There are three people in particular I should acknowledge, on the road to Queen of the Night. The first is a Mr Mozart, of whom you may have heard, whose contribution to the story is, hopefully, obvious. (If it's not obvious, but you have a burning desire to know, see here.)

Secondly, my wife, who has soprano'd an opera or two in her time (1) and who came up with the basic idea, that then sat around in the lumber room of my subconscious for a couple of years until I realised it was a kinden story after all.

Thirdly… well, thirdly is technical. First person prose is something of a special treat for me. I save up for it over months of writing before I let myself indulge. There are, in my book (2) a couple of unacknowledged masters of the first-person perspective. Gene Wolfe, of whom I've oft writ, is one, and he has perhaps explored the explicit nature of the first person account more than any other writer, especially when it comes to the innate unreliability that creeps in whenever anybody is telling their own story. Perhaps the highest expression of this is the diary of the amnesiac Latro inSoldier of the Mists (4)

However this story is not a Gene Wolfe story. Instead its style owes more to another favourite author, Peter S. Beagle. Shockingly few people seem to know Beagle, whose best known work is The Last Unicorn (5). Mr Beagle, like Wolfe, is a short story teller, as well as a novellist, and he has a particular penchant for first person narratives, where his skill shines in giving the teller a very individual voice (6). Beagle is one of those writers who taught me a lot when I was slowly piecing together my own writing style, and this story is something of a homage to his writing. So, enjoy!

Oh, yes. The story can be found here.

(1) Meaning that she's sung the female high part, not that she's had a rival family of opera singers gunned down.

(2) As I now actually have a book I should probably stop using this phrase willy-nilly (3)

(3) Another phrase I should probably stop using.

(4) For those that wish to read this, and you really should, it has bee reprinted with the second volume of the series, as Latro in the Mists.

(5) Although, if you can find a copy, my absolute pick of his books is The Folk of the Air.

(6) Beagle's first person magnum opus is The Innkeeper's Song, a novel pieced together from the interwoven accounts of over a dozen separate characters.

The Moth-kinden were once the dark masters of the Lowlands, holding the lesser races as their slaves. Then the revolution came and their power was broken by the new weapons and machines that their former subjects devised, and that they could not understand. Now, centuries later, they plot and argue in their mountain fastnesses, clinging to the ancient magic that failed them. Libraries of hidden knowledge surround them, the secrets of the dark ages before the revolution, and all of it unable to restore their world to them.

They have no gods. This is the first thing. To the certain knowledge of the Lowlanders there are no insect churchs, no spider-priestesses or weevil-popes. Oh, perhaps there are savage peoples at the very edge of civilisation, ekeing out a living in the harsh places that history has left to them, who cry out to the deaf ears of a non-existant divinity, but, say the Collegiate scholars, look where it got them. The very existance of such wretches, if it were proved, would surely substantiate the otherwise unanimously held belief that there are no gods worthy of the worship.

But the concept exists amongst them. The simple fact that a well-fed academic of the Great College can murmur, as he lights his pipe, "Well of course it's only the utmost savages that would bother with gods these days," demonstrates that such worship was once known. Where, then are the insect altars, the icons and effigies? One might wonder, at first, whether the old Inapt kinden, the Moths and the Mantids, were the last refuge of the ecclesiastical, but it is not so. Apt and Inapt viewpoints diverge a great deal, when the world of the invisible is spoken of, but neither finds room for anything as large as a god in their philosophy.

What definition of god is being used here, for certainly the Inapt peoples claim that the world is rife with intangible, supernatural entities? What makes a spirit into a god? In short, in the opinion of Collegiate scholars and Tharen sages alike, worship, reverence. The kinden's definition of a god is an entity that commands worship, and the kinden worship nothing.

Of course it's not that simple. Even aside from the possibility that there are, beyond the brief of Collegium scholars, priests and votaries bending and sacrificing at the sacred places of their unknown sects, there is a certain amount of the lives of the kinden that a observer from our more earthbound world might see at first as religion.

