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A wizard’s Ordeal is intensely personal,
and sometimes intensely dangerous… or not. Each Ordeal is tailored to
the wizard who may pass it – or fail to pass. Each one is in some ways
diagnostic of the innermost nature of the wizard who embraces the
challenge offered them by the Powers that Be.
This is the Ordeal of Mamvish fsh Wimsih, newborn child of a saurian
species trapped by its own Choice on a world that the Lone Power has
cruelly punished for rejecting it.
Vish may just be a hatchling, but she knows that the world is badly
broken, and needs to be put right. To make this happen she begins a
quest that will crisscross her huge, bleak planet and finally bring her
face to face with the powers that rule her world. And as for the Power
she will not meet… the tale of how that happened (or did not) is here revealed.
To celebrate this release: everything else in the store is 50% off today!
If you’re a presupporter: Updated versions of the OO file will be pushed out to you over the next eight hours. Please hang in there, as the system can’t send them all at once for fear of them being mistaken for spam. (And also: thank you for your patience!)
i like stories that start relatively mundane but keep piling on new things until you end up with things like “Wizard creates a race of sentient computers to defeat the concept of entropy while her sister goes through an alien airport trying to track her down”
Carl got that thoughtful look again. “People forget that robes were street clothes once. Still are, in a lot of places. And halos are to that fierce air of innocence what speech balloons in comics are to the sound of the voice itself. Shorthand. But most people just see an old symbol and don’t bother looking behind it for the meaning. Sainthood starts to look old-fashioned, unattainable… even repellent. Actually, you can see it all around, once you learn to spot it.
I really want an Avengers/Young Wizards crossover where a SHIELD agent asks a wizard what type of training the receive before their ordeal and the wizard answers “Training? We don’t get training, we get a manual and a support group”
Our English-language usage of the word has narrowed right down to almost always indicate the children of brothers and sisters. But if you look over here at ShakespearesWords.com you’ll see some examples of how the term is used in the plays, and cousinhood in the strict familial sense isn’t usually what’s being invoked. It’s the sense of relationship. No one uses this term (or its short-form variant “coz/cuz”) on anyone they don’t like or feel close to.
Anyway: since Shakespeare is someone / something I’ve been interested in since I was about eight, one day I found myself thinking about how he was using the term, and promptly borrowed the usage.
In the Young Wizards books the use of the term “cousin” expresses the concept that wizards are closely connected by a common value-set that parses similarly to a familial relationship, whether or not the mere chance of shared genetics is involved. “Brother from another mother” is one colloquial English-language phrase that comes close to expressing what’s going on: the sense that wizards are by virtue of the Oath and their calling ethically or spiritually related, with the attached implication that the connection means they properly help sustain and look after one another, in an (ideally) familial way.
Naturally there are lots of shades and degrees of the term in the Speech, hrasht, that most closely corresponds to “cousin” in the broad sense, some of them more intimate and some less so, and with varying states of emotion built in. I.e., my dingbat cousin, my cousin who has got himself in trouble again, the cousin who has a brain the size of a planet and isn’t it wonderful, my cousin who just brought me all these tomatoes, the cousin who really needs a good shaking and when I get my hands/fins/tentacles on her I’m going to see that she gets it, etc etc etc. But they all have varying degrees of affection hooked into them, the understanding being that you and they are fighting the same fight, the good fight, together – even though right now you may possibly want at the moment to punch them in the nose (once you figure out where their nose is). (And yes, there are also numerous hrasht-based-or-related versions of “my cousin about whom I find myself thinking thoughts about a physical relationship of some kind, how would we even make that work, who puts what where? Hmm, may take a while for us to sort this out, let me ask and we’ll see how it goes…”)
But anyway, relationship is understandably going to be important to wizards, who despite their relatively direct connection to and sponsorship by the Powers that Be, will sometimes feel as they pass through the world as if they’re fighting a losing battle. The “cousin” terms are therefore some of the oldest ones in the Speech, according to those expert at tracing its etymologies.
But then maybe this would be no surprise when one considers (from our small limited viewpoint) that scripturally speaking, right after they make the world, or themselves, or both, pretty much the first thing Gods do is make somebody else to hang out with. (And then “It’s not good for this guy to be alone, I’ll make him a help meet for him…” occurs pretty quickly thereafter, in one cosmology. I would bet you money there are close cognates to this in the Koran and the Upanishads and all over the place elsewhere. But investigation of that is a project for another day, as my eyes are bugging me and I’m supposed to be working.)
Way deeper philosophers than I’ll ever be have spent a lot of time writing about the eternal yearning of the Divine for the Other (in the Jungian / Campbellian / Eliadean sense, not as the pejorative noun/verb construction presently coming into use); the deep desire for there to be an Other, someone to be with, communicate with and be understood by, to relate to… someone in whose presence (and postulating whose existence) you’re not alone. The “cousin” concept is another variation of that.
Hope this helps!
tl:dr because ‘With!“
Just so you guys know, @alternativepuppy is my big sister. She asked DD this question because she asked me first and I didn’t know, so when she kept asking I just kinda snapped “Go ask Diane Duane”
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