Literature / Elcenia

Elcenia is a series written by Hannah "Alicorn" Blume (author of Luminosity and Hi to Tsuki to Hoshi no Tama). It consists of six novels (four complete and two incomplete) and several single-chapter 'shorts'.

The four complete novels are:

• Summons opens when two school-age wizards summon half-elf kama Rhysel from her home world, Barashi. This would normally be mostly harmless... except that no one can undo the spell, which means Rhysel is stuck on Elcenia until someone can. Rhysel adjusts to the new planet itself fairly well, but finds herself both experiencing and creating various upheavals, ranging from the personal to the romantic to the magical.
  
  On the bright side, she does suddenly have a lot of time for her research.
• Blood is the story of Talyn, who was a secondary character in Summons. He can read minds, and does. The story starts with him breaking his arm cliff-diving, chronologically a little after the beginning of Summons. Talyn is very interested in how things work; for example, he chose to leave his arm broken longer so that he could see the healing done slowly and learn more about the process.
• Silver is the story of Ehail, who was a tertiary character in Summons. She is a silver shren and the wizard of her house. The story starts at the very end of Summons. Ehail starts dating Gyre, Rhysel's brother.
• Empaths is the story of Ilen, another tertiary character in Summons, a jade shren that takes care of babies and suffers panic attacks over even the mention of the outside world.

The two incomplete novels are:

• Siaddaki is the story of Mallyn, an abused teenager who comes to Elcenia to seek help.
• Red is the story of Finnah, a shren who lives in the Kep Island Shren House until she moves to Binaaralav Academy to learn kamai.

There have been no updates since about 2015, and the author has not expressed any indication of when or whether she intends to continue it.

Elcenia's discussion thread.

---

Tropes:

• Aborted Arc: After saving a baby dragon from the affliction that kills most baby dragons with an Incurable Cough of Death in their first month of life, Rhysel learns that this particular baby isn't developing speech as expected, and decides to solve that problem next, only to be interrupted by the news that Master Revenn his been killed by a demon. Understandably, she drops the subject for a while, and never ends up picking it up again.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Due to some Deliberate Values Dissonance, people in Elcenia see Rhysel's parents as abusive because they use corporal punishment. Rhysel insists they aren't. But as it turns out, her mother is emotionally abusive to her, due to irrational fear of her spontaneous kamai. She finally gets better late in Silver.
  • Talyn likes one of Leekath's fathers, but the other is extremely strict and rude — and has convinced Leekath that his own contributions to the household are the only reason the other father can afford to be kind. The first time he meets Talyn, he proceeds to insult both Talyn and Leekath without provocation, treating Leekath like a cripple due to her magical gift and loudly supposing that Talyn won't be able to give her the support she needs in her "illness" and will just use her and walk away; he is then offended by Talyn interrupting and objecting.
  • In Silver and Siaddaki, Mallyn's parents are abusive even by the standards of Aristan, a nation full of abusive parents.
• All There in the Manual: Two main indices, one for setting and one for characters.
• Alternative Calendar: One for each world. Neither particularly resembles ours.
• Anthropic Principle: The magic system in Elcenia seems engineered almost precisely to ensure that Rhysel remains Trapped in Another World for a good long time — she's summoned in an obscure way that can't be reversed properly, the relevant Anti-Magic is absurdly difficult in general and doubly so for the particular spell affecting her, sendings arbitrarily only work on Elcenian natives... but of course, if she could return home on page 2, there would be a lot less of a story.
• Beware of the Nice Ones: Tekaal, polite, cordial, sometimes distant. Don't anger him.
• Blessed with Suck: Hearers, vampires that hear objects talking about themselves. Every object, all the time. And they can't turn it off. Vampiric Inanimate Audition is considered a mental illness because it eventually does make the vampires crazy.
• Binary Suns: Barashi orbits a binary star system and consequently has two suns, one brighter and one dimmer. As such, everything there naturally casts two shadows.
• Bittersweet Ending. Not to all novels, only with Empaths, it ends with Ilen and Hallai breaking up due to her using empathy to manipulate him, Ilen is left alone and still unsure how to take care of himself, but he at least has family and friends now
• Body Surf: Barashin demons.
• Bond Creatures: Wolfriders are magically bonded as infants with sapient wolves.