The Inapt are a case in point. The Moths, the greatest influence on Lowlands mythology, people the world with spirits, ghosts, natural forces that can be bargained with, appeased, commanded. Their relationship with the world of the invisible is an adversarial, masterly one. The most common explanation of the ways of the world, taught to Moth children and the occasional adventurous middle-aged Beetle scholar, is that the world is like woven cloth (2). Mind is like a snarl in the cloth, the pressure of each individual intelligence twisting the weave into a knot, and those skilled in magaic can tug upon the strings of the world around them. Mind is a knot that flies undone at the moment of the thinker's demise… or it does so most of the time. Sometimes the body dies, but the knot remains, held in place by guilt or hate or undone deeds, and thus the world has ghosts gibbering impotently at the edge of the Inapt eye. Sometimes great emotions, fearsome events, bloodshed and ritual, can create a knot where no mind ever was, and so a place, an object, can be invested with power, can become an entity in its own right. Sometimes this is a deliberate act, sometimes accidental, and sometimes arcane concordences decree the random creation of a spirit even without human intervention. Still, this world of spirits is, to the Moth-kinden magi, a resource of the world, as trees to a carpenter or animals to a trapper.

Those Inapt kinden who are less masters of their own fate perhaps have different understandings. The Mantis-kinden, brooding and sour-minded killers all, guard well their sacred places within their forest holds. There, it is said, they commune more closely than is healthy with their genius, the embodiment of all that is Mantis, and there they conduct murderous rites and rituals, and shed blood in celebration of the world's mortality (3). However, well-fed Beetle scholars are not invited to any such rites (4) and no account of them has reached the College, so perhaps the less said, the better.

But, to the notional real-world observer, what is this that they see so universally? Is this not surely some religion? Whyfor do the kinden meditate, religiously one might say, upon what must surely be some manner of civic or racial deity? What is it that reaches out and gifts them with flight, with killing spines, with fiery stings? What, in short, is the Art, if not the product of a worldwide polytheistic religion?

"It's no such thing," so says the Collegium scholar, and dismisses the anomalous visitor entirely from his mind. The Apt and the Inapt are close in their explanations of the Art, for all that neither is quite able to account for its effects and results. The meditation that all kinden engage in is a personal matter. It cannot be taught, exactly, although in many places there is a whole industry of tutors and facilitators, with tricks and gimmicks to assist their students in their own private contemplations. They share their success rate and professional integrity with consultants in many other industries and many other worlds. The consideration of the Art is an individual matter.

And yet hereditary, also. Although some Arts are universal within a kinden (a Fly's wings, an Ant's mindlink), careful research has shown that the Arts one's parents attain are those that the child is more likely to manifest, and recent research with halfbreeds seems to have shown this conclusively. But what is the Art, from where does it spring?

The insect-kinden believe, and the believe is astonishingly widespread and uniform, in Ideals. Platonic ideals, our notional observer might say, if blessed with sufficient education. As there are beetles, so there is Beetle, the perfect, the utmost of beetles, the definition and the exemplar from which all beetles are, in some way derived — the universe's template of beetleness, in essence. So it is that the Beetle-kinden meditate and, at last, find in their minds an understanding of the Beetle dream (5), and from this understanding, this grand comprehension, flows the Art.

Sometimes, in rare cases, this comprehension is felt. Beneficiaries have reported feeling an actual presence, of utter familial generosity, but scholars agree (more Apt than Inapt scholars agree, the Inapt are somewhat divided) that this is an artifact, a human hallucination born of incomplete understanding. Certainly a lot of Art manifests without any such conscious contact, which can lead to uncertainty about what Art a child has actually mastered, as much of it leaves no physical showing: the resilience of a Beetle-kinden, for example, is a difficult thing to test without risking a great deal if you're wrong.

So do these Ideals exist? Is there some offshoot dimension where they prey on one another, enacting out mindless myth cycles of birth and feeding and violent death? Most would dismiss the idea, although certain philosophies, sects and cults almost, within the Inapt kinden have explored such ideas in the past, and perhaps some still do.

And are their horse Ideals? Are their Ideal fish? Trees? "Of course not," grumbles the scholar, now thoroughly out of sorts with such foolish questions. "Who ever heard of a horse-kinden, after all?" And with that he turns the visitor out of doors, and goes to bed.

(1) Quoted from the culmination of "The Insect God", my favourite Edward Gorey story.

(2) Like all low-level academic explanations this one is useful, easy to grasp and essentially wrong.

(3) Not that I'm dancing around material from book 2 or anything…

(4) Or at least, none have yet found themselves able to file a paper on it.

(5) And when Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds that he's a beetle, his family and friends are over the moon about it.

