Notes
This story was, at all times, at risk of becoming way too long. There are three major storylines running through each other and I had no choice but to devote the first three chapters to entirely new characters and ideas. Even more (much smaller) ideas developed along the way, and I couldn’t cut out all of them without losing the heart of the story.
The idea for this “magic system” came to me long ago. (In fact, my brain invents a new type of magic, using the phrase “wouldn’t it be interesting if … ?”, seemingly every day.) The idea of being able to keep your life, your age, your appearance, something about yourself the same forever. To pick your best day and say “this is how I want it to be, always”.
It’s such a potent and interesting idea, that I wanted to explore it in more ways than just one. I originally planned a much shorter and more “predictable” short story around it, but that just wouldn’t do! That’s how this story ended up with so many different characters and ideas.
I hope it was still fun and easy to read, without ever overwhelming. I feel I’ve become better at that over the years, but I can never really shut off my hyperactive brain.
The Discovery of Fire
We don’t know much about the discovery of fire. It’s hard enough to find ashes or burn marks indicating fire thousands of years later. To prove that it was a controlled fire, or even created on demand, is even harder.
We do know that it was invented very early. As the story shows, fire has many advantages. Warmth. More energy from your food intake. Protection against wolves in the night. And, over time, the possibility of advanced tools to make progress even faster.
As the story also shows, humans likely used fire way before they could make it. Fires occur naturally, due to thunder, due to consistent heat and dry spells. The first step is to realize you can use it, and then that you can keep it burning.
Once humans have been around fire long enough, it’s quite conceivable that they experimented and figured out more of its properties. What if I put another stick into it? What if I hold my hand over it? Which materials burn and which don’t? Oops, I dropped my mammoth meat into the fire, wait, why does it taste so good?
The explanation I give in the story is just one possible explanation. While working with stones, trying to chip flintstone into primitive tools, you get sparks. By accident, one might set something on fire. Or, in the dark and the cold, the sparks stand out more and people start to investigate.
This does feel more likely, though, than invention of fire through friction. More specifically, rubbing wooden sticks and stones together.
(Or, for another example, maybe you have held a rope at some point in your life. And gotten painful hands, or even serious burns, when it rapidly slipped over your skin. Well, that’s friction. Two surfaces rubbing over each other, yanking each other’s particles apart, and as they snap back, a significant release of heat.)
The concept of friction, and that it creates sufficient heat for a fire, is something that feels too advanced for prehistoric humans.
Sure, I wanted to handle friction in this story too, but there simply was not logical/natural place for it. Animals that can barely talk to each other, that have just learned about fires, and you’re explaining the intricacies or friction? I can get away with a bit of magic, and Alix being supernaturally smart, but there are limits!
Heat Energy
The main type of energy discussed in this story is “heat energy” (or “thermal energy”). Because the storylines needed so much time, I couldn’t dive into it as much as in other stories, but that is fine. It is, after all, one of the simpler energy types.
Things that are hotter contain more energy.
Done. Lesson over. You can go now ;)
More specifically, we imagine everything is made up out of tiny atoms. I say “imagine” because we can’t see them or show them easily, but we have of course proven many things about atoms and even smaller particles in the modern day.
Your body is just a large bundle of tiny particles that are connected. Not with glue, or wires, or by soldering the particles together. No, there is actually a lot of space between those particles. In fact, you can say that any object is mostly … nothing. For simplicity, you might imagine particles are connected like magnets—they don’t need a physical connection to still influence each other and stay close to each other.
That empty space between them comes in handy, though, because particles vibrate. They do so all the time. All those atoms are always twisting and turning and moving. Somewhat similar to how Earth is also always twisting and moving, but we just don’t notice it because we’re moving in exactly the same way with it.
The faster particles vibrate, the higher the temperature of the object.
For most materials, you can’t really see this with the naked eye. A cup of tea that’s blisteringly hot looks exactly the same as a cup of tea that’s been in the freezer for a while. It’s not like a hotter cup is going to dance all over your table because of the shaking atoms.
