Places of Power

An idea that comes up in a lot of fantasy writing is that some places are imbued with tremendous magical power. I really like the idea of certain places being filled with supernatural energies. This might be for some intrinsic reason; perhaps the location is close to a nexus of magical currents and the surging energies swell out of their ley conduits to fill the air with… something. Or the place may have been inhabited by generations of spirits or magi; now the greatest of the inhabitants may be long departed, but a residue of their wonder-working remains.

I think the first kind of place appeals to me more, and on a deeper level. I prefer to think of great magic as something profound and ineffable, not to be tied to any particular works. However, this expectation actually makes this kind of magical setting rather hard to portray effectively. When authors write about the magic that suffuses a place, it usually seems to be disconnected from the place itself. I mean, I envision the magical effects as simply residing there; they are artifacts or enchantments, located in a particular space, rather than the space itself being magical.

So there aren’t a lot of fantastic places like this whose descriptions really speak to me. The most effective example I can remember of a place of this type appears in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Illearth War. Generally, Donaldson is not very effective at making his mystical places seem mystical unto themselves. The cavern at the Heart of Thunder and the thronehall of Foul’s Creche are supposed to be a-pulse with eldritch energies, but they really just seem to be places where great powers happen to have chosen to take up residence. However, in The Illearth War, several of the characters encounter Damelon’s Door—a narrow opening between a stalactite and the wall of a cave. The right magic is required to pass through; if it is not invoked, then the caverns beyond will become an strange and maddening maze. Intruders may wander forever through among the underground lakes and columned grottoes beyond, without ever reaching their goal. This seemed to me like magic that was really of the place (rather than in it). But this may have worked mostly because the characters do possess the correct formula to enter, so the reader never actually sees what the passages beyond would be like to an uninvited interloper.

For some reason, when it comes to magical places, I tend to feel like my imagination could conjure up so much more than most stories actually deliver. For example, I was rather disappointed by the Chambers of Fire (Sammath Naur) in The Return of the King. There’s just a door (which is always being watched by the lidless eye from the heights of the Dark Tower) and, beyond that, The Cracks of Doom. Based on my early exposure to adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, I had expected that Frodo and Samwise would need to climb all the way to the crater of Mount Doom and descend through the cone into the bowels of the volcano. Moreover, from the illustrations I’d seen, I thought that Barad-dûr was actually located inside the mountain, under the overhang of the upper slopes, so that the ring-bearers would need to sneak past the citadel of the dark lord before finding their way to a maze of lava tunnels, twisting and dividing, which would eventually lead to the heat of the burning Crack. That would have been a truly amazing mountain.

I suppose my inclination to expect (and want) a descent directly from the crater was influence by Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, which I read at a very young age. The hot, smoking craters of high volcanoes have had an eerie appeal to me ever since I followed Axel, Otto, and Hans down into the pipes of that Icelandic mountain. In fact, I used a volcanic crater as the location of a secret entrance in my own writing—although with what I hope was an original twist.

I was similarly disappointed by the Castle Called Mist in Fritz Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit.” (This was one of the very first stories Leiber wrote about the fantasy alter egos that he and his friend Harry Fischer had created, so it takes places in a fantasy version of the Hellenistic Near East. Leiber, when he was very young, was becoming involved in H. P. Lovecraft’s circle of writer friends, and there are also some unusual Lovecraftian touches to the story. A bit of Googling reveals that there may actually be an even older, longer manuscript of the story with yet more explicit references to the Cthulhu mythos. I’m not certain whether this would be an improvement, but I would certainly be interested to read it.) The castle is supposed to be partially alive and constructed with portals to other dimensions, some quite inhospitable. Unfortunately, while the story is one of Leiber’s best, in my opinion, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser don’t really stick around the place long enough to see much of the interesting magic at work. They take care of their critical business and get on their way. Certainly, that’s a logical thing for them to do, under such perilous circumstances, but I feel like Leiber could have made them spend a little more time up among the mists before they finished all the bad guys off.

On the whole, I think descriptions of magical places of the second type—places that are magical themselves because they have been the sites of many past enchantments—usually work more effectively. The thing is, this kind of magical place seems less majestic—tawdry almost. The magic in the air is just the dross from the creation of earlier wonders. So when I decided to write about such a magical place, I decided to embrace this vision of decadence, and I came up with this:

“The princes and emperors pored over many ancient tomes from their conquered lands. From these books, they learned powerful magics. They forged pacts with elder elementals and summoned cacodemons to do their bidding. The very air about the hidden palace—in the emperors’ laboratories and alchemical storehouses—became infused with magic. Vapors from subtle potions wafted along the hallways. Spilled reagents—substances of great potency—imbued the flagstones themselves with weak enchantments. Even the light became a source of eldritch power. One ancient emperor, a most clever artificer, fashioned an amazing lamp, which burned in his inner sanctum. He caught a tiny demon—an immortal fiend with dull red skin and pink, membranous wings. The emperor eviscerated the devil and bound it to his lamp with enchanted iron bands clamped tightly around the creature’s liver. The bands squeezed an inflammable oil from the organ. The demon writhed in agony as dark, viscous drops fell from the gaping wound in its breast, pooling within a glass hemisphere in which floated a tattered wick. By the eerie light of this demon oil lamp, the masters of Shaz prepared their most potent sorceries.”

I should also say the demon oil lamp owes a specific debt to “that evil, four-horned lamp which he feeds with cobras’ oil” from “The Master of Crabs.” Anyway, I hope you like it.