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Disclaimer: This is a writer talking about something he's writing.
I struggle with 'Seizure' because it's one of the most ambitious stories I've imagined so far, and the writing process has been more sensational than technical. With 'Thicker than Water' I had a battle plan I based primarily on two pre-existing Westerns, 'The Searchers' and 'Dollars'. It was a simple, character-driven plot that I spiced with some zombies and a fistful of bullets. 'Seizure' is a whole nother beast.
For one it features something I have craved to write about for years: apotheosis.
Deity, as a concept, is not exclusive to the Abrahamic schools of theology. Many faiths and creeds recognize gods but, of those creeds, only a few defer to a "God" with a capital 'g', because, in most faiths, deities aren't beings devoid of an origin; gods are born or, parenthetically, made. Further deity doesn't guarantee a creature's benevolence. Many gods are cruel by human standards, bound by Laws so incomprehensible to Man as to seem Laws onto the gods themselves. Gods, while necessarily observant to some form of Law, some system of natural principals or elements that enable their existence, they are not defined by morality. Gods, traditionally, are defined by power, and power is defined by what can be exploited or controlled.
'Seizure' is bedrocked in organized religion, faith taken to militant, often authoritarian extremes.
For you see...LONG AGO...
A god-emperor known as Cosp the Undying waged a jihad across the known galaxy, promising an endless dawn of godhood for all slaves to "the Eternal Work", of which Cosp considered himself merely the First: but the god-emperor vanished. His pan-galactic caliphate, headless, fell; the gateways--from whence the bounty of a thousand worlds flowed into the heart of empire---Cargula, the golden city--were broken; and the fu'raaz-adi, the slave-sorcerers that arm and govern the Eternal Work, splintered into two factions. At war to this very day.
The empire's reformed theocracy, La Respiracion, is governed by the descendant of the first governor of Cargula hand-picked by Cosp Himself, the emperor interim and head of the church, the Gran Saa'cri-adi.
The empire's entire governing structure is slave-based, the slaves systematically "offered" to the theocracy by the populace. Families that submit their children are taxed less exorbitantly than those that refuse an official inspection and induction of a prospective sorcerer into the ministry. Children from the same families or communities are instructed in separate temples to strengthen their divorce from their former lives; there they are disciplined and tested. Those few who survive exposure to a Fu'Raaz-adi's remains, who successfully bond with their eldritch implants, are raised to sorcerers.* To stop the implants from devastating their bodies, the sorcerers of La Respiracion must take daily doses of elixir, as vital as it is addictive. The supply, naturally, controlled by the Gran Saa'cri-adi, its means and synthesis brutally guarded.
To expand the theocracy, more eldritch implants are required, more children sacrificed, but a cult of sorcerer heretics, the Corloks, are terrorizing the empire. Whereas the empire's slaves are voluntarily gifted to the theocracy, the Corloks take them. Stealing the choicest children, the ones most likely to survive an implant, from their very beds, and leaving the emperor's citizens nothing to protect them but the dregs. The children abducted do not require elixirs to safely bond to their implants, and, once indoctrinated into the blasphemies of the brotherhood, these Corloks are able to uncover and ransack holy sites, sabotage the theocracy, and assassinate its agents, their central tenet being the destruction of "the grand heresy", La Respiracion: and so the holy war between Cosp chosen servants and their sworn enemies is waged: but La Respiracion schemes of a way to perfect its slaves, and end the arms race forever.
Its success is in the hands of a THIEF.
Did I mention this is all being done in one 120+ page script? I've got about 20 pages of the first draft knocked out, with about 40 pages of the outline already sketched. I mention all of this really as a means of holding myself accountable; it's a reference for when I'm not meeting my own expectations (which happens often).
The story's inspirations include:
'Mistborn', 'Elantris', 'The Lies of Locke Lamora', 'Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand', 'Ocean's 11', 'The Third Man', 'Thief: the Dark Project', 'Thief: the Metal Age', 'Dune', fiction by Jack Vance, fiction by Robert Chambers
*The sorcerers have four distinct classes, which the Caserias, the thieves guilds, refer to as: gasps, shades, feasters, and wares.
Gasps or"betegogs": Beastmancers, they can pour their conscience or "soul" into another living creature to posses them, typically a familiar, an animal that's been raised to be tractable to partial or complete possession by its master.
Shades or "tenegogs": shadowmancers, they can bend shadows to form interdimensional portals.
Feasters: Gastromancers, they can consume the flesh of another being to assume its sensory memories, ex. eating the eyeball of a corpse will betray what it saw in its last few moments; a tongue what it said, etc. Feasters dominate law enforcement.
Wares: A sorcerer that can intuit the eldritch powers hidden in another sorcerer. They're basically a walking "Detect Magic" spell, and they're damnably rare.