Black Jewels: Prologue

[beroli]

I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool.


The prologue, unlike the rest of the books, is told in first-person narrative. Its viewpoint character is someone who's overall a relatively minor character in the series. She explains the mechanics of "breaking" one of the Blood--stripping them of nearly all ability to perform magic. There are two ways it can be done. The first way is simply to use significantly more powerful magic than the victim has, and it can be done to anyone. The second way is that, the first time a woman has sex, if it's traumatic, she risks breaking her Jewels and losing most of her magical power. It's not guaranteed that that will happen; the darker the woman's Jewels (the more power she has), the less likely it is that she'll lose them. This is, explicitly, a way women are vulnerable that men are not. Ostensibly, it's balanced by women having more magical power overall.

The reason Tersa explains this almost immediately is that when she was a young witch, at the instigation of our not-yet-introduced villain Dorothea SaDiablo, Tersa was violently raped by a Warlord and lost her magical powers. ("Oh, some magic always remains, enough for day-to-day living and parlor tricks, but not the Craft, not the lifeblood of our kind.") With one exception, which I'll go into later, no one ever details exactly what does and does not constitute "basic Craft" which someone who's been broken still has. "But the Craft can be reclaimed--if one is willing to pay the price," Tersa says. At some point in the intervening centuries, Tersa sacrificed her sanity and regained access to the Craft. This is something no other character we see will ever do or even hint at understanding. She does not, apparently, wear Jewels. Mostly her abilities relate to the Black Widow ability to see the future, though she can also kill in a gruesome fashion which will come up eventually.

She alludes in broad strokes to the decadence of the Terreillian court where she serves, and she introduces two main characters: Daemon Sadi, from the Territory called Hayll. He's beautiful, bitter, cruel. He has a seducer's smile and a body women want to touch and be caressed by, but he's filled with a cold, unquenchable range. When the Ladies talk about his bedroom skills, the words they whisper are "excruciating pleasure." I don't doubt he's enough of a sadist to mix pain and pleasure in equal portions, but he's always been kind to me [...] There's the other one, in the opposite corner of the room. Lucivar Yaslana, the Eyrien half-breed from the Territory called Askavi. [...] Daemon and Lucivar are drawn to one another without understanding why, so wound into each other's lives they cannot separate. Uneasy friends, they have fought legendary battles, have destroyed so many courts the Blood are afraid to have them together for any length of time.

Tersa, speaking directly to Daemon but also speaking for Lucivar's benefit, disparages the ambitions and abuses of the other Blood present before saying "The Blood were created to be the caretakers of the Realms. That's why we were given our power. That's why we come from, yet are apart from, the people (landens) in every Territory. The perversion of what we are can't go on. The day is coming when the debt will be called in, and the Blood will have to answer for what they've become."

"They're the Blood who rule, Tersa," Daemon says sadly. "Who is left to call in the debt? Bastard slaves like me?"

[...] "The Darkness has had a Prince for a long, long time. Now the Queen is coming. It may take decades, even centuries, but she is coming." I point with my chin at the Lords and Ladies sitting at the tables. "They will be dust by then, but you and the Eyrien will serve."

Frustration fills his golden eyes. "What Queen? Who is coming?"

"The living myth," I whisper. "Dreams made flesh."

Then she tells him that the Eyrien is his brother, and "You are your father's sons."

This could be simple self-abnegation--Tersa herself is Daemon's mother, though he won't find it out for a few more chapters and six hundred years--but...no. The books treat Saetan's genetic contribution to his sons as far outweighing Tersa's or Luthvian's.

Then Tersa fugues out of her temporary lucidity and Daemon smashes the spiderweb spell-shape she used to predict the coming Queen so that the court's other Black Widows can't study it and see what she saw. The final sentence of the prologue is Not just another witch coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch.

Comments

[lliira]

You already know how I feel about the whole rape destroying women's magic powers thing.

I did not yet know how I would feel about the writing style itself. WOW I HATE IT. Like... worse than Anne Rice. It's not as purple as Anne Rice's style, so far as I can tell, but it's also not as skillfully done. Of course, it doesn't help that this is present tense.

And seriously, every woman who screws this guy says "excruciating pleasure" about it? All of them? Do they share a brain? This really reads like bad fanfic.