SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Caution: Spoilers!
Discussion about other works of James Galloway (Dragonstar, Alpha Project, The Fox and the Hawk, and others)

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Fel
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SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by Fel »

Hmm...well, I'll give you what I can remember of The Crystal Prison, but it's admittedly very little.

The main Character was Kyri, Kyri Maddox. She was 17 years old, and was in high school in Texas. She didn't know what she really was. She lived by herself on a small ranch outside of San Antonio, Texas, having won emancipation when her parents were killed in a car crash, which happened about 2 months before the story began. Her adopted parents were very wealthy, running a jeweler's shop, which she had sold when they died. She looked very exotic--she WAS a dark elf, after all, but since she was exotic in a beautiful kinda way, well, that kinda made up for it. But she always kept her ears hidden, because she thought they were a birth defect and hated them. Despite being so pretty, she was actually a social outcast, because she could read everyone at school like a book and didn't like what she saw in high school society.

Her only real friend in school was another social pariah that called himself Storm. She never knew if that was his real name or not, and he was a total enigma, to everyone. He never did a single bit of work in any class, yet always scored 100 on every test. He dressed like he dragged his clothes out of a dumpster, but he was always clean. He was almost mutely silent, but when he did talk, it was to unleash devastating barbs of darkly insightful views on the people around him. And everyone was...afraid of him. He'd stare at you with his yellow eyes, and it just sucked all the wind out of you, which was why he wasn't beaten up on a daily basis by the jocks that often found themselves on the wrong side of his acerbic comments. Kyri had a secret crush on Storm, since he was the only honest guy she knew, honest about himself, honest about what he thought. And he was the only guy in school she could really talk to, who wasn't just looking to stick his hand up her shirt or try to get at her money, since she was rich. He treated her like a person, and she reacted to it. She never told him about her crush, because she knew it would shatter their friendship, so she kept it to herself.

When Kyri turned 18, though, everything changed. On the night of her birthday, the necklace she'd worn her entire life simply shattered like glass, and it was then that she found out that she wasn't normal. A ghostly image of her parents appeared to her and only explained the bare facts to her without getting specific. Her parents had actually been magicians, and she'd been placed in their care by magicians beyond the boundaries of our world. The necklace had been a sealing spell that hid her from her enemies, but only worked so long before it had to be recharged...and her parents had been killed before they could renew the spell. But with the sealing spell gone, she was in danger, and she had to find the Second World so they could protect her. They told her that demons would come for her, but they didn't tell her why. They only told her that she had to hide, had to find the Second World, and they would protect her.

The Second World was the world hidden behind the world everyone saw, the world where everything that normal people thought were just fairy tales and myths actually existed. There really WERE magicians and werewolves, mummies and vampires lurking in the dark corners of the world.

The ghosts told her she had to find the Second World, make contact with them somehow. Her parents had kept her so hidden, so concealed, that they even hid her from their own kind, for her parents were part of that Second World.

She didn't have to go far to find it. She gets attacked by demons in broad daylight right in the middle of class the day after her 18th birthday, and she finds out that the Second World was keeping an eye on her. And their agent was Storm.

He wasn't a magician, he was a psychic, hundreds of years old, and he rescues her from the demons using his incredible psychic powers and, of all things, a shotgun and a sword.

The story from there basicly involved Storm guiding Kyri through the Second World as they try to find out why the demons want her so badly, to find the secret her parents had hidden so deeply that it had literally died with them. Kyri, being an impressionable young girl, finds her feelings for Storm going well beyond a teen crush, but he keeps his distance from her. He teaches her to fight, teaches her about magic as best he can since he's not magician, and acts as both mentor and protector as they literally crisscross the globe searching for clues to Kyri's true identity and the reason why the demons are trying not to kill her, but capture her alive.

Eventually, they ferret out the truth, that Kyri is a living key, the living magical seal holding the most powerful of the 13 Demon Kings imprisoned in a crystalline cell buried at the bottom of the deepest pit of hell. The demons must sacrifice her on that prison so her lifeblood can break the seal and release the demon. She learns, to her shock, that she's actually over a thousand years old, her memories and very body altered by magic as those allied against the demons move her from place to place, world to world, wiping her memory and starting anew whenever the demons get too close to her.

Needless to say, quite a bit of "Tarrin-esque" soul searching ensues from here. How would you feel if you found out you were actually a thousand year old woman whose memories were wiped out and whose body was magically regressed to childhood, and your blood would unleash the ultimate evil into the multiverse?

