be certain that he’s not ‘pretending’ are after Alina has already stabbed him, and then after he’s dead.

“But in this moment he was just a boy – brilliant, blessed with too much power, burdened by eternity.”

and

“Who had tended him? I wondered, feeling an ache rise in my throat. Who had combed his dark hair back so nearly from his forehead? Who had folded his graceful hands on his chest?”

I already said this in the previous one, but the story’s insistence that ‘The Darkling’ or ‘The Black Heretic’, who was corrupted by his use of merzost, can’t be separated from ‘Aleksander’, who seems to be treated by the story as an innocent, condemns that innocent to death.

The merzost is removed from Mal when he’s fatally stabbed by Alina’s dagger, and then Mal comes back to life. But Aleksander doesn’t. Well, not originally, anyway...When he does come back in RoW, he is without his ‘evil’ powers, but he’s still never allowed to reclaim his innocence, and continues to be treated as the villain both by the other characters and the narrative in general.

---

It should be plain enough that ‘Raistlin was Fistandantilus all along!’ is (one half of)the genesis of ‘The Darkling was the Black Heretic all along!’ twist, but of course the difference is that Raistlin wasn’t Fistantandilus all along, he was just Fistandantilus for this book. He doesn’t have to bear the weight of those hundreds of years of sin.

Other than on the most superficial level, the two scenes aren’t really worth comparing. The emotion generated by this reveal is totally opposite to that of the reveal in S&B. Finding out that the Darkling is the Black Heretic is supposed to feel like a terrible betrayal. We thought we were coming to know him, but he’s not the man he said he was, and in fact he’s a liar and maybe worse.

Finding out that Fistandantilus is Raistlin brings an incredible sense of relief. Caramon has never been the brains of the outfit, and this attempt to kill the most powerful wizard in history is an incredibly stupid idea, even for him. If it had actually been Fistandantilus in the bed, there’s no way Caramon (or Tas) would have survived. And even better, as we said above, Raistlin is back to normal now. (He’s still obviously plotting something sinister, but that’s normal for him, too).

---

Rather than the Darkling/Black Heretic connection, the story about Fistandantilus’ attempt to possess Raistlin bears the most resemblance to the Darkling’s resurrection and possession of Yuri in KoS/RoW.

The Darkling’s resurrection was not by his design, but the outcome was the same – like Fistandantilus, he possessed the body of an unwilling innocent (and at that time, Raistlin was unambiguously innocent, since that was before the end of the Test when he ‘killed’ the illusion of Caramon) in order to continue his quest for godhood. The ‘possession’ was dormant for a time – Yuri heard the voice of the Darkling as his guide, Raistlin was able to communicate with Fistandantilus’ spirit, which is how his magical knowledge and abilities increased at an unprecedented rate after his Test. Where the two storylines diverge is that Fistandantilus attempts to possess Raistlin fully, and he fails, because Raistlin defeats him. The Darkling is successful in his possession, and in the end Yuri is (presumably) trapped in the void with him.

Yuri’s backstory in The Lives of Saints seems intended to parallel Aleksander’s early life – he is shy and bookish, “narrow as a willow switch” and physically inept, and raised by an abusive uncle who beats him. At the end of the short story, half of Novokribisrk is destroyed in the Darkling’s vengeance for the wars and attacks on Grisha, and in the aftermath Yuri finds purpose in his life; this is as the otkazat’sya village is destroyed at the end of DitW, following which Aleksander resolves to devote his life to creating a haven for the Grisha.

The Darkling self-identifies as ‘Aleksander’ in his POV chapters, but it’s Yuri’s voice in his mind that serves as his human conscience, reminding him of his love for Alina, trying to warn the heroes when the Darkling plans to escape from captivity., expressing his horror when Aleksander murders Azarov for the cause, and even being the one to push Aleksander towards sacrificing himself for Ravka (again) in the end.

By comparison with Legends, in TGT, ‘Aleksander’ is Raistlin and ‘The Darkling’ is Fistandantilus, but in KoS/RoW, ‘Aleksander’ has become Fistandantilus, and it’s now Yuri who is Raistlin, but a weakened and victimised Raistlin who is possessed and seemingly dies (until confirmed otherwise), because in the Grishaverse Aleksander/The Darkling must always be the ultimate evil. I can only presume that the promotion of Aleksander from the nominally-Evil Raistlin in TGT to the actually-evil Fistandantilus in RoW was intended to force the audience to identify him as the villain of the piece, since we failed to accept it the first time.

---

Raistlin thinks he’s beaten Fistandantilus, but he hasn’t, not really. As I said purposefully said in the previous chapter about ‘Outsider’ characters, sometimes the Outsider is a villain who’s already dead, but their influence lingers on (as does the Darkling’s influence in KoS).

The goal of the story has hardly changed at all. The other characters started out trying to save Raistlin from turning into Fistandantilus by being forcibly possessed. Now they have to save Raistlin from turning into Fistandantilus because he wants to. As he tells Crysania in Chapter 10, “I came back to become him.” What he means is ‘to take his place in history’, but in fact Raistlin has already started to act more like Fistandantilus than he’s willing to admit.

Raistlin doesn’t suck other people’s lifeforce to prolong his own life, but that’s exactly what he does to people emotionally.

He can’t accept that the only reason he’s made it this far in life is because he’s so loved, and if he keeps going like this, it’s only going to be a matter of time before someone he (and the audience)cares about gets killed as a result of one of his schemes.

And, like Fistandantilus, that someone might just be himself.

Raistlin thinks Caramon isn’t emotionally capable of killing him, but that’s only because he doesn’t know himself. Since they’re two halves of the same soul, anything one of them is capable of, so is the other. When Raistlin reached his breaking point during the Test years ago, he tried to kill Caramon, so by dint of that we know Caramon is just as capable of killing, as Raistlin is capable of loving. It’s going to take a lot to push either of them to that point – to the point where their subconscious overwhelms them and they take on one another’s traits – but it’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.

---

In Jungian terms, ‘Fistandantilus’ is Raistlin’s ‘persona’ – the self-reliant, terrifying, heartless and truly Evil wizard he wants to be seen as, because he thinks this will make him strong and give him control in his relationships with others.

"...a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual."

- CG Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1953)

For the psyche to be healthy and whole, the persona has to be flexible enough to adapt when dealing with different people and situations – Raistlin (or anyone) doesn’t have to give up his persona completely (he can still be Black Robe if he wants to), but he mustn’t allow it to take him over. His ‘ego’ (true self) has to remain in control by balancing his persona with the other aspects.

Legends is one of the relatively rare works of fiction where we can map the characters onto all four attributes of Jung’s model of the psyche:

(This is from Raistlin’s POV – when comparing Legends with TGT, we refer to him as the ‘shadow’ because that’s Aleksander’s role in relation to Alina).

This map...does not translate so precisely to TGT. From the Darkling’s POV, ‘Aleksander’ is the ‘ego’, or inner true self; ‘the Darkling’ is the persona he projects to the world. Only Alina is able to see ‘Aleksander’ because she is both the ‘shadow’ and the ‘anima’.

This is why Alina ‘shares’ equivalent scenes and traits with both Caramon and Crysania – because in her story, she has to play both roles.

In my ideal world, Mal would fill the ‘shadow’ role (refer back to The White Goddess section in Book 1, Chapters 1-4, 6 for commentary on Mal’s role in relation to the Darkling compared with Caramon and Raistlin), but there’s little value in speculating about ‘what might have been’.

This isn’t to say that TGT has gotten it ‘wrong’, as such - my hypothesis is that the Mal/Alina/Darkling triad was most closely based on the Jack/Lili/Darkness triad from (Scott’s) Legend, which worked successfully enough in its own way – but the fact that Legends was designed with these roles assigned for the express purpose of giving the characters a chance to reconcile, whereas TGT didn’t assign the roles and had no intention of ever reconciling the characters, goes a long way to explaining why the tone of the two stories is so opposite, and why Legends is so hell-bent on reclaiming Raistlin, whereas TGT has no interest in reclaiming the Darkling.

---

The other thing the two ‘reveal’ scenes have in common is that they redefine the stakes of their respective stories.

In S&B, the reveal scene teases the possibility of “redemption” for the Darkling:

“Before he gave up his name and became the Darkling, he was just a brilliant, talented boy

…

It is because I love him that I will not let him put himself beyond redemption.”

Since this is the same scene in which we find out that his plan is to ‘enslave’ Alina and use her powers to expand the Shadow Fold – symbolically becoming the Black Heretic again – I assume that up until the point where he did put the collar on Alina (or expand the Fold? It’s not clear which) he was still considered ‘redeemable’, but since he made the wrong choice, his fate was sealed since the end of the first book.

And...that’s it. End of story. Villainous ever after. Even when he pays for his crimes with his life, even becoming ‘just a boy’ again in his death scene,he’s denied an active redemption in the sequel series, instead being relegated to the agony of purgatory. Maybe he’s been acknowledged as a Saint by Ravka, but the main characters still consider him unforgivably evil, and it’s their opinion that carries the tone of the story.

In Legends, the unknown catastrophe lurking in the background has already happened – Raistlin has already killed Fistandantilus and assumed his identity, and so this is about the point where the story begins to feel like a game of chicken between the writers and the reader. Just how bad is Raistlin going to be allowed to be, before he’s considered unsalvageable and the other characters give up on him?

We’ve already been told by Par-Salian that Raistlin is doomed, but...is that really true? After all, Par-Salian himself admits he “cannot understand” Raistlin and why people care for him so much.

There will be more time-travel related drama later, which will mean Raistlin isn’t as in control of events as he’d like to be, but at least for the rest of this book he seems to be master of his own destiny again and therefore has to be held responsible for his actions, since there’s no longer any possibility that Fistandantilus’ spirit is subconsciously controlling him.

Let’s take stock of the facts:

Murder

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, characters in Dragonlance are required to act in accordance with their alignment, and by committing acts that break their alignment, they risk incurring what are in gameplay terms, ‘alignment penalties’, or in story terms, ‘sins’. As well as the obvious social consequences, characters who commit too many sins can lose favour or be forsaken by their patron god(s) – and for magic-users like Raistlin and Crysania, that means losing their powers.

To remind the reader how it works, in the chapters leading up to this, Caramon and Tas go through a gladiator arena subplot which explores the merits of sponsored trial-by-combat versus execution (I’ll come back to this later), have a lengthy conversation about whether or not murdering Fistandantilus in his sleep can be morally justified, then Caramon has another internal monologue about it, just to be sure. There are also a couple of occasions where he reassures himself that this must be the right thing to do, because otherwise the gods of Good would intervene and stop him. And they do – it’s the light of Solinari, the moon of Good, that illuminates Raistlin’s face to make sure Caramon doesn’t kill him.

The story is very determined to press the point that killing people is wrong, including killing Evil people, and there isn’t a lot of breathing room to make excuses.

As the narration went to pains to confirm in the previous chapters, Fistandantilus was still considered ‘human’ at this point in time, and thus killing him did count as ‘murder’. If Raistlin had managed to come up with some way to kill Fistandantilus’ spirit in the future, he’d have been in the clear, because by that point Fistandantilus was definitely no longer human.

Raistlin has killed a human before – at the end of Chronicles, he was the one who killed Takhisis’ general Ariakis – but he was permitted to do that by all the gods, including Paladine, because Takhisis’ war threatened to break the Doctrine of Balance. That was the destiny he was chosen for, but he can’t use that excuse this time. No god has implored him to kill Fistandantilus, and the reason he came back in time in the first place was to get the rest of Fistandantilus’ spellbooks (and Crysania) so he can overthrow Takhisis, which will break the Doctrine, so he’s now going against the will of the gods.

(Note in case this wasn’t clear: When the Kingpriest tried to overthrow Paladine, he was punished by the Cataclysm because Good expects obedience and peace-keeping. Takhisis doesn’t take preemptive action against Raistlin’s attempt to overthrow her because the philosophy of Evil prioritises personal ambition above all else, and so he has the right to challenge her, even if it does risk destroying the world).

Killing in self-defense is permitted without incurring a charge of murder, but there are mitigating factors in this case which complicate the judgement.. Raistlin chose to come back in time and kill Fistandantilus. If he started the fight, he can hardly claim self-defense. Very conveniently, we didn’t get to see the battle first-hand and only have Raistlin’s word to go on, and of course he’s going to give the account that will keep Caramon and Crysania on his side. On the other hand, it is true that Fistandantilus was planning to kill him anyway, so should he be punished for seizing the advantage?

There’s more to the debate even than that, but what it comes down to in the end is:

Since Raistlin is in Evil alignment, he’s technically allowed to commit murder – allowed by his patron goddess Takhisis, that is. Committing murder won’t cause him to lose favour with the forces of Evil, but it will push him further towards the extreme end of ‘Evil’ on the alignment scale, darkening his soul and causing his Good-aligned allies to worry about whether he’s too far gone to be saved (Caramon) and condemn his actions (Crysania), thus making it harder for him to convince them to go along with his plans. More worryingly, although he’s in the right according to his alignment, Evil characters tend to earn evil fates…

Symbolism

In the quote from the previous chapter, Raistlin (as Fistandantilus) was described as a “black sun”. The Black Sun, or Sol Niger, is an alchemical symbol that represents nigredo, the first stage of the alchemist’s Great Work, or the process that grants immortality through spiritual transformation and union with the opposite principle (once again, this is the ‘Alchemical Marriage’ of the Sun and Moon that was referred to in the prologue post).

The Black Sun, or nigredo, from the Philosophia Reformata (c. 1622) by Johann Daniel Mylius, Balthazar Schwan

Historical alchemical texts are very variable (and inscrutable) in the way they explain the processes, but here’s one description of nigredo:

“He was obliged, if he were to be a true alchemist, to follow the preparation and meditations of earlier adepts. He was sure that in the boiling fiery mass he was witnessing elemental struggles personified as lions and dragons. He had to realise that in his own life the process of purification might be as painful and rewarding as the struggle within the sealed vessel above the furnace. Eventually came the nigredo, the blackening. The matter lay a black inert mass under the dews and vapours above. Often here there was a halt for a repetition, in which the distillates were returned to the black mass. The spirit of life returning to the decayed corpse was the picture in the mind, and the prayers said reflected the theme of desire for purification of the corrupt and broken body.”

- C.A. Burland, The Arts of the Alchemists (1967)

The story so far has fulfilled the alchemical process perfectly – Raistlin followed the preparations of the former master, Fistandantilus, he accepted that he would face a painful but rewarding struggle, he ‘blackened’ himself by defeating Fistandantilus, and the lifeforce returned to his ‘corrupt and broken body’.

According to the symbolism, Raistlin hasn’t necessarily done anything wrong – in fact, he’s successfully taken his first step towards achieving union with Crysania. But at the same time, he’s taken the first step towards his goal of immortality, the ambition he inherited from Fistandantilus.

In B1.11 I noted that the fire in Raistlin’s tower represented the alchemist’s crucible – that’s the ‘sealed vessel above the furnace’ mentioned in the quote above. When Raistlin and Crysania put themselves in that crucible, that was the moment they fully committed themselves to this process of transformation, and they must see it through, to one end or another.

"You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life."

- CG Jung, Letters Vol. 1

As we know, in the world of Dragonlance, humans trying to achieve physical immortality is wrong, and might even destroy the world by upsetting the Doctrine of Balance. The type of immortality Raistlin needs to focus on if he’s to fulfill the goal of the story and earn a happy ending is his spiritual immortality – he needs to preserve his soul by learning to love unselfishly. Basically, he can have Crysania, or he can have godhood, but he can’t have both, and according to the rules of the story, Crysania is the ‘right’ choice, and godhood is the ‘wrong’ choice.

This is along the same lines as what I said in the B1.5,7 post about how the ‘right’ choice the Darkling needed to make at the end of S&B was to put his love for Alina over the power of the Stag. If not for the collar plan, he could have had Alina’s love, but his choice to use her powers to expand the Shadow Fold (his equivalent of ‘godhood’) was his undoing.

On top of that - Jung used the phases of alchemy to represent the stages of personal transformation in his psychoanalytical work. The nigredo stage represents the first stage, which is the individual's confrontation with their shadow self.

Caramon being confronted with Raistlin's transformation into Fistandantilus is the in-story representation of that, since Raistlin is the external personification of Caramon's shadow. He's forcibly confronted with his own suppressed, subconscious nature -- and the possibility that that nature might make him capable of murder. Remember that Par-Salian sent Caramon back in time not for Caramon to redeem Raistlin, but for Caramon to redeem himself, and for that to happen, he's going to have to see this complete alchemical process through as well.

---

I...don’t know if I could write such a detailed explanation of the relative morality in TGT. The one thing we know for certain counts as a ‘sin’ is using merzost, but there’s no explanation given other than the assertion of ‘Grisha philosophers’ that this is ‘against nature’. Alina instinctively knows that to kill the immortal, merzost-suffused and seemingly sentient Stag is evil, but to kill the immortal, merzost-suffused Darkling is right, with ‘Aleksander’ being a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Killing the Darkling is ‘justified’ because he used merzost to create the Shadow Fold, which resulted in the transformation of humans into volcra, which is treated as equivalent to murder (but was actually an accident, and therefore was more like manslaughter), but Alina killed Mal (with his consent) in order to use her merzost, and she gets away with a symbolic death only.

The story takes place in fantasy 18th century Russia, and the characters are soldiers, so does that mean the ‘rules of war’ are 18th century Russian rules? What were the 18th century Russian rules of war, anyway? (I can’t know everything, literary mysticism is my bag, not Russian history!). The story certainly doesn’t tell you.

Moreover, in Legends the characters must learn to uphold the existing laws about the balance between Good and Evil, so we already know what the ‘right’ actions are, whereas in TGT, the characters are supposed to be overthrowing the existing regimes of the monarchy and the Darkling, but don’t seem to have alternative solutions of their own, and indeed the ‘new’ (slightly modified) political systems put in place are only briefly summarised in the closing chapters, with most of the tricky matters of implementation apparently being resolved off-page. RoW seems to be making some concessions in this direction in its ending with the conversation between the three women I quoted in the B1.12-14 post, where they debate the morality of whether or not to rescue the Darkling, but since that’s the end of the series as we know it, it’s too early to call yet.

As for the symbolism...I already wrote at great length in the B1.12-14 post about how confusing the use of the alchemical solar and lunar symbolism is, with regard to whether Alina is supposed to ‘unite’ with or overcome the Darkling.

The writing consistently steamrolls over any ambiguity by having Alina tell the reader what is right and what is wrong, and even scold herself for considering alternatives. In her argument with Baghra, the question is not whether or not the Darkling’s plan should be considered or can be justified, the question is only whether or not he lied about what the plan was, and then of course she never considers getting his side of the story. After she runs away, she begins to doubt herself, but immediately shuts those doubts down:

What if Baghra was wrong? I worried as I lay there. What if she’d lied? Or what if she was just mistaken?

…

It was such a tempting thought. If I went back, would the Darkling forgive me?

Forgive me? What was wrong with me? He was the one who wanted to put a collar around my neck and make me a slave, and I was fretting over his forgiveness?

…

In my heart, I knew that Baghra was right. I remembered my own words to Mal: He owns us all. I’d said it angrily, without thinking, because I’d wanted to hurt Mal’s pride. But I’d spoken the truth just as surely as Baghra. I knew the Darkling was ruthless and dangerous, but I’d ignored all that...”

So far as I recall, Alina never gives the Darkling’s views any moral consideration whatsoever after this point for the rest of the story, and the only character who continues to support him is Ivan (with his one paragraph of dialogue), and then in KoS his supporters are the antagonists.

In Legends, Caramon also tells us what to think after the above scenes, but the conclusion he comes to is the total opposite – he’s still talking himself into believing that Raistlin is justified:

“I would have fought for anyone, the cause mattered little to me. But Raistlin insisted that the cause had to be a just one. We walked away from more than one job because he said it involved a strong man trying to grow stronger by devouring others…

“But that’s what Raistlin’s doing!” Caramon said softly, staring up at the ceiling. “Or is it? That’s what they say he’s doing, those magic-users. But can I trust them? Par-Salian was the one who got him into this, he admitted that! Raistlin rid the world of this Fistandantilus creature. By all accounts, that’s a good thing.

…

So he hasn’t really done anything wrong. Maybe we’ve misjudged him...Maybe we have no right to try to force him to change...”

As already shown in B1.12-14, Legends (up to a certain point) is an in-depth moral debate about whether Raistlin is to blame for the circumstances, whether he’s in the right or not, and if not, what should be done about him; all the characters put forth their viewpoints, and it’s up to the reader to intuit who is right and wrong based on their interpretation of the subtext and knowledge about the setting. As events unfold, the characters change their minds, and characters who seem to be‘right’ in one scene can suddenly seem‘wrong’ in the next. And every time someone gets it ‘wrong’, they are going to pay for it.

---

I hope that was a severe enough warning that the time for Fun is over now, only Pain from here on out….for a long, long time. But not forever, I promise.

Love always wins in the very, very end. Love outlasts everything.

---

Leigh: Caramon should have just stabbed Raistlin, actually.

This style of ‘X happened in the original, but the characters should have done Y instead’ is about to become a recurring theme.

You know those dudebro video essays on Youtube, the ones that go for like 18 hours where they go through every shot of the movie and say what the characters ‘should’ have done? (as if the characters were totally logical and unemotional robotic beings who were in possession of all the knowledge of the story that the audience has)

That’s what TGT is. It’s a published fix-it fic, except every scene that’s ‘fixed’ is worse than the one it was based on. It’s a break-it fic.

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Yuri Vedenen is very high on my list of ‘Grishaverse characters who deserved better’. Everyone should be stanning him, since he’s supposed to represent us and all.

Not to get too far ahead of myself, but the amount of stuff in RoW that was taken from Legends and The Dark Tower is like, A LOT, and idk how I feel about that. Surely at some point (being a #1 bestselling author of over 10 books) you have to break away from the source materials and do your own thing, especially when you’re not really paying tribute to the original stories but instead are doing...whatever the hell this is.

I’m calling it now, there’s going to be time travel and/or alternate universes in the next book. 50/50 chance that “hell” in Ninth House and the “void” in RoW are the same inter-dimensional space.

I expect to be credited when I’m proven right.

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‘The Darkling was the Black Heretic all along!’ is the stupidest twist. I keep thinking about how it would have worked better if he WAS a descendant who was undoing the family legacy of trying to atone for their ancestor’s mistake, and he had just inherited the position and hadn’t earned all this authority he’s got.

Like that would have made him MORE VILLAINOUS, if that’s what she wanted!

I’m forever salty because ‘bad wizard is also this other bad wizard in disguise!’ is one of my favourite classic wizard schemes,and she wasted it

Me pre-TGV: wow what an amazing coincidence that two of my most beloved fantasy series that invented me as a person, Dragonlance and The Dark Tower, are both about time-traveling bad wizards with secret identities, isn’t it wonderful how both characters have things in common if you list their traits, but really in context they are such totally different people just trying to survive in totally different worlds, bad wizards truly have so much range, best character type, I love them all so much

Me now: Leigh what the fuck are you doing, Raistlin and Walter are nothing alike, their arcs are nothing alike, they have not a single thing in common, how dare you even imply that, I’ve never been so offended in my entire life. Get a job! Stay away from them!

---

I was almost completely unspoiled when I first read the books and I didn’t guess in advance that he was the Heretic, but I was not so much ‘surprised’ as ‘confused’. I distinctly remember thinking “is this the twist people keep talking about? Is he supposed to be the villain now? This doesn’t change anything”

He told Alina he was 120 years old, but he’s actually 500? this is unforgivable

I think it didn’t work because we don’t know anything at all about the Black Heretic as a man, he’s just ‘most evil wizard in history’ and I’m very thoroughly conditioned to assume by default that all evil wizardry is an attempt to regain control of one’s life following trauma and/or a distraction from crippling loneliness. That’s just Wizarding 101. Besides that, there’s 50/50 odds that any historical figure you hear about in a fantasy novel turns out to have been the exact opposite of what you’re first told about them.

“The Darkling is the Black Heretic!”

Oh and how is that supposed to be a bad thing? Now he’s doubly-traumatised, and he’s been lonely for five times as long! This is brilliant!

The fact that he has to hide his identity because he’s so hated by his own country, and he knew Alina would hate him if she found out, is The Thing that bonded me with him forever. Hiding the darkest part of yourself and your past misdeeds from the world and living with the fear of being found out is so relatable.

I’m not even going to attempt to explain all the time-travel quackery in this series until at least the second book, and even then only if I absolutely can’t avoid it.

Suffice to say for now that Caramon, Tas and Crysania have been sent over 300 years into the past, to the last days before the Cataclysm – the apocalyptic event that devastated the geography of Ansalon and signaled the departure of the gods from Krynn until their eventual return in Chronicles. Presumably Raistlin is around here somewhere as well, since he needs to get to Crysania once she’s been woken up.

Krynn was a different world 300 years ago, and in fact it was quite a bit more like Ravka, except that the Shadow Fold equivalent event that resulted in the near-destruction of the world was caused not by an overwhelming swathe of darkness, but by a ruinous blaze of light.

At that time, the most powerful city-state in the world was the shining city of Istar, capital of the Empire and seat of the Kingpriest, who was both the head of state and the supreme priest of the church of Paladine.

The Cataclysm was the gods’ retribution against the Kingpriest, who sought to purge the world of the creatures and philosophies of Evil, and even to become a god himself. The gods sent him many warnings that his ambition threatened to destroy the Doctrine of Balance that preserves the existence of all life on Krynn, however the Kingpriest and his followers refused to heed the omens, and so the gods sent ‘a burning mountain’ from the heavens (a meteor) to destroy Istar.

The true clerics – those who had genuine faith in the gods, rather than the Kingpriest – were taken directly to the afterlife before the devastation began. This is why Crysania had to be sent back in time – the only one with the power to restore her soul to her body is a true cleric in direct communication with Paladine.

However, as long as she’s alive, there’s a danger that Raistlin will convince her to help him open the Door to Darkness, and so Par-Salian’s true intention is for Crysania to be taken in the rapture along with the other clerics, where she will be beyond Raistlin’s reach forever, and, since the only other true cleric in the present time is Elistan, who is on his deathbed and can be trusted never to give in to Raistlin anyway, the mages can stop him without needing to fight him directly.

---

The narrator for Chapter 1 is Denubis, one of the lower-ranked clerics of Istar.

“This time the cleric looked more closely into the shadows formed by the huge marble columns supporting the gilded ceiling. A darker shadow, a patch of blackness within the darkness was now discernible. Denubis checked an exclamation of irritation. Suppressing the second shudder that swept over his body, he halted in his course and moved slowly over to the figure that stood in the shadows, knowing that the figure would never move out of the shadows to meet him. It was not that light was harmful to the one who awaited Denubis, as light is harmful to some of the creatures of darkness. In fact, Denubis wondered if anything on the face of this world could be harmful to this man. No, it was simply that he preferred shadows. Theatrics, Denubis thought sarcastically.

“You called me, Dark One?” Denubis asked in a voice he tried hard to make sound pleasant.

Ooh, who could this be?! Let’s jump ahead a few chapters and get a really good look:

"Standing on the fringes of the crowd was a black-robed figure. He stood alone. Indeed, there was even a wide, empty circle around him. None in the crowd came near him. Many made detours, going out of their way to avoid coming close to him. No one spoke to him, but all were aware of his presence. Those near him, who had been talking animatedly, fell into uncomfortable silence, casting nervous glances his direction.

The man’s robes were a deep black, without ornamentation. No silver thread glittered on his sleeves, no border surrounded the black hood he wore pulled low over his face. He carried no staff, no familiar walked by his side. Let other mages wear runes of warding and protection, let other mages carry staves of power or have animals do their bidding. This man needed none. His power sprang from within – so great, it had spanned the centuries, spanned even planes of existence. It could be felt, it shimmered around him like the heat from the smith’s furnace.

