Step 5: Happy Accidents

Sometimes when you're writing something great just happens to flow out of your head. This happened to me near the end of chapter 1 today, when I was writing my first in-depth use of Monan magic. I've decided that I like the concept of Mona having a sort of willpower to work alongside or against the mage using the spell. Here's how the spell was written:

“Sorry, Matthew, just keep them busy,” Leya shouted, as she fell to her knees and placed her palms flat on the tunnel floor. The ground was very warm. It did not take magic for Leya to realize that they were close to a magma chamber. She willed herself calm, and opened the channels within her that she’d been trained to utilize. She felt the planet’s energies beneath and around her, and mixed a little of her own in with them. She pushed her energy through those channels down through her arms and into the earth, feeling it dissipate as it entered the thick rock. Not breaking contact with the stone, Leya willed the floor to shift. She needed a distraction, and she needed something to separate the dryders. She did not need to kill them, or even get rid of all of them, but she needed to close off the tunnel.

She could feel the planet’s reaction - it had just the thing in mind. A heavy gust of wind played havoc with the dust and dirt in the tunnel as a terrible rumbling began underfoot. Matthew, locked in melee with at least three dryders, slowly pulled the group back away from the queue of monsters behind them, as the rumbling intensified. The floor erupted behind the front line of dryders, lava bursting into the tunnel and flowing down in the direction of the multi-legged army. Shrieks of terror and confusion echoed piercingly through the tunnel as the dryders scuttled back as quickly as they could. Despite their need of fire and their cultivation of heat, lava was still lava, and dryders seemed to burn easily.

Just a post to show I've been working. Took some time off for Christmas and the new year, though. But after working in my notebook at school again, I've rediscovered a need to work on this. That, in itself, is a happy accident.