Pale: More Extra Materials (more of them)
Two more Pale extras to finish off this month's fast lane order. First among them is a bonus for arc nine "Shaking Hands'" third chapter. Title of the bonus bit is "Path Practicalities."
First of all, I love that Avery is an illustrator after my own heart, and I will never stop loving it. I'm not sure if we know who "S. Drop" might be from the parts I've read, some of them were a while ago.
Second, it looks like the tree-and-ribbon path is just one of many little dream realms that got formed by longtime themed spirit shenanigans. Like those compound-spirit entities (the one girl, Edith I think, is one), but formed into a place rather than an intelligent being. The "wolves" talked about before might be kind of half and half, a compound spirit that ended up forming into sort of a place and sort of an Other. I think.
Next is some discussion about the Lost. They've been mentioned before as a type of Other that lurks around the Paths, and that a human can potentially turn into if they wander off into the deep ethereal and can't find their way back. Apparently, "Lost" is actually a tag you can pin to any Other, object, or even place that has fallen off the beaten Paths and partially decayed in the nothingness between. Well, "decayed" is the wrong word. More like "disassembled." Pieces of things (or perhaps, masses of spirits associated with things) tend to float away in the deep ethereal. Sometimes they're able to keep being a "thing" even with essential characteristics missing (an example given would be an object that only exists from the left side and not from the right). Sometimes these fragmented spirit-complexes form links with other such fragments, based on conceptual associations that often aren't obvious to the casual observer.
I don't know how to make sense of Avery's illustration for this, but I love it:
Honestly, context would probably ruin it.
Anyway, there's an entire branch of magic called "Finding" (it used to be called "chaos magic" until it became better understood and formalized) that involves wandering the Paths and fishing for Lost things to reel back in and make use of. The wording of this page suggests that Avery actually took the Finder subclass when she hit third level during the preceding chapters:
I guess the Finder could be that S. Drop person instead of...
Oh no wait. Right. S. Drop. Snowdrop, or Sundrop. I remember this being mentioned somewhere that that's the name of Avery's pet or familiar or something along those lines. Okay, this is basically being written by Avery and Avery's magical secretary, so yeah, she's the Finder.
Anyway, Finder magic seems right for Avery and what we've seen of her personality. I'm not quite sure why, but it just feels appropriate.
The next few pages concern glyphs and tools often employed by Finders. A ball of twine intricately wrapped around a spherical mould to represent binding something to the earth, which you can hit Lost with to make their structural vacancies catch up to them. A pair of runes representing the gates of horn and the gates of ivory that you can use to either share your dreams with other people (thus enabling them to see Paths the same way that you do and coordinate with you better on missions to the ethereal), or to fuck with your own subconscious and let you see things through a different set of symbolism than usual to see if it makes a Path easier to understand. I like that those two glyphs aren't innately tied to Finding; any wizard could find uses for them, but Finders have their own specific Finding-adjacent ones that make them favorite runes of theirs.
That sort of corresponds to the functions of the Gates of Horn and Ivory from Greek mythology. Not perfectly, but that's pretty much par for the course for occult symbolism in real life. In a world where magic is real but depends heavily on the variable use and interpretation of symbols, where wizards might have had very motivated reasons to deliberately reinterpret and repurpose them throughout a history of magical conflicts, it would probably be even more par for the course. It's the kind of idiosyncrasy that hints at good world building with realistically messy in-universe history.
The last page of this section has Avery planning some kind of big Finding spell involving a major hub Path called the Station Promenade. It seems like she and some colleagues might be trying to lasso some Lost path fragments and attach them to the Promenade to expand it into a full-on pocket dimension, or something like that. Maybe? I'd need a lot more context to be sure, but I think it's something along those lines.
I feel like the "Crimson Path" that is deadly and/or embarrassing to find yourself on is a humorous reference to something, but I don't know what.
Anyway, seems like the trio (or at least Avery) has been moving up in the magical underworld, and happily it seems like they aren't becoming notably worse people in the process at least based onthe glimpses I'm getting. Unusual for Wildbow. I do like that Pale seems to be a break from his usual flavor of grimdark, for all the other flaws it might have.
Finding/Chaos magic is cool, too. You could probably write a whole series of fantasy novels just about this as the only flavor of magic that exists without running out of conceptual ground to cover. It fitting neatly into an even broader system of magic and metaphysics is impressive. Again, Pact/Pale worldbuilding seems to be by far the best thing about them.
The last omake for this comission comes after arc 11 "Dash to Pieces'" second chapter. Its title is "Just In Case." Three letters, left by each of the girls for their respective (blood or found) families. Each letter set to reveal itself in their houses if certain conditions are met, and to self-destruct if certain other conditions are met. All of their contacts have been mind-whammied to not think about the girls or notice their absences until either set of conditions occurs.