He was tall and well-built, the black robes fell from shoulders that were slender but muscular. His white hands – the only parts of his body that were visible – were strong and delicate and supple. Though so old that few on Krynn could venture even to guess his age, he had the body of one young and strong. Dark rumours told how he used his magic arts to overcome the debilities of age.

And so he stood alone, as if a black sun had been dropped into the courtyard. Not even the glitter of his eyes could be seen within the dark depths of his hood.

“Who’s that?” Tas asked a fellow prisoner conversationally, nodding at the black-robed figure.

“Don’t you know?” the prisoner said nervously, as if reluctant to reply.

“I’m from out of town,” Tas apologised.

“Why, that’s the Dark One – Fistandantilus. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?”

“Yes.” Tas said, glancing at Caramon as much as to say I told you so! “We’ve heard of him.”

The resounding hush that accompanies Fistandantilus everywhere he goes is reminiscent of people’s reactions to the Darkling, particularly in the early scenes in S&B (the tent scene and the presentation to the King).

S&B is very thin on physical descriptions, but I think of all the novels and films we’re going to go through, the above passage is the closest to all the physical descriptors given of the Darkling across the series. Along the same lines as the contrasting descriptions of hands given in the Chapter 11 post, Mal is described as “broad” a couple of times, whereas the Darkling is “lean” in S&B and “all lean muscle” in The Tailor, and in WWSF he’s almost androgynous with a “slender-reed build”.

The other details about power great enough to span centuries need no explanation, though of course it’s important to note that Fistandantilus has attained his greatly elongated lifespan through dark magic rather than having been born immortal, and the implications of this are explained further in the below sections. Unlike the Darkling, he feels no need to invent ridiculous cover stories about untimely deaths and secret heirs, but instead wears his perpetual youth as a badge of his absolute mastery of the dark arts.

(Note from my inner editor: This passage is nonsense because how are we able to see such detail of what his body looks like inside these voluminous robes. Cut it out).

---

Dark One

Is a bad wizard even worthy of his black robes if he doesn’t have at least three different names and titles?

Leigh doesn’t think so, and neither do most of the writers on our list. My word count is going to explode wonderfully once we get to the Kingverse and I undertake the tortuous but fascinating labour of laying out and explaining each one of the legion of titles for the Dark Man.

For future reference, the full list of the Darkling’s titles is:

The Darkling

The Black Heretic

The Shadow King (in R&R prologue)

The Starless Saint, the Starless One, The Saint With No Stars (in The Lives of Saints)

His past pseudonyms are given as:

Leonid (the first Darkling), Staski, Kiril, Kirigan, Anton, Eryk (in RoW)

Eryk, Arkady, Iosef, Stasik, Kirill (in DitW)

Raistlin is a Hero of the Lance (yes, really, a hero), and the Master of Past and Present (not as good as it sounds, I only call him this when I’m making fun of him), but oddly enough it’s Fistandantilus’ title of ‘the Dark One’ that was semi-appropriated for TGV.

Where the title ‘Darkling’ originally comes from is something that, surprisingly, Leigh never seems to have been asked about, even after all the fuss and bother about changing it into a ‘slur’ on the show.

Dr Johnson’s dictionary defined ‘darkling’ as:

“a participle, as it seems, from darkle, which yet I have never found. Being in the dark, being without light: a word merely poetical.”

‘Poetical’ is the key, here. Historically, the word appears to have been used only in poetry, and was so rare that even Johnson couldn’t find evidence to speculate on the etymology of it. The only pre-20th century prose usage I can find is from Coleridge, who was, of course, a poet.

Like so many words, the earliest recorded use of the word ‘darkling’ is in Shakespeare, not as a noun but as an adverb meaning ‘in the dark’ or ‘in a dark way’. Shakespeare used it three times – Act 2, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 4 of King Lear, and most interestingly:

CLEOPATRA: O sun,

Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in. Darkling stand

The varying shore o’ the world!

Act 4, Scene 15, Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607)

In modern English this line, from Cleopatra upon seeing Antony’s dead body, might be rendered as, “O Sun, burn away your orbit. Let all the shores of the world stand in darkness!”

The image of the sun breaking free of its orbit and burning out relates very well to Alina’s powers burning out and leaving her ‘orbit’ by being transferred to the otkazat'sya, as Mal’s corpse lies nearby.

As for the ‘shores of the world’, the other appearance of ‘darkling’ I want to draw specific attention to is Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The whole of Dover Beach connects incredibly well with TGT and I intend to return to it in full in the eventual Shadow Fold post.

Here’s another good one:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

- Lord Byron, Darkness (1816)

According to Leigh’s 18 May 2012 blog post for Pub(lishing) Crawl, The Darkling was her original working title for S&B, but she thought it was too similar to Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, and she even considered changing the character’s name.

The other potential title she seemed to like the most, saying she was “smitten” with it, was The Black Shore, and I wonder whether she loved that title so much because it evokes both Shakespeare and Arnold’s poem.

Presumably at some point ‘darkling’ became a noun meaning ‘creature of darkness’, and I have very occasionally seen it used that way in other places, but if there’s any evidence of the transition, I can’t find it.

The only thing that ties the word ‘darkling’ directly to any of the other wizards on our list is this description of the Ageless Stranger in Book 5, Chapter 7 of The Gunslinger:

“He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times.”

This description recurs a few times in The Dark Tower (series) in relation to different characters. As for where Stephen King got it from, who knows. What does it mean? Unlike the Stranger, I only have so many hours, so we’ll have to come back to it later, along with the question of why wizards always seem to have so many names.

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Fistantandilus was vaguely alluded to in Chronicles, but this is the first time in the series that he’s appeared in person and so the narration goes out of its way to confirm that he is, at this specific time, a human (hence why light does not harm him).

The reason I point this out is because it will become relevant Later. The D&D alignment system which dictates the actions characters of various religions and species are and aren’t permitted to take against other characters, far from strangling the story, is actually an extraordinarily good device for keeping the writers honest. There are no moral double standards in favour of the heroes; everyone must act in accordance with their alignment or face the consequences.. Switching alignments is possible,but it’s a momentous occasion when it happens, since it often results in in permanent excommunication from family, friends, and socio-political groups.

Although Fistandantilus is human for now, Dragonlance doesn’t intend for the reader to consider him as a human most of the time.

Fistandantilus is the type of character I refer to as an ‘Outsider’. In this specific genre of psychological metaphor stories about epic battles between light and darkness, where light is personified in an ‘ego’ character and darkness in a ‘shadow’ character, due to the requirement that the ego and shadow be ‘integrated’ or reconciled in the end in order for psychological healing (outwardly manifested as world saving and world healing) to take place, the ego and shadow characters are not ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ but rather they are both protagonists who antagonise one another with opposing moral codes, until they must put aside their differences and combine their strengths in order to defeat the true villain who is endangering the world.

The Outsider is not always physically powerful in his own right (and in fact usually isn’t, since the majority of the story is focused on the rivalry of the ego and shadow characters), but may be a character who lurks in the background and tempts, corrupts or coerces other characters into carrying out his will. Since the ‘shadow’ character embodies humanity’s ‘dark’ or negative qualities such as selfishness, jealousy and fear, it’s the shadow character who is more vulnerable to the Outsider’s manipulation. In some cases, the Outsider need not even be present in the story, and might be a villain who was already defeated, but it’s the lingering effects of the trauma inflicted by the Outsider that must be overcome.

In SFF it’s common for the Outsider to be non-human, or a human who has willingly surrendered their humanity, which exempts the reader from any need to sympathise with them, and exempts the characters from needing to abide by any in-universe moral standards regarding the treatment of humans. This is useful in D&D settings where committing ‘murder’ of any sentient being is considered to be the worst sin, because killing an undead isn’t counted as murder.

Although he’s technically alive in the past, as we heard in the previous chapters, Fistandantilus learned magic that allowed him to escape from death and bind his soul to the Tower of High Sorcery until he could claim a new vessel for it. Mortality is one of the defining traits of humanity on Krynn, and trying to extend one’s natural lifespan is a grave sin, because it’s an act in defiance of the design of humans as they were created by the god Gilean at the beginning of time. Thus, there’s a clearly defined and indisputable justification in Dragonlance for why humans trying to become immortal is in violation of the laws of nature. When he used magic to extend his mortal lifespan, and later became a spirit and tried to claim another body, Fistandantilus lost the ‘right’ to be treated as a human, both by the other characters in the story and by the reader.

This ego/shadow/Outsider plot structure is the structure of Legends. Fistandantilus in his original lifetime was a rogue operator – a mysterious but legendarily evil figure who had no known origin, no allegiances, no weaknesses – and the Black Robes of the present day have no desire to see him return. It’s the possibility of Fistandantilus’ return by his possession of Raistlin that convinces Ladonna to go along with Par-Salian’s time travel plan.

Raistlin is not an Outsider. He’s a human, from the same hometown as most of the other heroes; he went to school; he did mercenary work with his brother. As much as he likes to pretend otherwise, he has friends and family who care about him. Until the events of Chronicles, his life wasn’t remarkably different from anybody else’s (Krynn being full to bursting with adventuresome types). Raistlin is the ‘shadow’ character in the possession of the Outsider, and so the goal of the story is not to defeat him, but for the ‘ego’ characters (Caramon and Crysania) to redeem him by breaking him away from Fistandantilus’ malevolent influence, and preventing him from sacrificing his own humanity in his attempt to become a god.

This is a plot structure we’re going to see several more times, in both its most simple and most complicated forms in the Stephen King novels, and in the Vampire Chronicles as well, where Lestat and his allies who try to exist by human(ish) standards are often pitted against the really evil vampires and demons and so on.

TGT seems to be attempting something along these lines but it’s very muddled because there’s a character missing. Alina is the ‘ego’ and the Darkling is the ‘shadow’, that’s straightforward enough, but the Darkling is also the Outsider.

As we said above, the ego and shadow characters are usually both humans, but the Outsider is usually a non-human so it can be destroyed without breaking the moral bounds of the story. If anything, it seems that Alina is the ‘ego’ and Aleksander (being the ‘human’ aspect of the Darkling) is the ‘shadow’, with his persona as the Darkling being the Outsider (representing the use of merzost that corrupted him) but ‘Aleksander’ can’t be separated or redeemed away from the Darkling, due to the story’s insistence that use of merzost for any reason is unavoidably and irreversibly corrosive to one’s humanity. According to the end of R&R, Aleksander’s humanity was worth mourning, but it wasn’t worth saving, and in RoW Alina seems to no longer care about Aleksander at all.

There’s an odd turn in the sequel books where the Darkling’s humanity is no longer represented by Aleksander but rather by Yuri, but I’ll elaborate on that in a future post.

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“Why does the Kingpriest keep him around the court? Why not send him away, as the others were banished?”

He said this to himself, of course, because – deep within his soul – Denubis knew the answer. This one was too dangerous, too powerful. This one was not like the others. The Kingpriest kept him as a man keeps a ferocious dog to protect his house; he knows the dog will attack when ordered, but he must constantly make certain that the dog’s leash is secure. If the leash ever broke, the animal would go for his throat.”

Ah, this sounds familiar. I’m sure it’s coincidence, but I like the way the dog metaphor relates back to all the other dog/wolf metaphors listed in the Chapter 7 post.

The ‘sinister court mage’ character type in modern fiction probably goes back to tales of John Dee in the court of Elizabeth I (who was possibly the inspiration for Spenser’s Archimago and/or Busirane in The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest), as well as Marlowe’s Dr. Faust in the court of Charles V, with some later influence from the assorted evil viziers (or Wazirs) from Sir Richard F. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights. Of course, the most famous Slavic ‘court mage’ was the rogue monk Grigori Rasputin, whose historical life shares a handful of superficial similarities with the Darkling’s, but instead Rasputin was primarily the inspiration for the Apparat:

I also love that you've got a religious mystic, an adviser to the royal family who's one of the more sympathetic figures at court. Are you trying to rehabilitate Rasputin?

I wanted to play with the idea...that when you abdicate power, when you give it to someone else, bad things happen. It doesn't matter if you give it to somebody good or somebody bad. The easy thing is with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are a lot of ways to abdicate power. You can hide power, you can delegate it...One of the appeals of Rasputin is he has the answers. One of the appeals of the Darkling is he has the answers. These people turn to Alina because they want her to have the answers. It's a very compelling thing to look to someone else to lead. And I wouldn't say that I was trying in any way to rehabilitate Rasputin, who, frankly, given how hard it was to kill him, I wouldn't want to bring him back. But the Apparat is meant to evoke a lot of our suspicions and fears about the particular character. People who don't know anything about Russian history know that name.

- The Atlantic, 20 June 2012

The Darkling’s political meddling has the most in common with Flagg’s performance in Eyes of the Dragon, so we’ll defer an in-depth discussion of the trope to that book.

“The doors swung open, emitting a glorious light. His time of audience had come.

The Hall of Audience first gave those who came here a sense of their own meekness and humility. This was the heart of goodness. Here was represented the power and glory of the church. The doors opened onto a huge circular room with a floor of polished white granite. The floor continued upward to form the walls into the petals of a gigantic rose, soaring skyward to support a great dome. The dome itself was of frosted crystal that absorbed the glow of the sun and moons. Their radiance filled every part of the room.”

Resemblant of the palace of Istar is the bright opulence of Ravka’s Grand Palace:

“...we were climbing the white marble steps to the Grand Palace. As we moved through a spacious entry hall into a long corridor lined with mirrors and ornamented in gold, I though how different this place was from the Little Palace. Everywhere I looked, I saw marble and gold, soaring walls of white and palest blue, gleaming chandeliers, liveried footmen, polished parquet floors laid out in elaborate geometric designs.”

The point of including Fistandantilus in the Kingpriest’s court is to once again emphasise Dragonlance’s philosophy of balance between light and dark. The Kingpriest is the world’s most powerful user of light magic, and Fistandantilus is the only one who can balance him with powers of darkness. It’s once Fistandantilus disappears from the court that the final days begin, because then the Kingpriest’s path on his quest for godhood is unobstructed.

I think TGT is trying to take this approach to the Darkling’s presence in Ravka’s court, but it’s not communicated well because the Darkling is the primary villain, whilst the Lanstovs are an impotent secondary distraction, and so much of the story’s moralising focuses on scolding Alina and the Darkling for using their magical powers. In a way, the King and the Darkling do keep one another in check – the King (with the support of the otkazat'sya peasantry) and the First Army prevents the Darkling from just taking over the country himself, whilst the Darkling prevents the nobility and the church from carrying out pogroms on the Grisha population.

The design of the Grand Palace is contrasted with that of the Little Palace, which is built of dark wood. The diamond-encrusted Grand Palace is presumably supposed to indicate the unfeeling ignorance of the nobility, but the Little Palace with its painstakingly carved wood paneling and mother-of-pearl-inlaid-everything is not very much less grandiose, merely a bit more naturalistic, and the detachment of the Grisha from the common people is also drawn attention to through the Darkling’s pantomime insistence on peasant-inspired food and clothing.

In Legends, the Kingpriest and Fistandantilus are both equally bad – one is trying to rule the world by becoming the supreme god of Good, the other by trying to become the supreme god of Evil, and for either of them to succeed will cause the end of existence – whilst both must be removed personally, the story’s ultimate solution in the end is not to eliminate the church or the wizards or the powers of light and darkness, but to ensure that the balance between them is maintained by teaching people on both sides to be good and to love and respect one another.

In TGT, the King and the Darkling are both equally(?) bad, but the King is villainous mostly on a personal scale – his primary crime being his assault of Genya, with the poverty of the peasants being as much a consequence of the centuries of invasions by other countries as much as anything internal to Ravka – whereas the Darkling has world-ruling ambitions which are couched in similar terms to godhood in Dragonlance. The two are not equals in ambition or competence, and so the Darkling is made out to be the more credible and sinister threat. Both the King and the Darkling must be removed personally in the end as well, but the conclusion of TGT doesn’t come out the same as Legends, because of TGT’s stances that darkness is evil and must be purged, and that an excess of Grisha power renders one inhuman and unfit to rule (until RoW, apparently).

There’s a lot of story to go yet, so we’ll wait until the end of Legends to consider the differences between the conclusions in proper detail.

---

“You mentioned the Dark One. What do you know of him? I mean, why is he here? He-- he frightens me.”

…

“Who knows anything of the ways of magic-users,” he answered, “except that their ways are not our ways, nor yet the ways of the gods. It was for that reason the Kingpriest felt compelled to rid Ansalon of them, as much as was possible. Now they are holed up in their one remaining Tower of High Sorcery in that cast-off Forest of Wayreth. Soon, even that will disappear as their numbers dwindle, since we have closed the schools. You heard about the cursing of the Tower at Palanthas?”

…

“That terrible incident!” Quarath frowned. “It just goes to show you how the gods have cursed these wizards, driving that one soul to such madness that he impaled himself upon the gates, bringing down the wrath of the gods and sealing the Tower forever, we suppose. But, what were we discussing?”

“Fistandantilus,” Denubis murmured, sorry he had brought it up.

…

Quarath raised his feathery eyebrows. “All I know of him is that he was here when I came, some one hundred years ago. He is old – older even than many of my kindred, for there are few even of the eldest of my race who can remember a time when his name was not whispered. But he is human, and therefore must use his magic arts to sustain his life. How, I dare not imagine.” Quarath looked at Denubis intently. “You understand now, of course, why the Kingpriest keeps him at court?”

“He fears him?” Denubis asked innocently.

Quarath’s porcelain smile became fixed for a moment, then it was the smile of a parent explaining a simple matter to a dull child. “No, Revered Son,” he said patiently. “Fistandantilus is of great use to us. Who knows the world better? He has traveled its width and breadth. He knows the languages, the customs, the lore of every race on Krynn. His knowledge is vast. He is useful to the Kingpriest, and so we allow him to remain here, rather than banish him to Wayreth, as we have banished his fellows.”

The grisly tale about the Tower being cursed is the sort of thing you could imagine forming the basis for one of the stories inThe Lives of Saints, but what happened wouldn’t be told in detail until later books, so we’ll skip over it.

Once again the comparison between Legends and TGT serves to emphasis how the Darkling doesn’t work as an Outsider character. Rather than abandoning the Grisha, he forms the Second Army and builds the Little Palace for the protection of the Grisha and of Ravka because he sees himself as being part of those groups and subject to the social contract of mutual rights and responsibilities with them, as opposed to Fistandantilus who does nothing to protect or defend anyone but himself, because he has no interest in other mages, no known homeland, and no national allegiance.

Fistandantilus lurks around the Kingpriest’s court seemingly for no other reason that because he can, because it brings him a perverse joy to be the only mage to be indispensable enough to remain. It’s proof that he’s more powerful and more feared than any of his fellows. Although wizards as a social class are being persecuted, this is no concern of his; he’s exceptionally self-serving even for a Black Robe.

I think the chatter about Fistandantilus’ use to the court because of his vast knowledge is implicit about the Darkling in S&B, though there aren’t any quotes to support it. The Darkling (under a succession of false identities) has also traveled the world extensively:

“Aleksander had traveled throughout Ravka, to places he and his mother had visited before, to distant lands where he’d gone on his own to study. He knew the secret ways and hiding places of Grisha...”

We get a regrettably brief glimpse at one of his youthful adventures in WWSF, but other than that all his centuries prior to the trilogy, and all the wondrous things he must have learned about, are left to our imaginations.

---

If there’s one argument I’m likely to beat to death by the end of this exercise, it’s that the ongoing Grisha/Fjerda/Shu Han conflict and the overwrought analogy of the Grisha as fantasy Jews is what killed the whole story.

Fistandantilus is a cut-and-dry villain because he has never cared about anyone or anything other than himself, and he conspires against and takes advantage of people in his own social groups, not for any kind of ‘greater good’, but rather for his own gain and no other reason.

The Darkling’s status as the leader of his own oppressed minority group and the very person who originally built, and subsequently spent hundreds of years maintaining, all the social infrastructure that protects them from harm makes him too sympathetic. Regardless of how many Genyas there might have been along the way, it’s inarguable that he has saved far more lives than he has ruined. He’s not completely in the right, he does need to be stopped from destroying the world with the Shadow Fold, but unlike Fistandantilus he’s not completely in the wrong, either, because the cause is worthy.

The Darkling creating the Second Army and the Shadow Fold is the only thing that's kept the Grisha alive and kept Ravka from losing the war. The story acts like the Darkling is the main problem but in fact he's a symptom and a victim of it. No one can 'move on' from the war or the persecution because it's still happening.

In Legends, the war is over, but everyone has PTSD. Raistlin really is the main problem now, but the story still acknowledges that all of this is because he's suffering. He talks a good game to Crysania about how there are all these neglected and impoverished populations suffering out there in the world and he’s the only one who can do anything about it, but he’s not part of any of those groups, and no one has asked for his help nor has he gone to anyone and offered it; he’s denying people self-determination because he’s the chosen one and the cleverest and most powerful wizard ever, and so he thinks he knows better than anyone else. The failed time travel plot relates to the theme that you can't change the past, but you can heal from it and create a better future. But that theme only works because the war really is over.

---

Full disclosure: ‘Outsider’ is a term I made up because I have never seen this famous and very common plot structure seriously written about anywhere. My term comes from Stephen King’s ‘Outer Dark’, which was named after the Cormac McCarthy novel, which was named after Jesus’ line from Matthew “But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness”.

If there is an existing technical term for this type of plot/character I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KNOW, PLEASE.

---

‘Darkling’ is very cute and almost twee, like‘Inkling’. The childlike FF black mages (like Vivi) could be called darklings, but it’s not much of a title for an ancient and mighty sorcerer, is it? It only works for him in the books because he’s such an ickle baby and he’s stuck at about 21 years old.

I was really disappointed when I read that the book was originally titled after the Darkling, it seems that Alina barely exists even in the author’s mind, she’s just a vessel for Leigh to get revenge on this conglomerate imaginary wizard (for whatever reason). LotR is named after Sauron but that’s the only other epic fantasy villain title I can think of. Even Stephen King names his fantasy novels after the heroes. It’s more like naming a horror novel after the monster (Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, IT).

---

I wonder whether Leigh just plain forgot that Raistlin is the chosen one and personally saved the world in Chronicles and is an official capital-H Hero in-universe. That won’t be the last time, either. He’s very good at Hero-ing actually, I am so proud of him.

Fistandantilus is great, he’s only my 4th favourite of the Black Robes but that’s not much of a slander because Dragonlance has the best total cast of anything ever.

Less than zero redeeming qualities, this guy, he is without doubt the most evil human who ever lived. You can tell that Leigh never read any of the books beyond the original 6 because Fistandantilus’ later-revealed backstory was designed to show what Raistlin would have been like without Caramon, which is to say really fucking terrifying and absolutely nothing like the Darkling. Leigh underestimates both how good and how evil he can be.

It’s always funny seeing perspectives of people who are totally oblivious to fandoms. Raistlin is the most beloved character in all of D&D history other than maybe Drizzt on a good day. Strahd is the new hotness but he’s just a pretty face and doesn’t inspire the same bottomless pathos.

The fact that Leigh thought she could retool him into a villain and murder him is a level of insane hubris that’s worthy of Fistandantilus. That’s exactly what Fistandantilus tried to do to him and IT DIDN’T WORK BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE LOVED HIM TOO MUCH, tell me more about how you didn’t learn anything from the story at all lmao

I wonder if she thinks Lestat is the villain of his own novels too.

Farewell Anne, you caused some strife over the years, but nonetheless you were a real one, one of the greatest authors of the last century, and I hope the Cosmic Mysteries are just as epic as you imagined them to be.

Thank you for Gabrielle (her himbo son and his sulky boyfriend are ok too I guess)

"No matter what's gone down, there's some capacity to understand that redeems us...we're inherently good, and that real evil is almost a fiction. Even if you get in the most evil character's mind, like Lestat's mind, you're going to find he's basically a good guy making certain decisions."

- Conversations with Anne Rice (1996)

The later books have their highs and lows but just

the fact that we left Lestat as the beloved leader of the vampires who has built a safe haven for them where they are all taken care of and living their best lives together in peace

means a lot to me, considering, you know

Lestat was in included one of Leigh's Darkling inspiration blog posts (I’ve now added the screenshot to the introduction); the Brat Prince has about as much in common with any of the other characters she’s mentioned, and in some ways he’s more relevant than the rest, but I left him out of my final list for this project because she only mentioned him once as a 'maybe'.

But what the heck, I’m sad (even more than usual) and I won’t be at peace until I’ve risen and fallen and risen again, thirsted and loved and lost, raged and laughed and cried with Anne’s dark alter ego one more time so

Lets Read: The Vampire Chronicles

(check the bottom of the Introduction post for the reshuffled order of texts)

Lestat my darling angel I am so sorry I left you out but now I will make it right.

---

Finishing your first novel and having it turn out to be a mess is understandable, everyone has done that and it’s the fault of the editors for letting it get to publication, but when you repeatedly say ‘I was inspired by monumental and beloved genre classics Dragonlance/Stephen King/the Vampire Chronicles etc’ and imply that you have somehow righted a historical wrong by having the wizard’s ‘victim’ murder him, then you’re putting yourself in a whole ‘nother league, cruisin’ for an analytical bruisin’.

How a lonely immortal person can find comfort and purpose when surrounded by mortals is the core of Maharet’s story in Queen of the Damned and it’s so sick and twisted that Leigh read that, seemingly cribbed the same setup for the Morozova story, and still decided to have Alina conclude at the end of R&R that as the only immortal person, the Darkling will be lonely forever and so murdering him is the merciful thing to do.

It sounds like a pointless moral debate because immortal people aren’t real, but taking into account what immortality represents in the different stories, it’s so offensive to go down the murder path.

---

There is a difference between:

The desire to become immortal as a means to have power over others and to avoid losing power due to emotional vulnerability, physical deterioration and death (Raistlin)

and

Unwillingly being inflicted with immortality as a metaphor for the feeling that a trauma/mental/physical illness is endless and inescapable, while everyone else’s lives are moving forward without you, followed by the massive personal strength and freedom you gain from overcoming that despair (Lestat and co)

The Darkling is in the same category as Lestat and co because he didn’t choose immortality, he was born with it and he’s mentally suffering because of it, but Leigh treats him as though he’s in Raistlin’s category of ‘person who wrongly wants immortality at the expense of others’.

Raistlin can choose to give up on his quest for immortality at any time, which would be doing the ‘right’ thing according to the rules of the story, and doing this would instantly earn him a happy ending.

The only way the Darkling can give up his immortality is to be killed, which he is , then he’s resurrected and is still unhappy and then he goes to suffer in tree purgatory. There’s no way for him to follow the rules of the story, get what he wants and live to experience it, it’s so unfair.

Alina doesn’t even make the choice, she supposedly does the wrong thing by accepting all the amplifiers and her immortality is forcibly taken away from her, but she still gets the ‘reward’ of (according to canon) a happy ending.

---

The Vampire Chronicles: Gabrielle has been trapped for her whole life and has never been able to do anything she wanted and now she’s dying of consumption. By becoming a vampire she can finally be healthy and as powerful as she always wanted and live freely travelling the world. This is what she deserves because fuck the patriarchy.

TGT: Alina is chronically ill and trapped in the army. By discovering her Grisha powers she can finally be healthy and powerful and live freely, but that would be greedy and make her evil, thus she must lose her powers and live in obscurity at the orphanage where she was raised.

Raistlin’s desire for immortality is immoral and self-harming, because at the end of Chronicles he is the most powerful person in the world but it’s still not enough for him, he refuses to live in harmony with nature and rejects everyone who loves him.

