The Writer Within: Developing the Amüli: Part Two

Happy Friday and welcome to the second installment of Developing the Amüli. Let's get started!

"So," you may ask, "when did amüli become humanoid? And more importantly, why?"

It was always very important to me to have the reason for the amüli changing to more human forms be something we could accept and understand and not a just because reason. After all, being a giant bird with a barbed proboscis seems pretty awesome, right? I'd love to be one.

Well, it would be awesome if the average life expectancy wasn't 25 years. Less, if you cast magic often, and when you can only give birth to one surviving egg out of every clutch, well. Life as a human seems much more fruitful, doesn't it?

One good rule of thumb for writing a book--especially a fantasy book--is to have one unique thing about your world, and have everything after that be a direct result of that one unique thing (the wonderful Jeff Altabef mentioned that once, and though I didn't know him at the start of The Amüli Chronicles, I honestly believe that it's true). Inrugia may seem to be a mess of unique and strange laws and events, but I promise you, all of those came from one core event: The deities lending life to amüli, ekra, and denrana.

Because the deities lent life, it was expected to be returned. Each time an amüli cast magic in the pre-Transition era (which requires the power of one of the three deities to be passed through the soul), part of that life force was taken back. The more one cast, the shorter one's life became. Few amüli ever lived past their 30th year, and for ekra and the denrana (later denayn), 30 years was a long, long time to survive. Magic couldn't even be written out of one's life. An amüli without magic didn't survive long on Inrugia; before the Transition, amüli were mortal, and thus survived according to the law of mortal wounds.

Another issue was how fickle the deities were when offering life. As I mentioned above, an amüli would be lucky if one egg out of a given clutch was offered life and hatched. This meant the amüli population, and therefore ekra (as ekra are literally built from the bones and tissue of recently dead animals), were strictly controlled by the deities. Namely, Batrisk, whose life-giving powers outshone those of his siblings. It was he the amüli most often sought to bless their eggs with life, and he who most often refused. Matrisk could give life, but hatchlings rarely survived long, and Katrisk could heal, but not actually give life.

With the amüli population declining at a steady pace and magic becoming more and more useful over the centuries, the amüli people needed some way around the blood price (the price owed the deities in return for life).

Centuries earlier, the denrana had attempted to find a way around their strict and short mortal lives, but their change had resulted in them becoming denayn, literally soul-eaters. They could no longer survive without devouring the souls of other Inrugian creatures, and the amüli were acutely aware of the consequences of trying to outsmart the deities and ignore paying the blood price.

Still, they yearned for more. They yearned, and not just for longer lifespans, but immortality, and thanks to Draemyn Pex, they were given it. Immortality came at a cost, however, and at first, amüli who survived the Transition were shocked to find they had mouths, fleshy, soft skin, and no longer looked the same as they had before. This was believed to be the only price for immortality for a long time, and most were content to appear ugly and humanoid in exchange for an everlasting life.

The Transition was a period of time roughly two thousand years ago when amüli souls were given over to human hosts on Earth (these hosts were later called "Soulbound humans," or "Soulbound"). Because an amüli's soul was no longer within its body, an amüli could cast magic without restraint. Aging still occurred, but wounds that would have once killed an amüli no longer did. Beheading, gutting, even a stab to the heart or brain wouldn't cause more than a bit of irreversible pain, maybe some brain damage, but so long as the soul wasn't hurt, the amüli could survive and heal from just about anything.

At the same token, magic, which had always been dangerous, became more so once amüli souls were removed from their bodies. It no longer caused instant death, but magically inflicted wounds could no longer be healed. The body was scarred with pock marks and boils, and the wound would weep and spread, eventually striking either the heart or the soul-casing (the empty organ where the soul once was held). Once the infection struck either of those places, the amüli became Soulless.

You'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what being Soulless means, though! ;)

What do you think of this twist on mortality and immortality? Do you test mortality in your own works? Let me know in the comments below!