• Bungled Suicide: Tsuan, after being confronted with Ilen's existence attempts suicide in a manner that only afterward she remembers could not have possibly killed her, and even if she had done it "right" would only have cost her a form. The doctors call it an "announcement of distress", an assessment she deems "probably about right".
• Call-Back: In Summons, Ryll asks Tekaal "what makes you think you're good enough to date my sister?" Two books later, Silver reveals that this is a habit of hers, as she asks Ehail the same question about dating Gyre — to both of their embarrassment, Ehail with her lower self-esteem just responds "Nothing", and Gyre chews Ryll out, causing her to mumble in her defense that Tekaal's answer^note "I have no excuse to doubt her esteemed judgment." was very witty.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Rhysel has her spontaneous kamai under control nowadays... as long as she does not get even a little bit drunk. Between that and some Kissing Under the Influence, she's embarrassed enough at her drunk self to never touch alcohol again.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: Talyn finds himself in one in Blood. To wit, he needs to shapeshift out of vampire form to eat something, but he's been in that form so long that he's too hungry to cast the spell. He ends up having to ask an elf neighbor for permission to drink her blood.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Elcenian dragons are divided into several color groups, with each group having access to different types of magic. Green-group dragons (jades, greens, coppers, malachites and emeralds), for instance, have mind magic, while blue-group dragons are more skilled at shapeshifting than other kinds.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: For unethically summoning Rhysel, Korulen is sentenced to tutor wizarding ethics to the younger students until the summoning can be reversed.
• Cursed with Awesome: Spontaneous kyma, who have less control over their powers.
• The Dark Arts: A subset of kamai is called the "forbidden workings" and includes transferring lifespan from one person to another. This is implied to be one of the least nasty parts of the forbidden workings; the forbidding came after a worldwide war against the abuse of power by kyma. When Rhysel admits that she considered giving Samia some of her lifespan, Revenn admits that this isn't exactly the reason this sort of thing was forbidden, but reminds her that even benign forbidden workings tend to result in Slowly Slipping Into Evil.
• Daywalking Vampire: While Elcenian vampires are not in general immune to the sun, there's a spell to keep them safe from it, as well as special cloaks to block the sun. The spell is not universally used, due to being fairly advanced, and suncloaks are a marker of vampiric culture, so every vampire owns a cloak whether they can cast the spell or not.
• Death Faked for You: As it turns out, Samia wasn't killed by the mental attack — a supposed friend of hers, who didn't like her courting a dragon, took the opportunity to hurry her out of the country and into a mental asylum in a dracophobic country, ensuring that she remained shut away for a very long time and that her dragon fiancé couldn't track her down.
• Dhampyr: Half-vampires are... problematic. Vampire biology doesn't match up with that of other species at all, so a half-vampire has a malformed semi-random mixture of the two and will be sickly their whole life, if they're even viable enough to avoid miscarriage. Vampires tend to disapprove of mixed relationships as a result — except in the case of dragons, since dragon genetics override all this.
• Didn't Think This Through: How Summons starts: Korulen and Saasnil co-cast a summoning spell that neither of them could cast alone to prove a point to Nemaar... the problem is, a summoning reversal requires the same capacity as the original spell, without the option to co-cast. Which means Rhysel's stuck until one of them can reverse it on their own.
• Dragon Rider: While no dedicated dragon riders exist, Elcenian dragons are generally willing to let other people ride on their backs when this is the most expedient way of getting around. Their Barashin counterparts, by contrast, would never allow another being to ride them.
• Dramatic Irony: Chapter 3 of Blood ends with Talyn mentioning rumors of demons in the province, and that such rumors usually turn out false. Anyone who (as recommended) read Summons first will immediately realize that this particular rumor is very real.
• Elemental Powers:
  • Rhysel is an elemental kama, which means she can manipulate all four elements.
  • Mages on Elcenia get power over one such element after "dying" by that element: for instance, a water-type would drown, but be alive at the end and have the power to control water.
• Exact Words:
  • Tekaal, needing the school grounds cleared to help save Eret and Theedy's dying baby without exposing them, tells the students he has heard a "report of local criminal activity" such that they all need to go back inside. He later clarifies that, while he was not expecting anyone to question him on this, he did pick a technically-accurate pretense — the shrens are, after all, squatting illegally — in case any of the students was wearing a lie-detection spell, which is something people do sometimes.