Gabrielle’s desire for immortality is justified because she has never been able to live happily, but if she becomes a vampire she can be free and have relationships with people who respect and understand her.

Alina is not like Claudia, where if she stays physically young forever that means she will never grow up emotionally and her childish selfishness and greed will consume her and cause her to harm others, because Alina is not 12 years old, Alina is an adult woman and overattachment to Mal is the thing that’s preventing her from growing up, not Grisha powers.

---

I simply cannot with this, Leigh just takes all these common elements from the different books - ‘wizard is immortal’, ‘wizard manipulates woman’, ‘wizard wants to rule the world’ - and chops them down to the lowest common denominator with no consideration about what they mean in the context of each character and story.

Every single thing is like this, and it’s exhausting.

It’s going to be a really damn long journey to explain on a theme/characterisation basis how ‘Flagg controls the King of Delain’ ended up as ‘the Darkling controls the King of Ravka’. I have walked that road and learned its secrets but at the end of it I felt dirty because I’m 99% sure that the connecting factor in Leigh’s mind at the time of writing TGT was nothing more than ‘evil wizard controls king because this is a thing that evil wizards do (because they are evil)’.

“The Tower of High Sorcery in Wayreth had been, for centuries, the last outpost of magic upon the continent of Ansalon. Here the mages had been driven, when the Kingpriest ordered them from the other Towers…None could enter who did not belong, none came to it without invitation. And so the mages protected their last bastion of strength, guarding it well from the outside world.”

From Dragonlance: Towers of High Sorcery (2004)

The persecution of the mages we will cover in more detail in a few chapters’ time. I think the automatic assumption these days is that any story about the oppressed magical minority that has to hide for its own safety must be derived from Harry Potter, but the trope is certainly older than that (and older than Dragonlance), and the situation in Ravka bears a bit more resemblance to historical Krynn than it does to the HP Wizarding World.

---

Worldbuilding with Light and Darkness, and consistency of meaning in symbolism

(tl;dr at the end of this section)

“...the Tower was open day and night. They could come and go as they chose – Black Robes, Red Robes, White Robes.

Though far apart in philosophies – in their ways of viewing and of living with the world – all the Robes met in peace in the Tower. Arguments were tolerated only as they served to advance the Art...It was the one thing that unite them all. It was their first loyalty – no matter who they were, whom they served, what colour robes they wore. The young magic-users who faced death calmly when they agreed to take the Test understood this. The ancient wizards who came here to breathe their last and be entombed within the familiar walls understood this. The Art – Magic. It was parent, lover, spouse, child. It was soil, fire, air, water. It was life. It was death. It was beyond death.”

Notice the repeated emphasis on opposite qualities and natural cycles – night and day, young and old, the stages of life, the four elements, life and death.

The philosophy of magic in Krynn is centred on maintaining balance and unity in people, in nature, and in the three divine orders – Good, Neutral and Evil.

The three moons of Krynn – White, Red, and Black - which are the source of magic for wizards of each alignment, are (probably) based on the three aspects of Graves’ theoretical Triple Goddess who rules over all the stages of human life and death, represented by the three sacred colours:

“I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her principal colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-trinity...the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination.”

- Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948)

The colours of the goddess are also found in TGT, Alina (white-haired in R&R, identified as a “moon-maiden” by Zoya), Genya (red-haired and red clothed, the beautiful lover who transforms into the battle goddess of “ruination”), and Zoya (the most powerful in magic), although the connection isn’t so obvious because the three women never clearly form any sort of power triad beyond being ‘the three female characters’.

Unfortunately Dragonlance is a bit hobbled when it comes to discussing the nuances of morality because it’s stuck with using the rather loaded terms ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’, which are D&D staples.

In an extraordinary feat of both-sidesing, D&D’s 3x3 grid alignment system was invented by adding the metaphysical dynamics of Tolkien (who contributed the Good/Evil axis) onto the original linear alignment system, which was based on the works of Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock (who, inspired by Anderson’s novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, developed his own Lawful/Chaotic multiverse specifically as a rejection of Tolkien’s worldview, which he saw as mawkishly sentimental, elitist and fundamentally misanthropic due to its basis in conservative Christianity).

As the original two Dragonlance trilogies are about the return of the gods to the world, the story is much more interested in the Good/Evil axis than it is in the Lawful/Chaotic axis, because it’s the Good/Evil axis that dictates a character’s faith (e.g. Lawful Good, Neutral Good and Chaotic Good characters are all adherents of Paladine).

‘Good’ (or light) characters are expected to be altruistic and work cooperatively in service of others, whereas ‘Evil’ (or dark) characters seek self-advancement at the expense of others and have a habit of cannibalising one another (not usually literally).

As we recounted in the Chapter 8 post, the races of Krynn were created by the gods, and each of the original races naturally shares the alignment of their patron god.

Humans are in a unique position because they were created as the designated Neutral race – they can have both Good and Evil traits in different measures without losing their humanity. No one disputes Raistlin’s humanity because he has converted to Evil, and as we saw in the previous chapter, Crysania scolds herself for imagining him as anything other than human. By contrast, Dalamar is an elf (the ‘Good’ race) who has forsaken and been forsaken by his people because he switched alignments. From Chapter 8:

“The dark arts impressed him most, and thus, when he was discovered wearing the Black Robes that no true elf could even bear to look upon, Dalamar was cast out of his home and his nation. And he became known as a “dark elf”, one who is outside of the light.”

When Crysania meets him in Chapter 11, she is shocked to find such a thing possible:

“An elf!” Crysania gasped...”But, that’s not possible,” she began in confusion. “Not serving evil--”

For those such as humans who are born with a dual nature, the importance of exploring one’s inner light and inner darkness in order to find personal balance has already been thoroughly hammered into Dragonlance readers prior to Legends, because the central conflict of Chronicles revolved around Tanis - the product of an unwilling union between an Evil-aligned human and a Good-aligned elf - needing to come to terms with both halves of his nature.

Tanis’ conflict was manifested throughhis love triangle where he has to choose between the shiningly pure elf woman Laurana and Kit, the human champion of the forces of darkness - a choice that he wouldn’t make until the very final chapters of the trilogy.

Laurana deservedly wins her man and closes off their story by telling him

“I love you now because I understand you. I love you for the light and the darkness within you.”

Weis & Hickman knew they were onto a real winner with that plot, so they recreated it in Legends,only this time it’s Raistlin who has to choose between his love for Crysania and the evil philosophy of the dark goddess Takhisis, whilst Crysania has to choose between her duty to holy Paladine and her desire for Raistlin.

Other than that, Caramon starts off Chronicles as Lawful Good (note I don’t agree with this, but that’s canon for ya), and Raistlin starts off as True Neutral. They’re forced to stick together due to their mutual weaknesses but they’re not in accord for most of the story, and it’s only in the end once Raistlin has switched to Neutral Evil that they’re ‘balanced’ in the sense that they’re able to accept one another for who they are and go their separate ways in peace. (Until the sequel, of course).

---

Limiting the discussion to the sources on our list, the Grishaverse’s attitude towards light and darkness and the way that attitude is expressed in the worldbuilding and the character dynamics has much more in common with the multiverse of Stephen King (which has no official name, so henceforth I will call it the ‘Kingverse’) and Scott’s Legend than it does with Dragonlance.

The Kingverse is huge and sprawling and maddeningly convoluted (like many of the horrors that inhabit it) and will be the subject of many, many thousands of words at its destined time, but suffice to say for now: as an isolated conceptual decision, prioritising Legend and the Kingverse over Dragonlance was fine, however it did result in a certain amount of awkwardness when trying to combine elements of the characters, setting and themes of those stories (where darkness is an inherently corrupting, invading, destroying force that must be fought against at all costs) with elements from Dragonlance (where darkness is a necessary aspect of the natural balance and the world will be destroyed without it).

All of the epic stories on our list feature the heroes of light battling against the encroaching forces of darkness, but the desired outcome is different in each case:

In Legend and the Kingverse, the darkness and all its agents must be destroyed as thoroughly as possible so that humanity can restore itself (hopefully to a better world) in the interval before the darkness inevitably returns and must be faced down again.

In Dragonlance, the darkness naturally strives to overreach and must be kept in check, but never too harshly reduced. Dark mages and dark creatures must be allowed to exist in equal measure to light mages and light creatures. (Remember in the Chapter 8 post we discussed how the artificial dark race of draconians were allowed to continue existing after the war in Chronicles).

In Dragonlance, the world and its people continue to exist because of the darkness; in the Kingverse, the world and its people exist in spite of it.

In Dragonlance, darkness is, as said in the quote above, a way of life. In the Kingverse, darkness is the end of life, or even worse, un-life, the domain of the undead and of extradimensional creatures beyond human comprehension.

Obviously the Grishaverse takes the latter road in the case of each comparison given above. We will delve more deeply into the mechanics and symbolism of the Shadow Fold at a later time, but in brief:

The main goal of both Ravka series is to eliminate the Shadow Fold (the physical manifestation of darkness)and in both cases the Darkling must be sacrificed – not saved – in order to do this. Likewise, the volcra cannot be healed and must be made extinct.

Ravka struggles to exist in spite of the Shadow Fold which divides it and devours its people, and its use as either a barrier or a weapon against their invading enemies is thoroughly decried by the narrative.

The dark power of the Fold is so antithetical to life that in RoW it is described as ‘vampiric’ and continues to crumble everything in its vicinity into inorganic matter, even after the visible darkness has been dispersed; it is also confirmed to be a location that exists outside of linear time and is linked to the interdimensional void. The Darkling’s powers are not limited to ‘shadow’ as in ‘the dark area behind an object blocking light’, but are also often associated via imagery with the vacuum of outer space.

Fora related example, consider the recurrence of the ‘night sky’ image mentioned in the previous post. In the first instance, Alina cannot see the stars, but only the “endless reaches of darkness between them”, because she feels powerless. Several times in S&S and R&R, Alina looks at the sky and is dazzled by the stars, desiring their power, but she no longer sees the darkness. In the final use of this imagery in the series, in RoW, the Darkling, now known as The Starless One, wishes to reverse the image again, so all the people of Ravka will ignore the stars in favour of the darkness:

“But people didn’t turn their eyes to the heavens in search of the dark. It was the light they sought.

All that will change, he vowed.”

Constantly in TGV, light and darkness do not complement one another but are instead a mutually exclusive binary, each battling to overwhelm the other.

There’s no moment anywhere in the series that makes use of even the most obvious platitude – that the dark of night is needed for the stars to be seen. More on this in the eventual Shadow Fold post, but I think that classic metaphor is present in the text, but only in the sense that ‘a great evil is needed to give rise to the goodness in the hearts of men’; which works in a purely hypothetical sense, however when the dark and the light are personified in characters of a story, the natural conclusion is that if the darkness dies, then so does the light (which is to say, Alina’s powers - Alina’s metaphorical life force), and this should not be presented as a good or deserved thing.

It’s anyone’s guess how this Kingverse-style worldbuilding is supposed to relate to the bafflingly opaque fantasy religion of Ravka. In her interview with The Atlantic of 20 June, 2012, Leigh described the religion as follows:

"...I never get specifically into Christianity. That was really important to me. There is no Christ in this world. The religion that is in the world is much closer to the kind of pagan tradition that was in Russia pre-Christianity, and even that grew out of the influence of Christianity, but that couldn't tamp down these local mythologies."

So, it’s not Christianity, but it’s a pagan tradition that grew from Christianity, but also the Grisha are fantasy Jews, so not actually Christians at all, then.

The best sense I can make of this is that the state religion headed by the Apparat is equivalent to the Russian Catholic Church (minus JC); the peasants still follow their ancient pagan ways, but the deities and folk heroes (actually historical Grisha) of the peasants have been reinvented as Saints of the church, as was the real-life custom. The Grisha follow their own non-spiritual tradition of the Small Science, and were considered heretics or witches by both the state church and the peasants before the formation of the Second Army.

I’d like to know her sources on Slavic Paganism, which is one of the least-documented traditions in the world. Given the difficulty of accessing trustworthy resources (at least in English?), I don’t think it’s fair for a non-expert to judge which concepts she did and didn’t at least attempt to represent without knowing what research she was working with.

“There was a hot, barbaric quality about the lessons for Easter Day which had nothing at all to do with pussy-willow and lemony floss chickens, although it might possibly have related to forgotten druidic atrocities. The lesson from Exodus was about the Paschal lamb and the god who flew over in the night and slaughtered the first-born men and beasts...the English mind was secretly horrified by glassy sea, crystal walls, white wool, brass feet and throne of the New Jerusalem where Spring would never come again because there was neither grass nor winter.”

- The Virgin in the Garden, A.S. Byatt (1978)

The above is about English Protestantism but the point still stands.

Stephen King built his world to suit his own nonconformist Christian beliefs - in his preface to the complete edition, he describes The Stand as being a “long tale of dark Christianity” - and while he mixes it up with lashings of any number of occult traditions, Lovecraft, Poe, Robert Chambers and 70’s rock’n’roll, I always feel like he knows the forces he’s meddling with, and the images fit together and overlap in ways that make sense. You categorically cannot deny that the man has done his research – he believes in the power of rock’n’roll about as much as he believes in the power of God, and anyway, he doesn’t use his mythos to tell stories about atrocities committed against historical minorities, he uses it to horrify (mostly) whitebread working-class Americans like himself. (The characters! I mean the characters!)

Leigh doesn’t talk about her beliefs except that she’s non-practising of Jewish descent. Regardless of whether she has first-hand knowledge of any of the traditions she claims are the basis of the Grishaverse religion, it doesn’t feel well-considered to me because the way she uses elements from eclectic sources often confuses what the meaning is supposed to be.

For example, the matter of the Darkling’s personal emblem being a solar eclipse. Upon learning this, my immediate assumption (along with seemingly everyone else’s) was that the eclipse symbol was in reference to the alchemical marriage of the sun and moon, which was described in the prologue post. Surely he has been waiting for the Sun Summoner so that together they can fulfill the transcendent marriage that will grant them both ultimate power and allow them to save the world. This makes sense because in real alchemy, the transformation of the mundane elements (i.e. lead into gold) is known as the ‘Lesser Work’ (or Small Science), and the transformation of the spirit which grants immortality to the master practitioner is the ‘Great Work’ (the equivalent of merzost). His words to Alina (when he tells her that she is his “balance” and so on) are in accordance with the alchemical interpretation, but apparently we are supposed to understand his traditional use of the image as yet more ‘manipulation’, and the actual meaning of the eclipse is the Biblical meaning – the extinguishment of the light of sun (and often moon) which is often mentioned in connection with the God’s wrath against the sins of man, and the end of days.

"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst."

- KJV Luke 23:44-45

According to Leigh’s blog post of 16 March 2014, in answer to a submitted question, Leigh confirmed that the sun being blocked by the moon would reduce Alina’s powers:

“A solar eclipse would have no effect on the Darkling, but it would make it harder for Alina to summon.”

That is to say, the Darkling’s symbol is intended to show his own dark power not marrying and complementing, but rather suppressing Alina’s powers.

Some of the Biblical allusions are good, really! The kefta being the colours of the priesthood’s robes in Exodus? Brilliant. The Shadow Fold as the (shadow of the) valley of death? Awesome! The nichevo’ya as a plague of locusts? Love it.

But her use of imagery isn’t consistently precise enough that I can trust anything to mean anything.

The other obvious head-desker here is the cosmic quince tree which is one of the major setpieces of RoW. The reason I included the quote from Byatt above was the line about the “hot, barbaric quality” of Biblical tradition.

One of the recurring ideas we’re going to explore in much greater detail in several of our later inspiration texts is the idea of deserts as a place of fear and loathing, oppression, dark magic, and apocalyptic revelation. The Shadow Fold inherited all these traits from the deserts of its forebears.

In the Bible, the desert (often translated as ‘wilderness’) is used both figuratively and literally to represent sin, privation and suffering – the 40 years of Exodus, and Jesus’ trial and temptation in the desert are just the two most famous of many examples – but of course the Israelites of the Bible could not escape or leave the desert even if they wanted to, because ‘desert’ is the biome of the vast majority of the SWANA region. In order to express feelings of safety and relief,the Bible is littered with passages about places of respite from the harsh heat and dry – wells and shady oases. Although ‘darkness’ in the Bible is the shade of evil, shadows, far from being evil, are often used as symbols of peace, comfort and protection, and of course this is one Biblical image that Leigh never capitalises on.

“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”

- KJV Song of Solomon 2:3

Note that ‘apple’ has historically been used as a placeholder translation to substitute for any fruit. The Biblical apple – including the apple of Eden - is actually a quince, as what we now know as ‘apples’ did not grow in the region. The singular, supreme ‘apple’ tree in Song of Solomon is poetically linked to the Tree of Life in Eden, where God walks “in the cool of the day”, i.e. in the shade of the trees.

I’ve no doubt that Leigh knows this, but she chooses to ignore those parts of her traditional images – the eclipse and the quince tree – that might cast any sort of positive light on the Darkling. If the idea of the tree sequence in RoW was that the Darkling has protected Ravka under his shadow by merging with the tree, then that certainly wasn’t clear.

Leigh doesn’t always use her imagery in the same way as her source texts, either – as I said in the Chapter 7 post, the dark hound (or wolf) metaphor is consistently associated with the ‘Darkling’ character across all texts, including The Stand, but on the other hand, the full moon in The Stand is used in similar context but means something totally different to the full moon in R&R. There’s an obvious link between (dark) ‘wolf’ and (light) ‘full moon’ (wolves howl at the moon) which ties the metaphors together in The Stand (and in Jane Eyre), but that link is broken in TGT because Leigh changed the meaning of one but not the other.

Tl;dr:

Dragonlance = Good (light) and Evil (dark) must co-exist in balance, lest the world shall end

Grishaverse = Good (light) must destroy Evil (dark) whenever it arises, lest the world shall end

Neither approach is inherently ‘bad’ however the transference of story elements from one to the other was confusing e.g.in Legends, if Raistlin and Crysania can truly fall in love, they will be ‘balanced’ and redeemed; in TGT the Darkling tells Alina she is his ‘balance’ but (according to Leigh) this is a manipulation tactic and if she falls for him she will become corrupted

From our list of sources, the Grishaverse worldbuilding is most like the works of Stephen King and Scott’s Legend

Leigh uses a lot of imagery about light and darkness from other sources such as the Bible, classical alchemy, and her inspiration texts, but not in a way that’s cohesive or consistent

---

Alright, let’s hear it:

“He wants to become a god,” Dalamar answered softly. “He will challenge the Queen of Darkness herself. That is his plan.”

my goodness, I never would have guessed that, how shocking

In their defense, 'world's most powerful wizard must be stopped in his attempt to overthrow god' wasn’t quite such a well-worn plot in 1986 as it is today.

This particular brand of evil wizard scheme is one we’re going to see again much later on in another book. Surprisingly, the Darkling’s plan to control the world with the Shadow Fold in TGT is never clearly framed in this way (perhaps because there’s no existing god to overthrow), even though it’s implicit since the plan involves the use of the god-like power of creation merzost, and later Elizaveta’s plan to resurrect him in KoS is:

“We will not be rulers. We will be gods...We will hold dominion over the world.”

I don’t want to dwell on this too much now, because Raistlin isn’t here and he should be allowed to tell us the finer details for himself. The important thing to consider in these chapters is not what the plan is, or even why the plan is, but the reason the characters (and thus, the story) propose for why the plan must be stopped.

---

Dalamar is Raistlin’s apprentice, not by his choosing but by order of the mages’ Conclave. In Chapter 9, Raistlin revealed that he has known all along that Dalamar was assigned to spy on him, and he sends Dalamar back with a message to show the other masters just what he thinks of that:

“Slowly, Raistlin lifted his hand and laid it gently upon Dalamar’s chest, touching the young man’s black robes with the tips of five fingers.

The pain was excruciating. Dalamar’s face turned white, his eyes widened, he gasped in agony…

...Dalamar collapsed upon the floor, clutching his chest, moaning…

...In a frenzy of pain, Dalamar ripped open his robes. Five red, glistening trails of blood streamed down his breast, soaking into the black cloth, welling from five holes that had been burned into his flesh.”

This is broadly equivalent to the Darkling’s mutilation of Genya as punishment for Genya’s half-hearted betrayal of him in favour of Alina. But what’s more interesting is what happens when Dalamar faces up to the Conclave and the horrified archmage Par-Salian tries to bail him out:

“Upon my return tomorrow, he will leave.”

Par-Salian raised his head. “Your return?” he asked, shocked. “But he knows you for what you are – a spy, sent by us, the Conclave, his fellows.”...”No, young Dalamar. You are very courageous, but I cannot allow you to return to what would undoubtedly be tortured death at his hands.”

“You cannot stop me,” Dalamar said, and there was no emotion in his voice. “I said before – I would give my soul to study with such as he. And now, though it costs my life, I will stay with him.”

The Darkling only wishes he could inspire such loyalty. Now, this is not to say Dalamar is entirely happy about this – he is bitter that Raistlin has “ensnared” him to such an extent, because those of Evil alignment hate to be subservient to others, but he seems earnest when he says that the unhealing wounds are “no more than [he] deserved,” for his betrayal.

As we saw in the previous discussion about the relation between sacrifice and magic, and the above section about magic being ‘life, death, and beyond death’, Dragonlance does consider magical power to be something worth pursuing even at enormous personal cost. The story respects Dalamar’s choice to adhere to his own philosophy, refuse Par-Salian’s protection and risk his life in the pursuit of power; he’s certainly no victim.

---

The conversation continues – Dalamar tells the Conclave of Raistlin’s discoveries of the unprecedented powers of the legendary Fistandantilus, Caramon doesn’t understand any this pretentious magic talk (some things never change) and demands answers, Par-Salian tells the story of Raistlin’s Test again (mostly for the benefit of the readers), and then we get some new information:

“His magic was powerful enough to defeat death itself. He moved to another plane of existence, a plane far from here, yet not far enough. Constantly he watched, biding his time, searching for a body to accept his soul. And he found that body – your brother’s.”...”Who knows what deal the two made during the Test? None of us, probably.” Par-Salian smiled slightly. “I know this. Raistlin did superbly, yet his frail health was failing him. Perhaps he could have survived the final test – the confrontation with the dark elf – if Fistandantilus had not aided him. Perhaps not.”

“Aided him? He saved his life?”

Par-Salian shrugged. “We know only this, warrior – it was not any of us who left your brother with that gold-tinted skin. The dark elf cast a fireball at him, and Raistlin survived. Impossible, of course – “

Oh, well it’s all different now, isn’t it? Raistlin isn’t evil, he’s possessed! By the most fearsome dark wizard who ever lived!

“Let me get this straight,” Caramon said, glowering at the white-robed mage. “This Fistandantilus...took over Raistlin’s soul? He’s the one that made Raistlin take the Black Robes.”

“Your brother made his own choice,” Par-Salian spoke sharply. “As did we all.”

“I don’t believe it!” Caramon shouted. “Raistlin didn’t make this decision. You’re lying – all of you! You tortured my brother, and then one of your old wizards claimed what was left of his body!” … “I’m going to get him back,” Caramon said finally, tears gleaming in his eyes. “If he can go back in time to meet this old wizard, so can I. You can send me back. And when I find Fistandantilus, I’ll kill him. Then Raist will be...” He choked back a sob, fighting for control. “He’ll be Raist again. And he’ll forget all this nonsense about challenging th-the Queen of Darkness and...becoming a god.”

Raistlin disappeared from the story of Chronicles at the end of Chapter 5 of Book 1 of the third novel, Dragons of Spring Dawning. He seemed to be dead – he specifically had a “dying breath” – but he was still holding the Dragon Orb “in a grip stronger than death”. (Magic lasts ‘beyond death’, remember?). He didn’t return until near the end, Chapter 11 of Book 3, after he had converted to Evil, and Caramon immediately saw that his brother was not the same:

“And your voice, it’s stronger, different. Like you...and yet not like you...”

We the readers, have yet to enter Raistlin’s POV in the novel. All his chapters so far have been from the POVs of other characters. Who knows what really happened,not just the first time Fistandantilus helped Raistlin to cheat death, during his Test, but the second time as well, and who knows how much of Raistlin’s mind is still his own?

“None of us, probably.”

Par-Salian doesn’t look good in this chapter. He’s seriously on the defensive, because he’s just revealed to the rest of the Conclave that he made his snap decision that Raistlin was the chosen one without consulting the rest of the masters, and it was that decision which allowed Fistandantilus and Raistlin to strike whatever bargain they did, which now has led to the whole world being in danger. Par-Salian seems very keen to blame Raistlin in order to divert blame from himself. His grim determination that he did ‘what had to be done’ regardless of anyone else’s feelings on the matter, and regardless of Raistlin and Caramon’s lives, casts doubt on his words and erodes the readers’ trust in him, thus pushing the reader towards buying into Caramon’s hopes, even though we know he has a history of blindly defending all of Raistlin’s worst behaviour.

---

Crysania is still laid out, but she manages to get in a word for her man when Tas tells everyone about the contents of a letter she wrote to Elistan, which Tas ‘found’, which is to say ‘borrowed’ (which is to say ‘stole’):

“In the letter, she said she was more – uh, how did it go – ‘firmly convinced than ever, after my talk with Tanis, that there was good in Raistlin’ and that he could be turned from his evil path. I must convince the mages of this –'

…

”I said I could tell her lots of stories about Raistlin, if she wanted to hear them. She said she’d like that a lot, so I told her all the stories I could think of. She was particularly interested in all the ones I told her about Bupu--”

“ ‘If only I could find the gully dwarf!’ she said to me one night. ‘I’m certain I could convince Par-Salian that there is hope, that he may be reclaimed!’

…

“I know I always thought Raistlin looked much better in black – with that golden skin of his and all. I certainly don’t believe everyone has to be good, of course.

...

Fizban said that there had to be a balance in the world, that we were fighting to restore the balance. So that means there has to be Black Robes as well as White, doesn’t it?”

(Note: Fizban is the god Paladine)

Tas is the in-canon captain of the good ship Raistania and I’m saving the in-depth discussion of him for a later chapter; suffice to say for now that Tas has no malice against Raistlin and would be thrilled to have him back regardless of alignment.

---

In order to help Crysania with her quest to convince the Conclave that Raistlin can still be redeemed, Tas agreed to fetch the gully dwarf Bupu and bring her to testify to the mages.

Gully Dwarfs are barely considered to be people and are widely regarded as the most disgusting race on Krynn, in both a physical and a moral sense. They are a cowardly people of low intelligence who live in slums, garbage dumps and sewers, they hoard filthy ‘treasures’ such as rotten food and animal corpses, and they eat anything.

“It happened back during the war, when we were in Xak Tsaroth. The only ones who knew anything about that city were gully dwarves. But most wouldn’t help us. Raistlin cast a charm spell on one of them – Bupu. Charmed wasn’t exactly the word for what it did to her. She fell in love with him.” Tas paused, sighing, then continued in a remorseful tone. “Some of us thought it was funny, I guess. But Raistlin didn’t. He was really kind to her, and he even saved her life once, when draconians attacked us. Well, after we left Xak Tsaroth, Bupu came with us. She couldn’t bear to leave Raistlin.”

Tas’s voice dropped. “One night, I woke up. I heard Bupu crying. I started to go to her, but I saw Raistlin had heard her, too. She was homesick. She wanted to go back to her people, but she couldn’t leave him. I don’t know what he said, but I saw him lay his hand on her head. And it seemed that I could see a light shining all around Bupu. And, then, he sent her home. She had to travel through a land filled with terrible creatures but, somehow, I knew she would be safe. And she was,” Tas finished solemnly.