The short of the story goes thusly: Kyri learns that the magic in her blood that will release the demon king is more than just a latent power. It's a kind of magic she learns to use and control, and she gains some control that power, using it to protect herself as the story progresses. When she learns the truth of herself, she realizes that she'll never be free, never be safe, and she must act. She finds out that the demon king is weak to the magic in her blood, since it forms the prison that holds him, and while she is the only key that can unlock his prison, the magic bound in her blood also has the power to destroy him. Together with Storm, and against the wishes of the Second World, Kyri and Storm trick the demons into bringing the Demon King's prison to our world. Kyri uses the magic in her blood on herself, binding Kyri to the fabric of our world, making it impossible for her to leave our dimension. Since she can never leave, the demons have no choice but to bring their master to HER. What comes afterward is typical skullduggery, as Storm and Kyri try to find the Demon King's prison before they can capture her.

But the demons outfox them, and Kyri is captured.

The ending is suitably melodramatic. Even as they slit her wrists and throat and her blood pours down the sides of the crystal, Storm invades the ritual. He beats back the demons and saves Kyri's life, which interrupts the magic that would release the demon king, for Kyri had to die bleeding out on the crystal for the seal to break. But Storm is killed, ignoring the demons to use his psychic powers to heal Kyri, giving his life for hers. After Storm dies, Kyri's rage allows her to completely control her full power, and she destroys the Demon King within his prison.

That's basicly the end. Storm's death scars Kyri, for she had loved him since before she knew who and what he really was, and he had never returned that love quite the way she wished he would. It's even more bitter when she finds a letter he wrote her before he died, confessing he loved her, but she was too young, too delicate, and had too much of her own life ahead of her to get involved with someone like him, a dark, cynical, centuries old man of questionable moral fiber to be a good match for someone so young and beautifully innocent. Storm's nobility was one of the qualities that attracted her to him, but it also kept them apart.

The story ends with her touching the scar on her cheek, one of the scars of the wounds she suffered at the hands of the demons, staring into the sunset of a world she could never leave again, trapped there by her own hand for the rest of her days.

And that scar is my honor to the Crystal Prison in the Firestaff series, for Spyder has that scar.

See, there you go. I'm sure maybe one or two of you may have wondered where she got that scar, since I mentioned it and most of you read into absolutely everything I put down. Now, you may not know how she got it, but now you know why she has it. ;)
Just another guy from the shallow end of the gene pool.
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Metatrone
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by Metatrone »

Sounds Great!Now flesh it out a bit...say...500-600 pages... :twisted:

I'm curious about this second Second World, cause a lot of writers try to pull of this "mysterious unseen people, creatures and places all around us" thingy. I think it gets too hard to manage consistency-wise. Like it a lot though.
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Fiferguy
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by Fiferguy »

See, there you go. I'm sure maybe one or two of you may have wondered where she got that scar, since I mentioned it and most of you read into absolutely everything I put down. Now, you may not know how she got it, but now you know why she has it.
I figured it was some battle scar from when she was a few thousand years younger...Didn't seem to be an important part of the story, or you'd have told us about it one way or another. :wink:
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michaelsuave
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by michaelsuave »

Doesn't sound like your more recent type of stories... at least the ending doesn't. I prefer the happy ending personally, not the tear jerker that leaves you hanging that way. :P
Tin Foil... Still putting down money that its the key for the defeat of the baddies...

Fel, Is it done yet? Probably not, but I don't have anything better to do! Is it done yet? Probably not, but I don't have anything better to do! Ahhh, its done... dang, now what am I going to read???
New books! Yay! let the nagging begin! Is it done yet? Probably not, but I don't have anything better to do! Is it done yet? Probably not, but I don't have anything better to do!...

True, I really have nothing better to do in my free time, I mean, what could be better than reading Fel's stories or being messed with by Spec? Thanks for the fun spec!
DigitalMaestro
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by DigitalMaestro »

So, Fel... is this story a world floating in your mind or has it been written? If it has been written, where can we find it?
imthejman85
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by imthejman85 »

Man, dangit Fel, I'm never going to get any writing done now. I'm too keyed up (no pun intended) thinking about yet another Fel Masterpeice. Why do you have to be so good at writing stories I love Fel, WHY!?!?!?! Ahem, now that that's out of my system... Can't wait for this one to come out if it ever does. Nice plotline, interesting charactor development, and an ending that has both the sweat AND the sour. I love it!
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. -George Orwell
kal
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by kal »

what is this plotline from anyway? and where can i find it? it sounds very intriguing.
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dellstart
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by dellstart »

Reminds me a little of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever for some strange reason. which is no bad thing - cause that's a bloody classic.
Read those as a kid ,were absolutely brilliant
kal
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Re: SHARE!!! Umm, well, you asked for it.

Post by kal »

ooo yeah, i just re-read those and found out he is releasing one last quartet of novels in that universe, 2 are out 1 is coming this year and one more in the future sometime
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