  • Talyn buys some time in an emergency by temporarily turning the victim to stone. When Rhysel admonishes him that this is forbidden kamai, he notes that technically, it's only killing people by turning them to stone that's forbidden, and this person is still alive. She's not super pleased with this leaning on technicalities, but lets it slide because she can't think of anything that'd work better in this context.
• Explosive Results: Rhysel's reading shows that the main failure mode for the working to give someone kamai ability is an explosion. So, before starting, she sets up ward gemstones in a careful geometric pattern to put a shield around her crucible.
  She cradled the crucible in the palm of one hand, and began funneling air through the other, passing it through a wall of power to clear it of impurities and infuse it with the ability to pass on kamai to someone born without it.
  The crucible exploded.
• Exposition Beam: Corvan's Master working was to invent this. The spell's caster and target can essentially have a lengthy conversation in the span of a few seconds — they can't use creative thought at that speed, but it's good for exchanging information.
• Familiar: Some Elcenian wizards adopt familiars, animals enchanted to help their bonded wizards channel more magic than they could on their own.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The countries of Ertydo and Egeria are both notoriously hostile toward dragons. This only comes up once, when it was instrumental in having Samia's death faked for her.
  • Wolfriders used to be considered unintelligent, because their language is built around their telepathy, and the common translation spells didn't account for that. Narax invented a new translation spell specifically to solve that problem, and the stereotype has been fading away since then.
  • Biologically, shrens seem to be the same species as dragons, but dragons and shrens agree that shrens are not dragons. This sentiment is due at least in part to how the Draconic language works.
  • Hearers, who are considered insane, despite actually having the power to hear objects; see Blessed with Suck.
  • Barashin Dragons are far less kind to humanoids than the Elcenia counterpart.
  • The nation of Ryganaav is brutal to all non-humans, as well as everyone with magical abilities.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Ryganaav: land of sand, camels, religious fundamentalism, and strongly defined gender roles.
• Feel No Pain: Downplayed with shrens — while they do feel pain, twenty years of esu tends to accustom them to ignoring it as meaningless. Ehail has to explain that "four months esu" is the line between an ignorable scratch and a dangerous injury.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Invoked — when Keo, who loves spicy food, takes Rhysel to one of her favorite restaurants, Rhysel doesn't think to ask about the little stars marking each dish on the menu.
  When Keo asked what Rhysel thought of the food, Rhysel's response was to breathe a little puff of fire at her; this was technically kamai, not a side effect of her "pepper rice", but it felt like it ought to be.
• Fish out of Water: See Trapped in Another World.
• Flat World: Elcenia is a square one; planets there are naturally regular polygons (though the moon is round, gray, and dusty...)
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Anyone looking at a Barashin god sees the same kind of person as themself. This is actually quite uncomfortable for Mindlink Mates, who have the headache-inducing experience of seeing the god in two forms simultaneously.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Enforced by the vampire religion. Drinking someone's blood without their explicit permission is a mortal sin — and you have to ask (or they have to offer) every time, even if they've given you standing permission.
• Functional Magic: Several kinds.
  • Barashi has kamai, which is Force Magic fueled by Mana, and the gods will sometimes intervene if requested and paid.
  • Elcenia has several, of which the most prominent in the story so far are wizardry, a form of Rule Magic or Ritual Magic that mostly behaves like engineering; witchcraft, which is alchemy; elemental magic, whose practitioners are called mages; and healing magic, whose practitioners are called lights.
• Geometric Magic: Wizardry, one of the Elcenian forms of magic, uses circle diagrams for some spells. The website uses summoning circles as a design motif.
• Guile Hero: Talyn uses magic to solve most of his troubles, but prefers to do it diplomatically.
• Half-Human Hybrid:
  • Rhysel and her siblings are half human, half elf. Barashin "halfbloods" breed true — any elf ancestry plus any human ancestry has the exact same result. Elcenian "half-elves" do not — they display elfin and human traits in proportion with their ancestry.
  • Elcenian half-dragons can be either "thudias" (essentially members of the non-dragon parent's species, with a few added dragon traits) or "parunias" (essentially just dragons). This is entirely random, but the vast majority are thudias.