This is a summary of events from the first book of Chronicles. Raistlin’s odd relationship with Bupu is used in both trilogies to expose his deep insecurities and fear of vulnerability. Bupuis the one person he can rely on for the kind of unconditional love he craves – unlike his symbiotic attachment with Caramon, Raistlin is confident that he is in full control of his relationship with Bupu, and he need not be jealous of her, because she is a creature weaker and more wretched than Raistlin perceives himself to be.

Raistlin’s true affection for Bupu seems to remain in Legends, when in Chapter 8 he gently smiles upon her and reminisces about their previous adventure while he uses her as a conduit for the spell that makes Crysania appear to be still alive.

This is the best indication in the novel so far that the old (mostly) non-evil Raistlin is still here. On the other hand, when he “charmed” Bupu into falling in love with him that first time, it genuinely was an accident. But since then, he has known that his magic is so potent that this is what it does to people, and he uses the same spell on Crysania regardless. The street magic tricks he performs for Crysania’s amusement in Chapter 11 are the same tricks he used to play for Bupu as well, which comes off as faintly degrading to a reader who remembers the previous trilogy.

Crysania’s resistance to the Charm spell is higher than Bupu’s – her natural resistance to the spell’s attempt to control her thoughts is what causes her headache in Chapter 11 – but she’s obviously still quite strongly susceptible to it, which is why she keeps swooning all over the place.

The mage Conclave doubts Tas’ story, and Par-Salian deliberately provokes Bupu to anger in an attempt to break Raistlin’s spell over her, so that they can be “certain of the truth”.

“Me know nothing ‘bout big, powerful wizards,” Bupu waved a grubby hand. “Me know nothing ‘bout no charm spell.”

…

...Bupu stared tearfully at Par-Salian. “The others – the big man, the kender – they laugh at Bupu. Thy look at me like some sort of bug.”

Bupu rubbed her eyes. There was a lump in Tas’s throat, and he felt lower than a bug himself.

Bupu continued, speaking softly. “Me know how me look.” Her filthy hands tried in vain to smooth her dress, leaving streaks of dirt down it. “Me know me not pretty, like lady lying there.” The gully dwarf snuffled, but then she wiped her hand across her nose and – raising her hand – looked at Par-Salian defiantly. “But him not call me ‘creature!’ Him call me ‘little one.’ Little one,” she repeated

For a moment, she was quiet, remembering. Then she heaved a gusty sigh. “I-I want to stay with him. But him tell me, ‘no’. Him say he must walk roads that be dark. Him tell me, he want me to be safe. Him lay his hand on my head” – Bupu bowed her head, as if in memory – “and I feel warm inside. Then him tell me, ‘Farewell, Bupu.’ Him call me ‘little one.’” Looking up, Bupu glanced around the semi-circle. “Him never laugh at me,” she said, choking. “Never!” She began to cry."

The only sounds in the room, for a moment, were the gully dwarf’s sobs. Caramon put his hands over his face, overcome. Tas drew a shuddering breath and fished around for a handkerchief.

…

Par-Salian laid his hand on Bupu’s head, his face was drawn and tired, but he appeared exultant. “Maybe we did not fail, maybe he did learn some compassion,” he murmured. Gently he stroked the gully dwarf’s long hair. “No, Raistlin would never laugh at you, little one. He knew, he remembered. There were too many who had laughed at him.”

Dragonlance is really good at affording dignity to its most insignificant people. Instead of shaming Bupu for being Raistlin’s helpless victim, the writing diverts all its scorn onto the other characters for thinking so little of her and they are made to feel chastened.

Other than adding another person onto Raistlin’s crowd of advocates, the point of this scene is to confirm that the effects of the Charmspell can be overcome by strong emotion, thus ensuring that Crysania is not perceived as completely disenfranchised and creating ambiguity of how much of her rapidly-developing love for Raistlin is true and how much is magically-induced. The spell is the equivalent device to the pleasure afforded by touching an amplifier in TGV – it introduces a hint of magical dubcon into the story which is tense and exciting and gives the otherwise unlikely romance a running head-start.

---

Par-Salian confirms (via Tas) that Crysania wants to save Raistlin because she loves him. He asks Caramon one final time:

“Do you love your brother enough to undertake this perilous journey? To risk your life for him, as this lady has done? Remember, before you answer, you do not go back on a quest to save the world. You go back on a quest to save a soul, nothing more. Nothing less.”

Of course Caramon assents, and Par-Salian announces that he will send Caramon and Crysania back in time (where her soul can be released from stasis) to face down the sinister Fistandantilus and hopefully save Raistlin, despite the dissent of the rest of the mage Conclave.

The pretense up to this point has been that Raistlin’s hitherto unknown evil plan must be stopped, because defeating (or maybe even weakening) Takhisis will destroy the world by upending the balance of Good and Evil, but the real emotional core of the story is that Raistlin must be stopped because attempting to destroy Takhisis will destroy Raistlin, and anyone who doesn’t try to stop him will be themselves destroyed with guilt. This is a fight he can’t possibly win. Even if he does somehow win and become the new god of Evil, he’ll still be forever lost to those who love him. The gods of Krynn can incarnate into human form – Paladine himself was a party member for most of Chronicles – but considering how determined Raistlin already is to cut himself off from everyone, only permitting contact from those he needs to further his plan, if he becomes a god it’s unlikely he’ll be dropping home to visit. Not to mention the spiritual damage that becoming the god of Evil will inflict on his soul.

Even those who don’t deeply love Raistlin still have reasons to believe him worth saving. When pressed as to why he chose Raistlin for that terrible destiny:

“I had my reasons,” Par-Salian said gently. “Some of them I cannot explain to you, not even now. But I can tell you this – he was born with the gift. And that is most important. The magic dwells deep within your brother. Did you know that, from the first day Raistlin attended school, his own master held him in fear and awe. How does one teach a pupil who knows more than the teacher? And combined with the gift of magic is intelligence. Raistlin’s mind is never at rest. It seeks knowledge, demands answers. And he is courageous – perhaps more courageous than you are, warrior. He fights pain every day of his life. He has faced death more than once and defeated it. He fears nothing – neither the darkness nor the light. And his soul...” Par-Salian paused. “His soul burns with ambition, the desire for power, the desire for more knowledge. I knew that nothing, not even the fear of death itself, would stop him from attaining his goals. And I knew that the goals he sought to attain might well benefit the world, even if he, himself, should choose to turn his back upon it.”

Magic in Dragonlance is permitted a good old sensawunda that it isn’t in TGV, because in TGV the desire to learn powerful magic – for any reason, even the ‘good’ reason of saving the world – is associated with greed and corruption and must be punished. Dragonlance mages are allowed to do powerful magic justfor the sheer thrill of it, just to see ‘what happens’, just to test their own limits, and knowledge is its own end.

The loss of Raistlin is not just a loss to those who love him, but to the whole world, because of the boundless talent and potential he has to further the development of the Art of magic. (This is more in accord with Dalamar’s reasoning for supporting him).

---

There is no scene like this anywhere in TGV.

At first I had meant to examine the handful of scenes in S&B where Genya (half-heartedly) and Ivan defend his actions, but those scenes don’t serve the same purpose, because the point of those scenes is not to show that they care for him, but rather how much control he has over them, to the point where they feel they must enable his evil actions to ensure their own survival.

The plot of TGT is as simple as Alina’s need to overcome her magical and emotional weaknesses in order to destroy the Shadow Fold and the Darkling because he is evil, and no consideration is ever given as to whether any attempt can or should be made to redeem him, whether for love or even just for utility.

In KoS, Yuri argues with Nikolai, Genya and Zoya that the Darkling’s actions were justified and that he will return as Ravka’s savior, but those conversations aren’t equivalent either – Yuri is clearly not a new hero but an antagonist, and his beliefs are thoroughly ridiculed by the returning heroes as dismissed as foolish idealism, in contrast with their lived experiences of the Darkling’s abuse.

The only TGV scene that can even begin to be compared with these chapters is the Kangaroo Court at the very end of RoW, where Alina, Genya and Zoya debate whether to attempt to save the Darkling from his eternal punishment within the quince tree, but the scene still isn’t about the Darkling’s personal worth or anyone’s compassion for him.

“I’m not certain we can just leave him there.”

Genya crossed her arms. “No?”

“Not if we want to rule justly. Not if the future is meant to be better than the past.”

“Do you have a fever?” Genya asked.

But Alina’s expression was knowing. “You’re afraid you’ll become him. You’re afraid you’ll be the avalanche.”

Immortal and unstoppable, another tragedy to befall Ravka.

“What are we meant to do?” Genya said. “Free him? Forgive him?”

“Grant him death,” said Zoya.

Genya stood and walked to the mantel. “Does he deserve it?”

“That’s not my choice to make,” said Zoya. “Not on my own.”

Alina rested her head on the back of the couch. “Why are we even discussing this? From what I understand, the Darkling knew the bargain he made.”

…

There was a long silence in the room. At last Genya reached for Alina’s glass and took a long sip. “I don’t believe the Darkling has earned forgiveness. I don’t know how many years of pain buys that, or when we become the monsters and he becomes the victim. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that math. If there’s really a way to accomplish it, let’s be rid of this burden once and for all.”

“All right,” said Alina.

Before she could talk herself out of it, Zoya rang for a servant to fetch Nikolai."

The reason for the decision to attempt to rescue the Darkling is solely so that Zoya and Genya can alleviate their guilt; there is no mention whatsoever of anyone loving him or wanting to redeem him or believing that he has anything to offer to the study of magic, and in fact the vague proposal of what to do with him once he’s retrieved seems to be to give him a trial possibly resulting in his execution. The eventual decision is so begrudging that Zoya nearly changes her mind about it anyway.

Unfortunately there’s no hard conclusions that can be drawn about this scene since it’s the very end of the series as we know it, and there’s no confirmed sequel on the horizon. It is, technically, entirely possible that the alleged ‘heroes’ will suddenly learn a lesson about compassion and forgiveness in the next installment, but after five entire novels (and two short story collections) devoted to nothing but hatred of this man, somehow I doubt it.

---

So, to summarise, Raistlin has on his team:

Dalamar (wants to learn from him, remains loyal even after being tortured)

Caramon (self-destructively codependent, will burn down the world for his brother)

Tas (a lifelong loyal friend)

Crysania (madly in love with him, wants to redeem him to fulfill her divine mission)

Bupu (a formerly magically-compelled servant who remains loyal after regaining free will because Raistlin is the only person who has ever been kind to her)

Kitiara (lingering big sister instinct, wants to rule the world with him, sends Soth to kill Crysania so Raistlin can’t get himself killed trying to fight a god)

In the early chapters, Tika never complains that Caramon still loves Raistlin, and she never says she doesn’t want Raistlin to come home to Solace and live with them. She complains that Caramon is destroying himself, but she doesn’t blame Raistlin for ‘manipulating’ him. We won’t see Tika again until the very final chapters of the trilogy, when once again it’s hinted that she wouldn’t have objected to Raistlin’s return so long as Caramon was healthy again.

Just about the only (named) person you can say is against him at this point is Par-Salian (see below section for the rest of his development in these chapters), and even then, Par-Salian goes from self-absolution to devastating self-blame in the course of three chapters, wishes he could believe in Raistlin, and still aids Caramon’s attempt even though he thinks Caramon has no hope to succeed.

The Darkling has:

Genya (his subordinate; moderately defends him from criticism and follows his orders, whilst also snookering his plans by discouraging Alina from developing feelings for him, then betrays him in S&S to allow Alina to escape, at the very end agrees to the decision to rescue him from eternal pain and then kill him, in order to “be rid of this burden”)

Ivan (his subordinate; properly loyal to the man and the cause, only gets one paragraph at the end of S&B to make his case, which makes no impression on Alina; killed in S&S as narrative punishment for his loyalty)

Zoya (his subordinate, switches sides in S&S, at the very end of the series decides to rescue him from eternal pain and then kill him, in order to fend off her own fears about being an unjust ruler)

Baghra (his abusive mother who claims to ‘love’ him but is also the primary agent of his destruction; only just barely makes the list because she doesn’t consider him “beyond redemption” until he expands the Shadow Fold at the end of S&B)

Yuri and the cultists in KoS/RoW (defend his actions but are thoroughly derided in-story; Yuri’s narrative punishment is to be trapped in his own body as the Darkling possesses him; the other most prominent cultist is murdered by the Darkling)

I don’t count David because the only conversation in S&B specifically about David and the Darkling is after the collar scene, where Genya tells Alina that “he feels terrible” about following the Darkling’s orders. The Darkling does seem to have earned unquestioning loyalty from the oprichniki and the background Grisha, but that doesn’t have much impact on the reader’s perception because they don’t have names, let alone personalities. Out of the characters who are loyal to him, Genya is the only one the reader is encouraged to like, since Ivan and Zoya are both bullies. I think Baghra is supposed to be seen as the only person willing to tell the necessary hard truths, but she’s so cruel to everyone that there’s nothing likeable about her.

It’s not much of a list, is it, particularly taking into account the fact that all of Raistlin’s defenders are the main characters, people who have long-standing and close personal relationships with him and who have already been wronged by him but still look past that to leap to his defense, whilst the Darkling is left with the badly under-developed secondary cast, all of whom change their minds and turn on him once he wrongs them, and in the sequel duology his defenders are the antagonists.

Support for the Darkling is never about him and his worth beyond his immense magical powers, because no one knows who he really is and he doesn’t have personal closeness with anyone. His soldiers who support him are depicted as having been manipulated from a young age, unable to escape their conscription into the Second Army, and/or being desperate enough to compromise their own morals in order to end the wars, and his cultists are victims of propaganda and villains.

TGV (so far) says that anyone who tries to save and redeem the Darkling will end up being tortured or killed, because having compassion for an ‘evil’ person is dangerous and self-destructive.

Legends says that doing everything they can to try to save and redeem Raistlin is the only way the characters can save themselves (and/or achieve their goal), because not having compassion for an ‘evil’ person is dangerous and self-destructive.

---

Back in the Chapter 7 post I mentioned there was a second parallel relationship that foreshadows a better potential future for Raistania than the Soth/Isolde story.

This book was the first appearance of Ladonna, Par-Salian’s opposite number in the Conclave and the archmage of the order of the Black Robes.

“There are no Creatures from Beyond lurking in the corners, Ladonna, I assure you,” the old mage said dryly. “Had I wanted to banish you from this plane, I could have done so long ago, my dear.”

“When we were young?” Ladonna cast aside her hood. Iron-gray hair, woven into an intricate braid coiled about her head framed a face whose beauty seemed enhanced by the lines of age that appeared to have been drawn by a masterful artist, so well did they highlight her intelligence and dark wisdom. “That would have been a contest indeed, Great One.”

“Drop the title, Ladonna,” Par-Salian said. “We have known each other too long for that.”

“Known each other long and well, Par-Salian,” Ladonna said with a smile. “Quite well,” she murmured softly, her eyes going to the fire.

“Would you go back to our youth, Ladonna?” Par-Salian asked.

She did not answer for a moment, then she looked up at him and shrugged. “To trade power and wisdom and skill for what? Hot blood? Not likely, my dear. What about you?”

“I would have answered the same twenty years ago,” Par-Salian said, rubbing his temples. “But now...I wonder.”

Oh my. This flirty banter between the male archmage of the Whites and the female archmage of the Blacks is highly suspect. A couple of pages later, they have a little bit that parallels the Chapter 11 scene of Raistania talking into the fire.

It’s impossible not to read this as hinting at a past romance; although clearly something went wrong between them and the heat has died down over the years, they still have affection for one another and get along well enough and support one another in pursuit of their mutual goals in the oversight and furtherance of the Art. If Raistlin and Crysania can both let go of just a little of their pride and ambition and stop trying to convert one another, maybe they could end up something like this.

Subsequent books would confirm that Par-Salian and Ladonna were, in fact, passionately in love and hoped their union would end the division between the White and Black orders, and they possibly had a child together (there are a lot of ‘maybe’ babies in Dragonlance) before the affair went sour. Decades later, they retired from active wizardry together and hopefully lived out their last days in love, peace and comfort.

---

Most of this chapter is the archmages arguing about the time travel plan, how to stop Crysania from helping Raistlin, how to stop Raistlin from growing more powerful, and so on. They share a shocking vision of Fistandantilus, but what they saw isn’t revealed to the reader. Par-Salian says that sending Caramon back in time won’t change anything that happened in the past.

“Caramon is my redemption,” Par-Salian said without looking up. The old mage stared at his hands that lay, trembling, on the open spellbook. “He is going on a journey to save a soul, as I told him. But it will not be his brother’s.” Par-Salian looked up, his eyes filled with pain. His gaze went first to Justarius, then to Ladonna. Both met that gaze with complete understanding.”

So, Par-Salian lied (a frequent habit of his. ‘Good’ doesn’t mean ‘nice’). He also believes Raistlin is too far gone, but he decides to send Caramon on his rescue mission anyway, in an attempt to make amends in the only way he thinks possible – perhaps he has destroyed one of the brothers, but there is a slim chance he can save the other, by forcing Caramon to face up to the fact that Raistlin really is unfixably evil, and giving him another chance to break ties with his Raistlin once and for all and move on with his own life.

Ladonna leaves Par-Salian with Justarius, the archmage of the Red (Neutral) Robes.

“It is a strange charm Raistlin possesses! You never met him, did you? No. I felt it myself and I cannot understand...”

“Perhaps I can,” Justarius said. “We’ve all been laughed at one time in our lives. We’ve all been jealous of a sibling. We have felt pain and suffered, just as he has suffered. And we’ve all longed – just once – for the power to crush our enemies! We pity him. We hate him. We fear him – all because there is a little of him in each of us, though we admit it to ourselves only in the darkest part of the night.”

I admit this passage annoys me and I would have cut it because it feels like being clubbed over the head; this is blisteringly obvious confirmation that Raistlin represents the Shadow Self (unconscious, repressed aspect of the personality) – in this trilogy he plays the Shadow to Caramon, and the Animus (inner masculine aspect) to Crysania, but as the darkest person in the world, he also serves as a sort of Shadow of the collective population of Krynn, as the world continues to suffer through its post-war and religious trauma.

This is the same role that the Darkling performs in TGV – he is Alina’s Shadow (and Animus), but he is also the Shadow of the Grisha and all of Ravka. His common name connects him with Ravkans of all social classes through centuries past and present, and the mark of his personal trauma is laid across the land in the form of the Shadow Fold.

When Par-Salian says he “cannot understand” the effect Raistlin has on people, this is a subtle hint that he is wrongabout Raistlin being too evil to be redeemed, because the only way to become psychologically healed is to accept and embrace the Shadow, not reject it.

Justarius provides the interpretation because he is the master of Neutrality, and thus he has understanding of both the Light (Ego) and the Dark (Shadow) aspects.

As we know, the healing and empowering function of psychological Shadow Work is something Leigh failed to incorporate into TGT, but we’ll revisit to this topic in greater detail in a later chapter.

“Farewell, my friend,” Justarius said gently. “I will wait for you outside the laboratory should you need help when it is all over.”

“Thank you,” Par-Salian whispered without raising his head.

Justarius limped from the study. Shutting the door too hastily, he caught the hem of his red robe and was forced to open it again to free himself. Before he closed the door again, he heard the sound of weeping.”

Par-Salian's guilt is a powerful thing to end the sequence on. This set of chapters provides a harsh account of Raistlin’s history as a serial user and abuser of people. In Chronicles he just barely gets away with it because everything he does is ultimately in service of saving the world, but that excuse doesn’t pass muster in Legends because this time around his plan to save the world again and even better by overthrowing the goddess who inflicts (largely abstract) evil is a thinly-veiled excuse for him to attain ultimate power and control so he will never have to be vulnerable again. Even so, the conclusion of it all circles back around to the fact that the inciting event was the Test, during and after which Raistlin was used to death by Par-Salian, according to the command of holy Paladine (who has been oft-mentioned but conspicuously, almost deafeningly absent in person thus far), and the only way he was able to survive that was to allow himself to be used by Fistandantilus.

Raistlin isn't absolved by this, but the constant return to focus on the complicated chain of events that led to his downward spiral positions him as a tragic figure who, for all his skills and powers, has been bravely fighting a losing battle for survival against the forces of fate.

In Dragonlance, all the characters have known one another for years – many have known one another for their whole lives. They all lived through and experienced first-hand the traumatic events of Chronicles and the preceding years – the Test, the return of the gods, and the war – and in Legends they must come to understand the range of effects those events had on one another, recognise and try to help each other through their suffering.

As we pointed out previously in the Chapter 9/DitW discussion, no one knows the Darkling’s personal history, and so no other character cares or even is able to care about where his ‘cycle of abuse’ started, or how he progressed from the “boy - brilliant, blessed with too much power” to the tyrant he is in the present day, and his downfall is credited to his 'unnatural’ lust for power and use of merzost rather than the conditions of violence and fear under which he was forced to live.

Setting aside DitW and relying on the information given in-story to the characters, the only character (other than Baghra) who knows anything at all about the Darkling’s early life is Alina. In R&R, Baghra tells her the story:

“We moved from place to place, we saw the way our people lived, the way they were mistrusted, the lives they were forced to eke out in secrecy and fear. He vowed that we would someday have a safe place, that Grisha power would be something to be valued and coveted, something our country would treasure. We would be Ravkans, not just Grisha. That dream was the seed of the Second Army. A good dream. If I’d known...”

This very brief account of events from hundreds of years ago fails to make any meaningful impression on Alina, who started out the trilogy being resentful of the ‘privileges’ enjoyed by the Grisha of the Second Army.

No timespan has ever been given for the number of years between DitW and the present, but it must be several centuries and possibly up to a thousand years or more, because (according to his cover story) the ‘current’ Darkling is 120 years old, the Black Heretic was five generations back on his fabricated family tree, and in RoW it’s confirmed that the Black Heretic ‘lived’ several generations of kings after the Darkling created the Second Army. This one paragraph can’t possibly do justice to the number of murder attempts, betrayals, losses of friends (which he once had, according to RoW) due to wars and misadventures and old age, and all the other tragedies he must have suffered during that time.

---

End notes

‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT RAISTLIN IS THE SHADOW SELF? DO YOU UNDERSTAND YET?’

Calm down Maggie I GET IT OK

---

YAY we’re a whole one-third of the way through the first book of the trilogy (of the first story on the list ;_;), and it’s only taken me over a month to get this far.

Thankfully the plot of Legends starts to go its own way from now on, so I’ll be able to start skipping chapters and hopefully finish the book by the end of January.

Next time, we go BACK IN TIME.

Cut it here because it’s SO LONG but there was more to say about TGV’s victim complex where anyone who is wronged by the Darkling in any way regardless of reason MUST hate him forever or else they are‘weak’ vs. Dragonlance where everyone is Raistlin’s ‘victim’ but none of the ‘good’ characters care because love is both powerful and complicated, and none of the ‘evil’ characters care because abuse is part of their totally valid religion.

I’m sure there’ll be a time to cover that later

---

Outtakes and opinions:

I remember when the show came out there were all these ‘Shadow and Bone Explained’ articles saying that the Grisha colours were like the Hogwarts houses, way to show your cultural ignorance, there are at least three (3) ways that is wrong.

---

No shade intended towards Kit this chapter. “Kit/Sturm is just superior in every way, she never needed Tanis, he didn’t understand her, and she should’ve been gay anyway” I say, as I ugly cry every time she tells Tanis she always loved him and then dies in his arms, where’s my goddamn musical to fix that.

Kit and Dalamar as Team Comphet in this trilogy was my introduction to the concept long before I knew the word. Dragonlance is very equal opportunity when it comes to endearingly outdated sexual politics

---

Dragonlance: Caramon is Lawful Good, the same alignment as Sturm, the most noble paragon in all of D&D history!

Also Dragonlance: Caramon is described as “selfish guy who cares for no one but his brother” in the dramatis personae

who was responsible for this I just wanna talk

---

The Grisha being historical Ashkenazi Jews but scrubbed of religion really riles me up, I hate it when authors write these worlds full of invented religions but still can’t stand to have religious heroes because of whatever hangups they have with real life. Inej being devout is one of the tiny little glimmers of goodness in the Crows books

---

Michael Moorcock talked about the influence of his works on pop culture (including D&D) in his most recent interview which you can read here: https://screenrant.com/michael-moorcock-interview-elric-melnibone/amp/

He was surprisingly measured about it, he’s mellowing out in his old age.

This absolute titan contributed more to modern SFF than any other single person including Tolkien, I will die on this hill.

First, the dashing rescue. Raistlin saves Crysania from the spooky forest; it’s very romantic and an obvious contrast to the way he stands by and idly watches Kit nearly get murdered by the Hands of Doom in Chapter 5.

“What was that, speaking her name from the shadows of the oaks? She could see it, standing in a clearing, robed in black. “Crysania,” the voice repeated. “Raistlin!” She sobbed in thankfulness. Stumbling out of the terrifying grove of oak trees, fleeing the bone-white hands that sought to drag her down to join their endless torment, Crysania felt thin arms hold her. She felt the strange burning touch of slender fingers.”

She swoons in his arms, but then:

“...realising what she had been through, and realising, too, that she had allowed him to see her give way to weakness, Crysania pushed the mage’s arms away. Standing back from him, she regarded him coldly. ...How was he capable of doing this to her? Never had any man been able to humiliate her so! Never had any man cast her mind in such turmoil!”

This part where she scorns him because she’s ashamed of showing weakness parallels exactly what he does to her in the prologue. Generally throughout the story, they keep pace with one another in terms of their emotional development and desire for the relationship. The story treats them as equals in terms of agency and it certainly doesn’t take long for them to become equals in vulnerability once Raistlin starts to fall for Crysania at warp-speed. Like her thoughts above, “How dare this woman make me be attracted to her! This has never happened before!” is going to be Raistlin’s constant refrain once we eventually get into his POV.

By contrast in S&B, Alina is very passive in terms of both her thoughts and actions in the relationship, in order to more clearly position her as a victim of this ‘manipulative’ man. At certain points in S&S and R&R, Alina is the one to take the lead, but always in an attempt to manipulate The Darkling. The fact that she attempts to take advantage of his feelings is never given any sort of narrative reproach, presumably because the reader is supposed to assume that his feelings are ill-motivated and thus unworthy of their concern.

In Legends, this avoidance is treated as a flaw in both Raistlin and Crysania, whereas in TGT, Alina is shown to be 'weak' for wanting the Darkling, but as we said in the Chapter 5 discussion about repetition of tasks, it seems to be the case that he is supposed to give in to wanting her and thus abandoning his quest for the stag (and the rest of the plan).

The interactions in this scene are quite opposite in tone to Darklina’s interactions in S&B when the Darkling rescues Alina from the Fjerdans.

“He raised his hood and offered me his hand to help me onto the horse. For a moment, I hesitated. He stood before me, a dark rider, cloaked in black, his features in shadow. ...He had saved my life. And what other choice did I have? I put my hand in his and let the Darkling help me into the saddle.”

When Crysania sees Raistlin as a dark silhouette in the shadows, she’s so happy to see him, and it’s only after she gets embarrassed about falling into his arms that she gets angry with herself and pushes him away.

When Alina sees the Darkling, she sees him as a sinister figure. Presumably this is supposed to be foreshadowing of his true nature, an instinctual warning that Alina disregards reluctantly, not because she wants him, but because she thinks she has no choice but to go with him.

In both cases the woman does first, unconsciously, the thing that the story wants her to do by the end (for Crysania, to love Raistlin; for Alina, to reject the Darkling), and then forces herself to back down, but a difference in the effect of the scenes are perceived is created because of the advance warning we have of Raistlin’s scheme.

Crysania’s scene is more tense because the reader is already aware of the danger she is unwittingly heading into – by backing away, the reader thinks that she is doing the right thing by resisting what we know is Raistlin’s manipulation, although later on it will turn out not to be so simple as that. Crysania maintains some dignity and strength, whilst Alina merely appears standoffish and ungrateful because the reader has no reason to doubt the Darkling’s integrity except for the nasty rumours we have heard about him, which in any more generous story would exist only to be proven untrue.

