BoM/TWS Message Forum

With "The Hidden Importance of Sleep"  I finish off this 3-chapter preamble. Fair warning, though - if you don't like the concept of women being used, consciously or otherwise, as narrative devices in tragic ways, be forewarned.

Another fair warning: this will contain heavy spoilers.




























As you may have noticed, Mireya has been (apparently?) turned into a corpse-golem, and through something other than a mask, Will (or "Jeff") is passing off as her. These first few chapters pin everything into an incident that happened in Brazil, and the last arc of the Mireya chapters deals exactly with that.

The BoM arc leading to this has Will suffering the effects of the corpse-golem spell on his father, which definitely makes Prof. Audrey Blackwell the villain of this story. However, one of the topics I wanted to work with was to see if you could do genuinely benign things with the Libra, and the corpse-golem spell is a clear example of it. While there's huge clues pointing out to what might have happened, to have Will consciously use the corpse-golem spell on someone, let alone someone he's closely related with, leads to a very serious moral conundrum: what could make someone who suffered from that very same spell to use it willingly? These questions will have to wait, of course, but this also leads to even more questions.

For example: if Will knows how to use the corpse-golem spell but doesn't have the Libra, then how did he acquire that knowledge? Better yet, how can he transform and have Mireya's thoughts and memories without using a mask? What was that "deal" struck by Will and Charles in the first place, one that he fears will be "broken" with Rick's sudden reappearance? Who's hunting Mireya?

Most of these questions will be answered in the last arc of the Mireya chapters, which have a link in this chapter. Also note that there's a second option leading to "The Associates" . This will be an interquel of sorts, mostly the same way imaj worked his own magnum opus by having Will progress from someone joining the Stellae to a full-fledged, if questionably well-intentioned, villain. I'm pretty excited about that "interquel" because it should allow you to explore training as a Stellae through a different lens, where Will isn't turned into a golem but instead joins willingly (pun not intended). There'll be a lot of echoes to previous chapters, but most of these are new content that - hopefully - will enrich Stellae lore.

"Continue" will be left untouched by now, as it'll show how Will, alongside Rick, will hunt that trail for the Libra. Tomorrow, I'll finish the last arc of the Mireya chapters, and later then, potentially starting the "interquel" of Will's journey into becoming a Stellae.

With that said: did you expect this twist? Was it well done or in poor taste? I'll discuss a bit more in detail after I finish the last of the Mireya chapters, so you can understand some reasoning behind (most) of the decisions I made. And again, I apologize if this feels like a gut punch to you, or if it feels like done in bad taste.