Recently I published a collection of stories from Unnamed Journal, which are set in a fantasy universe I’ve been knocking around for a little while, known as Cevalon (actually the name of just one of the continents, work in progress, you get it).

Equally recently, I wrote a post about Brandon Sanderson’s Laws of Magic in Fiction. Given that the Tygg & Drea stories are fantasy, and involve magic, I thought it might be a good exercise to critically examine the stories and see how well they keep to Sanderson’s Laws. Stipulate that violating the Laws isn’t by definition a Crime against Fantasy Literature, but it is a thing worth thinking about going forward. Laws of Writing aren’t actually laws, but guidelines are worth understanding.

The Voyages of the Dread contains 5 stories:

• The Dying Goddess
• The Barbarian on the Shore
• The Sword in the Cave
• The Skeleton King
• Foul is the Golden Scale

Herewith a Sanderson-based analysis of each.

The Dying Goddess:

What Happens: The Dread arrives at the city of Guhlia on the Isle of Atmos to discover a lizard cult has taken over the city. Tygg finds himself allied with the city’s rulers against the cult. Drea, sick with some fever in her cabin, finds herself subject to a mutiny by her sailing master, Haraldr. She overcomes the mutiny with Magic or Witchly Power of some sort. Tygg discovers that the lizard priests are enslaving people to use their voices in some mad sonic cacophany to bring forth some Beast of Outer Dark (Kal-Ophicor, the Stone Eater). Drea is able to use a similar sonic Magic to breach the walls of the dark temple, and also to create a sound that drives the Beast back into the Outer Dark. Tygg gets to kill a priest. They sail away, pleased with themselves.

Three Laws Analysis: Drea’s is definitely Soft Magic, i.e., I don’t bother explaining the rules. In fact, no such rules exist. Drea’s abilities come to her largely involuntarily, via a backstory from a novel I haven’t written yet. For example, her illness is explained as “the blood” being “on her”, implying a regularity of incapacity. This constitutes a Limit, which is in keeping with the Second Law. I further establish the importance of Sound as the magic the dark priests are using. Drea also speaks of the cult as having existed in ancient times, implying she has studied it. This means I haven’t quite violated the First Law. It makes some kind of sense that Drea is able to counteract the Stone-Eater. Since this is a first story, expansion is not really at issue, so the Third Law does not apply.

Score: 2/3 Laws followed, 1 Law N/A

The Barbarian on the Shore

What Happens: A young girl with the ability to slip out of time is attacked at her home by Tusk Men, wild barbarians who live far offshore and sacrifice people with magical gifts to their whale god. Tygg intervenes, kills the Tusk men, and takes her to the Dread. Drea sails her to Gazer’s Isle, home of an ancient seeress who lives through many lives. It is implied that the girl becomes Gazer, and she looks at the events many centuries later, knowing the fate of Tygg and Drea and their descendants.

Three Laws Analysis: Magic or sorcery doesn’t really come into play here. The story is told from the point of view of the young girl, named Falla, and the narrative breaks back and forth across time, beginning where it ends.

Score: N/A

the Sword in the Cave

What Happens: The Dread arrives on a distant, legendary continent, finds a community of lost women. The women inform them that a terrible beast has kidnapped them and stolen their memories, and sacrifices one of them at regular intervals. Tygg doesn’t buy it, and walks off to spy on the women. Drea does buy it, and takes some crewmen of the Dread to the place where the women say the beast lives. Both discover that it is all true and all a lie: there is a monstrous beast, called a kethnod, but the women transform into bird-beasts that devour people. Both fight their way through, alone.

Three Laws Analysis: Drea does use a sonic screech of some kind to fight off an enemy, a distant echo (rimshot) of the power she used in The Dying Goddess. So that’s an established thing, giving me some leeway with The First Law. Plus, it’s only a minor victory, not the crux of the plot. On the other hand, she destroys or drives away the kethnod through means she does not fully understand, driving the titular sword into the earth as she falls into the center of the beast. This is all very vague and mysterious, so it could be argued that as a climatic action it is unsatisfying. In terms of the Second Law, Drea is limited by being tricked by the false women. She’s not all-seeing, or all-knowing, despite her knowledge. In terms of the Third, the story expands the world some, but doesn’t expand anyone’s powers or abilities. So that’s a pass.

