Myth and the Masquerading Magic of the Mechanism

by Anneliese Avery

When I set about building the world of The Celestial Mechanism, for The Nightsilver Promise, I knew that I wanted to create a world full of wonder. A world where destiny was set in the stars of the Celestial Mechanism and, just like the planets and stars of this clockwork universe, every person in the Empire of Albion has their track in life. Their track is defined by the position of the stars at the moment of their birth, and must be followed. In the opening of the story we meet thirteen year old Paisley Fitzwilliam who has just received her stars and discovered that her fate is to soon die. 

Paisley’s world is dominated by science but I have long resonated with Clarke’s third law- “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”  

I wanted to create a Science System that felt like a Magical System; giving the reader the same sense of discovery and excitement that I often feel when learning about scientific principles.

 
In The Nightsilver Promise there are Alchesmiths – people who create metals that are bonded to the lifeforce of a person. Nightsilver is one such substance – it’s an exotic metal forged from entangling the atoms in the blood of a person with silver. This creates a midnight black metal that takes on some of the properties of the person that it is connected to. For example, when nightsilver is cold and brittle it means that the person it is entangled with is dead. In The Nightsilver Promise Paisley discovers something from her mother’s Nightsilver pocket watch that sets her off on an epic journey to the floating boroughs of London Above and beyond.

Sometimes, while I’m writing, details about the world arrive fully formed, as if they have always been there – this is what happened the day that the dragons appeared. I realised in a moment that the Great Dragons were naturally evolving creatures, they are bird-like in their physiology and related distantly to the flying reptiles that first appeared in the Triassic Period.
The Great Dragons, which we discover have been hunted into extinction, are believed to have helped the Chief Designer to forge the many tracks of the Celestial Mechanism – their fiery breaths responsible for all the stars in the sky were hot enough to fuse exotic particles and create the unseen tracks that everyone travels upon.

I knew that Great Dragons were not the only species of dragon to exist in my world. I had great fun exploring the variations of dragons , and putting them into the exhibitions in the Dragonian Wing of The Natural History Museum. From the jewel coloured Papillon Dragons as small as butterflies, to the shetland pony sized dragons who find their homes in the Northern Reals with the Krigare, the child warriors who fly on them and protect the Northern Realms from the Empire. 

But the crowning jewel of The Natural History Museum in my world is Fyrdhwæt (“feerd-hwat”),  one of the few Great Dragon remains found by Dragonologists. She dominates the Hintze Hall, wings outstretched, mouth open. Like all Great Dragons her remains are perfectly preserved, the reason thought to be that because the Great Dragons made the Celestial Mechanism they are entangled with it in a similar way that a person is to Nightsilver, as long as the universe exists the remains of the Great Dragons will be preserved. 

The blending of science into original myths and masquerading as magic in The Nightsilver Promise has been a delight to create. I hope readers  who explore the Empire of Albion with Paisley will find much wonder to inspire their curiosity.