The “low” of the Lowlands was in relation to its northern neighbour, the slowly-disintegrating Commonweal, whose southern border was and is a vast fault-line running for hundreds of miles roughly east-west, from the Atoll Coast as far as the Tharen Mountains and the forest of the Darakyon (1). As recently as fifty years ago a party of scholars from Collegium made the difficult journey to the relatively uncultivated lands south of the fault to view the high, stratified cliffs that had been brokered as a border between the Moth and Dragonfly territories. Drilling and digging satisfied them that the bands of rock beneath their feet were the very bands reproduced in the highest reaches of the Barrier Ridge. At some point in the incalculably distant past, some colossal shudder of the earth had sent the entire Lowlands slipping down, or raised the Commonweal up, forming the fault and ensuring that the divided land would never be whole again, not to mention probably sending an area of land of the same size again slumping into the sea. This time of catastrophe, which must have come close to seeing the end of human occupation within a thousand miles of the fault, was reckoned to predate even the Moth-kinden records, although the Moths would neither confirm or deny it. In conclusion, the scholars said, no recollection or myth exists that echoes this ancient disaster (3).

The Lowlands, the distinct region defined between the Barrier Ridge and the sea, is of a dry, warm climate. Where the weather and the lie of the land allow it, there are discreet areas of forest, some of them very large, and the Mantis-kinden that dwell there claim that their domains were once much greater in the Days of Lore, but they are prone to exaggerate the scope of their own grandeur. Certainly the logging activities of the Apt races, as they moved inexorably into a semi-industrial age, have made resented inroads into such forests as remain.

Where the earth is bare of trees, the natural landscape is one of scrubby, low vegetation, tough shrubs and bushes with spiny leaves, yellowing grass and lots of dust. The land is often broken up where water courses through it, making a badlands of little gullies and canyons, the latter sometimes choked by stunted vegetation. Summers are hot and dry, with rain coming mostly in the spring and autumn, and then not plentifully. Winters are mild, and it is a matter of record if even a little snow is seen.

Civilisation, or that version of it that currently holds sway in the Lowlands, spread from the city of Collegium (formerly Pathis) swiftly, and five of the six main Apt city-states were essentially in place from the beginning: Collegium and its four Ant-kinden neighbours.

It is worth taking a moment to consider the very early history of Collegium, Pathis as it was then. That history is lost to those who now walk those city streets, but speculative academics have wondered why the Lowlands was given over to the Ants, at that time, save for one colony of Beetles. Whilst most scholars simply assume that this is how things have always been, a few dissenting voices wonder if the Moths, finding the dull, dutiful Ants to be insufficiently stimulating company, had somehow bought or brought in a more lively-minded subject race for their leisure-city, and if so, from where…?

Of the Ant city-states, after the yoke of the magicians had been thrown off each of these cities turned suspicious eyes on the other three. The Lowlands, that had once been unified under the gloom-coloured wing of the Moths, fragmented into its current political patchwork. Those Moths who still cared enough about their lost power nodded knowingly and told each other that this is what happens when you let the slaves run the world.

Collegium itself owes its survival to that mutual suspicion. The early Beetles retained no monopoly on their crossbows, and they would not have been able to stave off an assault by the militaristic Ant-kinden. Had any of their neighbours tried their hand, however, more Ant armies would have set out within the tenday (4) to oppose the action, and so Collegium remained self-governing by default. This neutrality in the affairs of the Ants gave the city an unexpected power for, despite their xenophobia, their mutual loathing of their own kind, should that kind bear a different-coloured skin, the Ants still needed to trade, to gathering intelligence, and to learn more of the rapidly evolving engineering that the Beetles had pioneered. Collegium became their go-between, and Ant students attended the Great College to learn something other than warfare from Beetle masters. For their part, the Beetles of Collegium were still very much in the same stage of fierce philosophical idealism that had led them to reject slavery, and they took their responsibilities seriously. Conclaves of well-intentioned academics began trying to educate the Ants in the ways of peaceful co-existence. This work would nor bear fruit for centuries, but the dedication of those academics would, in some small way, eventually pay off when, only a generation ago, the Sarnesh Ants abandoned slavery as the price of a permanent alliance with Collegium. (5)

