*gloom*

Jul. 14th, 2005 05:19 pm
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[personal profile] persephone_kore
Spoilers for With a Single Spell. I don't remember the author's name. (Actually, I'm not sure what the main character's name was, either. Hrm.)


But anyway, I feel really sorry for this one dead character. We never actually meet him -- not until he's a skeleton, anyway. See, the main character is a wizard who only learned one spell before his master died, and he's too old to apprentice to anybody else, and when he tries to read his dead master's grimoire, it burns the house down.

So over the course of the book, he eventually acquires success. One step in this is finding what appears to have been a flying castle before all the magic was somehow removed from a given area, causing it to fall down. It looks like most people just left after it fell; there aren't a lot of bodies or anything, and it's been largely looted. Still, hidden in a secret passage, there is a clearly magical, valuable tapestry which he takes away to an area where the magic isn't gone. There's also the skeleton of another wizard who appears to have been running along the corridor and split his skull on the doorway to the tapestry room when the castle fell.

Turns out the tapestry is a magical transporter. It's also really hard to make, involving very advanced magic, at least a year of weaving, and very precise work. This dead wizard had made two -- one to travel to the room where he die, and one to another world. Apparently if you make a tapestry of a place that doesn't exist, and go through it, the place is created.

So the main character goes through the one tapestry and finds the dead wizard's castle. And lover. And grimoire (which has one illegible page at the start, where the dead wizard painstakingly wrote down the first thing he ever learned as an apprentice before having it impressed upon him with a stick that it was a secret). And the main character eventually gets the transportation problem fixed (albeit with a few remaining wrinkles) and falls in love with and marries the girl, and clears up assorted of his other problems faced throughout the book, right down to replacing a small boat he stole early on, along with the picnic lunch that was in it at the time.

It was, by and large, a happy ending. But I finished the book having felt terribly sorry for the dead wizard ever since the part where the main character realizes that he split his skull open running to try to get back to the other-castle and the girl. It's not that he was such a great guy, exactly -- apparently he was a two-hundred-year-old womanizer and had a running feud with the wizard who knocked his castle down, not to mention the otherworldly castle had a creature in it which he conquered by means of compulsion spells -- but still... for all it was nice seeing the main character get a break, I

Actually, the only name I can call to mind is the dead wizard's nickname. His lover called him "Derry." (It was short for something, but every time I check the book, I discover that I got the full version wrong.) I wonder if I'm oversympathizing partly because of Darigan?

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