Vigor Mortis (part three)

Okey dokey, time to read chapters four and five and bring this review to a close. So far this story has done a lot to interest me, but also a lot to annoy me, so chapters 4-5 are going to end up either making it or breaking it for my final assessment.

On one hand, this is a long serial, and the only reason my cutoff point is here specifically is because that's what's been commissioned, so my feelings by the end of this post might well be unrepresentative of the story as a whole. On the other hand, five chapters should be enough time for a story to hook you, and I assume that there's a reason the commissioner decided to end it at this point specifically.

That's not to say I'm expecting to be disappointed. Like I said, "Vigor Mortis" has done some interesting things, and if it seems to be developing them in a satisfying way leading up to this cutoff point then It will have earned my praise.

Anyway, Vita - following Lyn's advice - just ate Grig's soul and then (almost literally) flushed his body down the toilet. She's got a dual metabolism now, with a magical neuromusculature that supplements her physical body, and is hiding in Lyn's basement to avoid detection and/or deadly accidents. The story made a point of introducing us to Grig's family before this, so the question of how they'll manage without him is probably going to be important. So, let's continue!

Chapter Four: Still Warm​

The chapter starts with Vita in the little dug-out hollow under Lyn's shack, being approached by Rowan the street performer. We haven't really gotten to know Rowan yet; he's part of the gang, and he trades bread for pennies, but beyond that he's basically just been in the background. Now, he's inspecting Vita bemusedly as he listens to her and Lyn's reports.

Vita is attracted to Rowan, incidentally. Also, "it's a secret to no one" that Rowan and Lyn are a thing, which is a weird way of putting it that makes it sound like an open secret. Not sure why it's any kind of secret at all, though, tbh. Also, Rowan and Lyn are both notably better fed than Vita and the other kids under their ostensible protection, suggesting that they might not be totally equitable in how food gets shared around. Then again, I'm still sort of unsure about how much the kids actually help with the stealing and begging and so forth. Or how many, if any, of them are really "in" the gang, for that matter.

Anyway, Rowan apparently has a bit of doctrinal knowledge (maybe he does his juggling or mime acts at sermon half-times sometimes). He reaffirms what we learned before, about animancy and its offshoot necromancy being illegal, and natural animantic talents being completely unheard of (though once again, we don't know how much time and space they have records from), and adds more information. Some of which feels kind of awkward, like its stuff that Vita should already know, but still useful to the reader. Animancy is illegal both due to religious beliefs about the soul being the domain of the Mistwatcher alone and therefore not for mortals to play with, and because of the unique threats it poses to society. Necromancy might have the most public stigma due to it being nasty to look at, but the other applications of animancy - mind control, personality sculpting, memory manipulation, etc - are actually prosecuted much more harshly at least by the secular authorities.

Then...okay, this is just a bad scene. Vita is asking all these questions about different types of magic and what they do and how they're used, and Rowan is answering them all, with these really long, erudite, technical answers. Some of the questions Vita asks have answers that she's already told us in previous chapters, like "what is biomancy used for?" But here she's asking, and phrasing the questions as if she actually doesn't know. It's all clearly for the audience's benefit, with no thought to the characters. As a result of this, Vita is suddenly in "what is aura?" territory, while Rowan the near-penniless street juggler is apparently academically educated about the history and process of magical research. Like, he's clearly just reciting the author's worldbuilding notes, with Vita temping as the Q of a QnA page.

Half of it isn't even relevant to the situation at hand.

After the terrible exposition is finally over, Rowan and Lyn tell Vita that she should probably not use her powers anymore if they require her to kill people. Not because they don't think there are people around worth killing, but simply because of how much attention a string of necromantic murders and/or undead mysteriously turning up is likely to bring down. However, Vita thinks it would be a shame to not use her unique abilities since she has them. And so Rowan tells her to go experiment on animals. Um. Okay.

Then this happens:

““Good. Now let’s go. I wanna see what you do. You got a preference for which pest to kill?”

I think about that for a bit. What sort of animal would I want to serve eternally in my loyal undead army?

”What about crows?”