Around a generation after the revolution, Beetle merchant-venturers travelling north-east found spectacularly rich iron and mineral deposits in the Tharen Mountains, just at a time when the new technology was crying out for raw materials. The mining camps that formed there soon became a town, and then a major manufacturing centre, as the venturesome Beetles realised that they would only retain control over their finds if they started to use them on site, rather than simply shipping the ore back to Collegium. This new city was named Helleron, and within a century it had become the industrial powerhouse of the Lowlands, using every trick of artifice and engineering to produce goods quicker and cheaper than everywhere else, until most of the Ant-kinden started buying in extra weapons and armour from the Beetles, because it spared their manpower and saved them money. Money was another achievement of Helleron, and the Helleron mint still makes gold Centrals (“Central Mint of Helleron” is stamped on the reverse) and silver Standards (a standard fraction of a Central, and traditionally the price of an Ant-kinden shortsword from the Helleron workshops.) Each city produces its own small change, ceramic wheels that are broken into wedge-shaped fragments called “bits”, and the bits from one city are not good currency elsewhere. Travellers change up into Helleron coin at the city gates (exchange rate depending on where and who you are), with the resulting handful of worthless chips generally given to beggars, or greasing the palms of the guards.

The political stalemate in the Lowlands, that was so profitable and useful to the Beetles, continued unchanged for several centuries. The four Ant cities remained at loggerheads, each generation picking the scab off the old wounds. Every so often one city would conceive of some advantage and pitch up outside the walls of another, only to be beaten back, or forced to retreat when another army was sighted on route for their own. The city of Vek controlled access to the distant cities of the Atoll Coast (6), and the island city of Kes held most of the southern coast and the best access to the Spiderlands by sea. Tark sat close enough to the Silk Road to become rich from Spider trade, and Sarn sat close enough to Collegium to develop a stronger trading relationship with the Beetles than the others.

The Lowlands was able to develop without much intercession from beyond its borders. To the north the Commonweal had been falling apart since before the revolution, slowly being consumed by rebellious princes and bandit-chieftains. To the east there was the Dryclaw desert, and whilst marauding bands of Scorpion-kinden might make life difficult for their neighbours, there was never any chance of a major incursion there. To the south and the west there was the sea. The Silk Road to the Spiderlands was long, and the Spiders themselves viewed the emerging cities of the Lowlands as a crude backwater of no real interest: being Inapt themselves the Spiders could not predict how the new mechanistic sciences would change the world. To the north and east, where the Dryclaw left off into more arid scrubland, a scattering of small cities and a lot of savage hill tribes. The Beetles did travel this way from the start, trading and teaching and founding new cities, but the road was difficult, and the merchant-lords of Helleron always looked inwards, towards the rest of the Lowlands, viewing the cities to the east, Myna and Szar and Maynes, as of little real value. (7). Of course, nobody foresaw at the time that those squabbling, barbaric hill tribes would one day be united by a man who would coin the title “Emperor”. The Lowlands’ insular mindset, its firm belief that, as the cradle of civilisation, the world should come to its door rather than the other way round, allowed the Wasp-kinden to unify, to conquer their neighbours, to put even close cousins like the Soldier Beetles of Myna in chains, and all without any outcry being raised. Until, of course, the Black and Gold colours were brought even to the Lowlands’ very borders.

(1)   There is no getting away from fantasy fiction names. The trick is not to mention more than two in a sentence, and ideally only one if you can get away with it. The number of times I’ve picked up a new book in the shop and read the blurb on the back to see something like “Vloscodd, Prince of Hnaarf, has long sought the Voopsrod of Quango, for only the rod can prevent Ipsum, Falxlord of Loobroomdin (2)…” and the brain, battered by such inanity, turns off. I’ve had sight of the back-text for Empire, and there is one name therein, just one name. It should be possible to give the gist of a book’s flavour or story without getting out the scrabble board. But for now I’ll have to sprinkle this entry with a few place names because, frankly, it is a geography lesson.

(2)   Gene Wolfe, in his admirable Sun novels, had a very clever twist on fantasy names, titles and the like. At first his writing seems dense with neologisms, sometimes almost opaque with unfamiliar terms which are never explained. The joke is that none of the words he uses are new. They are all real words, used correctly. Mr Wolfe expects his readers to keep up with him on the hunt, and the chase is rewarding in itself thereby.