In other words, they're going on what they think may be a suicide mission, but also might turn out to not be.
Avery's letter is the longest, which makes sense considering she's the one with the most family who she cares to talk to. Also, she has another, shorter letter that she asks her parents to pass on to Ms. Hardy, that teacher who she had a crush on, which is also included here.
“Heya mom, hi dad,
Yep, it’s Avery. This is really hard to write. If everything goes according to plan, you’re not going to read this. If nothing goes according to plan then this might go up in flames when it sets my mattress on fire and you’d have nothing to read. But in the event that things go mostly according to plan but you’re rearranging stuff in my room to find clues about where I’ve gone or what happened then this isn’t that.
There are things I still can’t tell you, even on paper, even if I’ve disappeared or died. I know it sucks. It’s okay if you’re angry. I just want you to know I’ve been trying to be my best self and do good in the world and if there’s something that ends up keeping me from coming back to you guys I hope you know that at least.
I don’t think what I’m going to do tonight is directly dangerous but I think a whole lot of messiness can come from it and that might be dangerous. So here we are. I wanted to make sure you had something of a final word from me.
Please don’t bother Verona and Lucy too much. If there were answers I could safely give then I’d put them here. If you have questions, give them lots of time to answer and take ‘no’ for an answer if you have to. Consider that a last wish or something. They’re my best friends more than Olivia ever was.
If they aren’t around either then I don’t know. Maybe you can compare notes with their parents, I dunno. That’s if you have to ask. But I think the best thing you could do would be to get out of Kennet. Ditch the job, bring Grumble and leave. Kennet has depths to it you wouldn’t believe and it’s beautiful and rich and awe inspiring and even funny. It also has parts to it which are terrible and scary and intense and awful. Whatever parts you’re thinking I might be talking about like drugs or gangs it’s really stuff that’s at least two hundred times worse than that. I helped out with at least one of those things.
I’m going to be holding onto the best things, if I can. Trust in that. If I’ve disappeared at the time you read this letter then I’m pretty sure I’ve disappeared in adventure and excitement and laughter and style and glamour. But I can’t ignore the bad stuff.
So that’s why I want you to go. You told me once that you were really sorry that you sorta forgot I existed for as long as you did. That you didn’t listen, that you wanted to try, you’ve said stuff like that, right?
And I’m a pretty good kid, right? I’m easier than some of the others so that’s why I didn’t get as much attention, right?
All the not listening you did and the ignoring me and everything? I forgive you for that and I think I understand but what I really need you to do is take all that credit and all the brownie points and all the listening and attention I’m due and bundle it all up and take this to heart in a big way:
GO. Run.
Leave Kennet for anywhere else.”
In the early chapters of Pale proper that I read, Avery did have some anxieties about how easily she disappeared into the cracks of her large, loud family. It was also suggested that she had an easier time making the "don't think about me" spell work on her parents on account of this groundwork already being in place.
Anyway, while this letter is very cryptic with regards to where she's going and what's been happening, it definitely communicates her complicated feelings for her family pretty well. Wanting to (potentially) end things on a positive note, insisting over and over again that her parents did nothing wrong while unable to stop herself from implying the opposite. I do wonder how likely they'd be to actually skip town at her urging, even if the letter telling them to do so came alongside a creepy lifting of mental barriers and sudden realization that one of their children is gone forever. I'm not sure what the hell I would do, in their place.
I wonder how earnest Avery was being about her vanishing potentially meaning a Good End for her and possibly the other girls. That might just have been to give her family a glimmer of hope that she's happy wherever she is and thus make them less likely to go poking after her and getting themselves killed too.
She gives them some additional bullet point bits of instruction and/or advice.
“-If an opossum shows up here or at your new digs, feed it. She likes me and she’s cool and she deserves all the cuddles and good things. Don’t let my siblings torment her.
-If anyone named Zed or Nicolette or Ray ask for anything or say anything then listen.
-Matthew and Edith are dangerous, I think. They said they’d keep me safe and if you’re reading this then they didn’t.
-I’ve left a letter for Ms. Hardy. Please deliver it.”
Is the opossum she speaks of the entity known as Sundrop or Snowdrop or whatever it was? I think it might be. I remember it being an animal familiar of some kind.
Don't remember Zed, Nicolette, or Ray.
Matthew and Edith were the very nice and helpful couple whose backstory felt a little creepier and darker to me than it did to the characters at least at the time. If they're now believed (though not absolutely known) to be dangerous, well, that doesn't terribly surprise me.
Postscript is mostly stuff that should have gone in the scriptscript, but given the emotional difficulty of organizing and writing a letter like this I won't judge Avery too hard.