Rowan smiles knowingly, standing up to exit the hideout. I blush a little. I might sleep with a stuffed crow still. It’s not weird.

”Crows, huh? Why crows? Might be a little hard to catch ‘em.”

”I just... like crows,” I protest meekly.

”...So you want to kill them and mess with their souls? Should Lyn and I be worried?”

My face goes white.

”N-no! That’s not what I mean at all!”

”Kidding, Vita,” Rowan says with a laugh, tousling my hair. “Crows could be good practice. They’re smarter than most pests. I’d question how long a crow zombie would actually be able to fly, but... well, we can’t let you leave undead around anyway, okay? That could be really bad.””

I *think* this is supposed to show us that Vita is a little "off" in a way that compliments her powers, or perhaps is being corrupted by them due to the soul-consumption. I think. The alternative is that the author just does not understand animals or people's fondness for animals.

Rowan and Vita leave Lyn and go hunting for crows so Vita can zombify them and eat their souls out of love. As they walk, Rowan casts a silence spell around themselves so that they can keep talking about spooky stuff without anyone hearing. Then, when they reach the alley full of crows, he conjures some illusionary food to lure them in, and then kills one with a fire spell when Vita isn't fast enough to grab it.

So, Rowan is an actual wizard. Like, a trained, educated one. In fact, he's a licensed one; before firebolting that crow, he tells Vita not to tell anyone about this, because he's licensed to use illusion magic but not pyromancy.

-____-

...

In chapter one, our introduction to Rowan was this:

“I make my way through the winding alleyways and pop out where I know Rowan has set up shop. He’s a con man and expert gambler. Where Lyn steals the stuff we need to survive, Rowan makes all the cash. Despite his questionably legal business model, however, he’s careful not to get a bad reputation.

He’s just running cups, because as smart as he is, he isn’t always that creative. Ball goes under a cup, cups spin around, he palms the ball into a new cup if he wants them to lose and doesn’t if he doesn’t. It’s a classic game, though he spices it up with juggles and fancy twists for the show. I sidle in behind his stall, giving him his half of the bread.”

This educated, multidisciplinary wizard squats in a shack and does the ball-and-cups trick for a living.

And he doesn't even rig the game using magic, just sleight of hand.

...actually, why would anyone ever gamble money against someone they don't know in this world? Minor magical talents are common, and varied. There are no ends of ways that someone could use their quirk to cheat unless you already know what they can do. How does this line of work exist at all?

Also, nothing that Rowan says or does in this chapter gets a surprised reaction out of Vita. If Rowan being an undercover wizard was a surprise twist or something, that would be one thing, but Vita and Lyn are both being written as if they're completely used to this.

I guess when Vita told us he was a street gambler and performer before, she just decided to omit him being a full-fledged wizard? She told us that he was doing the cup game because despite his smarts he lacks the creativity to come up with something better, but didn't feel like mentioning that he's also a legally certified wizard but is apparently not creative enough to monetize that either?

Was she just playing a prank on the audience? Am I supposed to imagine her making a trollface at the camera right now?

I went back through the previous chapters looking for all previous mentions of Rowan to make sure I hadn't missed something. Nope.

This is so fucking jarring I don't even.

...

So, Rowan kills a crow. Vita takes its soul. Or at least, she claims to. She is an unreliable narrator and her description of events don't necessarily correlate to the events that actually happened. Also, this is a story written in first person perspective, so the "events" have no existence outside of Vita's retelling. What are these words on my screen, and what do they signify? Also, life is meaningless and we're all just wasting time waiting for ourselves to die. Vita removes the tiny, shardlike animal soul of the raven and puts a fragment of her own soul in its corpse. It becomes a mindless zombie, shuffling across the ground toward Rowan and trying to scratch and peck him until Vita tells it to stop. Next, she fuses that fragment of herself she zombified it with back with its own soul that she's still carrying. The zombie crow becomes a revenant crow, complete with all its memories and instincts from life. It flies at Rowan and tries to go for his eyes before Vita tells it to stop.