Crysania remembers a conversation with Elistan which is broadly equivalent to Alina’s fight with Mal in S&B.

"He was surprised - and alarmed - at hearing Crysania had been invited to visit Raistlin in the Tower - a place where now beat the heart of evil in Krynn. Elistan would have forbidden Crysania to go, but freedom of will was a teaching of the gods. He told Crysania his thoughts and she listened respectfully. But she had gone to the Tower, drawn by a lure she could not begin to understand - although she told Elistan it was to 'save the world.'"

This conversation is much less aggressively confrontational than the scene in S&B. She's too embarrassed to tell Elistan that Raistlin kissed her - uh, "charmed" her - she can't even think the word "kiss". It still achieves the purpose of raising the narrative tension by showing that she's wading into something she isn't emotionally prepared for, but it's so much less hysterical and humiliating than the Mal/Alina fight.

Other people (mostly old men) telling Crysania how terribly naughty she is for chasing after this bad wizard is something that happens quite often in this book, but unlike Alina, Crysania is allowed to make her mistakes and suffer the consequences (once again, remember that she is currently dead) rather than being immediately smacked down and then 'saved' from having her purity sullied, as Alina is when Mal warns her against the Darkling and then immediately afterwards Baghra tells her to run away, following which she must be rescued by Mal again.

It’s actually Raistlin that saves Crysania here – he needs her alive, so he does some magical finagling to make it appear as though she’s merely comatose, then puts Caramon, Tas, and Bupu (more on Tas and Bupu in a couple of chapters’ time) into a magical sleep, and summons the mobile Forest of Wayreth (where the mage Conclave is stationed) to surround them, knowing that the mages will do what they must to free Crysania’s soul from stasis.

"She was too startled by the fact that people lived here. How silly, she scolded herself. What kind of monster have I pictured this man? He is a man, nothing more. He is human, he is flesh and blood. The thought relieved her, made her relax."

I'm fairly reminded of the scene in S&S when Alina goes to the Darkling's quarters for the first time:

"A servant had lit the lamps in the Darkling's chamber. I surveyed the room and let out a long breath. What had I been expecting? A dungeon? A pit? That the Darkling slept suspended from the branches of a tree? ...It was good to know that some part of him was still human, that he laid his head down to rest at night like everyone else."

In Legends, the readers' anxiety rails against Crysania's comfort, because we've already been told that Raistlin is putting it on, but she's allowed to fall for it and consider him human (which he certainly is).

In S&S, this passage is immediately followed by one of Alina's long-distance visions of the Darkling, which terrifies her and emphasises the ‘unnatural’ nature of their bond. She's immediately punished for considering his humanity; the scene seems to exist solely for the purpose of disproving it.

"What is this fruit?" Crysania asked, picking up a piece and examining it in wonder. "I've never seen anything like this before." "Indeed not, Revered Daughter...Shalafi has it brought to him from the Isle of Mithas." "Mithas?" Crysania repeated in astonishment. "But that's on the other side of the world!"

Meanwhile, in Ravka:

"...I saw with astonishment, sliced plums that must have come from a hothouse. A servant brought us hot tea from one of the large samovars. "Sugar!" I exclaimed as he set a little bowel before me. ...Sugar had been rationed in Ravka for the last hundred years, but apparently it wasn't a novelty in the Little Palace."

In Legends, the reader already knows this is all fake, and is waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under Crysania; the intimate nature of the scene also makes it an obvious Persephone allusion, whereas in S&B this is merely the first time that Alina has been happy and properly fed and thus it’s very cruel when her life at the Palace is snatched away from her.

I won't go through every little detail of this chapter; by now it should be obvious that the goings on here are well-matched with Alina’s various experiences at the Little Palace.

---

"What marvelous hands you have," Crysania said, without thinking. "How slender and supple the fingers are, and so delicate." Suddenly realising what she had been saying, she flushed and stammered. "B-but I-I suppose that is requisite to your Art-"

Female Gaze: The Novel

I won't quote them all but this is every other chapter with these two. Crysania knows what she likes in a man, and good for her.

TGT is much lighter on description than Dragonlance, but the Darkling’s hands and fingers are variously described as “long”, “white”, “strong” and “graceful” , which is more adjectives over the course of the trilogy than anyone else’s hands get. It’s an implicit rule of fantasy that wizards should have nice hands, as a consequence of their usual indoor lifestyle and a mark of refinement, in contrast with the of clumsy appendages of more brutish types - Mal is said to have hands that are “rough” and “calloused”.

This is a bit of a tangent, but all the Dragonlance characters have canon stats and this is not so much random fluff as it is in-story acknowledgement that Raistlin has high Dexterity; I think there’s an even chance that the Darkling's disappointingly seldom-seen knife kink is a holdover from Raistlin's silver dagger, which is a Dex weapon and a D&D mage’s traditional last resort, being the only physical weapon their order permits them to wield.

---

Returning to the point I raised in the Chapter 5 commentary about Raistlin and the Darkling being opposite in terms of their personalities, motivations, and self-image: Raistlin really is out for himself first, the rest of us are just lucky we get to come along for the ride because it makes him feel magnanimous to look after all the little weak people, and he has never hesitated to tell us so:

"Yes, I was weak. Yes, they protected me. But some day, I vowed I wouldn't need their protection! I would rise to greatness on my own, using my gift - my magic!...For what I have sought - power. I don't need them - any of them – anymore."

It’s unimaginable that the Darkling would ever say anything like this to Alina. The only way it’s possible to get this kind of interpretation of the Darkling is by asserting that everything he has done and wants to do for the Grisha and for Ravka is just an excuse for him to amass personal power. Even his own internal POV narration in RoW is entirely focused on (what he perceives as) the good of Ravka, so taking that line also necessitates the argument that he has no self-awareness.

I find it strange that, according to the infamous June 2012 blog post on Once Upon A Bookcase that sparked this whole controversy, Leigh herself considers Raistlin to be the least bad of her Bad Wizard list ("not quite bad enough"), but she still made the Darkling arguably less bad than that.

“But this power is evil!” Crysania said, leaning forward in her chair and regarding Raistlin earnestly. “Is it?” asked Raistlin suddenly. His voice was mild. “Is ambition evil? Is the quest for power, for control over others evil? If so, then I fear, Lady Crysania, that you may as well exchange those white robes for black.” “How dare you?” Crysania cried, shocked. “I don’t--” “Ah, but you do,” Raistlin said with a shrug. “You would not have worked so hard to rise to the position you have in the church without having your share of ambition, of the desire for power.” Now it was his turn to lean forward. “Haven’t you always said to yourself – there is something great I am destined to do? My life will be different from the lives of others. I am not content to sit and watch the world pass by. I want to shape it, control it, mold it!” Held fast by Raistlin’s burning gaze, Crysania could not move or utter a word. How could he know? she asked herself, terrified. Can he read the secrets of my heart? “Is that evil, Lady Crysania?” Raistlin repeated gently, insistently. Slowly, Crysania shook her head. Slowly, she raised her hand to her throbbing temples. No, it wasn’t evil. Not the way he spoke of it, but something wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t think. She was too confused. All that kept running through her mind was, How alike we are, he and I!”

Perhaps TGT’s theme about “the lure of power” (quoted in the Chapters 1-4 commentary) being inherently corruptive owes something to this conversation, however Dragonlance has got no business pushing that message when half the main cast are the leaders of nations or religious groups (not to mention the fact that the source material is a TTRPG where levelling up, performing epic feats and amassing magical loot are core aspects of the gameplay). Its position on power and ambition is specifically that 'desire for power is corruptive if you desire power for selfish reasons'. The in-depth discussion on the concept of ‘balance’ in Dragonlance is still to come, but briefly, the story recognises that qualities usually associated with “evil” such as ambition are beneficial and even necessary to have in measured amounts, and the trouble only begins when a person’s 'evil' traits too strongly overrule their 'good' traits.

In (present day) Krynn, political, spiritual, physical and magical power are all clearly separate things, and as we discussed in the previous chapter, the characters can choose to sacrifice (or be forced to lose) one type of power in order to gain another type, and so loss of power can be seen as an exchange rather than a narrative punishment.

TGT tends to get rather confused on this point because of the fact of Grisha power being tied to physical health and immortality, and Alina’s status as the Sun Summoner also giving her political and religious status. For Alina to have all the power is deemed by the story to be ‘too much’, and therefore she is made to lose all of it; this arbitrary rule deems it wrong for the Darkling to become ruler of Ravka because he is also immortal and a Grisha and will use his Grisha powers to enforce his will, whilst Nikolai is a virtuous absolute monarch because he is an otkazat'sya (who knows how this theme is supposed to apply when it comes to Zoya in RoW).

As I have said before, Crysania is a much stronger character than Alina, so Raistlin just exploits what's already there - she already knows she's destined to be the hero, whereas Alina starts out with negative self-worth and in order to ‘manipulate’ her the Darkling has to convince her that she's the only one who can save the world, it takes a long time for her to start to believe she actually is important, then 'the reveal' happens, and for the rest of the story Alina keeps on insisting that she doesn't really want any of this power or importance, but she gets punished for it in the end anyway.

---

"How alike we are - he and I!"

I don't think this is where Like Calls to Like comes from; I think that's more a reference to real life concepts of Hermetic ("That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above") or sympathetic magic:

“If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.” - The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Sir J. G. Frazer (1922)

---

Unlike Alina, Crysania was born into a wealthy noble family and is very sheltered. Raistlin forces her to watch conjured visions of all the poor and homeless people in the city, “Bars, brothels, gambling dens, the wharves, the docks...all spewed forth their refuse of misery and suffering before Crysania’s shocked vision...” Relentlessly, he expands the visions out and out until Crysania has witnessed all the suffering of all the people in the world.

She collapses with grief, he holds her. They sit up all night talking about Raistlin’s plan to “change the world”, but the reader still isn’t told what it is. Crysania’s faith is clearly starting to waver, but she holds out on him because she believes the dream vision Paladine sent her was intended to warn her that Raistlin’s plan would “cause the world’s destruction!”

“You cannot do this,” Crysania whispered. “It is wrong, you must be stopped.” She held onto his hand very tightly. “Prove to me that it is wrong,” Raistlin answered, drawing her near. “Show me that this is evil. Convince me that the ways of good are the means of saving the world.” “Will you listen?” Crysania asked wistfully. “You are surrounded by darkness. How can I reach you?” “The darkness parted, didn’t it,” Raistlin said. “The darkness parted, and you came in.”

Raistlin is one of those people who constantly lies to himself in order to hold onto his sanity and pretend that he isn’t completely miserable and that he likes being all alone and doesn’t need love from anyone (his previous tirade about how he no longer needs protection also comes off as protesting too much). This chapter isn’t in his POV, so we don’t have access to his internal thoughts, and it’s up to the reader to decide how much of this is him trying to appeal to Crysania’s pride and self-importance, and how much is a subconscious plea from arising from a secret hope that his mind can be changed, that he doesn’t have to go through with whatever it is after all.

The imagery in this scene of a man drowning in darkness and a woman as a beacon of light is the same imagery used in the camp scene where the Darkling tells Alina that only her power can help him to “change the world” by destroying the Shadow Fold.

“I’ve spent my life searching for a way to make things right. You’re the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in a long time.”

Once again, we know that Raistlin is trying it on here, but as the story progresses he will be caught in the trap of his own pretty words; the Darkling is being completely honest, but his hopes will ultimately be dashed when Alina betrays him.

“Slowly, gathering the folds of her white robes in her hand so that she did not trip, Crysania descended the stairs. And kept on descending...down...down...into unending sleep.”

In S&B:

“I looked up through the broken beams of the barn’s roof to the night sky. It was full of stars, but I could only see the endless reaches of darkness between them. I imagined myself standing in the dead silence of the Shadow Fold, blind, frightened, with nothing to protect me but my supposed power.”

Both of these images – Crysania descending into ‘unending’ darkness and Alina looking at the stars in the night sky – are recurring images in their respective texts. The main difference is in the level of agency afforded to the female MC.

Crysania consistently and deliberately chooses to walk into the darkness. She disregards the warnings of her allies and superiors until in the end she is completely unable to escape the darkness, but her actions are always presented as being her choice, and thus she earns her fate.

The use of this imagery in relation to Alina shifts throughout the story, but in this first scene, she is completely passive, presumably in order to communicate how powerless and unimportant she feels at the beginning of her story.

---

I think the most important distinction to note in this chapter is that Raistlin’s pursuit of Crysania is overtly, almost aggressively romantic right from their first encounter in the opening scene, both in terms of his actions and in the way it’s framed by the narration. Legends often lets its subtext carry the romance - Raisltin’s invitation to Crysania in the prologue is labelled a “proposal”; at one point during this chapter, “Raistlin’s voice seemed to come from the flames”, and Crysania replies “to the flames”. Fire, beyond being an obvious symbol of passion, is used to represent the crucible within which occurs the “alchemical marriage” that I described in the prologue chapter.

He deliberately targets her sexual repression and inexperienced curiosity, whilst assuming that he himself will remain immune to any such folly. He spends time alone with her and always makes her the centre of attention. Considering that prior to the prologue they have never met and know one another only by reputation, he seems unnervingly attuned to what she likes, and so it’s easy to interpret this as profound natural compatibility.

Regardless, he doesn’t mean to make good on his apparent intentions, and although Crysania apparently has some indispensable role to play, he excludes her from his glory, saying “I will change the world.” (not “You and I are going to” etc).

Raistlin decides that he has to get Crysania to fall in love with him because that is the only way he will be able to convince her to help with him his plan. His actions genuinely feel manipulative (because they are), but the other characters and even the third-person narration all pile on trying to make the reader believe in this as a true romance, even before it starts to go that way in-story.

Legends quite desperately keeps doling out all these hints and hopes that Raistlin does have some real feelings for Crysania (and his brother and his friends) despite his wickedness, because in Dragonlance the ability to love is what makes a person worthy of being loved in return, and love earns forgiveness.

In R&R the Darkling tells Alina that he “seduced” her because he “needed [her] loyalty...needed [her] bound to [him] by more than duty or fear,” but that supposed original intent hardly seems borne out by his actions in S&B. The Darkling and Alina slowly build up a connection over time, which appears to surprise even him. The couple of heart-to-heart conversations they have at the Palace are impromptu, unless he has cunningly planned in advance to be ‘interrupted’ by Alina during his visits to Baghra. Is he pretending to constantly look “ruffled”, “genuinely baffled”, “surprised” every time he is around her?

He seems to be quite uninterested and in fact treats Alina with great indignity during their first meeting, where he talks to everyone else before her, stabs her in the arm with a knife, and hands her off to Ivan like “a sack of potatoes”; on the journey back to the Palace he starts to give her his personal attention but nothing that seems untoward, except for perhaps the part where he holds the back of her neck on the horse (but then, that can be fairly easily dismissed by the fact that an amplifier needs to be in direct contact with skin to work, and Alina’s neck is likely the only bare skin she has other than her face and hands). Alina herself seems to think nothing of it. At the time she is too tired to think clearly, but she never reflects on it later.

During her time at the Little Palace, Alina “rarely saw the Darkling, and when [she] did it was from a distance, coming or going...He never said a word to [her], rarely even glanced [her] way.” She becomes desperate for scraps of his attention and is paranoid that he’s ignoring her; since we never see his side of it, it’s not really possible to tell whether he’s deliberately winding her up, or whether he's...actually just really busy because there's a war going on, and she needs to focus on her lessons, anyway. Even when he calls her to his office during dinner, he doesn’t sit up with her for hours like Raistlin does with Crysania – they have a short conversation about nothing interesting, and then he dismisses her.

The Darkling doesn’t really seem to care whether Alina feels anything for him at first, hence his initial poor treatment of her. He expects her to help him ‘destroy’/control the Shadow Fold not for him, but for the sake of the Grisha and Ravka – for their people. Nevertheless, he gets progressively more emotional and 'human' from the camp scene to the “kefta will be black” scene to the couple of scenes at Baghra’s hut, as any ‘trustworthy’ love interest would, but after ‘the reveal’ the reader is apparently supposed to stop sympathising with him, even though he still has feelings for Alina, because in the Grishaverse, love is not enough to make a person worthy of care. The argument that his love is selfish because he only loves her ‘for her powers’ is too awkward to countenance because of the way that Alina’s powers are explicitly stated to be an intrinsic part of who she is. The argument that he loves her ‘for her pliability’ also has holes because he tells her that she is meant to be his equal and his balance and “keep [his] powers in check”. Whether this is his believed truth or ‘manipulation’ cannot be proven (as usual) because the idea of whether there actually is some kind of destiny or higher power that caused the advent of the Sun Summoner is never explored in the story.

According to Alina, he was pretending - after accepting Baghra's word, Alina thinks "Had it all been deliberate? The kiss by the lake shore, the flash of hurt that had played across his face that night in the barn, every human gesture, every whispered confidence..." When they reunite at the end of the book, she constantly accuses him of lying and acting, and refuses to listen to anything he says. But how much of this is supposed to be the author’s unsubtly delivered truth, and how much of Alina’s paranoid, vindictive behaviour for the rest of the series is a result of her severe trust and abandonment issues?

In a shocking twist, even Leigh herself has managed to bring herself to admit that the Darkling wasn't lying.

Her Goodreads note attached to the "I've been waiting for you a long time, Alina...You and I are going to change the world" scene says that the Darkling has bought into his own speech, which implies that he has tricked himself into having true feelings for Alina, in the same way that Raistlin does:

"Even so, sometimes the Darkling is so smart he games himself, and I think this is one of those moments. Yes, it's a line he's used before and he'll use again, but that doesn't mean he doesn't believe what he's saying is true."

This seems to be backed up by his reflections in RoW, where he remembers that he felt "human" with Alina and felt "something more" for her.

In the end, the minutae of each individual line of dialogue and each described facial expression don’t really matter. It is the task of the author to construct the story in such a way to convince the reader of twists and reveals. I was not convinced that the Darkling was trying his hardest to malevolently “seduce” Alina without harbouring any tender feelings of his own, and seemingly a lot of other readers weren’t, either.

---

End notes

“The darkness parted and you came in” The audacity of this man, what a fucking faker, I love him

This is why I can’t take the Darkling at all seriously as some kind of ‘master of seduction’ or whatever Leigh wants me to believe.

Raistlin is all “Revered Daughter you are so special, let me put my arms around you, I will stroke your hair, do not fear” every five minutes, he’s a damn menace.

The Darkling hardly even does anything. He just...talks to this girl a couple of times, falls for her (seemingly because of his own romantic idea that this is ‘destiny’, rather than anything Alina does), the two times he kisses her it's apparently unplanned, and it’s only after she dumps him that he starts up with the personal space invading and the double entendres, because he may as well go for broke since he’s got nothing to lose.

I could have kept going on this point forever but it was just turning into words words words words words all saying the same thing – I was convinced that Raistlin seduced Crysania over the course of about three conversations because I could see how much effort he put into it (bless his heart) and she actually acts seduced. The Darkling had months to work on Alina, but he doesn't succeed because he doesn't pay her enough attention to get her out of that 'whatever would he see in poor little me' angsty stage. He’s so bad at this I feel sorry for him.

“The Test in the Tower of High Sorcery set the world of Krynn apart from other AD&D worlds.” - Tracy Hickman, Dragonlance: The Annotated Chronicles, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Book 1, Chapter 2

As I hinted at in the prologue post, the mage Test is a matter of immense significance in Dragonlance, to the point that it’s considered to be one of the defining features of the setting. Magic in Dragonlance is every bit as dangerous as it is prestigious. Anyone can study magic (talent does run in families but it’s not more or less likely than any other genetic trait) but to be accepted by the mage Conclave as a master practitioner requires total dedication of mind, body and soul.

"The Test is required of any mage seeking to practice the arts of magic at an advanced level. Administered in the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth, it is conducted by the leaders of all three Robes. For, long ago, the magic-users of Krynn realised what had escaped the clerics - if the balance of the world is to be maintained, the pendulum must swing freely back and forth among all three - Good, Evil, Neutrality. Let one grow too powerful - any one - and the world would begin to tilt toward its destruction."

(The matter of the balance between the three alignments is something I will cover in detail in a few chapters' time).

The exact nature of the Test was established as a mystery from the very beginning of Chronicles, and we are told over and over again throughout the series how terrible it is. Just about everyone we meet who has survived the Test is scarred from it, both physically and psychologically, even decades later.

The full story of the Test was later told in Raistlin's prequel duology (1998); however for the purposes of this commentary I will only refer to information contained in Chronicles and Legends, because those are the only books I'm certain that Leigh has read.

This is Caramon's very abbreviated account from Chapter 6:

"I swore I'd never go near that foul place again! They destroyed him there, Tas. When he came out, his skin was that strange gold colour. They have him those cursed eyes so that all he sees is death. They shattered his body. He couldn't take a breath without coughing. And they made him...they made him kill me!"

As is the convention with twins in fiction, Caramon and Raistlin have a sort of symbiotic relationship and represent the two halves of the psyche as per Jung’s model – each plays the Shadow (repressed, subconscious traits) to the other’s Ego (conscious traits). Caramon believes himself to be brave and noble and selfless, but as we saw in the earlier chapters, he harbours secret resentments against the rest of the world, needs constant emotional validation, and has a deep fear of being separated from his brother (in his particularly low moments in this book, he actually hallucinates that he is Raistlin); Raistlin is determined to be as selfish as possible, and his tendency to rely on trickery, sneak attacks and strategic escapes rather than direct assaults leads others to mark him as a coward, but considering the way he endures everything life throws at him, often alone and without fear, he is perhaps the most brave of all the heroes, and as per the afterword, he has a “small spark of caring in his own heart that even the darkness within him cannot completely extinguish”.

During the Test, Raistlin is attacked and weakened till he is on the brink of death, at which point Caramon appears to rescue him by casting a powerful spell, despite having absolutely no talent or knowledge of magic. Having lost exclusive rights to his magic, the only thing he values about himself which his brother doesn’t share, Raistlin’s suppressed jealousy boils over and he attempts to kill his brother, later revealed to be an illusion cast by the archmage. Caramon is made to watch all this unfold from the sidelines and is prevented from intervening.

In the story, the point of this was two-fold – to break the bond between the brothers so that Raistlin would become exclusively devoted to the Art of magic, and thus could be used as a tool by the gods in the impending divine war, whilst at the same time forcing him to confront his own hatred and hopefully teach him a lesson about compassion and being grateful for what he had, now that he’s lost it.

This didn’t work out as intended – Caramon refuses to abandon his brother despite witnessing the attempted murder; Raistlin survives the Test within an inch of his life, but he becomes sicker than ever and gets stuck with the cursed eyes as punishment (see the next section).

On the metatextual level, Raistlin's destruction of the illusion represents his attempt to reject his own suppressed traits such as kindness and protectiveness over others, reject the bounds of social acceptability, and commit fully to the pursuit of magical power above all else.

Fortunately, it was just an illusion after all, so he gets plenty more chances to try (and fail) to integrate the different aspects of his psyche, which is what this trilogy is about, and which we will discuss in more detail in a later chapter.

Another thing we're told repeatedly with emphasis is that Raistlin is the youngest mage to ever have taken the Test; this is his most formative experience.

The pattern of a young kid with immense magical powers being confronted with a near-death experience and being forced to kill his symbolic double (Annika), which represents his loss of innocence and total commitment to a path to darkness and power-hungry ambition is the same in both stories, but the world-specific circumstances behind each, in conjunction with the way the idea is utilised in each story leads to a totally opposite effect.

In Dragonlance, the fact that some kind of curse was inflicted on Raistlin during the Test is the very first thing we ever learned about him in Chapter 2 of Chronicles, and we keep hearing about it forever; his entire character (and Caramon’s entire character) is built around it, as well as a significant proportion of the plot of both trilogies (and later books) and the setting itself. Without the Test, there is no Dragonlance.

It is not something tacked on as bonus materials in later editions of the last book, after the relevant character is already dead, which retroactively explains his personality and backstory and makes him more sympathetic after it's too late to make any difference, and remains unknown to the other characters who might have been moved to treat him differently if they had known the whole story.

The Test is a systemic evil (by our real world standards) enforced by the mage Conclave (on behalf of the gods) to destroy the weak, the incompetent and the insufficiently dedicated, in order to identify those with true world-shaking potential. Attention is constantly drawn to how insane it seems to everyone outside the system, and yet no one inside the system ever makes an attempt to dismantle it, because they all believe in it.

“Raistlin relinquished his body to the power of magic, and it was not enough. The magic demands everything from him. For Raistlin, the Test of the Tower of High Sorcery never ends.” - Tracy Hickman, Dragonlance: The Annotated Chronicles, Dragons of Spring Dawning, Book 2, Chapter 5

The idea of sacrifice is intrinsic to wizardry in Krynn in a way that’s opposite to the Grishaverse, because in Krynn, the “sacrifices” required to master magic are voluntary. The only mages who will ever be made to take the Test are those who are already on the path to choosing power over all else, and thus becoming a danger to themselves and others. The seeming injustice of Raistlin’s Test is never made to be about him, because he tells everybody all the time how completely willing he is to give up everything in pursuit of power, and this is borne out by his actions. He has suppressed desires for love and acceptance, but he almost always chooses to prioritise power, without being coerced into it by outside forces. Raistlin was technically lured into the Test – he didn’t know he was taking it until he was in it – because the archmage Par-Salian decided that he was the chosen one and they needed him now, but there’s no doubt that had he been given the choice, he would have gone through with it anyway.

The suggestion that the Test might have been over-cruel only comes about because the experience ruined Caramon’s life, and thus this secret wizard’s business negatively affected people outside the wizard’s enclave. Ordinarily, mages who take the Test are the ones who have already willingly separated from their family and friends, but Raistlin was not strong enough to make it to the Tower at Wayreth on his own, and so Caramon came with him but then was traumatised as a bystander.

Raistlin’s Test was one of those cosmic world-axis-shifting events - the powers and ambitions of the gods and all the mightiest wizards of past, present and future collided in one time and place, the weight of it all had to be borne on the shoulders of one frail young man, and the outcome would determine the future of Krynn forever.

The position of the story is that this was a one-time inescapable tragedy which everyone involved was maneuvered into by the forces of destiny. If Raistlin had not been made to take the Test – and if he had not survived only thanks to the intervention of outside forces yet to be revealed – then the whole world would have been doomed. It was a necessary evil, and we must all accept what happened, deal with our grief and move forward. There’s no real suggestion that the magic education system in general is a problem (the reader can choose to take that position, but it’s not supported by the text). Highly ambitious wizards in Krynn choose to sacrifice their personal relationships and their physical and mental health, but in exchange they are rewarded with the knowledge, power and prestige they desire. Raistlin endures the worst Test that anybody has ever had, he sacrifices the most, and he finishes up his story as the most powerful, respected, feared, all-round legendary wizard in the history of Krynn, which is what he always wanted.

The relationship between sacrifice and magic is opposite in the Grishaverse, because there the sacrifices are all involuntary, and the only choices are between bad and worse outcomes. Grisha must choose between suppressing their powers and living in fear and poor health, or revealing their powers and risking death – whether through execution by the Fjerdans, experimentation by the Shu Han, or death in battle in Ravka’s Second Army, not to mention any of the other misadventures that can befall Grisha in the royal service (Genya). In the end, Alina must either give up the fight and surrender to the Darkling, thus sacrificing her freedom and control over her powers to him, or master her powers in order to defeat him, in which case she must sacrifice Mal’s life to get the final amplifier and then lose her powers anyway for being “greedy”. She is remembered as a Saint and saviour, although by this time she has long left behind her mid-Book 1 desire to be renowned as a hero, and instead she wishes only to disappear from history and live an ‘ordinary’ life.

