It’s been a while for Midnight Alley, as I’ve been setting up the new historical fantasy Substack, Silverwood Stories. That’s the new home for all the stories set in Civil War era Appalachia and the Old West. They don’t fit with the Moon Road world, and they deserve their own space to grow.
This time around, though, let’s have a look at the way magic works on the Moon Road, plus a few thoughts on incorporating magical systems into worldbuilding.
The Magic of the Moon Road
Long ago, the peoples of Earthside and Faeside arose out of the same seedings from the stars. That makes them all distantly related, with similar capabilities for magic. But then everything changed.
The two “sides” are in different, but slightly overlapping, dimensions of the Universe. They’re separated by the Moon Road that wanders through the uncharted emptiness between them. When the Road was young, the two worlds were much closer together.
In those times, before the Moon Road grew and pushed those worlds farther apart, there was much more movement between them. We’ve all read stories of people abducted under faerie mounds, changeling children, and magical beings taking humans as lovers and spouses.
That means that on the Fae side, there are colonies of humans, or at least the descendants of those taken as children or lovers and never returned to the human world. By now they’re not entirely human of course — there’s a strong fae component to their DNA.
On the Earthside, that’s also true. From the days when fae types spent more time in the human world, there are still people carrying the DNA of those shapeshifters, magic makers and beings once worshipped as gods.
But although the peoples of Faeside and Earthside sprang from the same star stuff, they also evolved differently, in sync with the environment of their respective worlds. And that includes their relationship to magic.
Earthside humans are iron and water rich, with red, dense blood and an inability to survive in water, or in places where oxygen is thin. On the fae side, the world is lighter, made up less of iron and water than of air and fire — light, rare metals and energy currents like magnetic fields and radiation from space. A lot of them, such as the Sidhe, have thinner, bluish-purple blood and a higher tolerance for low oxygen environments.
Magic is stronger and more pervasive in the Fae world than in our own, and as both worlds have advanced technologically, magic has taken a major role in science and tech there. On the Earthside, magic is now the purview of a few practitioners who draw from the Earth’s own energies in places where they’re most accessible, such as Soledad City.
Because of all this, the Fae side has learned to use the Moon Road for its own purposes — to travel between Earthisde and the Domains, and even to set up businesses and various enterprises along its strange, living length. Most Earthsiders, at least in modern times, have never traveled the road and don’t know of its existence. That makes the Earthside ripe for exploitation by a variety of power-hungry Fae entities.
The two worlds remain inextricably entwined, linked by shared ancestry and similar paths forward. But most Earthsiders think the old stories are just that —children’s stories, or fodder for fantasy books and films.
Of course that’s not true. Just ask the intrepid agents of the Directorate.
On Worldbuilding: Reader-Friendly Magic
“Do you believe in magic?”
That’s the question my lawyer asked my agency’s director at depositions when I was going on trial for witchcraft. It was an important one. Her answer would explain why she’d launched a literal witch hunt spanning two installations, triggering a civil rights investigation and impacting the lives of multiple employees and clients.
She twisted and squirmed and hedged, and finally said it depended on the magic.
All of this began when our new and much-disliked supervisor found sugar sprinkled on her desk. She thought we — two other case managers and I — had put a curse on her. She spiraled into strange dysfunction after that, and rumors of dark magics in the workplace began to spread.
Now, I’m not writing about this to bore you with this peculiar chapter in my life, but to suggest that all you need is a tiny detail like a sugar packet on a desk to make magic seem very real.
If magic plays a significant part in your story, your magical system has to work seamlessly, so readers embrace it without nagging questions that kick them out of your story world. Or having to plow through lengthy explanations and stage-setting to figure it all out.
You can make your magical systems as simple or as complex as you like. But they must make sense. And they must have constraints that challenge your characters. Readers hate a “magic wand” that pops conveniently up to solve sticky plot problems. Weave your magic into the fabric of the story through the experiences of the characters themselves. Drop small details and bits of lore. Your readers will fill in the rest, and they’ll love the chance to co-create your fantasy world.
In the tech-centric faerie world of the Moon Road, true magic plays a fairly marginal role in daily life. On both the Faeside and the Earthside, magic is the purview of a select few, though it often touches others — with some very interesting consequences.
I’ve chosen that route partly to make my characters solve their problems on their own, and partly to suggest that in a lot of ways, advanced technologies and magic really aren’t all that different. They run on systems and protocols, fed by forces harnessed by skilled users.
But readers only see that through the eyes of a pair of characters who don’t practice magic themselves. We learn about the magical side of things as the Hunter and Marcus do — gradually, without long explanations.
Every magical world runs by its own rules. But it’s important to reveal them to the reader in tantalizing glimpses that tease the imagination into action.
You might not need much more detail than a packet of sugar strewn across a desk.
Coming up: The Bone Angel, Series 2 concludes this month, and Series 1 is on its way to becoming a standalone ebook. And if you’re intrigued by stories about war, witchcraft and dark magics of the past, stop on by Silverwood Stories. It’s also free.
Till next time —
JM