I'd wonder why the crow revenant has the undead rage thing going on while Grig didn't, but nothing established by the narrative necessarily has any bearing on future events so I know there's no reason to bother caring. Just to drive this point home, Vita asks Rowan about undead aggression and whether her own soul has some sort of demonic compulsion in it that's tainting her creations, and he reassures her that all undead are just like this as far as he knows. And then, she doesn't mention Grig having been an exception to this. In fact, she doesn't even think of this contradiction herself in her internal monologue. Has the author forgotten? Maybe. It could also be that Vita is trollfacing at the camera again. Good thing the story has taught me not to care about it, or this omission might have confused me.

She experiments more, testing the revenant-crow's instincts and her ability to reign them in via commands. It seems to still act like a normal crow besides being obedient to her and violent toward anyone else. Then we get this gem:

““Okay,” I agree with a nod. “Question first, though. How does Lyn’s threat sense thing work? I spiked on it when I ate the last soul. Why? I don’t want to set that kind of thing off.”

Rowan tilts his head a bit.

”When you ate…? Well, martial types like Lyn get all kinds of pseudo-magic crap, and it’s long been theorized that the stuff they do comes from the same kind of energy that makes souls work.”

Apparently, Lyn the street thief is a "martial type." Who gets "pseudomagical crap" type abilities by virtue of being a martial type.

It's literally just fourth edition D&D flavor text, except it's not even being delivered the way a character in the Nentir Vale would explain it. Or even the way the game manuals would explain it. It's being delivered the way a pop-culture-fantasy-jaded DM introducing a pop-culture-fantasy-jaded new player to the character classes would explain it.

...

The good news is that my newfound apathy has been broken through, and the story has managed to make me feel something again.

The bad news is that you all will need to hold on a second so I can relocate from the living room to the bedroom, where I'm further away from the kitchen knives.

...

Vita experiments on some other vermin, and then wolfs down their souls and hides the bodies before leaving with Rowan. Vita jokes that she at least might be able to subsist on bird and rat souls instead of food so there will be more for the others. Rowan thinks for a moment, and tells her that he'll see if he can find a better job for her within the gang. Because he's just thought of a use for her powers? No, just because. He's musing about ways he could use an assistant for his stupid carnival game scams.

Why wasn't she already doing this, if he thought it would be more useful than having her steal bread?

Why doesn't he have urchins climbing over themselves to help with this, if he thinks it would be worth his while to have someone helping with it?

Rowan brings her to one of his spots and has her help him with an unspecified scam. No description of what they're doing or how. Vita just tells us that they do it, and that it's kinda fun and she turns out to be good at it, with Rowan sending her silent instructions using the message cantrip as she works. Granted, bringing her to help with a scam immediately after the necromancy experiments with nothing in between and no training or even teaching in between is implausible enough that I suspect Vita is making this whole part up.

They move from location to location, doing their scam carnival games. Then they see a uniformed templar headed their way. Or so Vita claims. End chapter.

Chapter Five: Yellow Sky
​

The templar walks up to Rowan and demands to see his kynamancy (illusion) license. Rowan, very chagrined, produces it, which means that everyone within earshot now knows that he's an illusionist and are therefore no longer willing to play his scam games. Except that with wild talents being a common thing, being a licensed mage doesn't even...eh, forget it. The templar, who seems to have been intending to do this, smirks after seeing the license and walks away, forcing Rowan and Vita to relocate again.

...

So, that was a pointless fakeout. Red herring cliffhangers can be fun, but this one didn't advance the story or introduce an important character or anything like that. It was just a fake cliffhanger to have a fake cliffhanger, like the author was afraid people would stop reading if she didn't. Well, to be fair, if I were her I'd be afraid of people giving up after chapter four too, so the desperation is understandable.

Also...did that Templar know Rowan? If not, why did he think Rowan was practicing illusion magic? I guess he used his Detect Magic ability and sensed Rowan using message on Vita? That's the only thing I can think of, because his scams are otherwise nonmagical.

What if Rowan had just told the Templar that he has a natural telepathy quirk? It was previously established during the magibabble dialogues that the schools of magic are just descriptive best-fit categories and that wild talents sometimes but not always mirror learnable wizard spells, so the Templar shouldn't be able to distinguish between the two.