(3)   They were wrong, as one son of Collegium would eventually discover…

(4)   The Apt races, being of a logical mindset, tended to decimalise pretty much anything they got their hands on. Before the revolution the Inapt races relied on a complex calendar of irregular intervals and festivals that their slaves could not remotely comprehend.

(5)   The result was a lightning Vekken assault and siege on Collegium which the Beetles staved off, by ingenuity and bloody-mindedness, for long enough that the relief force from Sarn was able to put the Vekken to flight. The Ants of Vek would feel very keenly what they felt as a defeat by an inferior kinden, the peaceful and scholarly Beetles, and would not forget it. Even now they nurse their hatred of Collegium as much as they do their loathing of other Ants, if not more.

(6)   The Atoll Coast was never the Moths’ domain, and the large tracts of inhospitable land separating those cities, clinging as they are between ocean and desert, even from Vek has ensured that very little traffic goes on between them and the Lowlands proper. The presence on the coast of another Ant city-state has prevented Vek from exercising its territorial inclinations in that direction.

(7)   These lands had also been part of the Moth’s domain, but the Moths themselves had never felt comfortable here. Many centuries before the revolution they had wrested these lands from a great evil, or at least a great rival, the ill-favoured Mosquito-kinden, with their blood-magic and their hungers. Although the Mosquito-people were supposedly exterminated to the very last, the Moth-kinden never quite believed it, and even before the revolution they had been relinquishing their hold on these places, abandoning them to their fate. It seems likely, though, that a lot of the Beetles now living in this region can trace their ancestry back to slaves imported by the Moths from Collegium, rather than to the later adventurers from Helleron. Similarly, the Soldier Beetle folk of Myna, who are of a kinden that exhibits traits of both Ants and Beetles, are reckoned to be the stabilised result of Moth-kinden underlings becoming acquainted with the local Ants of nearby Maynes. One scholar has hypothesised that the initial inhabitants were an all-male workforce brought in by the Moths to rebuild the city.

The slaves found their voice.

This was five hundred and thirty-seven years before the main action in Empire (1), and we know this because the main action in Empire takes place in the year 537. The slaves had never had a calendar, while they lived under the boot of their masters. Their masters’ calendar was incomprehensible to them. The same year, to the old, sorcerous races, is the 53^rd Year of the Locust, but the rules by which that Locust succeeded the 18^th Year of the Flea are opaque to those that cast off their shackles. A look at a magician’s almanac would reveal nothing of sense to the former slaves, and in this can be seen, in microcosm, the conceptual divide ;that changed the world.

At some time before that year of revolution, that year zero of the new calendar, the slaves began to improve their lot, and improve the lot of their masters, too. They had lived under the yoke for centures, millennia, doing everything the same way as their ancestors. They farmed, they smithed, they built, and all of it with simple tools and traditions handed down through the generations. Their masters, concerned with more otherworldly matters, let them get on with it, intervening only when their needs were not tended to.

The story of the revolution is the story of the Lowlands, although its echoes were felt across the world. The Lowlands, as they are now known, were once the domain of the Moth-kinden, who ruled over a subject population of Beetle– and Ant-kinden slaves with the aid of their Mantis warrior servants. Although the Moth-kinden preferred the cold altitudes of the mountains for their homes, they established a city named Pathis as a coastal retreat, and shipped in a population of Beetles to serve them there. In Pathis, after so many years of quiet, something happened.

It was not the great, sudden, violent overthrow that popular history records. These things do not work in such ways. It would have started simply and peacefully, and the masters would have had no idea that they were observing their doom when they saw the new toys of their workers. Perhaps it was a new way of grinding wheat by harnessing the river or the wind. Perhaps it was a new way of drawing water by means of a screw, or ; of lifting loads by pulley and counterweight. It made the lives of the slaves easier and it made them more efficient servants, and so none of the magician-lords were alarmed. Their ability to scry the future, much vaunted amongst their kind, had a blind spot where progress was concerned. They had their minds on higher matters, they would say, but the truth is that their magical divinations saw none of it. Moreover, and more crucially, their minds encompassed none of it. The principles that their industrious servants utilised to achieve these advances were as baffling to them as their magic was to those same servants. The divide between the haves and the have-nots was widening, but in such a way that those who had done without were finding ways to compensate. Steadily, and then rapidly, the slave races were becoming ingenious, and none more so than the bustling Beetles of Pathis. Pathis was a place of some luxury, in those days, and even the servants lived relatively easy lives. They had time, that the labouring peasantry did not, to think about the world and how it worked.