• Healing Hands: Lights have the ability to heal anything from grievous wounds to minor headaches with a light they form by cupping their hands, but they cannot heal themselves or other lights. Lights find sunlight to be very pleasing, even nutritious.
• Hearing Voices:
  • Briefly mentioned in Summons and a major plot point in Blood, a very small percentage of vampires can hear inanimate objects speaking. Even though the voices can be used to obtain useful information, "Vampire Inanimate Audition" is classified as a mental illness, because most hearers tend to be driven out of their skulls by hearing every object, all the time.
  • Vi'Yan Rylaatin the Third, High Priest and ruler of Ryganaav, hears voices which he (and the entire nation) believes belong to the gods. A quick look with some mind kamai proves that he's just mentally ill. The ironic contrast between the two examples is lampshaded. Talyn tries inserting different messages in the priest's head in an effort to reform the religion, and it sort of works; Vi'Yan promptly accepts the new voice, but the shift in teaching encounters pushback that causes a violent religious schism.
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: "Personality revision" is customary on Barashi for those convicted of violent crime. Since this is meant to be a lawful action, the practitioners perform the smallest possible change that ensures they won't reoffend. Talyn finds them creepy as all hell, and has done exactly one ever, for a woman whose crime was not specified for the reader, but seeing it in her mind was enough to convince him to go through with the personality revision despite his misgivings.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Directly stated to be possible via magic, though male couples require a surrogate, and female couples can only have daughters.
• Human Outside, Alien Inside: Not quite human, but vampires resemble pale half-elves externally, but have dramatically different internal anatomy without a discrete circulatory or digestive system.
• I Choose To S Tay: Long before any solution is found to send Rhysel back, she's built enough of a life for herself that she decides she wouldn't want to move back to Barashi full time — especially since she's not close to her family and has found a boyfriend. Tekaal eventually finds a spell that would reset her "native" world to Elcenia, which simultaneously opens the way for her to more easily visit Barashi, but signifies the shift in where she considers home.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • Every chapter in Blood is a present participle, e.g. "Cliffdiving", "Stealing", "Geasing".
  • Every chapter in Silver is a two-syllable word, e.g. "Shyness", "Adopt", "Tiger".
  • Every chapter in Empaths is an emotion, e.g. "Gratitude", "Caution", "Limerence".
  • Every chapter in Siaddaki is a Draconic word, e.g. "Spheote" (adopted), "Noi" (safe), "Uen" (hug).
  • Every chapter in Red is a location, e.g. "Kep Island", "Binaaralav Academy", "Livahe's Restaurant".
• If I Had a Nickel...: Kolaan, discussing local Everyone Can See It somehow-not-actually-dating pair Soraak and Kutran, says that if he had an aaber for every time he tried convincing Soraak to just kiss Kutran already... well, he'd still want more, but not as much.
• I Have No Son!: Magically enforced for Elcenian dragons — anyone who breaks a "line edict" loses their line name. Gyre and Kenar do this on purpose, when the latter returns to his egg family and wants to give up Gyre's line name to take theirs.
• I Know Your True Name: Elcenian dragon names are extremely magical. The first two syllables are given to them shortly after birth — traditionally at a month^note due to pure-blooded dragons very frequently suffering an Incurable Cough of Death in their first month of life, but there's an upper limit of about five years, and if it's missed such as with Fena/Zinc, the dragon just won't have a true name, ever. The second two syllables are the line name, which is "like a surname but not really", according to Narax — it can only be given by someone who can be considered the dragon's parent (exact details not fully clear even in-universe, but does include adoptive parents, and does not have the five-year time limit of the base name) and any given line name is exclusive to a particular gender+color combination. And they can gain further syllables by taking them from others' names — this requires their cooperation and is generally only done with family and close friends, but there's no strict rules on it except that it must be entirely the receiving dragon's idea, the same syllable can't be donated more than once, and a dragon can't have more than two syllables from the same person. A dragon always knows their full true name, at all times, and if it's at least four syllables, they have a unique song to go with it. If someone, anyone, sings a dragon's full name to the tune of their song, that dragon instantly knows who and where — though this is filtered through what the dragon already knows of that person and that place.^{For example...}if you were randomly singing syllables and they coincidentally happened to match a dragon's song, that dragon would only know "someone I've never met in an existence I've never been to just sang my name".