“I love you all, my messy, terrible, glorious thunderstorm of a family. Rowan needs to step it up for Laurie. Stop faffing about and go to school and be a guy that deserves her because she’s going to face the world at a run and you’ll get left behind if you aren’t careful. She’s cool.
Declan needs to be nicer to girls and everyone in this family needs to make sure of that. I’ve been thinking a lot about what sports mean to me and I really hope that if video games are the same thing for you that you can find all the enjoyment in the world in them.
Kerry you have the best laugh and I can’t remember a great moment with the family without your laugh as part of it so keep it up.
Sheridan, you had my back when it counted and I can’t tell you what it means to me, or how it changed the idea of what family is in my head. You get so down on yourself but you’re so so so much better and cooler than you think you are. You’re clever and funny and cool and the big problem is that you’re smart enough to think of all the reasons why not to or what could go wrong. Keep being you and take some leaps of faith for my sake, ok?
Mom & Dad, most of this letter is for you but to give you another paragraph: I have no regrets. You did nothing wrong here, to play into my disappearing or whatever else happened. All my memories of growing up and the hours-long round trips to Olivia and homeschooling and birthday parties and everything are just so jam packed with good memories I know that if I get the chance I’m going to want to do a lot of the same things for my kids way down the road so take that for what it’s worth.
Sorry this is so rambly. It’s so hard. Every sentence makes me want to write two more that contradict or explain and I can’t do either so I’m going to make this a big messy letter and hope it’s better than leaving you with only questions and wondering.
Give my love to Grumble. My heart feels like it could explode with love for him and yet writing a single paragraph for him is way too hard and I think you get why so maybe you can explain it to him if he needs an explanation because I can’t.
Love you all.
Avery.”
It's touching, either way. Once again, I feel like Avery is doing her best to reassure her parents they did everything right in the event that they end up reading this, but plans to hold everything they did wrong against them in the event that they don't.
Her letter to M.s Hardy is...less powerful and interesting than I'd have hoped. At least, absent context.
Moving on to Verona now. Her letter is preceded by a brief IM exchange with someone named Jeremy, who she seems to have chosen as her found family in place of Brett Hayward, Avatar of Divorce. Rather than a physical envelope left somewhere for him to find, Verona links him to a google doc that only shows a bunch of weird glyphs unless the conditions are met. Verona's got some kind of technomancy deal going on, it looks like? That's cool. Also feels appropriate to her personality; she seemed to be the most up on the engineering aspects of magic, and setting spell to software seems like it would take a very good theoretical understanding.
“Jeremy dude,
I told Lucy and Avery and a woman called Miss to pass on a password for a gallery I sent you. You’re my designated replacement if anything happens and that gallery has the big rundown. Yep, you thought you were getting to know me? That was all the tip of the iceberg, buddy.
If you don’t remember me then that’s probably because, (like the place my name refers to) I don’t really exist (anymore?). But the text should – I took a few steps for that. Quick rundown: I’m Verona, classmate or ex-classmate, creative. We were/are friends of a bizarre cat and art involved nature. There was bathing-suit-area-touching and I didn’t run screaming. You had your moments of being awkward and your moments of being cool and I was 100% down for being the passenger to that roller coaster so thanks. You had some damn manly moments for a guy who’s supposed to only be starting on the road to becoming a full fledged man.
Maybe the most important: you sent me a lot of cat pictures too and that’s a surefire way to game this system. You could have screwed up most of the stuff I just talked about and if you sent me cat pictures and if I thought you could take okay care of Avery and Lucy then I’d be like “who else!??” Theres no other consideration as I see it.
On that note? I’m writing this under the assumption that they’re there. Avery Kelly and Lucy Ellingson. No other end result is okay in my books. If they aren’t there and it’s just Miss who is giving you this password and you’re trying to decide whether you should get on board or if you’re already on board but you’re wondering how much you want to get into the Kennet stuff in particular? Don’t.
Not without Avery and Lucy. Don’t. It’s not worth it without them.
That’s all the thought I’m willing to spare to that!
Here we are. Quick and basic rundown. There’s stuff in the files and images. It’s scattered and some isn’t super well explained but you should be able to figure out who to ask to fill in the blanks.”
I'm not sure if she meant the thing with the cat pictures literally or not. She was the one with a cat totem, as I recall, so who knows what mystical resonance it might have created. Also, she's mind-whammied him very, very thoroughly and isn't sure if it will come off when the letter gets unlocked. Also, he's apparently her appointed "replacement," and unlike Avery she's good with him getting involved as long as the other two survive and are there to guide him.
I think he's around her age, or just slightly older? Idk.