...

They head home after the cop encounter. Vita informs us, five chapters in, that the sky in this world is yellow. It also glows, without a sun, except for when stormclouds block it out. "Night" happens when another island happens to fly over this one and shadow it from the sky. The islands' movements are regular, though, so this place gets six hours of night every...well, she actually doesn't tell us how often these conjunctions happen, but presumably its regular and frequent enough for human circadian rhythms to keep up with.

Interesting worldbuilding, but - once again - bad presentation: the way Vita explains this is as if she's expecting us to find this unusual, rather than sounding like a native of this world with no other frame of reference. A familiar problem, by this point.

They make it back to the shack, and...okay, this is actually some nice descriptive prose. As well as a more interesting day/night cycle than I was expecting, now that she's explaining the whole thing in detail:

“Cragscar is one of hundreds… well, probably more like thousands? Maybe more? Anyway, it’s one of many islands that fly through the sky on the same predictable orbits. Just over eight hours after Craigscar passes over, the Mist Thimble will bring four hours of darkness and rain as it floats overhead. The Mist Thimble is particularly beautiful, a sort of bucket-shaped island with streams of water which pour constantly out from its sides. I’ve always wondered how it never runs out. It casts great rainbows when viewed from a distance, and the showers of warm water it pounds on the streets can be a beautifully welcome sight to the many people like me who’ve had to fight for a fresh drink. Twenty hours after Mist Thimble leaves, another island will pass over, and so on. Countless islands are visible just by looking up during the day, and I have absolutely no way of knowing how many are below our island. I’ve never been anywhere near the edge, and if I try to talk to a scholar or something I’ll probably get my ass kicked by the city guards. I doubt I’d even believe there was an edge if there weren’t... you know, sky islands flying around everywhere.”

So, multi-day (by our reckoning) periods between conjunctions, with multiple islands passing overhead and causing "night times" of variable length, as well as periodic "rains" when they pass under the waterfall island. That's really cool!

On the other hand, does Rowan not count as a "scholar?" Even if he isn't, is the total number of known islands really such esoteric information that this generally well-informed guy doesn't have a good chance of knowing it?

Vita does some silent philosophical musing about whether her own existence as a soul-eater is inherently harmful, whether gifts really do come from the Mistwatcher and - if so - whether that means that necromancy isn't actually blasphemous, or that her gift is unique and granted by a completely different entity. It's decent, as philosophical musing goes. Vita also shows herself to be more sceptical and rationally minded than you'd expect of someone with her background. Notably, she's able to isolate the statements "all gifts come from the Mistwatcher" and "the Mistwatcher hates necromancy" and conclude that her existence means that at least one of those two statements must be false. It doesn't sound like such an impressive leap when I describe it in retrospect, but her ability to demark specific premises and arrange them into something like propositional logic is actually pretty remarkable for someone with no education.

She climbs into the little hollow she's moved into, and hugs her one toy - a little stuffed crow named Rosco, one of the only things she owns - against herself. She tries an experiment, and puts a soul-shard of herself inside of the toy. Sure enough, it gains a very crude, limited sort of mobility; she can cast animate objects as well as animate dead with those unfused soul shards. She cries herself to sleep hugging her animated toy.

In the middle of the night she wakes up to a sensation like a giant, alien tongue sweeping over her body. A shadowy entity fills the room. As Vita lays paralyzed in fear, the entity sucks the soul-shard out of Rosco and then phases away through the floor, retreating down into the mists below the island to consume what it scavenged. End chapter.


The author clearly has a good story to tell. The moral and existential philosophy threads are very much worth following, and the story is engaging with them intelligently and clearly. The fantasy worldbuilding is really good and creative, at least when it isn't ripping off Dungeons and Dragons. The problem is that she's a bad writer.

This is exactly the type of situation where I ring the "get a coauthor!" bell. I think this author could co-write some really amazing stuff if she had a partner who can communicate her ideas while covering for her shortcomings as a storyteller.

Unfortunately, as it is, this story is borderline unreadable.