However, as you know, if something gets too hot, it melts instead. (Perhaps to prevent the same of losing its cool and dancing all over the table.) The particles vibrate so rapidly that they can’t sustain their bonds, so it stops being a solid and it becomes fluid. Particles fly around and you can easily break or split the thing. (If they get even hotter, they become a gas.)
Heat energy is, shall we say, expensive. Reluctant.
It takes a lot of fuel to heat a home, for example. That’s why it’s a prime target for tackling climate change: better insulation, more efficient heaters, it would mean a lot.
(As I write this, our home is being renovated and we thus have no central heating … in the middle of the winter. We have to keep ourselves, and our machines, from freezing with electrical heaters. Regularly, when someone turns on/plugs in a new (small!) heater, our entire electricity network cuts out. This doesn’t happen with any other device. That’s how much power those things require!)
Why is this? Because heat is constantly being transferred. It constantly tries to “equalize” everything. If you put a hot item into a cold bath, it will quickly start giving away its warmth to the water, until they’re both equal temperature. Similarly, if you put a cold item into a hot room, it will warm up while the room itself cools down.
That’s conservation of energy. If something cools down, well, that energy has to go somewhere. It can’t just be lost. In most cases, it just means its surroundings heat up, until they’re at an equilibrium.
In other words, heat energy is a constant battle to keep in your grasp, whatever you do. Just like life is a constant battle of ups and downs, for highs amidst the lows …
To make this a little more fantastical, I introduced ideas like the firebirds. They actually take in (fire) heat and convert that energy into something else themselves.
Greece & City States
When I invented the Saga of Life, I was ~11 years old. At the time, I was one of those kids who read an encyclopedia for fun, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp on general history and biology. This has been proven a major, arrogant oversight ;)
As I grew up, as I came back to the Saga with adult eyes and actually wrote the next cycles, I realized many initial assumptions and worldbuilding of mine didn’t fit reality at all.
The godchildren are an example of this. They are clearly based on the idea of Ancient Greece. They follow their general timeline (with laws, advancements, location) and are exterminated too in a similar fashion to how the Romans did it in our real history.
To my younger ignorant self, Ancient Greece was this epitome of civilization. They invented democracy! They had all these geniuses inventing things! They were free, they were prosperous, they were the first “true civilization” (ha, ha ha), damn the Romans that killed them!
And yes, Ancient Greece did a lot of good things. I still think this “interpretation” with the godchildren works in most cases and I continued with it. But they were absolutely flawed in many ways, repeating the mistakes of many “true civilizations” that came way earlier.
One such “mistake” is explored in this story, by Prebuha mostly. The idea of “divide and conquer”. The idea that, if you give a large number of people a vote on everything, and you build your nation out of a large number of smaller provinces, then everything will work out! Everybody debates, they reach perfect compromises, and everyone is happy! Democracy!
Greece cut itself into many city states, each with independent rule. The result was the same as with any other civilization, such as Sumer that had all these independent cities with their own “godly rulers” fighting over an area the size of a stamp. People disagree. People fight for more land. Somebody makes a play for more territory, perhaps because of disagreement on some earlier issue, and this kicks off that endless cycle of vengeance. Winning wars, losing wars, and nobody actually progresses.
Most wars, most strife, most problems in history were civil wars and family affairs. Multiple groups or cities that belonged together turning on each other. Sumer succumbed to it. Greece did. The Roman Republic did. (And Ancient Egypt followed as a result.) It is, unfortunately, not unthinkable that it happens again in our lifetime. Civil war in the United States, for example, has been brewing, and it fits the characteristics of that cycle perfectly.
And so, as I continued planning and writing the Saga of Life, I leaned more into the dysfunctional side of the family of godchildren. Their thrones weren’t just some fun invention anymore, they were the heart of their own “city state”, were they increasingly prefer their own laws and ideas over whatever Ardex or Bella thinks everyone should do.
My younger self thought Greece had it all figured out. Now I know they had figured out some things, but the only times they really “united” was against a common enemy (Persians and later Romans). Hence, my choice to keep the godchildren as a mirror image of Ancient Greece. Hence, the buildup to the First Conflict era of the Saga of Life.