• I'm Having Soul Pains: In Elcenian dragons not flying causes a longing called esu. After a while esu will manifest as physical pain and steadily grow worse without upper limit. The only way to end esu is flying under their own power. Shrens are dragons who can't fly with their natural wings and therefore suffer from esu continuously until they are old enough to shift into a different flying form (which is not affected) They eventually stop caring about most pain as irrelevant; a shren who broke most of her bones wasn't particularly bothered by it.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Not actual immortality, but Elcenian dragons' human forms age ten times slower than actual humans (with the equivalent age for other races), and stops at equivalent age 20. Barashin elves and Barashin halfbloods all stop aging at 25 and stay in that age for a few centuries, then start aging again. Vampires are a straight example of this trope.
• Impossibly Delicious Food: To vampires, blood's taste is proportional to the lifespan of the creature it comes from. Elves, being fairly Long-Lived, are tasty. Dragons, living about twelve times longer, are delicious enough to be mentioned in the vampire religious texts. And Talyn, after using forbidden kamai to steal ten years off thousands of people in war-torn Ryganaav, is as a Fantastic Drug to Leekath.
• Inconvenient Summons: Rhysel getting teleported while asleep kicks off the plot of Summons.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Pure-blooded infant dragons have a staggeringly high mortality rate in their first month of life. The first symptom is a cough; once that shows up, they're dead within an angle.
• Interface Spoiler: Averted on the supplementary pages, all of which have a "show spoilers" button regardless of whether or not the page does in fact contain any spoilers.
• Interspecies Adoption: Of shren babies, mostly by Barashin elves, during the events of Silver.
• Interspecies Romance: The writing focuses on interactions between Elcenia and Barashi, and as a result there hardly seems to be any intra-species romance. As of Chapter 12 of Summons, all romantic involvement has been between people of at least partially different species.
  • As of Chapter 13 of Silver only three of the twelve most prominent couples that appeared so far are the same species through and through, with three other couples involving a partial species match with a mixed species partner.
  • Empath, the fourth book, is the first one to have a protagonist couple of the same species and planet.
  • This is part of the Draconic "culture": before marrying a dragon mate for life, they have several marriages with humanoid species.
• Irony: Talyn is annoyed by the fact that vi'Yan Rylaatin hears voices as a result of being "scrambled as eggs" insane, and rules a nation, with everyone including himself believing that the gods are speaking to him, whereas Leekath hears voices that offer real information about objects around her, but is considered by her people to be mentally ill.
• Language Equals Thought:
  • By any real-world standard, shrens are dragons with a disability. The Draconic language, on the other hand, makes it very clear that shrens are not dragons at all. Another concept baked into Draconic is that a shren ceasing to be a shren by any method other than dying is a miracle — which makes it hard for Rhysel to point out that she's not a god.
  • The interlude "Zinc" explores the opposite of this trope. Dragons being natural omniglots means they can analyze a language and learn about its speakers. Pluralizing "friend" is weakly ungrammatical in the Isateian language because their culture has such a high standard for what constitutes friendship that most only ever have one.
• Life Energy: The fuel for kamai.
• Long-Lived:
  • Elcenian elves live three times longer and age three times slower than humans, while Barashin elves live for a little over a millennium.
  • Elcenian dragons have lifespans of two to four thousand years, dying of old age more or less randomly between those two points.
  • As a Barashin halfblood, Talyn will live about 800 Elcenian years, making him tastier to his vampire girlfriend than an Elcenian elf, but not as much as an Elcenian dragon. To fix that last bit, he steals ten years each of lifespan off of thousands of people in war-torn Ryganaav, on the grounds that probably none of them were going to use it anyway.
• Loophole Abuse: How Rhysel's summoning is finally broken. Elcenian summoning spells don't work on Elcenian natives, so Tekaal digs up an obscure spell that "resets" Rhysel's homeworld to Elcenia, and the summoning vanishes in a Puff of Logic. She's still on Elcenia, but now she can use sendings (which only work on Elcenian natives) to go back to Barashi any time she wants.
• Mage Tower: An established cultural system on Barashi. A tower means "a kama lives here and is available to provide magical aid". Rhysel recreates her tower on Elcenia, but is slightly disheartened by the fact that on this world, it's just a tall building she lives in.
• Magi Babble: with several different magic systems at once, there's a lot of this.
