Annotated Raven's Children - Issue #1: Page 24

[layla]

[<-- Previous page] | [Next page -->]

In another case of "I'm not really sure if the art is good enough to tell what's going on", the dogs got flash-frozen to death. (How? Ah yes, that's the question, isn't it?)

The following is kinda spoilery if you're following along with my RC posts without having already read the whole thing. (If you have read it, you already know what's up with Jained and Jemer, and that's the only spoilery thing below.)

la la la, spoiler space ...

When I was seventeen(ish), around 1994, I wrote a novel called "Stormsong", which was set in the Arctic of the world that eventually became the Raven Tribe's world. "Stormsong" took place among a group of small city-states on the tundra, which had agriculture because they relied upon a special class of magic-users called weathershapers to warm the soil and air enough that they could grow crops. The novel was about a war among the city-states and their earliest clashes with the Tolshay Kahn empire.

When I imported the Raven Tribe into the world of "Stormsong", I had initially planned for the timelines to sync up. The plot of "Stormsong" involved the Tolshay Kahn first starting to expand into the north, and "Raven's Children" is set about 15 or 20 years later, once the Tolshay Kahn have become an established presence in the area. Some of the "Stormsong" characters were going to have cameo appearances in RC, and Jained and Jemer are borrowed wholesale from the novel. In "Stormsong", they're very minor characters because they were young children at the time -- they were six-year-old twins who lived in the communal weathershaper house where Stormsong (the novel's protagonist) lived, and having passed the screening tests for weathershaper ability, they were in the early stages of their apprenticeship. In the RC universe, they were captured and enslaved by the Raven Tribe instead. (I think at the time I wrote "Stormsong" they were both boys; I changed it to a boy and a girl when I decided to make them main characters in "Raven's Children".)

Subsequent changes in plot and culture made it impossible for the events of "Stormsong" to have happened, as such, in the RC universe. Also, the Wagaibe (Jained and Jemer's people -- they were called Wendeir in "Stormsong", I think) ended up becoming nomadic herders rather than farmers, which means that the pressing need for the weathershapers in "Stormsong" is no longer such a vital issue in the RC world. But they still have the powers.