** SPOILER WARNINGS ** for Anthony's two novels, _The Last Page_ and _Black Bottle_.
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
+
** SPOILER WARNINGS **
Anthony---
I finished _Black Bottle_ last night and had a few Qs I thought you might consider answering for me. I had hoped to finish prior to NTX to ask in person, but didn't pick the book back up again until after the show (I had paused at the chase after Sandren for a few months, and picked up _Lord of Light_ during that time).
I was pleasantly surprised at the ending, and thought that you did a great job of setting htat up through Caliph's increasingly negative views of Sena as he bought more and more into others' perceptions of her and her machinations.
So, onto the Qs:
1. Sena, Caliph, and their daughter, and Nathaniel and Taelin/Arrian all survived the end/recreation of Adummim, right?:
- Sena is immortal, divine, and Eternal like the Yillo'tharnah, and can be discovered and brought back/summoned/reincorporated by Caliph (or others) summoning/recreating her via the Cisrym Ta?
- Caliph and daughter are immortal and divine but not Eternal (since they didn't make Sena's pact)?
- Nathaniel is immortal still but not divine, but he's scattered to the four winds/across the multiverse, and will take strange aeons to pull himself back together again; but he probably will, eventually.
- I'm not sure about Taelin and Arrian, who are immortal but not divine and scattered too, right? My sense is that Taelin takes Arrian's place---that was Sena's revenge against Nathaniel, beyond having Caph kill him, so Nathaniel no longer has a #2 to come with him into a future. So Arrian may have been immortal but she might be truly dead and gone, or perhaps is immortal and scattered but can't come back together; and Taelin is like Nathaniel now---immortal but scattered?
2. I thought that giving Nathaniel a phylactery was a nice touch, and that itself evoked the demi-lich as well. What was he, in your mind?
3. Where did Nathaniel screw up?---if he foresaw Sena's machinations, baby as #2, and planned for the shawt tinctures and annotations in the Cisrym Ta, what happened that he blew it in the end (beyond his phylactery being destroyed)?
I probably have some additional Qs but those will suffice for now. Thanks for writing the books, they were highly evocative!
Allan.
WOW. I just realized that due to the way Wix notified me, I erroneously re-replied to Allan's post of 3 years ago instead of noticing HD's post from an hour ago! Oh well. My bad. Carry on!
Wonderful. I'm glad the ending proved pleasantly surprising. That was the hope from the onset of both novels.
I would probably fail to answer most of your questions satisfactorily even if I dragged out my voluminous binder of notes from the composition period of the writing. What I can say is that early in book one, the leadership of the Witchocracy, which claims to know Sena best, assert that she knows nothing of love.
This is the assertion I set out to undo over the course of two books.
It was always my intent to "drive her crazy" or at least make her appear to go crazy and to become unreliable to the reader. Her foil of course was Taelin, who appears wholly sane and rational in the beginning, if somewhat fanatical. I wanted to invert these two characters over the course of the story so that their reliability, sanity and "goodness" did a mirrored flip-flop. It was also important to me to question the nature of goodness and love. I wanted the "bad guys" (witches) to be trying to save the world and the perceived "good guys" to be going along with a plan to destroy it. I wanted the reader to feel torn.
This is all foundational to answering one of your questions (I will agree to answer two of them).
It was my belief as I wrote the books that Nathaniel's mistake was that he did not believe Sena was capable of love/altruism/self-sacrifice. As most people do, he assumed she was like him. Because Nathaniel did not envision that Sena would willingly sacrifice herself, he assumed his victory was guaranteed.
The other question I consent to answering is that I always drew on the demi-lich trope first produced in the spare sentences surrounding Acererak. When I wrote the books, I never filtered the fiction through a game system and to say that Nathaniel was a demi-lich would be dishonest in the same way it would be dishonest to say that Puff the Magic Dragon must have been a Green Dragon. However, if I were now to attempt to retrofit that fiction into my ongoing campaign, Nathaniel Howl would likely, yes, be a demi-lich or some variety of similar entity.
Thanks for reading. And now...back to working on the Ravens Fell campaign!
:D
So glad you liked!!!
That review is so funny!! When I got to the end of Black Bottle, I was so stoked that I jumped out of my chair and screamed "YEEEAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!" like I was Rick Flair.
Maybe I am a tad more excitable than the average literary critic...
Yeah, this https://www.dropbox.com/s/k7khyddh9h55eze/language%20tree.BMP?dl=0 should take you to my languages for the Atlath.
Characters in my game often interface w/ Old Speech, Ilek, Naneman etc.
Father's day suuuuuuuuhked for me so hard. My daughter Ella just left the Wed before to live w/ grandma for benign reasons (proximity to boy friend among them). Anyway, I'm happy to be back to work today and not thinking about it.
Enjoy the chart!
Hi again Anthony---
That makes sense, both from your earlier comments and those here. Do you leverage the languages from the novels in your games too?
Yes, that became clear to me in Black Bottle, although I imagine that it started somewhere in The Last Page, too (I read them almost back-to-back, so I don't really differentiate the two).
That dynamic definitely came through as the acceleration into the finale for the novels built!
I've enjoyed both, and am very glad that you've found your way back to AD&D!
Allan.
PS - I hope you and your family had a fine Father's Day too!---on Saturday, the boys and I spent the afternoon at The Arcade filled with Missile Command, Robotron, Joust, Qix, Tempest, Galaxian, Ms. PacMan, Cenitpede, Frogger, and more, along with some pinball too---The Machine/Bride of Pinbot, Addam's Family, Star Trek the Next Generation :)
Hey, Allan,
Congrats on finishing the novel. If I were to elevator-pitch the end of the book to someone, I'd just tell them that everyone dies. Caliph and his daughter are translated into a new existence, but everyone else essentially winds up dead. While it's pretty clear Sena could come back at some point beyond the limits of mortal time, she too therefore, is about as dead as dreaming Cthulhu.
I admit that I don't generally have answers for most questions re. the books b/c I prefer to let the words alone deliver whatever impression you're left with. Good or bad. One of my favorite reviews of all time is this one here. Tl;dr: "This is a completely depressing book with no redeeming virtues." It's just so wonderful how people see things differently, isn't it?