• Magic A Is Magic A: True within each planet, although not between them. Which is unsurprising, given that they have different laws of physics.
• Magical Gesture: Elcenian wizardry uses gestures to channel specific amounts of power; every spell that uses the same amount of magic uses the same gesture. Leekath describing power-pull gestures in Blood when Talyn gives her an unprecedented channeling capacity of a thousand makes them sound like an inherent fact of the universe, and mostly systematic with exceptions called "Voyan numbers" — gestures up to 599 are at this point theoretically known about but have never been tested for Voyan numbers, and nobody yet knows how to cast at levels of 600 or more.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: The reason why the vampire religion assigns stars based on the second midnight after the newborn's birth — this span of time is long enough to ensure that a genuine vampire infant has involuntarily shifted to and from bat form, thus proving that there was no "deception".
• Mindlink Mates: Keo is mindlinked to her husband Kanaat — as a unique jade dragon, she has incredible power in the domain of mind magic, so this is something she can do. She also mindlinked Narax and Samia, which had nasty results when the latter's Psycho Ex attacked them with a memory-shredding spell. She relinked them when it turned out that Samia hadn't died after all, but due to a lot of circumstances, this went badly and Narax cut off the link. Keo refuses to create any more mindlinks ever again as a result.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Hearers go mad from constantly reading the minds of inanimate objects.
• Mind Rape: The memory-shredding spell that killed Samia and nearly killed Narax is exactly as bad as that name makes it sound.
• Mistaken for Dyed:
  • A common problem for female dragons when they are in their human form due to the color of their scale being their hair color.
  • In Summons, Rhysel notes a pair of brightly-colored ducks in the pond at the local Wizarding School. Upon spotting some students practicing color-changing spells, she wonders if maybe the ducks were a different bright color a few semesters ago. They weren't — the "ducks" are shrens, their bright color is Morphic Resonance, and they are not happy about Rhysel invading their privacy.
• Morphic Resonance: Shapeshifted dragons and shrens keep their scale color — in humanoid forms, females have it in their hair and males have it in their eyes, and in other forms, they have the color all over.
• Mythopoeia: Mostly in the background at the present moment, though a goddess does appear.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: Rhysel is originally already from a Magical Land and retains her Barashin kamai powers, letting her do things that are impossible by Elcenian standards.
• Non-Indicative Name: "Unique" dragons are not, strictly speaking, one of a kind — they just happen to be exactly rare enough that statistically there is probably one of each color group alive at a time.
• Omniglot: Elcenian dragons are magically able to speak all languages.
• One-Word Title: The title of the series as a whole and all the individual books. The series title is also an example of The Place, being the name of the world that the story is set on, at least, initially.
• Orphaned Series: There have been no updates to the series in several years, including unfinished books Siaddaki and Red.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Barashin and Elcenian dragons are distinct from one another in several respects, but both come in several varieties each, are of the classic Western kind, live very long lives, breathe fire and fly.
  • Elcenian dragons are Colour-Coded for Your Convenience and voluntary shapeshifters, with the caveat that some part of their default color scheme remains in every form they take, and can conceive at will and control what sex their children will be. They're on generally good terms with other Elcenian peoples, using their shapeshifting to mingle with them and often interbreeding — in fact, they do so very often to get around the fact that children born to dragon/dragon pairings are often very sickly and rarely survive into adulthood. The children of these pairings will be either true dragons or thudias, who are essentially normal members of their other parent species but able to turn into small dragons.
  • Barashin dragons, by contrast, are much more isolationist and almost never interact with other species.
    Narax: "Every time you mention Barashin dragons, it confirms my suspicion that they must be extremely tiresome people".
  • Elcenia is also home to drakes, creatures resembling miniature dragons but with only animal-level intelligence.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elcenian elves age like humans, only three times slower, while Barashin elves age like humans until they reach adulthood, then stop aging entirely for a millennium or so.
• Our Gods Are Different: Barashi has a singular set of 24 gods with physical forms (which they disguise to resemble whoever is looking at them) and omnipotence in matters of their own world. Their existence is a universally known fact. Elcenia has a number of mutually contradictory religions and no gods stepping forward to settle the issue. Though the god of the vampire religion is at least real enough to give Talyn appropriate visions when he's trying to convert.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Elcenia's vampires aren't undead in the sense of being created from other creatures, but rather a race that reproduces on its own like any other. They can shapeshift between bats and pale humanoids, and need to drink blood for sustenance. At one time they hunted other creatures for blood, but now they have a religious prohibition against taking blood from the unwilling. Their life spans depend on the lifespan of the creature whose blood they drink. They are harmed by the sun in humanoid form, but not in bat form. They can also use a spell for protection.
