The traits of each element are personality traits that we recognize, representing categories of people that we can identify in our own world. In designing her system of magic, Marks displays both literary skill and psychological wisdom. These are the people upon whom the fate of Shaftal turns, and they are driven, both by their own natures and by magic, to seek, meet, and come to love each other. Amid this struggle, we meet Marks’ sharply-drawn characters: Zanja, fire blood, last survivor of a protected primitive tribe Medric, half-Sainnite Seer, whose visions in the service of the invaders take their own turn Emil, fire blood, combination philosopher and warrior Norina, Truthken, equally frightening as friend or foe and Karis, earth witch, a metalsmith whose early life as a child prostitute left her addicted to a vicious drug that destroys its users will. The power of the witches terrifies the invaders, and they murder all they find, and brutally oppress the rest of the citizenry. Â A fire witch is a Seer, plagued by visions. An air witch is a Truthken, so driven by logic and reason that she can identify truth or falsehood immediately.Â Â An earth witch is a conduit for the power of the land itself. When the imbalance of elements in a person is extreme, wildly skewed in one direction, the result is a witch. Each element relates to reality in its own way, by its own native “logic,” and it is fire logic that drives this story. And a fire blood’s understanding comes through symbols and intuition. Water bloods are so rare that they are virtually unknown, and their nature remains mysterious. Earth bloods interact with and interpret the world through concrete physical reality, air bloods through logic and reason. This results in the differing “bloods” - individuals whose personalities and abilities reflect the traits related to their dominant element.

Most people possess a balance of the four elements, but sometimes one element predominates. Magical power in Shaftal is of four types, associated with the traditional four elements of fire, earth, water and air. They cannot understand the Shaftali way of life, or the presence of magic in Shaftal’s people. The invading Sainnites are refugee mercenaries, whose tradition of war for hire has become war for gain. But when the current G’deon dies without leaving a successor, the people of Shaftal must try to stand up to an invasion without his help. The G’deon is the titular head of Shaftal, and the fulcrum of its greatest magic. Magic inhabits the people, and works through them - not always at their command, and not always at their convenience. Marks’ remarkable novel is the Shaftali people themselves.

In the way that our atmosphere serves as the medium for the phenomenon of weather, the medium of magic in Laurie J.

If you are a native of the land of Shaftal, not only do you use magic, magic uses you.

Fire logic by laurie j marks