With regard to circumstances, the events of DitW are clearly not anybody’s choice. There are no gods, no archmages, no grand destinies demanding to be fulfilled. There are only poor insignificant people who feel forced to brutalise one another to ensure their own survival. Constantly moving from place to place, being forced to hide their identities and their powers, amplifiers being hunted by their own kind, and children needing to defend their lives from other children are all presented as normal everyday events in the lives of the hunted Grisha.

“The way we live, the way we’re forced to live – it makes us desperate.

…

There is no safe place. There is no haven. Not for us.”

The Darkling’s ‘origin story’ paints a much better picture of him than Raistlin’s does, because by this point in his life, Raistlin is already a fully-formed Mean Wizard who gets in over his head on his quest to amass more power first and foremost for his own gain, whereas the Darkling appears to be nothing more than an inoffensive, lonely little boy who decides that he will do anything to make the world better, not just for himself and his mother, but for other people as well.

That being the case, it’s very disheartening to find that DitW apparently wasn’t supposed to make us feel sorry for Aleksander at all. I was rather shocked when in her interview on 22 September 2021 with t he PEN/Faulkner Foundation, she reduced the substance of DitW to “cool motive, still murder”, and specifically stated that she didn’t intend to “humanise” him or for people to like him after reading the story, and she finds it frustrating when they do. I admit I don’t understand the point of introducing new information about a character if it isn’t supposed to make the reader feel or think any differently about the character.

Raistlin is completely and unquestionably in the wrong for trying to murder his brother out of nothing more than pure spite, but it’s not left up to sympathetic readers to make excuses trying to justify him. Everyone else in the story fall all over themselves to do that for us, because they love him as much as we do and they want to believe in him.

“He-he didn’t kill you, Caramon,” Tas said, feeling completely helpless. “Tanis told me. It was just an image of you. And he was sick and scared and hurting real bad inside. He didn’t know what he was doing--”

By contrast, in his author’s eyes, young Aleksander is not even allowed to get away with killing in unambiguous self-defense, and the story eventually dispenses ‘poetic justice’ upon him when he is finally killed by Alina (Annika’s symbolic double) far in the future.

My last point on this issue is that The Test was never the central problem to be solved in the story; it was a necessary trial that Raistlin had to pass through in order to become powerful enough to play his part in saving the world from an unrelated future conflict, which went on to do with stunning success. He did it so well that he couldn’t bring himself to stop trying to save the world even more, which is how we have found ourselves here in the sequel. Because Weis & Hickman weren’t guaranteed to be allowed to write their sequel, the issue of Caramon and Raistlin going their separate ways in peace was resolved in the end of Chronicles, and it isn’t until the opening of Legends that we see Caramon has relapsed, thus necessitating a new adventure. Although the happenings of the Test were a mysterious subplot in Chronicles, nevertheless its problems were resolved by the end – the world was saved, and Caramon and Raistlin got to become whole, separate people.

DitW is not just the ‘origin story’ for the Darkling’s character, but it also serves as something of an origin story for the central problem of TGT, by showing in close perspective the suffering of the Grisha, which the future Second Army was formed to remedy. As has been expounded at great length by other people, the problems of the Grisha persecution and the wars are not resolved in the end of TGT, and the Darkling died alone anyway (twice!). As neither the personal nor the world-scale problems presented in DitW were resolved, no purpose is achieved by its inclusion except for the addition of more suffering without relief into the overall story.

---

"I see time as it affects all things," Raistlin replied. "Human flesh withers before these eyes, flowers wilt and die, the rocks themselves crumble as I watch. It is always winter in my sight...even [upon] elven flesh that ages so slowly the passing of the years are as rain showers in the spring...I see the mark of death!"

So this is what the eyes do. The point of forcing Raistlin to see the effects of time on everything was supposed to be to force him to learn patience and gratitude for what he has while it lasts, but all it did was cement his resentment of the gods who inflicted this upon him, and pushed him further in the wrong direction – he is now acutely, permanently, constantly aware of the transience of all things, the futility of mortals trying to achieve anything worthwhile in their short lives, and he is paranoid about running out of time.

This is interesting because out of all our proto-Darkling wizards, Raistlin is the only one who isn't technically immortal or ageless, but he's also the only one who has an intense emotional struggle with this vision of everything aging and dying around him - all the others were born/created inhuman or have fully embraced their loss of humanity.

The Darkling’s tearful suffering over outliving everyone and everything is much more emphasised in the show; in the books he seems to have lapsed further into the more common ‘everything is dust in the wind’ listless attitude of his other immortal wizardly brethren, particularly in RoW. Whilst he has never abandoned his original goal of ending wars and Grisha persecution, he has very little emotional response to being confronted with the many lives lost along the way, because he is always looking past the deaths of individuals in order to see the ‘big picture’, something which Raistlin has been rendered physically incapable of doing in order to try and stop him from going down this path.

---

"You have seen the great door in the very back of the laboratory?...The door without a lock?"

...

"And do you know why it is not opened?"

"You cannot open it, Shalafi [Master]. Only one of great and powerful magic and one of true holy powers may together open --"

...

"Yes," Raistlin murmured. "you understand. 'One of true holy powers.' Now you know why I need her!"

Ah-ha. The Plan (once again, discussed early on in an antagonists-only scene, rather than dropped on the audience halfway through as a surprise twist for shock value) is to use Crysania's powers to open this magic door, which goes...somewhere that still will not be revealed until later.

It should be obvious that this requirement for Raistlin to combine his dark magic with Crysania’s holy powers in order to achieve his goal is the forerunner of the Darkling’s need to use Alina’s powers to control the Shadow Fold.

"...It is madness, with my limited powers." A trace of bitterness tinged the mage's voice. "That is why I am about to undertake a journey."

...

"You have heard me speak of Fistandantilus?"

"Many times, Shalafi," Dalamar said, his voice almost reverent. "The greatest of our Order. Those are his spellbooks, the ones with the nightblue binding."

"Inadequate," Raistlin muttered, dismissing the entire library with a gesture. "I have read them all, many times in these past years...But they only frustrate me!"

Fistandantilus was the most legendarily evil wizard in the history of Krynn; Raistlin inherited all his spellbooks when he took over the Tower, but there are a bunch of them missing and he can't accomplish his goal without the additional power he can gain from them.

This is pretty well along the same lines as the plot of S&B: The dark wizard needs the girl with holy powers to accomplish his great work, but he also needs another macguffin that was created by the most powerful ancient wizard (i.e. Morozova's amplifier), and the search for that macguffin comprises the main plot of Book 1.

---

This was a tricky one to write, let alone read, congratulations if you made it to the end.

Make sure you remember Fistandantilus, we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the future (which is to say, in the past, ohohoho).

---

We will come back to DitW much, much later in the series. Traumatic villain backstories are a dime-a-dozen, but if I had to limit myself to just our Darkling sources, I think half of it was derived from the Test story but the other half came from elsewhere.

There should be a law against the ‘last minute reveal of the villain’s tragic backstory’ unless:

1. The villain actually survives the ending, or 2. The villain dies but then the hero mourns him and carries on the fight against the REAL evil

---

I can’t get over how Maggie Weis for 35 years has been like “Everyone can identify with Raistlin, he just wants to be loved! He literally CANNOT be totally evil, he tries so hard but he can’t do it, bless his little wizard socks” whereas Leigh is just...you know.

I love Maggie so much, she is one of my favourite human beings ever. One of my (many) author parents who raised me.

“To what extent could the volcra be understood as personifications of the Darkling? Of Alina or Mal?”

This is one of the questions from the Teacher’s Guide to S&B. Sadly, the Teacher’s Guide does not come with answers, and so we may never know the authorially approved interpretation of the connection between Mal and the toothy beasts. I question their function as ‘personifications’, since the Darkling and Alina (and Mal) are already people, and ‘personification’ generally refers to the representation of a non-human thing as a person, rather than the other way round. As in, the Darkling is a personification of the volcra…

...Never mind.

The Shadow Fold itself I will write about when we come to its Dragonlance equivalent, but for now, into the mage’s laboratory we go, to ponder the literary origins of the volcra.

Lair of the Live Ones, by Jeff Easley, from the 1987 Dragonlance Legends calendar

“Though the most powerful mage living upon Krynn, Raistlin’s power was far from complete, and no one realised that more than the mage himself. He was always forcibly reminded of his weaknesses when he came into this room – one reason he avoided it, if possible. For here were the visible, outward symbols of his failures – the Live Ones. Wretched creatures mistakenly created by magic gone awry...”

This description is remarkably similar to Baghra’s account of the volcra in S&B:

“The only mistake was the volcra. He did not anticipate them, did not think to wonder what power of that magnitude might to do mere men...They are his punishment, a living testimony to his arrogance.”

This emphasis on the wizard’s avoidance of the creatures as reminders of his own ineptitude is about where the resemblance ends. The Live Ones can think and talk and are loyal to their master (in a terrified kind of way), unlike the apparently mindless volcra who long to tear the Darkling apart. As is the emerging theme of this series of posts, the real point of interest is the difference in the way the same idea is put to work in both stories.

At first glance, both of these passages appear to be a manifestation of the usual vaguely Christian-flavoured “attempting to create life is usurping the place of God!!” trope used to mark the villain. This goes back to (at least) Frankenstein, and whilst I understand the theme of Frankenstein to be an indictment specifically of irresponsible, uncompassionate creation rather than creation in general, the more simplistic message is what it has been reduced to in popular culture.

The Grishaverse takes the positionthat the creation of the volcra was a ‘sin’ because the use of merzost – a real Russian word which means ‘abomination’, but in the Grishaverse also refers to the power of creation – is forbidden. Since there is no god (or pantheon of gods) credited with the responsibility for creation in the Grishaverse, and we hear very little about the actual beliefs of the religion (as I complained about in the prologue post), the reader’s belief in this ‘sin’ as having spiritual significance beyond ordinary murder or mutilation is reliant on the reader imposing onto the story their own (assumed) real life beliefs about living in accordance with nature as it exists rather than transforming nature to suit man’s needs, and the assumption that this use of the Darkling’s power is ‘unnatural’, even though he was born with it.

Dragonlance is blissfully quite divorced from real-world religious influence, though. It crept in every now and then, however the original creator of D&D and founder of its’ publisher TSR, Gary Gygax, despite being a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, was enormously well-read across the full spectrum of English-language SFF, and when it came to the business of fiction it was his famous 'Appendix N' - the long list of books which he cited as his inspirations – that served as the company’s Bible.

The true significance of this scene in Dragonlance requires worldbuilding knowledge to understand - life on Krynn was created by the gods in deliberately designed forms(elves by Paladine, humans by Gilean, and ogres by Takhisis) at the beginning of time. The other intelligent races came about later by magical accident, and were permitted to continue to exist due to their general benevolence, even though they have been known to mess up the gods’ plans. Prior to the events of Chronicles, Takhisis used evil magic to create the race of draconians in order to fill the ranks of her army. As soon as the dragon army was defeated, some of the draconians, created solely for the purpose of inflicting mindless violence, turned on one another, whilst others milled around, seemingly not willing to continue the fight but uncertain of what else to do.

“And what about them?” Caramon gestured at the draconians.

With a sigh, Raistlin faced the draconians. Lifting his hand, he spoke a few strange words. The draconians backed up, expressions of fear and horror twisting their reptilian faces. Caramon cried out, just as lightning sizzled from Raistlin’s fingertips. Screaming in agony, the draconians burst into flame and fell, writhing, to the ground. Their bodies turned to stone as death took them.

“You didn’t need to do that, Raistlin,” Tika said, her voice trembling. “They would have left us alone.”

“The war’s over,” Caramon added sternly.

“Is it?” Raistlin asked sarcastically, removing a small black bag from one of his hidden pockets. “It is weak, sentimental twaddle like that, my brother, which assures the war’s continuation. These” – he pointed at the statuelike bodies – “are not of Krynn. They were created using the blackest of black rites. I know. I have witnessed their creation. They would not have ‘left you alone’.”

This was Raistlin’s last act in Chronicles before he left to assume command of the Tower. The last we saw him, he strongly condemned the creation of the draconians, and seemed determined that they must all be destroyed in order to restore the divinely-imposed natural order to the world and ensure the safety of the people. Now, two years later, here he is attempting to create his own monstrous slave race by way of the black arts.

You can interpret this as the strongest evidence yet of how far he’s fallen since he first isolated himself from the world, or evidence of the lengths to which he has been driven in his desperation to end this heavenly war – a war of which only he seems to see the full picture. Raistlin has always been special and chosen by higher powers to have knowledge of things beyond the grasp of other men, but is his paranoia finally getting the better of him after his intense ordeals? Alternatively, you can theorise that Raistlin had already decided to attempt these experiments back when he first converted to Evil, which retroactively casts doubt on all his words and actions in the back end of Chronicles. All of these are valid, but the one to which the reader’s mind drifts first will colour their perception of Raistlin’s character for at least the first third of the novel.

So far as I remember, the Live Ones are never again mentioned, in this trilogy or in any other stories. Raistlin is never ‘held to account’ for their creation, because there are far, far bigger problems in Krynn than a few tortured bags of flesh locked up in a tower where they can’t really do any harm. Whilst this is obviously a terrible thing he has done to an unknown number of people(?), the story is interested in Raistlin’s state of mind far more than it is in the practical effects of his villainy; the Live Ones are nothing more than a yardstick by which to measure the growth of darkness in someone we care about.

---

I’m quite bitter about the fact that in Dragonlance, this appears to bean odd little throwaway scene, but there is still this much to say about it and it successfully fulfills an important purpose in the narrative, whereas in TGT the same concept is made into a centerpiece of the plot and yet nothing meaningful ever comes of it. This is one of the rare occasions where Leigh has taken something from her source material(s) and expanded on it, rather than trimming it down savagely and/or destroying its emotional effect; this ought to be praiseworthy, however (as usual) she badly fumbled the bag.

“Volcra” doesn’t have any etymological basis that I can find, so I suspect it’s another of Leigh’s made-up “Russian” words. The best I can do is that it’s vaguely similar to “vulture”, and both creatures are flying, flesh-eating omens of death. They (and the nichevo’ya) fill more or less the same role as orcs, trolls, goblins, and the other typical “evil” races of fantasy fiction – the compassionless, “cultureless” monster army that hails from the local land of darkness and spreads only death and destruction wherever it goes.

Leigh doesn’t seem to have thought about them overmuch during the creation process, and no one else seems to have asked her; according to her interview for Bookyurt on 24 May 2012, she was asked by a reader to explain why the volcra can’t leave the Fold at night, however she didn’t actually provide the answer (to the reader or in the interview), and I suppose now we will never know.

During the journey through the Fold in S&S, Alina is strongly affected by her knowledge that the volcra were once humans.

“I could hear the volcra’s screams, helpless and human to my ears, the keening of mothers mourning their young.”

Alina has to clearly remind herself that “They’re monsters” in order to justify for herself the need to kill them. She wonders whether they understand the concept of vengeance for their fallen kin.

Unlike Legends, TGT seems to be genuinely interested in the plight of the volcra, beyond just what their existence symbolises about the Darkling, but this interest resolves into another example of the story valuing cruelty and violence over compassion and healing.

For unexplained reasons, the powers of Light and Darkness have a metaphysical element to them which other Grisha powers do not share. The Darkling is able to make shadows solid, and use shadows to transform men into monsters; the sun is a ball of flaming gas, and yet Alina’s sunlight is somehow different and better than the flames generated by the Inferni. It’s never really clear in the narration how this works – sometimes she seems to be drawing the power directly from the sun, moon or stars, at other times the light seems to come from inside her body.

"The wound can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound. The wound is the wound of my passion and agony of love for this creature. And the only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow." - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Episode 5

Building on the conclusion from the previous post about tying the short stories into the main narrative, what would have made sense to me is if in the end of R&R, instead of having her powers taken from her and distributed amongst the Soldat Sol,Alina used her powers to transform the volcra back into humans.

This would have paralleled the creation of the volcra as a symbolic rebirth; the people who were 'infected' by the Darkling's power hundreds of years ago are 'cured' by Alina's powers. It also would have allowed Alina to pay off her debt for using Morozova’s amplifiers, since she would be using them to heal and correct nature by transforming beasts back into men - a reverse of Morozova’s own sin against nature, which was his creation of beasts from his own bones.

The Wound of Love can only be healed by the one who inflicted it, the one who inflicted the Wound on the Darkling was Annika; her attempt to kill him destroyed his innocence and then he created the Shadow Fold, the "wound on the map" that is the physical manifestation of his suffering. Alina (as the symbolic reincarnation of Annika) should have been the one to heal the Wound of the land and its people. This also would have served as a neat inversion of the conclusion of AatTW; in the short story, the people of the western valley seem to be affected by the monstrous nature of their rulers, to the point that they wish to be physically transformed.

“They pray for sons with red eyes and daughters with horns.”

If the monstrous volcra of that (implied) same valley were turned back into humans in the end, that would better fulfill the theme of the Goddess story - that the world and its people are constantly renewed by their movement through a never-ending cycle of light and darkness (days, seasons, and ages).

Like the leaderless draconians in the end of Chronicles, once the Darkling falls, the volcra attempt to disperse. In Chronicles, Raistlin’s destruction of the non-violent draconians is denounced by his comrades as needless cruelty, but in TGT the volcra are accorded no such consideration, and instead are hunted down and put to death by the newly empowered otkazat’sya soldiers, an act which goes unchallenged by the now stone-hearted Alina.

The draconians did survive as a species, and later got their own duology (Kang’s Regiment, by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin) to tell the story of their emerging post-war culture.

By the time of the Nikolai Duology, the volcra seem to be confirmed as extinct, which does rather beg the question of why “it was said some of the monsters had escaped” in the end of R&R. The characters think about them during traumatic flashbacks, but no one ever mentions one being sighted recently.

Of course, Nikolai was transformed into a volcra-like monster and he is allowed to survive, and an entire new adventure must be dedicated to curing him, because he is a Main Character and Royalty, and thus Important, unlike all those poor peasants that the series was allegedly about liberating.

---

A whole 2k+ words without mentioning either one of my “volcra are vagina dentata” or my “volcra are the true form of humanity” tinfoil hat agendas. Please clap.

Every modern SFF author who wants to have an evil monster army in their book should first be made to read Grunts! by Mary Gentle; it is funny and kind to orcs. Orcs are people too.

Uh...give me your best shot on how the volcra are personifications of Mal in Book 1. If I got that question in class, I would fail. I genuinely don’t know.

Welcome to

"...the ancient Tower of High Sorcery. Shadow surrounded it by day and by night, for it was guarded by a grove of huge oak trees, the largest trees growing on Krynn...No mortal being, not even a dragon, could enter that accursed ring of guardian oaks...Their vast, spreading branches blotted out the light of moons and stars by night, of the sun by day. Around their roots flowed perpetual night. No soft breeze touched their hoary arms, no storm wind moved the great limbs..."

From Dragonlance: Towers of High Sorcery, 2004

Both Dragonlance and the Grishaverse get a lot of mileage out of dark, spooky forests as liminal spaces. This concept first appears in S&B when Alina arrives at the Little Palace:

"Then we entered a thick stand of trees, large enough that it felt like a small wood, and passed through a long, dark corridor where the branches made a dense, braided roof above us...[I had] that sense of crossing the boundary between two worlds."

(That last line is so obnoxious; normally Leigh's problem is with telling rather than showing, but in that case she just did both, as though she really, really needed to make absolutely certain that the reader realised how clever she was being by using the physical environment to represent the heroine's Threshold Crossing into the Special World).

She uses the concept again at the end of the novel, when Alina encounters the mythical Morozova's herd in the Permafrost forest.

The enchanted thorn wood in Ayama and the Thorn Wood fulfills this role again:

"...a shadowy wood. The gray-bark trees were tall and so thick with thorn-covered brambles that Ayama could see nothing but darkness between them...The wood was lit by stars - though she knew very well it was the middle of the day."

The Thorn Wood is vaguely implied to be in the same location as the Shadow Fold and/or monastery of Saint Feliks, which in RoW, where the central quince tree is described as "the doorway between worlds".

I'm mostly certain that the thorn wood imagery in the Grishaverse is derived from Biblical imagery of the "thorns and thistles" that were man's lot after his exile from Eden, and Abel-Shittim (the Field of Thorns) where the Israelites dwelt in Numbers.

"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field" - KJV Genesis 3:18

In addition to that, sacred groves and so on are universal mythic concepts which are found everywhere in fantasy fiction - the sacred grove is the dwelling place of the Goddess, and the traditional site of the ritual battle between the Waxing and Waning kings we discussed last chapter - so I'd never accuse her of copying the idea from anywhere, but I still think it's worth noting that it appears repeatedly in the same context in both stories.

---

The POV character for this chapter is Caramon and Raistlin's half-sister Kitiara Uth-Matar - Dragon Highlord, seducer and destroyer of men, and all-round baddest bitch in Krynn.

Hands of Doom, from the 1987 Dragonlance Legends Calendar

simp simp simp simp, I love herrrrr

This is a case of could-be-borrowing, could-be-coincidence; the Darkling also has a half-sister, as revealed in When Water Sang Fire and "confirmed canon" in RoW; both Kitiara and Ulla are dark feminine villain-ish types; I'm mostly certain that the Darkling having a half-sister who's a mermaid is a reference to the Greek legend of Thessalonike the mermaid, who was half-sister to Alexander the Great, but quite possibly it's a combination of the ideas from both sources.

Alexander the Great with his sister, by Mentis Bostantzoglou (Bost), 1984

Like the Darkling and Ulla in WWSF. Kit and Raistlin have a tense, mistrustful relationship, but the bond of blood can't be denied. Kit and Raistlin share a lot of personality traits (though often manifested in opposite ways), whereas Caramon is more or less the "white sheep" of the family.

We're reminded of the likeness and unlikeness between them by another parallel drawn between the openings of Chronicles and Legends.

When the heroes reunite after five years at the beginning of Chronicles, Kitiara is the only one not to show up. Instead, she sends a note with "her regrets and best wishes to all of [her friends] and her love to her brothers". Later it's revealed that the new Lord to whom she has sworn allegiance is Ariakis, the champion of Takhisis, Goddess of Evil, and general of the enemy forces. To make a very long story short, Kit schemes and fights against her former friends until Ariakis is defeated, then she replaces Ariakis as commander of the dragon armies and lets the heroes go, because...well, now they'll have to spend the rest of their long, happy, peaceful lives knowing that they owe her for sparing them. Not because she cares, or anything. Definitely not.

In Chapter 3 of Legends:

"Caramon wrote to him, Tanis. I saw the letter. It was - it tore my heart. Not a word of blame or reproach. It was filled with love. He begged his brother to come back and live with us. He pleaded with him to turn his back on the darkness. ... "It came back," Tika whispered. "Unopened. The seal wasn't even broken. And on the outside was written, "I have no brother. I know no one named Caramon." And it was signed, Raistlin!"

This time, there's no need to shock the reader with the fact that Raistlin has sworn allegiance to Takhisis, because we already know about it from the last book. In fact, a different betrayal is implied. In the prologue, Astinus suggests that Raistlin's loyalty to Takhisis is false.

Kitiara is generally affable to everyone, but then she'll stab them in the back as soon as the need arises, whereas we have known Raistlin to be the opposite - caustic and spiteful to (almost) everyone's face (seeing him take a leaf out of Kit's seduction playbook in this trilogy is really something else), but up till now he could always be relied upon to save the day, no matter how treacherous he seemed.

So...could this deliberate parallel mean he's up to something? (Yes. Raistlin is always up to something). At the end of Chronicles, he told Caramon that it was time for them to go their separate ways, because he had Very Important Things to do that would surely result in Caramon's death if he followed. Is this some kind of ruse to keep his brother out of whatever he's cooking up? (Also yes). When he comes back into the story, will he be on a different side, as Kitiara was?

---

Raistlin invites Kitiara to his Tower, and they sit around drinking wine and arguing about whether or not to team up and take over the world.

"With your help, we could rule [the continent] Ansalon, you and I. In fact" -- Kitiara turned suddenly, her face alight with eagerness - "with your power we could rule the world! We don't need Lady Crysania or our hulking brother --" " 'Rule the world,' " Raistlin repeated softly, his eyes burning. "Rule the world? You still don't understand, do you, my dear sister? Let me make this as plain as I know how." ... "I don't give a damn about the world!" he said softly. "I could rule it tomorrow if I wanted it! I don't." "You don't want the world." Kit shrugged, her voice bitter with sarcasm. "Then that leaves only--" ... He could help me! she thought angrily. He is truly as powerful as they said. More so! But he's insane. He's lost his mind... Then, unbidden, a voice spoke to her from somewhere deep inside. What if he isn't insane? What if he really means to go through with this? Coldly, Kitiara considered his plan, looking at it carefully from all angles. What she saw horrified her. No. He could not win! And, worse, he would probably drag her down with him!"

The relationship between Baghra and the Darkling is a bit of an enigma, and might be an original idea from Leigh or inspired by something else she hasn't disclosed; none of the wizards on our list have significant mother figures (Flagg is...complicated, he very occasionally has one, because Stephen King is awesome and doesn't waste time on boring concepts such as canon or continuity, but that's a story for another time).

Caramon and Raistlin were raised by Kitiara since their mother became very ill after they were born. Just in this one chapter, there's multiple connections we can draw between Kit and Baghra.

In S&B, the Darkling tells Alina about his plan to destroy the Shadow Fold (with her help) almost immediately, while they are traveling to the Little Palace, then it's revealed later that he was (sort of) lying. Here in Legends, we're still kept in suspense about what Raistlin's plan is for several more chapters. Even so, Kit's reaction to figuring out The Plan is fairly similar to Baghra's.

"I never wanted him to feel the way I had as a child...So I taught him that he had no equal, that he was destined to bow to no man. I wanted him to be hard, to be strong. I taught him the lesson my mother and father taught me: to rely on no one. That love - fragile and fickle and raw - was nothing compared to power. He was a brilliant boy. He learned too well.”

Like Baghra to the Darkling, Kit values her brother's immense magical power, which elevates him above all other men, until she decides his ambitions have gone too far, and then she decides he must be stopped.

Also like Baghra, she rejects the child/sibling that can't be used to further her own ambitions (Ulla/Caramon).

"Something within her rose to the challenge. The baby would live! She would make him live, whether he wanted to or not. "My first fight," she used to tell people proudly, "was with the gods. And I won!" And now! Kitiara studied him. She saw the man. She saw -- in her mind's eye -- that whining, puking baby. Abruptly, she turned away."

Like Baghra, her relationship with her family is based more on power, pride and control than genuine love; there is love in there somewhere struggling to show itself, but the world is cruel and love is weakness; in each case the guardian's determination to ensure the child's survival comes from the guardian's pride and will to defy the odds than it does from love of the child.

Kit also goes about trying to derail The Plan in the same way Baghra does:

"He must be stopped...But we do not have to confront Raistlin directly. His scheme hinges upon Lady Crysania. Remove her, and we stop him. He need never know I had anything to do with it, in fact..."

This last one speaks for itself, really.

"When he was small, I taught him that to refuse to do my bidding meant a whipping. It seems he must learn that lesson again!"

This is an awful lot of comparisons over the course of just three pages. There are even more similarities between them if you take the rest of the series into account. I honestly don't think Leigh did this consciously, or that Baghra is based on Kit at all (I do think Zoya is inspired by Kit though, which we will come to much later on), and their roles in the story aren't equivalent, so I don't think there's much value to be had in comparing them as characters. What is worth comparing though is the way the impact of this harsh upbringing is depicted in each story.