“In school I realized a teacher can’t turn down or turn away your assignment if you stick to the rules and terms they set for it, along with the universal rules where you know you won’t get away with stuff. This is all basically that. You need to know and pay attention to the rules to get around them or throw the people in charge for a bit of a loop. and you need to get around them because the people making and setting up the rules are older and powerful and they’re set in their ways. This is how you screw them up.
It’s not all that easy. There are forces who’ve been studying and messing with rules since before your family was the Cliffords and actually knowing and figuring out the rules is a whole thing that can take generations to work out.
You have the tools I think. You’ve got a good heart and a good head. You’ll need to rejigger things. Put that artist part of you front and center first, okay? That part of you that can look at the page and look at a tree and figure out how to use the tool you’ve got to make that tree into something that sits on the page. Some of that’s skill and some of its practice and some of its interpretation. Everything that goes into art matters here.
I’d give you the rundown on how I think and how I do things but that would take forever and I think you’ll get the gist of it if you go through my spell notes and pictures of things. Low down, dirty reality is that if you’re reading this and I’m not around anymore then my approach wasn’t all that hot, was it?
You know how I’m a bit weird? You’re going to be dealing with a lot of weird types and if you can figure out how to think from a certain angle where you’re treating them like you treated me, I think you and them will get along well enough.”
That's definitely an interesting metaphor. The school rules and the teachers.
Very self-aware admission that he should probably avoid using her own tricks if she ended up getting herself killed with them, heh.
Unsurprisingly, Verona's letter is the shortest overall.
Lucy's message for her mother is probably the most interesting of the three, mostly on account of the things it *doesn't* do. Especially in light of her mother Jasmine's characterization in the "talk about the girls" interlude.
“There’s no way to write this letter and also keep secrets. So keep in mind that this part of the letter can’t go to the police. It has to be the business letter only.
Magic is real. All of the little things that don’t add up about me being gone don’t add up for a reason. I and Verona and Avery were each brought in to fill a spot for the local monsters, so they could say they had someone in place.
As I write this letter I am planning to go confront a woman named Edith James and her husband and possible co-conspirator with some pretty heinous things. It’s not a drug problem that’s filling up the emergency department’s waiting room, it’s the aftermath of something they did that I think they did out of greed, killing something big that was supposed to keep the balance.”
No cryptic shit, no mysterious half-explanations, no "I wish I could tell you more"s. Just full damned disclosure. Masquerade lifted.
Jasmine definitely seemed to be more trusted by her (otherwise mistrustful-to-a-fault) daughter than the other parents were by their own. More than that though, I get the sense that Jasmine's supportiveness had a somewhat clued-in nature even as far back as then. Like Lucy has been slowly letting her in on things in stages, and this deadhand letter is just a (potential) acceleration of that process.
It's a big contrast with not only the other two girls, but also with the usual YA fantasy genre expectations as a whole.
Typically of Lucy, she's more sure than the others that the suspects they have in mind are in fact guilty even before getting the final confirmation. Also, apparently whatever the Carmine Beast was killed for, it's putting local muggles in the hospital in droves.
Apparently that Hungry Chorus thing was also even worse than it sounded:
“A few hundred or thousand people across Ontario have died and they didn’t even get to be remembered afterward. Their vulnerabilities were preyed on and they were killed in a series of horrible, violent nights that went on for nearly a decade. Many of those in the know seemed to think it happened naturally, a ritual starting on its own, but it was made with greedy intentions. Everyone who died was erased and their families and classmates and friends forgot they existed. I stopped that process from happening but I don’t think I can bring those people back.
I don’t want this to end without there being justice. If I was capable of accepting any other answer then I think this might be the point I gave up. I could let Edith win, I could choose the option where I didn’t risk me dying and you having to find this letter.
I can’t. I can’t let the people who would do that get what they want and take any more power or get any more influence.
That’s why I’m going, even if there might be collateral damage. It’s why I’m writing this letter as a just-in-case.”
The candlelight necromancer duo had a hand (if not neccessarily the most active hand) in creating the Hungry Chorus. Which apparently killed thousands of people and erased their memories and records from existence.
I'm guessing this was either preparation for whatever thing they and their mysterious co-conspirator killed the Carmine Beast for, or the Beast found out what they were doing and had to be killed before it could bring the entire regional pantheon down on them.
Anyway, Lucy's main motivation is apparently to not let the bastards get away with it. Not sure what the other two are motivated by at this point. And, I guess arc 11 is where they finally crack the case that started the story? It's still less than halfway through the serial though, so I guess either they turn out to have been barking up the wrong tree with Matt and Edith or it turns out that there was another BBEG with an even bigger plot behind them.
I wish I could say more. The worldbuilding interludes are all really good and give me plenty to analyse. The plot extras...I just don't feel equipped to say much about without having read the actual story.
