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conulyand I kept waiting for somebody else to mention it in a review, but nobody else did, so here I am.
So, way back in A Deadly Education, you may recall that El made a magic mirror. Which didn't come in handy at all and I'm not sure she even bothered to take it with her at the end of Graduation.
But anyway, she stops and spends some time narrating at us that what you're supposed to do is coax the spell into the pour as you do it so it doesn't bubble and become useless, but she's actually crap at that so instead she's modified a spell designed to crush the life and mana out of people into a basic pressure chamber to flatten the mirror with no bubbles. Because, as she says, "coaxing isn't her strong suit".
This really is a surprisingly important scene in the context of that first book - it's one of the things that clues Aadhya into the fact that there's something really weird going on with her friend. Just to make sure we get the message, she spells it out for us - "Using incantations to smooth the pour is stupid, because that's trying to force your will onto the materials against their nature".
Anyway, this all comes back again, doesn't it? Because isn't that the other way of making enclaves, the one that's more customary but also bad? You literally crush the mana out of some poor hapless soul and into a mawmouth, to force an enclave into the void.
But that's not what El does at all, is it? It's right there at the end of her book, the part of the incantation that the person translating it hadn't understood - doing it the right way means asking and coaxing, no pressure, no forcing.
Which makes for a nice bookend that I think nobody else mentioned, especially as it also manages to tie into El's uneasy moral dilemma, where she believes forcing people to do the right thing is wrong but also she's aware that by killing mawmouths she's ultimately doing just that. But her hands are just a bit tied, honestly - what's she supposed to do, not kill them?
And now I want to know what her magic mirror thinks of all this, wherever she stashed it.
So, way back in A Deadly Education, you may recall that El made a magic mirror. Which didn't come in handy at all and I'm not sure she even bothered to take it with her at the end of Graduation.
But anyway, she stops and spends some time narrating at us that what you're supposed to do is coax the spell into the pour as you do it so it doesn't bubble and become useless, but she's actually crap at that so instead she's modified a spell designed to crush the life and mana out of people into a basic pressure chamber to flatten the mirror with no bubbles. Because, as she says, "coaxing isn't her strong suit".
This really is a surprisingly important scene in the context of that first book - it's one of the things that clues Aadhya into the fact that there's something really weird going on with her friend. Just to make sure we get the message, she spells it out for us - "Using incantations to smooth the pour is stupid, because that's trying to force your will onto the materials against their nature".
Anyway, this all comes back again, doesn't it? Because isn't that the other way of making enclaves, the one that's more customary but also bad? You literally crush the mana out of some poor hapless soul and into a mawmouth, to force an enclave into the void.
But that's not what El does at all, is it? It's right there at the end of her book, the part of the incantation that the person translating it hadn't understood - doing it the right way means asking and coaxing, no pressure, no forcing.
Which makes for a nice bookend that I think nobody else mentioned, especially as it also manages to tie into El's uneasy moral dilemma, where she believes forcing people to do the right thing is wrong but also she's aware that by killing mawmouths she's ultimately doing just that. But her hands are just a bit tied, honestly - what's she supposed to do, not kill them?
And now I want to know what her magic mirror thinks of all this, wherever she stashed it.