• Our Witches Are Different: Witches make Magic Potions, from shampoos to "pef tan" (which makes anything an Impossibly Delicious Food) to "moon water" (which lets wizards deal with channeling sting). Contrast the world's other types of magic: Wizardry ^note Creates and casts pre-defined spells with Magical Gestures and Incantations, which always do exactly what they were designed to do and nothing else, lightcraft^note Can summon a ball of light that heals wounds, magery^note Elemental Powers over a particular classical element, though the potential must first be activated by "dying" of that element, and sorcery^note Literally just telekinesis.
• Overly Long Name: Dragons have a custom of copying syllables from the names of those they're close to, which adds up over the course of their very long lives.
• The Place: The title of this series, and also a One-Word Title, as it's the name of the world that the story is set on, at least, initially.
• Plain Palate: Liria Meialek-rimei likes her food unsalted and near-flavourless.
• Plant People: Lights have some elements of this, being able to photosynthesize, and needing more water then others.
• Psychic Powers: Various forms of mental magic are present in both worlds. Barashi has mind kama to accomplish this, while empathy — the ability to magically alter emotions — is innate in green Elcenian dragons. Some of these also have true Telepathy in the bargain, and some, like Keo, are capable of doing things like permanently linking minds together.
• Puberty Superpower: Kamai generally manifests around 12-13, or the developmental equivalent for races other then humans. Spontaneous kamai manifests a little later (around 14-15), and innate kamai manifests earlier.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: A young vampire learning a spell to check channelling capacity assumes he miscast when trying it on Talyn — who has taken hundreds of thousands of units of unwanted channelling capacity from the people of Ryganaav. For reference, the student has capacity 502 and that is considered quite high.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivered by Tekaal to Rhysel's parents
• Shape Dies, Shifter Survives: Dragons that die while shapeshifted lose access to that form and immediately shift back to dragon shape. This forced shift can be dangerous in itself, if their location is inconvenient — Kaylo's parents died when a scoot killed their assumed form while they were standing under a stone bridge. Death by starvation, channeling sting, or a spell that explicitly kills its target will also permanently kill a dragon without even changing them back.
• Ship Sinking: Invoked by Samia, because she doesn't like the idea of Narax getting together with anyone she knows.
• The Shut-In: Since shrens in shren houses need to be kept inside until they learn to shapeshift and are no longer contagious, some of them end up becoming "inside shrens", who never go outside even as adults. Some inside shrens, like Ilen, have outright panic attacks about the mere prospect of going outside; this is unusual according to Finnah, who cites one "guy down the hall from me" who is content just looking out the window and one "lady upstairs" who to hear her talk would seem to have every intention of going outside and just... never does.
• Starfish Language:
  • Wolfriders are weakly telepathic, and their language is constructed around this fact. Most species don't hear the telepathic portion of the language, and until a translation spell was invented that actually accommodated for it, many believed wolfriders were simply not that intelligent.
  • The Draconic language is constantly updating itself with no apparent intent from its speakers, and every word has an absolutely preposterous amount of meaning baked into it. Non-dragons can't learn it because it's just impossible to learn; even dragons can only "learn" it by virtue of being natural omniglots.
• Standard Time Units: Played straight within each world, and averted between them. The day-night cycles of the two worlds have different lengths, among other things.
• Super-Empowering:
  • Rhysel's Master working is to reconstruct an old ritual that grants kamai power to those not born with it. Because this brings kamai to Elcenia, the Barashin gods declare that she is responsible for how it is used there. She takes this very seriously.
  • A kamai working invented to count Elcenian channeling capacity is modified to transfer it instead. This is the only known way for Barashin natives to use Elcenian wizardry. Talyn quietly steals every last drop of CC from everyone he meets in Ryganaav, on the grounds that they all hate magic anyway and would be glad to be rid of it if they knew — he uses some of this to give Rhysel a nice round 500 units.
• Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious: The longer-lived a species is, the better they taste to a vampire, and the more they will extend the vampire's own lifespan. Dragons are an occasional delicacy. Talyn, after skimming thousands of years of lifespan from the people of Ryganaav, is even better, almost overwhelming Leekath with pleasure.
• Superpower Lottery: Elcenian dragons are Long-Lived natural omniglots with Voluntary Shapeshifting, which is already a pretty sweet deal. Then there are the "unusuals" and "uniques", which take their color-group's special powers up to eleven — Keo, as a unique green-group dragon, has incredible powers of mental magic, which she uses to do things no other person can do.
  "Yeah," [Narax] said, "that's the standard green-group dragon package. Jades and greens and coppers and malachites and emeralds," he added when Rhysel raised an eyebrow at the phrase "green-group". "All have the empathy. Unless you're an unusual, in which case you get that and you're also a telepath. And unless you're Keo, who's an empath and a telepath and also kind of ridiculous."
• Sympathetic Magic: Proxic kamai allows a kama to create a miniature model of the subject that, with the help of loose hair or the like, becomes synchronized to them. Rhysel uses it to fix Talyn's broken arm (and slowly, because he wants to observe the process) and Leekath uses it to make the statue's voice tell her about Talyn when he's captured by the Linnipese army.
• Technician Versus Performer: While there's not any actual rivalry between Elcenian wizardry (technician) and Barashin kamai (performer), the difference manages to cause trouble once people start trying to learn both simultaneously. Talyn, tutoring a student having trouble with flying, has to explain to her that the "crisply! crisply!" attitude her wizardry instructor impresses upon her is exactly the opposite of what kamai needs.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: Aar Kithen repeatedly declines Rhysel's offer of changing to First-Name Basis and keeps calling her Aaral Camlenn. Once they start dating he agrees to call her Rhysel and be called Tekaal in private.
• Time Dissonance: Discussed, but averted. Narax, early in his relationship with Samia, had to repeatedly assure her that despite being Long-Lived, dragons don't experience time any faster than humans, and while being married for the eighty-odd years of her life would only be a small fraction of his, it would still feel like eighty years to him, not the blink of an eye.
• Translation Convention: There's a side page dedicated to discussing it.
• Translator Microbes: In the form of a natural dragon ability and various wizard spells and kamai.
• Trapped in Another World: The premise of Summons. An unusual example in that Rhysel is also from a Magical Land.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Mages need to get into a situation where they would otherwise die from their associated element (falling from a height for air mages, burning for fire mages, drowning for water mages, being trapped in a cave-in or landslide for earth mages)before they can access their powers. Not all potential mages choose to go through this for obvious reasons, air mages being the most likely to do it.
• True-Breeding Hybrid: Barashin halfbloods breed absolutely true with both each other and members of either of their parent species, which is why they're not called half-elves — it doesn't matter whether they are in fact 50-50 or just have one ancestor several generations back, they display the same even split between human and elven traits. As Rhysel puts it, "it's the blood that's halved, not the actual descent".
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: The characters occasionally mention the need to convert between the two worlds' different timekeeping systems.
• Uneven Hybrid: Elcenian elf-human hybrids blend smoothly — the more elf, the longer their lifespan.
• The Un-Twist: In-Universe in Blood; Talyn, when reading the vampire holy book, predicts very early into one of its arcs that the mysterious person the Most Holy Founder traveled with, who claimed to have drunk "the blood of the world", is in fact the vampire god in a mortal guise, and even notes his lack of surprise when the book formally reveals it later.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: One of the abilities of Elcenian dragons. Can also be done with kamai and, at least for cosmetic changes, wizardry. Vampires can shift between humanoid and bat form. Thudias can shift between their birth form and a miniature dragon form of their dragon parent's colour.
• Wizarding School: The Binaaralav Academy of Wizardry.
• Wrong Context Magic: the use of Barashin magic in Elcenia, and the exploitation of the differences, is a major plot driver.
• Yandere: Arylla stalks Gyre obsessively, even after he starts dating Ehail. Gyre tolerates this because her brother is his only source for certain gems, and he has been known to refuse business to those who annoy his sister. When Ehail solves that problem by conjuring gems for Gyre, Arylla decides that Ehail must be mind-controlling Gyre and decides to Murder the Hypotenuse.

---