Black Jewels: Jewels Glossary

         I was going to do one post on the full two-page glossary printed at the front of each Black Jewels book, whether novel or anthology, but partway through writing it I realized that, with my commentary, it was getting pretty long. Accordingly, this post is just on the first page of the glossary, the one that lists the Jewel ranks. 

 

 

 

Jewels

 

White
Yellow
Tiger Eye
Rose
Summer-sky
Purple Dusk
Opal*
Green
Sapphire
Red
Gray
Ebon-gray
Black

*Opal is the dividing line between lighter and darker Jewels because it can be either.

When making the Offering to the Darkness, a person can descend a maximum of three ranks from his/her Birthright Jewel.

Example: Birthright White could descend to Rose.
 

 

              The Blood are people born with magical abilities. They rule over those who lack magical powers, who are called "landens." Treating landens as people, versus treating them as toys, is an obvious marker for whether a character is good or evil. Importantly, magic is carried in the blood; no major character has landen relatives (I'll revisit this in more detail when I reach Tangled Webs, at least three books from now), and the Blood and landens live completely separate lives. Even Blood servants use magic casually and habitually.

              There are no named Blood characters who don't wear Jewels, except the villain of Tangled Webs. As the name of the initial trilogy implies, Bishop's focus is overwhelmingly at the more powerful end of the spectrum. Oh--that's something I hadn't spelled out: A darker-colored Jewel means more magical power, though there's a range of power within each Jewel. At the time when the books start (I know, that phrasing's a big giveaway, but what it's giving away is something you learn right off), the darkest Jewel anyone has ever gotten at the Birthright Ceremony as a child has been the Red. If you have Birthright Red, you might receive the Black Jewel as your adult Jewel, your "Jewel of rank." You also might receive a Red Jewel marginally more powerful than your Birthright Jewel. The only time in the books where someone doesn't improve their Jewel rank by at least one color at adulthood, he's been severely traumatized and emotionally stunted, the thought of being an adult or having more magical power scares him, and it's explicitly called out in the text that he could have gotten a far more powerful Jewel were those things not the case, but some adults do wear the White Jewel without any sign of any kind of mental vulnerability: some people simply don't have that much magical power, theoretically.
 

              Where do the Jewels come from, at the Birthright Ceremony or at adulthood? That's less than clear, but the Jewels come from some combination of dragons and "the Darkness," a mysterious force which characters in these books seem to worship even while not expecting it to actively assist or impede them, whatever they do.
 

               Nothing story-internal makes a darker-Jeweled character morally superior to a lighter-Jeweled, or Jewelless, one. That said, the most powerful Jewel Bishop gives to a villain, ever, is the Red as Jewel of rank, while for the initial trilogy, the good viewpoint characters wear:

the Gray

the Gray again

the Ebon-gray

the Black

the Black again
 

             And then there's a character whom Bishop systematically excludes the reader from the mind of, but whose moral standing is as far beyond questioning as Aslan's in the Narnia books. She wears Black as a Birthright Jewel, and her Jewel of rank is a never-seen-before color they call Ebony.
 

             The next post will cover the other half of the glossary, and detail the other types of rank that exist in Blood society--and the implications of the fact that there are multiple human races but only one "Blood society."