Dragonlance in general (not just this trilogy) expends a lot of time and effort on debating about "who's to blame" for Raistlin's descent into villainy, and whilst the conclusion it comes to is broadly the same as TGT (i.e. himself), you definitely can't say they didn't explore every other possible alternative first. It's obvious that whilst a certain degree of Raistlin's (and Caramon's) problems can be traced back to Kit's harsh substitute parenting and eventual neglect, that's not anywhere near the whole story. Raistlin has significant, complex relationships with other people and societal groups in the world (although those relationships generally involve him deliberately excluding himself from the group), and being flogged as a kid is definitely not the most traumatic event of his life (it barely even rates). About the most you can say is that if the point of this was to harden him up, then it really worked. He never expects loyalty from anyone, on the basis of blood or anything other than self-interest, and in Chronicles, he's not at all bothered or surprised when it's revealed that Kit has betrayed the group.

When Raistlin departs to the Tower of High Sorcery in the epilogue of Chronicles, he's fully accepted the world's judgement of him as the villain. He knows himself to be in the right and has convinced himself that he neither wants nor needs loyalty, validation or acceptance from his family or anyone else, and this is why it's so difficult for anyone to get through to him in this trilogy. His internal conflict begins when, to his own disgust, he finds that his human heart and body aren't so ossified as he thought they were, and he does want Crysania's love.

The Darkling's inner world is for the most part left to the readers' interpretation, but it appears to me that he is the complete opposite to Raistlin. He is starving for love, obsessed with his self-image, and he seems to define himself by his layered group identities. His creation of the Second Army and the Little Palace is for the sake of the Grisha. His appeals to Alina are for the sake of Ravka. When Alina comes to the Palace, he wants to give her a black kefta because she is the only Etherealki like him, and he is distressed when she rejects it, because she is excluding herself from their group of two, thus leaving him alone again. When Alina finally concedes to their shared identity on the night of the Winter Fete, he is unable to resist his desire to be with her. Rather than being confident in his own self-knowledge, he is constantly agitated about forgetting his original self, which is why he gives Alina his name in R&R.

Genya tells Alina that it is at the Darkling's insistence that the Grisha in the Little Palace eat (and by extrapolation, dress) like peasants, "Saints forbid we forget we're real Ravkans."

No origin for these customs is given, so it's left up to the readers' imagination . You can theorise that this is purely performative, because the Grisha need to prove to the otkazat'sya that they are loyal to the Crown and the country; you can equally validly theorise that this is a manifestation of the Darkling's personal quest for authenticity, the need to prove to himself that he is still the same peasant boy as when he began, that he is a good Ravkan, by clinging onto the memory of things from that life and making them visible around him at all times.

His relationship with Baghra is the only significant personal relationship he has, due to their longevity and the secret of his true identity. It seems that he wants to have her around, since she lives at the Little Palace under his watch, and he appears to visit her regularly and (foolishly) shares his plans with her. Even so, he's resentful of the fact that she still has an emotional hold over him, and she can still make him jump by shouting at him, like he's twelve years old again. When she betrays him, he's deeply hurt but he can't stand to kill her. He's distressed when she throws herself off a cliff in R&R, and it's not anything to do with the fact that she has attempted to thwart his plans.

Because he doesn't get the love he needs from Baghra, he casts around looking for it in other places. In RoW it says "he'd searched the world for his mother's other children, hungry for kinship, for a sense of himself in others." Since he is immortal and other people live and die so quickly, he eventually begins to seek love from intergenerational groups - the common people of Ravka, the Second Army - rather than individuals. After his (first) death, Alina says that "For all his crimes, the Darkling had loved Ravka, and he'd wanted its love in return," and since this is the denouement, I believe we're supposed to accept this as truth from the author through the mouthpiece of the protagonist. Then in RoW he sacrifices his life (again) "for Ravka", and asks to be remembered as a Saint, so that he will forever be loved by the people.

This fixation on group identity also affects the way he judges other people - when a person joins the cause (Alina, Genya, Zoya, Azarov in RoW), he expects that they will have the same unwavering loyalty to the cause that he has, regardless of personal cost.

(Of course, what's so irritating about all of the above is that due to the non-existence of his POV and Leigh's known opinions on the matter, absolutely anything he says or does can be written off as "manipulation!!", but I refuse to buy into that).

This isn't a negative criticism - it's obvious that she's picked the bits she liked out of all these wizards and left out the bits she didn't, Raistlin's chronic illness being the prime example of that - but I do find it troubling that the Darkling is already the most abused out of all of them in some ways (due to his minority status), and yet she still chooses to add more pain and expects us to not feel badly for him.

---

"Now you see the importance of this Reverend Daughter of Paladine! It was fate brought her to me, just when I was nearing the time for my journey." Kitiara could only stare at him, aghast. Finally, she found her voice. "How-how to you know she will follow you? Surely you didn't tell her!" "Only enough to plant the seed in her breast." Raistlin smiled, looking back to that meeting. Leaning back, he put his thin fingers to his lips. "My performance was, frankly, one of my best. Reluctantly I spoke, my words drawn from me by her goodness and purity. They came out, stained with blood, and she was mine...lost through her own pity."

gasp

Just imagine how different things could have been if Leigh hadn't been so completely committed to this idea that the Darkling must deceive the reader in order to serve as a warning against real wizards.

Raistlin is the same scheming, conniving, tricky bastard he has been for years, and we hear this from his own mouth on page 81 of 398 (of Book 1 out of 3); after the prologue (which is supposed to be unsettling), Legends allows the reader to be confident in their interpretation of what is real and what is not, because we are told from the very beginning that Raistlin intends to use Crysania for some dark purpose, and even the methods of his manipulation. Like the Darkling, it's rare for him to outright lie; generally he tells (select parts of) the truth as he sees it, in the way he thinks will be the most appealing to Crysania, and he does everything he can to make sure she feels sorry for him. When we're in his POV we get to witness him planning how to string her along and weighing up how far he thinks he can push his luck.

This is so much fun. It's interesting. Occasionally it's hilarious, in an oh-gosh-how-sweet-he's-so-scared-of-catching-feelings kind of way. It's increasingly maddening every time he refuses to give in. If you have ever in your life considered lying to someone to get what you need from them, maybe you can find it relatable. Maybe it does make you hate him just the tiniest little bit. By the end, when everything has gone out of anyone's control, it's tragic.

But perhaps most importantly, it doesn't make the reader feel stupid or unwanted for caring about him.

I love Raistlin to bits, I really, really do, but I still find him less sympathetic than the Darkling (at least in S&B), because I know for certain that he has chosen to do things that he knows, in his heart-of-hearts, are wrong. I was there, Gandalf; I lived through it with him. My problem with the big reveal in S&B is that it's entirely possible that the Darkling has actually changed his mind (or is in the process of changing his mind, or would have changed his mind later) about "enslaving" Alina if the relationship had been allowed to continue and Baghra hadn't pulled the rug out from under him. Because we're never allowed to see his side of the story (until RoW), it's open season for the reader to interpret and project onto him however they want to, and incorrigible bleeding-hearts like me who always insist on the most generous possible interpretation of every character (because people are good by default, actually!) are willing to let him get away with far more than Leigh wants us to (as she always complains about).

In fact, the story even seems to be constructed with this in mind.

At the time of the reveal, the reader is still intended to view the Darkling as Alina's primary love interest, and therefore we are well-disposed to him; right now he's looking even better in comparison to Mal, who has just had a great no-holds-barred argument with Alina and made her feel terrible about herself. Even Alina (briefly) doubts Baghra's accusations. As an isolated incident, I don't regard Alina's snap decision to flee the Palace as poor characterisation. After the deprived, lonely, unhealthy life she's had, everything seems to be going too well for her all of a sudden, she's only just started to be confident that she really fits in at the Little Palace, and now Mal has come along planted the seed of doubt in her. She's not even sober at the time. It makes in-character sense for her to catastrophise and run away.

What sours me on it is that taking into account what we discussed at the end of the prologue chapter about the Darkling's introduction and the establishment of narrative expectations, it seems that it should be a mistake that Alina misjudges him based on the accusations of others. We were told from the very beginning that he was Bad, when we actually met him he seemed to be not so bad, but then in the end it turns out he was Very Bad indeed. What have we learned? Always believe the rumours that people in your own in-group tell you about people in the out-group, just in case? Very troubling, especially when the out-group in question is clearly identified as a persecuted minority with an close real-world equivalent.

The repetition of tasks is a standard fairytale (and fantasy) motif; if the hero fails the first attempt to complete the task assigned to him by the story, then it's only fair that he be given another attempt (or two, or five. However many it takes). As was previously mentioned, the early chapters seem to be setting up for Alina the lesson or task of overcoming her fear of and prejudice against the Grisha and the Darkling.

In the camping scene before they arrive at the Little Palace, the Darkling confronts Alina with the question of whether it would be "better" to kill an enemy with a sword, rather than with the Cut, to which she replies that she doesn't know.

"But I thought of the look that had flickered over his features, the shame in his voice when he'd talked about the Black Heretic, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had failed some kind of test."

She has failed the "test", explicitly identified as such in the text, of understanding him, and accepting the nature and necessity of his (and thus, her own) Grisha powers.

On the night of the Winter Fete, Alina has just about fully accepted her new life with him at the Palace - she is about to pass the "test". The Darkling almost chooses to forgo news of the stag for the sake of being with her, but changes his mind at the last minute.

"Tonight, we received word that my men have spotted Morozova's herd. The key to the Shadow Fold is finally within our graps, and right now, I should be in the war room, hearing their report. I should be planning our trip north. But I'm not, am I?"

Alina's "test" is to understand the Darkling and accept his and her own powers; the Darkling's "test" is to give in to love for Alina and thus abandon his quest for Morozova's power (and the rest of the plan).

When they reunite when the stag appears at the end, that ought to be the second chance for each of them to learn from their previous mistake and make the correct choice; instead, the Darkling has now fully descended into villainy and goes straight to forcing the collar on Alina, and thus she never considers hearing him out or letting him back into her heart.

I know I said in the introduction that I would resist talking about Jane Eyre, but very briefly, the whole sequence of events in S&B - Alina's "imprisonment" in the Little Palace, followed by her discovery of her lover's dark secret, followed by her escape and time spent in the wilderness, and so on - as well as certain aspects of the imagery, really do make it seem as though S&B is supposed to be some kind of fantasy appropriation of Jane, except then there's another two books and Jane murders Rochester in the end.

How unsurprising.

Manipulation is the beginning of Raistlin's character arc, but it's the end of the Darkling's, since as Mr Barnes keeps pointing out (to everyone's amusement), the Darkling is "a little bit conceptual" and more of an "allegory" than an actual character after the first book. Leigh never lets him progress beyond the (alleged) evil of his original intentions, which is tragic because, like Raistlin, he really does think that this is the only way to save the world. The Plan is far too important to risk it all on a girl being uncooperative, and if only she knew everything he knew and had suffered as he had suffered, she would agree with him and go along with it anyway.

---

Kitiara hangs out with Lord Soth, the Death Knight.

"Knight of the Black Rose," continued Raistlin, "who died in flames in the Cataclysm before the curse of the elfmaid you wronged dragged you back to bitter life."

The placement of this scene and dialogue is really clever. The above quote is all that is told of Soth's backstory in this chapter, but Kitiara narrated the full story back when Soth was introduced in Book 3 of Chronicles:

This is the same chapter in which we revisit the prologue scene, and learn that Raistlin has lied to Crysania in order to lure her to his Tower, which recalls Soth’s seduction of the elfmaid Isolde. In the prologue, Raistlin’s offer to Crysania is specifically described as a “proposal”. His current allegiance to the goddess Takhisis substitutes for Soth's first wife. Like Isolde, Crysania believes that it's her mission from her god to redeem her dark lover from his past misdeeds.

In the event that the reader has missed this or forgotten the story from Chronicles, much later on in the book the priestesses of Paladine will explicitly compare Crysania with Isolde:

“...There was a young girl in our Order who had the power of true healing. That young girl who was seduced by the Solamnic knight. What was his name?

“Soth,” said Quarath. “Lord Soth, of Dargaard Keep.”

( I rag on Leigh about this sort of thing all the time, so it’s only fair that I point out that this bit of dialogue adds nothing to the scene and appears to exist only to make sure the reader notices the parallel. Even Dragonlance isn’t completely immune t o my editorial pen).

Since the Soth/Isolde story seems parallel to the Raistania story so far, it hints that Raistania could progress along the same lines. On the other hand, Raistlin knows the story and deliberately mentions it, so does that mean he knows he's initiated a perilous chain of events, and has he planned ahead to avoid suffering Soth's fate? Or will his pride cause him to disregard the story's warning, until it's too late?

We’re not told whether Crysania also knows the story, but if she does, it isn’t in the front of her mind, because she doesn’t recognise Soth when he looms out of the shadows and kills her at the end of Chapter 7. (Yes, really). Crysania considers her brief death and subsequent resurrection to be sure signs of Paladine’s support for her mission to redeem Raistlin, but to the reader, taking into account the additional knowledge gained from the other POVs, she appears to be marching onward to certain doom.

It’s not all bad news, though, since there's going to be another parallel in a few chapters' time which foreshadows a different possible outcome for Raistania.

This is not exactly something Leigh could have recreated, since she was starting a brand new story, but the fact remains that all of the Grishaverse worldbuilding that could have been used to foreshadow a good or bad ending to Darklina was done after TGT had ended. Like Raistania, Darklina does have two possible outcomes paralleled in other stories, but instead of being used for foreshadowing, both the other stories were published after R&R when it was too late for them to generate any narrative tension, and so they feel like missed opportunities instead. The "bad ending", where one of them murders the other, is Eryk/Annika in DitW – Eryk, of course, is the Darkling, Annika seems to be specifically equated with Alina due to her white-blond hair and her status as a war orphan; the "good ending" is Ayama/Beast in Ayama and the Thorn Wood.

This is admittedly more of a stretch, but it’s possible to read AatTW as connected to TGT because:

The setting is an unnamed pastoral kingdom in a “western valley”, which recalls the farmland of the Tula Valley in west Ravka where the Shadow Fold is located;

The Beast is a dark, werewolf-like creature. Leigh wrote the song “Winter Prayer” which describes the Darkling as a “shadow hound”; my first thought was that this was a reference to Rochester being associated with the gytrash in Jane, but maybe it also has something to do with “The Hound” Clegane? In The Stand, Randall Flagg appears to Mother Abigail as "a huge Rocky Mountain timberwolf, its jaws hanging open in a sardonic grin, its eyes burning. There was a beaten silver collar around its thick neck, a thing of handsome, barbarous beauty, and from it dangled a small stone of blackest jet..." The Dog (of the Underworld, i.e. Cerberus) is also one of the symbols of the sacred kings in the Goddess story. The poetic meaning of the dog is 'Guard the Secret' - the Secret being the true name of the King, on which his magical power and his life force depends.

Ayama is a poor girl, and considered to be unattractive, like Alina in the beginning, but she discovers the “monster” inside her through her romance with the Beast. Like Alina and the Darkling, they recognise the loneliness in one another;

The first story Ayama tells, about a boy who can never be full because his mother swallowed the night sky, which is now inside him, meaning that he must swallow a piece of the sun in order to complete himself, is impossible not to relate to Darklina.

If Leigh had had the Language of Thorns ideas earlier, she could have woven the Ayama/Beast story into S&B as a Ravkan folktale that Alina knows, or something, which also would have served to pad out her very thin worldbuilding. According to her interview with Hypable on 28 September 2017, she wrote three of the stories at the same time as TGT as a worldbuilding exercise, but the two stories that really matter to the main characters – AatTW and WWSF - were written afterwards.

If she had written any scenes from the Darkling's POV, she could have used his memories of Annika to explain why he has trust issues about giving Alina an amplifier.

---

There's a great analysis post on the "If I had cut him down with a sword would that make it any better?" scene by black-rose-writings

Go read it!

I was intending to aim for one post per week, but at that rate we will likely be here for years; honestly I didn't think there would be this much to talk about in every chapter. Everyone who has seen the Twitter thread will know that I'm a few chapters ahead there, the parallels between the stories are only ramping up, and as I think further ahead to the other books and films on the list, I'm starting to think that they might all be like this.

This one gave me a lot of trouble because I kept getting side-tracked thinking about how terribly written Baghra is and how I have no idea how Leigh wants me to interpret her (many, many paragraphs were written and deleted, count yourselves lucky), let's see if I can update a little faster next time...?

POV structure in epic fantasy

"I have no intention in this book of "defining" the term epic fantasy. Neither do I expect my polemics to convince anyone already opposed to my point of view...If I fail to define epic fantasy (except very roughly and in passing) in this essay I shall also fail to defend it for its own sake...only a little is outstandingly good and much of it, while it has attractive qualities of enthusiasm and vitality, has no literary merit"

- Michael Moorcock, Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987)

In her interview with Liakeyes.com (April 2012), Leigh states that she

"...always thought of the Grisha Trilogy as High Fantasy or Epic Fantasy. Please don’t ask me to distinguish between these two things because I’ll start babbling about heroic quests, and word count..."

Unfortunately, she fails to define what she thinks "High Fantasy" and "Epic Fantasy" actually are and what she thinks the distinction between the two is. There is no industry standard definition of these terms. Lloyd Alexander, who coined the term "High Fantasy" in his 1971 essay High Fantasy and Heroic Romance , identifies the classic mythological epics (Beowulf, the Norse Eddas, The Song of Roland, the Matter of Britain, and so on) as the "fountainhead" from which modern high fantasy flows, which can be interpreted to mean that they are the same in spirit, or that one is descended from the other. Even Wikipedia considers High Fantasy and Epic fantasy to be the same thing; they share an entry.

Since we can't know precisely which criteria Leigh thinks define High and/or Epic fantasy (I honestly don't see how word count of all things could make a difference, The Well of the Unicorn is epic fantasy and that's less than 400 pages), let's limit our consideration to the books we know she was consciously imitating - Dragonlance, Eyes of the Dragon, The Stand (more like urban fantasy but it has an epic structure), The Dark Tower, ASOIAF; I'll also throw in Dune, since she refers to that a lot in interviews.

What all these epic and/or high fantasy novels have in common (apart from wizards) is that they all have large, rotating casts of POV characters of different ages, races, species, cultures, occupations, sexual orientations and gender identities. It is entirely possible to write brilliant, successful epic high fantasy in sole first-person POV (e.g. Chronicles of Amber and Book of the New Sun ), but one of the benefits of having a large, diverse POV cast in epic fantasy is that it expands the world - because the reader enters the POV of characters in different places and cultures, sometimes even time periods, and is able to see the way the events of each characters' journey is interconnected with all the others, the fantasy world and all its peoples and environments (hopefully) feels like something worth saving, rather than just the small corner of it inhabited by the protagonist.

This is one reason why the ending of TGT falls so flat - the destruction of the Shadow Fold by the otkazat'sya who have inherited Alina's powers is presumably supposed to be a triumphant reclamation of the land by its people, but it has no emotional resonance; the reader cares vastly more about Alina than they do about Ravka as a nation and the general population, because we've been exclusively in Alina's POV for the entire story. We don't even know these other people, and so we feel nothing for them, in fact we feel resentful that they have taken something precious from Alina. Why should the reader care about Ravka, when we have only seen it through Alina's eyes, and it has done nothing good for her? The main characters are very determined to defend the monarchy , (for some reason) but I never really got the sense that most of them love the country .

Secondly, a rotating POV cast allows for the use of techniques such as repetition of similar events in different contexts, and parallel character developments; it allows complex and nuanced exploration of the theme by showing it from different perspectives and in different circumstances.

For a non-fantasy example, consider the number of couples in Pride & Prejudice (which has an omniscient narrator with access to the thoughts and emotions of all the characters) . Each of the courtships explores different aspects of the theme (the overwhelming importance that social class and family reputation had on marriage in the Regency period); it wouldn't be possible to do so much examination of the theme with just one couple.

The relative brevity and simple plot of the novels when combined with the single POV also does no favours for the secondary characters. TGT is really only interested in Alina, the Darkling, and Mal, and the secondary characters mostly act as props for the love-triangle story - Genya is victimised by the Darkling to prove how evil he is, Alina is made to look magnanimous when she "forgives" Genya for her betrayal, Zoya is the skilled, beautiful "mean girl" for Alina to feel insecure in comparison to, Mal breaks up with Zoya which is supposed to prove his true love for Alina and show that he has grown beyond being a shallow fuckboy. Nikolai occasionally has a bit more to him because he's the author's pet, but he still fills the role of "handsome, rich, charming, powerful, all-round better man whom Alina nonetheless rejects because of her true love for Mal".

I find it strange that Leigh chose to use an opposite POV structure to all these books she admires so much, and apparently didn't understand the devastating effect that would have on the audience's perception of the story, characters and themes. In her interview with Deliciousreads.com on 26 September 2014, she says that in early drafts of S&B when it was a standalone novel, "There was originally a split POV between Mal and Alina," which I imagine would have shown Mal's quest to hunt the stag, would have at least attempted to convince the audience of the depth of his feelings for Alina, and would have brought the POV and plot structure much closer to the other stories that inspired TGT.

Certainly she and the creative team for the show have come to realise after the fact the terrible impact this decision had on the audience's view of his character, hence Mal's POV being restored in the show. Obviously this is not any kind of justification of Mal's appalling behaviour towards Alina in the novels; the reason I mention it is because while covering these chapters of Legends I had the horrifying realisation that as Raistlin is to the Darkling, and Crysania is to Alina, Caramon is to Mal. (How dare she).

The theme of Legends is that unselfish love is the most powerful force in the world - love saves, love heals, love redeems. Attempting to use love to gain something (power over others, personal validation) is harmful to oneself and others. The characters are given multiple opportunities to learn and understand the theme during the story; those who have accepted the theme by the end are rewarded with happiness, those who reject or fail to understand the theme fail to achieve their goal. Also, it's a positive theme, the characters have to learn to do something they were not doing at the beginning of the story, and if they can learn to do it, it will make their lives better.

It is a tragedy, the characters who fail to understand the lesson are harshly punished for the sins of pride and ambition, however the ending of this trilogy still isn't as cruel as R&R. In the afterword, the authors' stated purpose was to write "a quest [about]...saving a soul," (this is not paid off in the expected manner, however I content that it is paid off in a way that's acceptable ), whereas TGT is a quest to destroy a soul.

The lesson here is the opposite to TGT, where Alina is supposed to harden her heart against the Darkling, until in the end she has become vicious enough to kill him; her compassionate nature is a weakness that causes her to fall for his schemes. In Dragonlance, romantic and family bonds are the most valuable and precious things, and it is by caring for family, even the ones that have betrayed, manipulated, gone down a dark path and done terrible things, that all souls are saved. Sometimes loving someone means letting them go, but it never means killing them.

Book 1, Chapters 1-4

The theme about love is established in the first four chapters, which follow the rest of the cast from the Chronicles trilogy. It's been two years since the end of Chronicles , and the band of heroes have all married one another. One by one, they arrive at the Inn of the Last Home in Solace (the "hometown" of Dragonlance, where it all began). These chapters deliberately mirror the opening chapters of Chronicles, in order to demonstrate how much the characters and the world have changed in the time since, and which things have remained the same.

Both first chapters start out with Tika in the Inn; in Chronicles , she’s the barmaid, and it’s an ordinary day; in Legends , she’s a war hero having a PTSD flashback and the novel spends f our entire pages outlining how miserable she is in excruciating detail. In Chronicles, Tanis comes home and sees his oldest and dearest friend Flint for the first time in years, and they have a tearful reunion. In Legends, Flint is dead, but Tanis still hears the memory of his voice. The quest of Chronicles begins when a mysterious woman with the magic of the gods arrives at the inn, pursued by the forces of darkness. The quest of Legends begins when...a mysterious woman with the magic of the gods arrives at the inn, pursued by the forces of darkness.

As the old heroes arrive, we are introduced to all these contrasting marriages and their domestic joys and struggles -

Tanis Half-Elven has married Laurana, the princess of the Qualinesti (Tolkien: Wood) elves, they have a long history and are very happy together, but he is still uncomfortable being fully immersed in Elven society, his father-in-law has just died, and although he has never gotten along with the in-laws of course there will be a terrible scene if he doesn't make it to the funeral on time.

Laurana's brother has entered a marriage of convenience with Alhana, this is described as "not a marriage of love...[but] a marriage that will help restore order to the world." Alhana had been in true love with Sturm, one of the heroes who tragically died in Chronicles. She will never truly love again, but she has married for the sake of the world's peace, and does have some influence over her husband.

The Plains tribes are on the brink of war (as always), but the chieftains Riverwind and Goldmoon are perfectly happy and already have three kids in two years(!!) - a son and twin daughters.

Tika married Caramon (Raistlin's twin brother); she is obviously in terrible distress about something she won't talk about, and is trying to pretend everything is normal. Everyone keeps asking her where Caramon is and she keeps making excuses.

In a truly shocking twist, it is revealed that the marriage is falling apart because Caramon - one of the most kind-hearted, hard-working, self-sacrificing heroes of Chronicles , a man who values family above all else - has become a wretched, disgusting drunkard who is completely unrecognisable to even his oldest, dearest friends.

The reason for all this misery is that Raistlin never came home with them to Solace but instead shut himself away in the Tower of High Sorcery to study dark magic. Although he has married Tika, Caramon freely admits that his poor frail little brother will always be first in his heart, and is clearly more worried about Raistlin (wherever he is, whatever he may be doing) than he is about his wife who is right there the whole time.

This is all so fucking horrid. It really, really fucking hurts to read about the lives of these beloved characters spiraling out of control, all because of the actions of another character, who has his own serious problems (Raistlin is equally beloved, though he makes it damned hard sometimes); I can never read these chapters without crying.

The grand point of it all is: nobody is an island, even if they want to be, every choice we make affects the people who love us and has a ripple effect on the rest of the world. We're now in a situation where Tanis has to choose between staying in Solace to support Tika, or moving on to meet up with his wife's family. On the one hand, Tika is borderline suicidal; on the other hand, missing the elven king's funeral could cause a political incident that will hugely set back the tenuous post-war human-elven relations, and none of this would be happening if Raistlin had just come home with them after the last adventure. Visited occasionally. Written them a letter (that wasn't completely hateful). Anything.

This is High Fantasy, but it's so viscerally real, and it has a greater scope and levels of complication that S&B doesn't have, because it’s genuinely interested in the love that people have for “the villain”, even when that love does great harm to them, whereas S&B never seriously entertains the idea that the Darkling might be worth saving, that he might have some points, that maybe Alina's personal liberty is worth giving up if it means ending all wars and ending Grisha persecution, that she might have some obligation to listen to the wishes of her own people who do agree with the Darkling and respect him as their leader, and so on, and so on. It isn't possible to get a proper appreciation of anyone else's lived experience because everything is filtered through Alina's POV. For example, in a brief exchange at the end of S&B, we hear that the reason for Ivan's intense loyalty to the Darkling is because his entire family has been killed serving in the wars, but it wouldn't be in character for Alina to be able have a deep understanding of that trauma because she's never had a family (other than Mal), and I don't think it's possible to summarise that kind of pain in half a page and treat it with the appropriate seriousness. Ivan’s loyalty to the Darkling is treated as a flaw because it causes him to excuse the Darkling’s “evil”, and in S&S he dies for it, but we’re never allowed to see any positive side of it from Ivan’s own POV such as the strength and sense of purpose it gives him.

I'll be coming back to these chapters later on, with regard to the fact that Raistlin has a surprisingly high number of people who care for him and advocate for him in this book, whereas the Darkling is not permitted to have those things.