The key moment came when the toiling underclass realised that their new tool of emancipation, the fruits of their labours, truly belonged to them. Their masters could not comprehend it, could not use it. Lock a chest as crudely as you liked, and you denied its contents to the masters, or at least those that did not wish to crack open the container to learn its contents. Refuse to operate the mill, and the masters could puzzle over the gears until winter came, without ever seeing the smallest piece of it, and by now they were dependant on the increased supply of bread those mills brought in. The slaves began to realise the power of supply and demand.

Relations between the masters and their servants went downhill, we can be sure. Records from the days immediately before the revolution are not plentiful in either camp, but no doubt there were some Moths who wanted to order in the Mantis-kinden, to enact a cull that would break the back of the new pride their slaves had grown. Others, for they were a philosophical race, would have spoken against that, perhaps they had even become fond of their slaves and their mysterious toys.

What popular history records, though, as the spark of the revolution, is the invention of a new weapon. Nowadays the less-educated, and some that should know better, would say that the crossbow was all the revolution was about, disregarding all those decades of less martial innovation. Still, the crossbow tipped the balance.

The weapons of the old regime were the sword, the spear, the bow and the claw. The Mantis-kinden were swift and deadly, an unholy terror to any slave that had displeased his masters. They were never many, though, even in their prime. However, when all the slaves could muster were shortswords and work-hammers and slings, that did not matter. A single Mantis-kinden of moderate skill could butcher a score of ill-trained peasants without breaking into a sweat. A Weaponsmaster could do the same without getting a drop of blood on herself.

Longbows are a skilled warrior’s weapon. Longbows take constant practice, focused strength, a steady hand and a good eye. Even the shortbows that the Moth-kinden favoured required expertise, and of course none of the slaves would be allowed the chance to acquire such skills.

The crossbows that the Beetle-kinden invented struck nearly as hard as the longbow, and at close to the same range, although they were horribly slow to load. Their lesser advantage was that they were quicker and easier to make. Without poetry or elegance in their crafting or use, they were the weapon for the masses, and the masses took to them with a sudden fervour. Their greater advantage was that anyone could use them with a minimum of training, anyone except the masters. The old races, the races that had leant on magic and never understood the new principles of force and stress and moving parts, could not ever understand even the simple crossbow. The mental block was complete. They could pick it up, and they could even pull the trigger if carefully coached, but they were as likely to hit a friend as an enemy, and as for reloading…

The Moth-kinden and their followers were driven from Pathis by the Beetle-kinden, and their control over the Lowlands collapsed almost overnight. City after city cast them out, the Ant-kinden taking readily to the Beetles’ new weapon, and defeating warbands and even armies of Mantis-kinden in the field by using their mind-linking Art to coordinate their battle. The old warfare of individual duel and mobile skirmish gave way to the Ant way: solid blocks of infantry, shields and swords and ranks of crossbows. In a staggeringly short time, there was nothing left of the great Moth-kinden rule but a couple of mountaintop communities, and a few forest holds of the Mantids.

The rest of the world changed less catastrophically, but as if that first revolution in Pathis had broken some fundamental natural law, the rot set in everywhere. The old Dominion of Khanaphes, far to the east, had already fallen into ruin; the Dragonfly Commonweal closed its borders and began to lose control of its own principalities to anarchy and brigandage; the Spider-kinden retained a hold on their lands, but their rule became less and less reliant on magic, and more on simple persuasion and manipulation. It was the dawn of a new age.

In Pathis, the Beetles took stock, and began to construct themselves a new state from first principles. Their first maxim (2) was that there would never again be a slave within their walls. Their second maxim was that they would, at least, retain some of the trappings of their fled masters, most specifically the great academy of learning that had been completed only a few years before the revolution. They called it the Great College, and they renamed their newly-freed city Collegium.

Just under five and a half centuries later it would be Collegium, with its high ideals and beliefs, that would begin to resist the encroaches of the Wasp Empire, as Empire in Black and Gold begins to tell.