Score: 2/3

The skeleton King

What Happens: The Dread sails to a distant island, because Drea feels a magical vibe, a sense of a powerful magical object of the kind she searches for. Just as Tygg kills a manticore, another ship shows up, full of buccaneers led by a pirate lord named Admar. Admar is chasing the legend of a famous pirate, the Skeleton King. The Skeleton King’s hoard is cursed, but Admar thinks he has a magic charm that will protect him from an army of the dead that guards the treasure. The crew of both ships invade the island, fight manticores and fell beasts and even the army of skeletons. Admar is killed but Drea can use the charm effectively and destroys the skeleton enemy. Inside a golden cave, they find the Skeleton King’s treasure, and the King himself, impossibly old, wanting the charm (a silver skull) back. Drea gives it to him and the Skeleton King and the charm vanish as if they were never there. The treasure remains, and the remaining pirates and sailors take their fill.

Three Laws Analysis: This story relies less on Drea’s ability to perform spells and more on her sensitivity to magical reality. She seems to sense things without understanding them. Only when she takes hold of the charm is she able to unlock it’s purpose. This is vague and Soft-Magical, but it’s set up reasonably well (not perfectly well, but…). So that’s a positive on First Law. On Second Law, everyone is in danger from the various entities, in ascending order. Drea especially seems to be a passenger on the journey until she’s able to solve it. No instantaneous understanding or ability here. With Third Law, I’m constantly putting the Dread in new places, and each place operates by new rules. It’s hard to do depth and not width when I’m constantly shifting the location. That’s true for every story, but I feel obliged to acknowledge it here.

Score: 2/3

Foul is the Golden Scale

What Happens: The Dread has been shipwrecked in unknown circumstances, and Tygg and Drea appear to be the only survivors, washed ashore on a distant land. They crawl through a swamp, and Tygg kills a crocodile. Finally they get out and find a strange place, where the land and the stone and even the trees are slowly becoming golden, preserved and scaly. They observe a bizarre ceremony in which a godlike figure rises from underground, and drawing from the life force of assembled people, spreads the golden scale further across the land. Tygg, thinking he’s found a bigger crocodile to kill, leaps down to find the Golden One, taking Drea, who is sick, with him. Down in the dark is more than the strange golden man, there is a Kuldar, a being of an ancient race that preceded mankind, which neither eats nor drinks nor kills, but draws its sustenance from the earth itself. Kuldar hate all animals, especially man. This one has breeded with a human to produce the Golden One. It’s intentions are to transform the world itself into a new kind of creature, golden and terrible. It captures Drea and uses her abilities for its goal. The Kuldar also betrays its son, the Golden One, who allies with Tygg to defeat it. They do not succeed, but when Drea breaks free of the Kuldar, she does, using its own sacred fire against him. He wanders away, defeated. Tygg and Drea, reunited, make plans for the future.

Three Laws Analysis: Drea’s ability to use the Sacred Fire is established by the antagonist himself, and it fits in with other magical abilities she has shown in previous stories. First Law is good. Drea is sick and overwhelmed much of the story, and Tygg is out of his depth if still formidable. Second law is good. The story draws heavily on mythology for this universe that I’ve put together before, in other stories. So I’m not adding depth that wasn’t already in-universe, and it goes away to draw out some of Drea’s backstory. That’s a good combination of depth and width, so Third Law is good. We have a hat trick.

Score: 3/3

And there you have it. I ended up doing better than I thought, considering I hadn’t heard of these laws when I wrote these stories. They’ve given me some thinking to do on how I construct stories, as well. Overall, worth the exercise, and I am confident that the stories themselves work.

Thank you for your support.