The White Goddess

Robert Graves' 1948 (revised 1952)The White Goddess is a thoroughly inscrutible monster of a book - part anthropological, part literary, part polemical, part autobiographical - and most of the "historical facts" stated within are completely bunk; nevertheless, it was in universal circulation in the English-language literary scenes of the late 20th century, and thus had a massive impact on fiction and poetry of the time, and from there, popular culture. As such, it remains an invaluable cipher to interpret late 20th century SFF texts and their descendants, such as TGT.

I haven't been able to find any confirmation of whether Leigh has read the book (though I'd be surprised if she hasn't). In any case, the Goddess myth explored in the book is the basis of the plots of both Legends and TGT.

Everything Graves considers to be True Art (take this term with a mountain of salt) depicts some scene or episode from the story he calls the Single Poetic Theme, a sort of ur-text that forms the universal basis of world mythology:

"The Theme, briefly, is the antique story...of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride, and layer-out."

- Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948)

The story is a mythological metaphor for the cycles of nature - day and night, summer and winter, life and death. The world is personified in the Goddess, and the opposite states of nature which the world cycles through are personified by the twin gods, or sacred kings, ever at war but in balance with one another. The “Waxing Year", is representative of the current season, the status quo, the social structure and character relationships in place at the beginning of the story. The "Waning Year" is the dark half of the year, or the winter season. For the Goddess, the King of the Waning Year is cognate with the mythological 'dark man' or 'predator' who is physically and/or sexually threatening; his appearance signals

"...a psychic change from one level of knowing and behaviour to another more mature or more energetic level of knowledge and action."

- Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992)

In TGT, Alina plays the role of the Goddess to both Mal and the Darkling, who are the ‘twin’ Kings, by virtue of the fact that they are both the descendents of Ilya. To Mal, Alina represents the ‘mother’ because she has been with him since childhood, and takes on a symbolic mother role (simliar to the Virgin Mary) in S&S when he becomes a soldier of the Sol Koroleva cult; she is the bride (obvious, and they do actually marry in the end); and she is the layer-out because she kills him in R&R in order to obtain his power as an amplifier. Like the sacred kings in the myths from which the story template is derived, Mal is ritually sacrificed but later resurrected, and his association with the Firebird is symbolic of the light and fire of summer, the “Waxing Year”.

To the Darkling, Alina is a mother figure because when he meets her, he is ‘reborn’; if we believe his words, then this is the first time for a long time that he has had hope; the Darkling is often associated with imagery of death, but in RoW his memory of his time with Alina in TGT is that “with her, he was human again”. She is the bride (once again, obvious), and the layer-out because she does kill him in the end; his frequent descriptions using imagery of coldness and stark black, white and grey colours identifies him as the King of the Winter season, or the “Waning Year”. The Darkling's appearance prompts Alina's "psychic change" by revealing her powers and taking her away from her familiar surroundings to the Little Palace.

Unlike Mal (and the mythological sacred kings), there’s no hint of the Darkling’s resurrection in R&R, but in Leigh's interview with Lifestyle Inquirer, 19 June 2015, she did say

"I don’t want to close all the doors, there are uncertainties at the end of “Ruin and Rising,” even in certain deaths that aren’t necessarily forever."

The most obvious interpretation is that the death she’s referring to is Mal’s but that doesn’t really strike me as an “uncertainty”: he died, he was resurrected, an explanation was given (no matter how poorly foreshadowed it was). But another characteristic of all these wizards the Darkling is based on is that they have a habit of returning from the dead; I don’t think she had the plot of KoS planned in advance, but perhaps even at the time of writing R&R she had considered the idea of bringing him back if she ever wrote a sequel.

In Legends, Crysania is the Goddess; as seen in the previous chapter, the prologue reveals her loyalty to Elistan and the god Paladine (the powers of light, Waxing Year), she pursues Raistlin (the dark man, Waning Year), and Caramon (Raistlin’s twin, also representative of the Waxing Year) is sent on the quest to retrieve her from falling victim to the powers of darkness.

TGT has a similar quest structure to this, where Alina (the Goddess) is “captured” by the Darkling, and we later find that Mal has gone on his own (unseen) quest to retrieve her, by hunting the stag so he can gain entry to the Palace.

Mal is “inspired" by Caramon (and Jack from Legend and possibly Eddie Dean from The Dark Tower, we’ll get to them in time) in the same way that the Darkling is “inspired” by Raistlin, which is to say that they have physical characteristics in common, some of the same things happen to them in the story – they’re both handsome military boys with curly brown hair and blue eyes, both have a string of casual flings before eventually settling down with the girl from back home, who was there all along; Mal’s descent into drunken thuggery in S&S recalls the way Caramon starts out in this book; Mal’s dalliance with Zoya in S&S (which he blames on Alina because she’s changed) recalls the part in Legends where Caramon claims to love Crysania, however she rejects him, knowing that he is using her to replace his true love for Tika, since she may not take him back in the end.

All of this comes back to the same problem I concluded with in the previous chapter about management of expectations. Caramon is pretty unlikeable at certain points in this book but it works because he was already a hero in the previous trilogy; the audience and the other characters already love him and we want to see him get better and be happy, because we know he’s better than this. It’s also easier to sympathise with him because while he’s become the abusive husband, we know that the reason for this is that he’s suffering in a different abusive relationship with his brother; his fatal flaw is having too much (unreciprocated) love for another person, and it’s very diffcult to condemn a character who loves. Unlike Mal, we know the truth and depth of his feelings because we’re often in his POV.

In the beginning of S&B, Mal is nobody to us, we have no prior attachment to him so he just progresses from being unlikeable to being eminently hateable. Alina’s memories of childhood happiness in The Meadow as a device to encourage the readers’ attachment to Mal don’t have anywhere near the same weight as an entire previous trilogy of novels from his POV.

In her blog post of September 8, 2012 (deleted now, but the screenshot is in the introduction post of this series), Leigh said:

"He was inspired by every goblin king, dark wizard, and troublesome gent I ever fell for (usually harder than for the hero)."

I find it interesting that here she chose to refer to the "dark wizard" specifically in opposition to "the hero" whom she feels like she was supposed to fall for , because it implies something about the way she understood the theme and the roles of the characters in Legends. In the Goddess stories, it’s important to understand that neither of the Gods/Kings is the villain – they represent opposite aspects of nature, amd the existence of both is necessary for the survival of the world, which is why they are constantly renewed in the cycle of death and resurrection. Each is only “evil” from the other’s POV, because neither of them wants to lose their grasp on the Goddess’ power and thus fears being defeated and usurped by his rival.

I wonder whether Leigh regards Caramon (Waxing) as The (sole) Hero of Legends, and Raistlin (Waning) as The Villain. From my point of view, that’s really not how it’s presented in the books - the whole story is about everyone trying to save Raistlin and giving him all these chances to stop what he’s doing; he can just come home at any time and everyone will take him back with open arms (some more reluctantly than others, but no one’s arguing for him to be imprisoned or executed or anything). He is the antagonist in the sense that he’s the one causing all the problems, but I don’t believe the reader is ever supposed to feel hateful towards him. Generally whenever he says/thinks/does something awful, shortly afterwards he'll say/think/do something decent or someone will argue in his favour, or something terrible will happen to him, which balances it out and encourages the reader feel sympathetic again.

"But, don't you see, Caramon - you have followed him into darkness! And you're dying by inches! Raistlin himself told you to walk your own path and let him walk his. But you haven't done that! You're trying to walk both paths..."

...

"But you are not coming back to me as husband or even friend until you come back at peace with yourself."

...

"Maybe that'll be never," Caramon said surlily. "Ever think of that, huh, my fine lady?"

"Yes," Tika said steadily.

"I've thought of it. Good-bye, Caramon."

Toxic co-dependence is actually the main obstacle of Caramon's character development in Legends . When his brother rejects him, he has this complete breakdown, and Tika has to learn to toughen up and get by without him, until she throws him out of the house.

Then in Chapter 6, Tas confronts him:

"All you've done, all these years, is whine! The noble Caramon, sacrificing everything for his ungrateful brother. Loving Caramon, always putting Raistlin first!...You only did it because it made you feel good!

Raistlin didn't need you - you needed him! You lived his life because you're too scared to live a life of your own!"

To relate this back to what I said at the beginning of the post about the theme being about unselfish love - Caramon's love for Raistlin is regarded as selfish because he uses it as a crutch to assure himself of his own goodness, and as an excuse to avoid having to make choices. His entire arc in this trilogy is about letting go of his lifelong overattachment to his brother and living his own life.

As we know, Alina's character development is constantly crippled because of her dependence on Mal, and she is never allowed to get over it; even when he dies at the end, he immediately comes back and any progress that could have been made is undone.

I wonder if Leigh interpreted the lesson of Caramon's arc specifically as "codependence on an evil person is unhealthy" rather than just "codependence is unhealthy". In TGT, every bad thing that happens to everyone is made to be the Darkling's fault (e.g. the King assaulting Genya); perhaps her interpretation of Legends was that Raistlin was toxic to Caramon and thus this caused Caramon to become toxic to Tika, the marriage breakdown was all Raistlin's fault and Caramon doesn't bear any of the fault for it because he's "the hero" and thus must be in the right and/or the victim of "the villain".

I find it upsetting that everything is always made to be about the men and Alina's story is always made to be about the Darkling and Mal; there's the same kind of insidious misogyny in this interpretation where Raistlin/Caramon is the only toxic relationship that matters and Caramon/Tika is just blamed on the emotional manipulation of the villain; I feel like it takes away some of the impact of the fact that Tika is the first one to stand up for herself and break off the toxic relationship; she just decides for herself to do it, no one tells her to, and it's not really anything to do with "standing up to/not giving in to the villain", she does it for herself because it's what she wants.

Tika gets so ashamed about her friends finding out how bad her life has become, and that's not quite enough to push her over the edge, but then she is the only one of the group to realise that Crysania is in love with Raistlin; it doesn't directly say this in the text but I think when Crysania says she wants to "reclaim" her man, that's when Tika realises that cutting her husband off is the only way there's a chance that she can force him to change - that's the only way she can "reclaim" him; and then that's the only reason why Caramon goes on his character development/healing journey (Tika is the real hero of Legends).

The roughly equivalent Mal/Alina scene isn't like this; in the scene in S&B where they have the argument in the Little Palace, Mal leaves and the scene lingers on Alina, she wants to "run after him, to take back what I'd said, to beg him to stay," and in the next chapter

'"Come back," I whispered, my body shaking with fresh sobs...I knew I would probably never see him again, and I ached with it."

This extended focus on Alina's distress feels humiliating and it really puts the emphasis on the fact that she (feels she) made a mistake, whereas in Legends its in Tas' POV and all it says is as they leave he can hear "grief-stricken sobbing." It's made obvious that Tika is horribly upset at having to do this but the writing doesn't ever humiliate her or imply that she's made the wrong choice.

I had two paragraphs about themes in TGT which didn't make the cut, but the point was that there's an inherent cruelty in the writing of TGT, because punishment is built in to the delivery of the lesson to the character(s). (The reason why the paragraphs didn't make the cut was because I was getting too tied up in knots debating about whether the themes could be proven to apply to characters other than Alina).

The theme of TGT is widely agreed by the audience to be that greed is corruptive, and I think that is the best and clearest possible reading for the text, however Leigh herself is strangely inconsistent on this point. In her interview for Desert News on 29 September 2015, she identified the themes of the story as:

...sacrifice, friendship, the lure of power, the things we're willing to give up for the sake of belonging to someone or something.

"The lure of power" presumably refers to greed; "friendship" is too vague to talk about, for something to be a theme you have to say more about it than "it exists in the story"; "sacrifice" and "the things we're willing to give up..." are effectively the same thing. This last one is the real winner, I think - she has described it in those same words in more than one interview. If we take the themes as "greed" and "sacrifice", I think of both of those as negative themes, because they require the character(s) to give up something that they want, in exchange for "belonging" or the greater good.

In relation to the palace scene mentioned above, by treating Alina as though she's in the wrong, the text asserts that Alina is being "greedy" for liking her new life at the Palace and "the way the Darkling looks at her", she is "sacrificing" her friendship with Mal in order to "belong" to the Darkling, whereas Mal is in the right because he asserts that the Darkling doesn't "own" him (i.e. Mal belongs to himself and he won't sacrifice his freedom). Alina is made to learn the lesson when emotional pain is inflicted on her - she loses her friendship with Mal, and straight afterwards she loses the Darkling as well; whereas in Legends, when Tika accepts the lesson (that she needs to throw Caramon out for his own good, and hers), she is rewarded because her life immediately gets better; although this argument scene is vastly worse than the one in S&B because it's the (temporary) end of a marriage, somehow it actually hurts me less to read about it.

Introduction to Dragonlance

Legends (1986) is the sequel trilogy to the original Dragonlance Chronicles (1984-5), licensed novels set in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Krynn. The books were used to promote the game, immerse players in the setting, and give players and DMs inspiration for roleplaying characters and adventures. There are over 200(!!) Dragonlance novels and supplementary books in total, of wildly varying quality, but the core books revolve around the heroes of the War of the Lance - the event that heralded the return of the ancient gods and dragons to Krynn.

The world of Krynn is Tolkien-lite, populated with various races of men, elves, dwarves, kender (similar to hobbits), with draconians as the rough equivalent to orcs.

Map of Krynn from Time of the Twins

Since this series of posts is specifically in relation to Dragonlance's relevance to The Grisha Trilogy, I'll be skimming over any parts of the books that aren't important to that topic. I've decided to skip Chronicles and cover only the second trilogy, because it's fairly obvious that it's the events and characterisation in this trilogy that served as Leigh's inspirations. I will fill in the details of events that happened in the original trilogy where necessary, but for the most part, it won't be.

Obviously Leigh didn't adopt much of the typical European high fantasy setting from Dragonlance; what we're interested in here are the character developments, motivations and dynamics, and the broad strokes of the plot.

"No Tolkien cred for me. This was my first foray into secondary world fantasy. One of my best friends and I used to call each other Laurana and Sturm. (Actually, we still do. Makes for fun texts: "Congrats on baby #2, Brightblade!") Though my interest lagged after the first six books, the Legends trilogy was my favorite, mostly because of a certain Raistlin Majere, an arrogant mage with a thirst for power and what might best be described as reluctant humanity."

- Leigh Bardugo's top 10 childhood reads, The Guardian, 28 June 2013

Note about The Last Trial musical: There is a musical adaptation of Legends which gives the characters the eventual happy ending they (and we all) deserve.

We know that Leigh is aware of the musical because her friend Emily Duncan mentions in the acknowledgements page of her novel Wicked Saints that they have discussed it. Leigh knew that there was so much fan desire for a happy ending to this story that a group of fans wrote and performed an entire professional musical to make it happen, and yet she still decided to bait and not deliver. (For shame).

It sounds as though they are not fans, and in hindsight, that is unsurprising.

The Meeting

Carve this prologue on my tombstone, I will love it till death and beyond, it's so good.

Like the Grishaverse novels, the setting and the main characters are introduced from the outside, with a minor character narrating the prologue in third-person.

The purpose of the prologue is to establish Crysania and Raistlin as our pair of mirrored protagonists, and make it abundantly clear that this is going to be a story about sexual awakening (both literally and as a metaphor for self-actualisation). A huge amount of emphasis is put on Crysania's frigidity; she is described as colorless, "made of marble", she has a "cold smile that brought no more life to her face than the moonlight upon snow". her lips being "bloodless" can be interpreted as a euphemism for a lack of sexual desire or experience.

Right from the beginning, she's a much more confident, mature protagonist than Alina ("the swiftness and almost masculine length of her stride" and her "firm and strong" handshake) although her cold self-righteousness is clearly presented as a character flaw (pride is her fatal flaw in the story); by contrast, Leigh seems to view Alina's kind heart as a weakness that has to be beaten out of her, and it's in the latest book Rule of Wolves that she's at her most stone-hearted.

Now onto Raistlin. Like the Darkling, we hear about his "unnatural powers" before he makes his personal appearance.

"He entered in the dead of night in darkness, the only moon in the sky was the moon that sheds no light."

Note about magic in Dragonlance: Magic is tied to religion. There are three orders of gods, each ruled by one of the major gods: Paladine (good, light), Gilean (neutral, red), and Takhisis (evil, dark). Each of these is associated with a subordinate god, the personification of one of the three moons of Krynn, from which magical power is derived (e.g. dark magic draws on the power of the black moon, Nuitari).

Raistlin started out as a red mage, but turned black before the end of Chronicles (following a dream vision in which he was told he needed to convert to Evil alignment in order to obtain the power to save himself and his companions; he has a lot of visions over the years), and we're going to get a lot of dramatic descriptions of swirling black velvet robes.

Crysania is a Cleric (different magic class, focused on healing) of Paladine, so she wears white robes; obviously their contrasting black/white costumes establishes them as wielders of opposing light/dark magic and adherents of the associated philosophies. This convenient wedding symbolism identifies them as the personifications of the dual aspects - the opposing natural principles that must be united in a sacred marriage (or "Alchemical Marriage") to bring perfect harmony to the individual participants, and the estates (nations, religions, social classes, and so on) they represent. This is the same status afforded to The Darkling and Alina in TGT (...if the alchemical symbolism of the story had been allowed to resolve itself in the expected manner, without interference, that is).

The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, from Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550.

I've theorised that the "Small Science" was partly inspired by real historical alchemy (albeit very poorly represented), and partly by TTRPG systems including D&D; the Grisha types of Inferni/Squaller/Tidemaker broadly map to the classic RPG elemental triad of fire/lightning/ice, which explains why there's no "Earth" element (Fabrikators manipulate metal but are classed as a separate type to Etherealki); Neutral-aligned mages in D&D wear red robes; in Ravka, Corporalki wear red, and they can be either killers or healers.

One of the things I like the least about the Grishaverse books is the way that they're chock-full of religious references and imagery, but (especially prior to King of Scars), the actual beliefs of the religion and how it affected people's lives was barely examined, and the most religious people were usually depicted as desperate, gullible, or crazy cultists. None of the main characters really seem to be believers, which seems very unlikely in the pseudo-historical setting; I don't know if this was an attempt to appeal to a majority atheist (or at least, non-Christian) audience, or what, but I found it incredibly hollow.

I have a lot more to say about the (mis)use of real-world theological elements in the series, but that would be off-topic for this post. The point I'm coming to is that the conflict between Raistlin and Crysania's philosophies has so much more weight than The Darkling and Alina's because it's properly connected to the worldbuilding. In Krynn, the gods are undeniable real beings who regularly interact with the characters. Crysania is basically the Mother Superior-equivalent of her religion, with complete conviction that she has the power of her god behind her and it's her destiny to save the world, whereas unfortunately Alina is just some girl without much of an education who doesn't seem to believe in anything (except, "the Darkling must be stopped!")

"Elistan, at that time, was in the fullness of his power. Handsome, strong, even in his middle years, he seemed like one of the clerics of old...Crysania began the evening finding cause to admire him. She ended on her knees at his feet, weeping in humility and joy, her soul at last having found the anchor it had been missing."

Crysania remembers meeting Elistan, the high priest of her order. Upon hearing him speak, she has this seemingly quasi-sexual revelation, and immediately breaks off her engagement with a nobleman and takes religious orders. Their relationship is technically non-romantic and non-sexual, but Elistan and the church fill a similar role to Mal, in that they are the "safe" environment that Crysania has to break away from in order to grow and discover her true self and her true desires. Raistlin finally arrives in person.

"At first she saw nothing, only a shadow of darkness in the doorway, as if night itself had taken form and shape within the entrance. The darkness paused there."

So now we begin to see where the "inspiration" for the Darkling comes from. However, there are a lot of substantial differences between the way Raistlin is presented to the reader as opposed to the Darkling. In particular, Raistlin is so sickly he's constantly coughing up blood everywhere and is on the brink of collapsing at any moment. This magically-induced illness was inflicted during an extremely dangerous wizarding trial several years previously; there'll be more to say about that in later chapters.

What is important for now is that it's clear from this chapter (not to mention the previous trilogy) that he's not supposed to be physically appealing. He has a mysterious allure - clever words, and an aura of power and arcane secrecy that makes him irresistibly compelling - despite his more repulsive physical (and personality) traits.

Raistlin is a "frail, thin man, shoulders slightly stooped, who leaned upon his staff as he walked, as if too weak to move without its aid...he moved like a human of ninety..." His golden skin makes his face appear as "a metallic mask", his eyes are "a gilt mirror, flat, reflective, revealing nothing of the soul within...the pupils within the golden eyes were the shape of hourglasses!" (The hourglass eyes are important, more on those when they're further explained in the story).

Obviously TGT makes use of the more common and predictable Cautionary Tale approach, where the "dark, handsome, powerful, alluring" man is secretly a dangerous predator, whereas in Dragonlance, we instead have "dark, sickly, unattractive, powerful, but still strangely alluring" man is already known (by both the characters and the readers) as the world's greatest villain from the very beginning. It's more complicated, more interesting. Raistlin exploits Crysania (and the reader's) sense of compassion more effectively than the Darkling is able to for most of TGT, because his constant physical suffering is compounded with his emotional suffering and the weight of all the hardships that the world, destiny, the gods, fellow wizards, and fellow men impose on him over the course of his the story.

Physical suffering is something that the Darkling rarely experiences. Grisha are completely immune to illness, his scars inflicted at the end of S&B are only treated as superficial markers of his evil nature in the following books, and have been sexified for the show.

"She could feel Raistlin's muscles twisting in spasms, sense his pain and suffering. Pity filled her heart...Raistlin jerked away from her touch, shoving her to one side...he regarded her with scorn."

This is something that is going to happen a lot in this book. In the previous trilogy, Raistlin was always physically dependent on his brother Caramon, due to his poor health, and being beholden to that fool is something he deeply resented. Since the company of heroes parted ways, he's been responsible for his own health, and making a very poor job of it, but he values his independence and his quest for magical power too much to take care of himself. Like Crysania, pride is one of his great flaws. For now, it's just a matter of maintaining independence and not looking weak, he would reject anyone, but soon enough this is going to evolve into hating himself for being attracted to this woman, and hating her for being the object of attraction, and potentially distracting him from his mission. Which rather brings to mind,

"The problem with wanting...is that it makes us weak."

This tension between attraction and repulsion is really only seen in this book, out of all Leigh's sources; all the others are either plainly evil manipulators (Flagg, Lord of Darkness), or Jareth (is explicitly Sarah's subconscious animus, appears to be threatening but is actually totally subordinate to her).

There are moments in this book that really seethe with sexual tension; the extreme repression of these two voluntarily celibate, maniacally faith-driven people (Raistlin's faith is in the art of magic itself, rather than his patron goddess, but it has the same effect) means that even this benedictional kiss on the forehead radiates heat.

This is another reason why Leigh's mealy-mouthed approach to religion doesn't pay off. She's written this series all about pseudo-Catholic Saints and Heretics and Priests and there's vague undercurrents of BDSM everywhere; it could be fun and kinky and funny, but instead she's so completely po-faced about it all the time. We're still in the prologue of Book 1 of this trilogy, and yet the only thing in the Grishaverse that even compares to this is the chapel scene from the end of S&S (which is my favourite scene in the entire series, by the way).

Compare "a warm smile, dark and secret—a smile for just the two of them," with the below extract from S&B; the same emphasis is on the secrecy and the forbidden nature of the kiss, which leads the heroine to (want to) believe in her own special importance and exclusivity.

Raistlin sighed wearily, and there was an expression of sorrow in his face and voice, the sorrow of one who is constantly suspected, misunderstood...Raistlin started to leave, but Crysania stopped him. "I-I apologise for not trusting you, Raistlin Majere," she said softly.

Compare with S&B:

"Something flashed across his face, something that looked like anger or maybe even pain. Without another word, he rose and walked away from me...I thought of the look that had flickered over his features, the shame in his voice when he'd talked about the Black Heretic, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had failed some kind of test."

These two interactions are also essentially the same - the heroine doesn't give the desired answer to the dark man, he expresses sorrow that she has misjudged him, she suffers guilt.

First impressions matter; what I find the most interesting in comparing this prologue with the first few chapters of S&B is the difference in the management of readers' expectations. In Chronicles, Raistlin was known to be bad news; except for his brother, the other heroes mistrusted him from the very beginning of the adventure. He seemed to be more or less redeemed in the end, but last we saw him, in the epilogue, he was clearly up to something sinister. Has he really changed his ways in the two years since? And why is he trying so hard to make a good impression on this woman, when he's normally so...uh...himself? His gentle visage slips for a moment, when he mocks Crysania for her faith in her god, so the reader is still hesitant to trust him. Then he apologises to her! (So out-of-character!) The only way to know what he's going to be in this story - hero, villain, or somewhere in between - is to keep reading. It's compelling stuff.

Meanwhile, S&B necessarily has a different approach for its introduction of the Darkling (because, unlike Raistlin, the Darkling isn't a character already known to readers), and whilst it seems effective at first, it doesn't make for very good or interesting storytelling by the end of things. TGT has such a stock-standard coming-of-age quest opening (blank slate reluctant heroine, childhood friend draped in death flags, arrival of a mysterious stranger), it automatically sets up expectations in the reader's mind, and then all those expectations are "subverted" in ways that ultimately disappoint and only generate negative emotions. Like most of the writing problems in TGT, it also creates some unfortunate implications in the messaging.

We know that Alina distrusts the Grisha from the beginning of the story, because the prologue shows that she is afraid of being taken to the Little Palace, despite the fine things she is promised, because that will mean she will be separated from Mal. Since this is the beginning of a heroic fantasy bildungsroman, knowing the way these things usually go, the reader might assume that Alina's fear of separation is a character weakness that she must be made to overcome during the story. Defeating her fear as a child, going to the Little Palace and learning to use her powers would have been the "right" choice, as it would have restored her health; instead, she passed the opportunity by, and has suffered for it ever since. However, the Call to Adventure is most persistent, and so years later, she has another chance acknowledge her previous weakness, defeat it, and fulfill her destiny.

In the present day Chapter 1, we are given another poor impression of the Grisha, and the Darkling in particular. They arrive in fancy coaches, whilst the First Army has been marching for two weeks; the Darkling's coach nearly runs Alina down in the road, then Zoya comes along and shamelessly flirts with Mal. There's not much excuse for the Darkling's driver, but this is rather unfair to Zoya - flirting with men isn't morally wrong (except to misogynists); how is she, a complete stranger, supposed to know that Alina is secretly in love with Mal, and so flirting with Mal is a violation of the "girl code"?

Alina is predisposed against her, but there's no need for a kind-hearted reader to be; instead, one might assume that, once again, Alina's insecurity and constant comparison of herself to other women, and her desperation for Mal's attention, are flaws she will be required to overcome during the adventure.

Then, we have the passage where the cartographers gossip about the Darkling. He's not natural, it was one of his kind that made the Shadow Fold, this one is just as bad as his mad ancestor. All of this is very loaded language that seemingly identifies the Darkling as the most ostracised member of a minority group - the Grisha are the Other, and the Darkling is the most Other. (And naturally the "magical minority" in fantasy fiction is generally associated by the reader with a real life minority group - women, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and so on, according to the readers' personal experience).

Generally the point of a fantasy quest is to learn something; the ability to save the world is the end result of that lesson for the hero, but it's the lesson or theme of the story that the audience is supposed to apply to their own lives. "Save the world" is often a metaphor for self-actualisation; the realistic equivalent to "saving the world" is harnessing one's inner power and potential, and using it to achieve one's dream, to do something for the benefit of oneself or the benefit of others.

All of this set-up implies that the lesson of TGT is going to involve Alina overcoming her own socially-acquired prejudices against the Grisha and the Darkling. Meanwhile, the Darkling will be made to overcome his detachment and haughtiness that is implied by his reckless arrival in the carriage - he will be made to sympathise with the poorest and most down-trodden people, people like Alina as she originally was in that scene, and by their powers combined, they will save the world.

But, as we know, that's not how things turned out, and I think that's terribly sad.