And magic? Standing in the ruins of their masters’ fall, with the Moths fled and gone and the bright sun beating down, the slaves looked at one another as if to say, What was stopping us doing this, all that time? Freedom brought an end to fear, and the old magic had always fed on fear and doubt and darkness. The Beetles and Ants recalled the ways that their former overlords had cowed them, and called them tricks, and called themselves gullible for falling for it. Magic was a fiction, they said, and if the Moths still believed in it, more fool them. Machines were the future, not a bogus rule of charlatans and conmen living off the toil of the honest. So it was that the great dark magics of the Moths, of all the elder kinden, fell from the pages of the new histories and, in these enlightened times, nobody believes a word of it (3).

(1) ; ; A note for the pedants: chapter 1 takes place in the year 520, the balance of the book takes place in 537.

(2) ; ; And one not followed by their fellow former slaves such as the Ant-kinden, who continued to enslave one another with glee for centuries.

(3) ; ; ;After Douglas Adams, of course.

What is certain is that, having chosen a side, mankind collaborated in the final throes of genocide. Even in these more enlightened ages unearthed bones still speak of a wealth of land vertebrates that once lived and died upon the surface of the world, and then just died, species by species, at the mandibles of the foe, and at the stone-headed spears and arrows of traitor humanity. Who is to say what races of mankind did not discover the road to salvation, and perished at the hands of their defecting brothers, and their new, armoured allies?

No records remain.

Having guaranteed its survival, indeed its dominance in the world, mankind turned inwards. Families gathered in clans, and clans into the kinden, each with its entomological patron saint. In time there arose a hierarchy amongst those kinden, specifically a ruling class, and a servant class. The distinction was in their way of viewing the world.

This was a lost age of magic (1). Modern commentators refer to it as the Age of Lore, but only amongst the descendants of the ancient master-races. Those that suffered under the lash call it the Bad Old Days, the Dark Ages.

There were those amongst the kinden who saw the universe in a certain way, as a great weave in which there were threads for the pulling, to tug the world into shape. This was magic. It was not the Art, that was, in its various forms, open to all. Those kinden who could grasp the power of magic could control the world. Great wonders, and ever greater terrors, were theirs to command. Those who could not were fit for nothing but servitude.

Magic, for the kinden, meant darkness. Magic was born from uncertainty. Its power was weakest when the heart was high, when the bright sun shone. At night, in times of fear and doubt, magic crept in. It is no coincidence that those kinden whose grasp of magic was strongest, were also those kinden most at home at night, with eyes best suited to pierce the darkness.

In those far-off days, days mourned only by the usurped conquerors, great states were formed, the thaumocracies of elder times. Greatest of these, holding sway over the vast and fertile Lowlands, was the domain of the Moth-kinden: unparalleled sorcerers, scholars without peer, for many thousands of years they ruled sternly and without love, a great domain built of the backs of slaves, enforced by the unequalled warriors of the Mantis people, swift and deadly, and themselves ruled by fear of their dark masters.

There were heroes, in those days, and great lords. There were secrets to drive the incautious mad. The Spider-kinden of the southern lands built their gorgeous palaces of gold and silk, and the Monarch of the Dragonfly Commonweal to the north ruled the fifty principalities in fairness and splendour. There were wars, in those days, insurrections, exterminations. The Moths, in their power and wisdom, saved their slaves from even worse tyrants: kinden whose names are now no more than shadowed myth, so that when mothers chide their children with tales of how the wicked Mosquito-kinden will come and drink their blood, they little realise that there was a time, once, when it was true.

It is lost to modern hands, of what span of years the Age of Lore lasted. The old races, the ancient masters, counted the years by a method as inscrutable as their supposed magics. Millennia, that much is sure. Thousands of years of lost history, abandoned philosophy, heights of glory and depths of horror that the world shall not, if it is lucky, see again.

What is sure, is that it came to an end.

A little over five centuries ago, the slaves, the dull and the ignorant and the fundamentally unmagical, found their voice.

(1) A Lost Age of Magic. It is, I admit, a stereotype, but I like it. There is something haunting and glorious about the thought. As you can see, though, this is not the “Golden Age” nor quite the “Rule of the Dark Lord” that fantasy oscillates between. It is a true dark age, a span of history, with all its plethora of deeds and dates, now lost. There are also two corresponding ways for an Age of Magic to come to an end, too. The Golden Age simply fades, until it is only a memory. The Dark Lord is defeated by the Forces of Light, who then also fade into the background. I hope that I have found a rather different spin on things.