What's Your (Magic) Type?

Magic steeps the setting of Blightshade. Witches live among humans and commonplace enchantments shape the world. Each of the eight types of magic has strengths, weaknesses, and a manifestation of an associated plant like lily of the valley, iris, yarrow, or nightshade. Magic passes through family lines. Dominant magical traits are common. Recessive magics are rare—either prized or hated.

But this magic system wasn’t built to power a world. It was built to challenge one relationship.

“Rather than asking who will run through your novel’s preordained gauntlet […] figure out who you will be building that gauntlet to test.”

This is how Lisa Cron, author of Story Genius, uses a story’s world to target her protagonist’s weak points and force the character to show us what they’re really made of. In the same way, the magic system of Blightshade evolved to underscore the relationship between the main character Lorne and his brother Tahj.

• Lorne’s rare Curse Crafting alienates him from others with kinder, more powerful magics. Out of place with his family, Lorne rejects everyone before they can reject him.

• Tahj’s Charging magic is a warm and generous power that never serves it’s own wielder. Tahj gives everything to convince Lorne he belongs, even at the cost of Tahj’s own wellbeing.

It may seem small to build an entire magic system on a single pair of brothers, but then how difficult would it be to repair a broken relationship with the weight of the world pressing down on the cracks.

Eight distinct magic types power the world of Blightshade. Are you a Glamour witch, creating beauty out of nothing? A Healer, outpacing disease and death? A Clairvoyant, peering through the mist of the future?

Blightshade is Alison Wright's dark fantasy debut following Lorne, a vain witch with corrupted magic. Lorne's quest for a cure will expose his diseased powers, entangle his fate in a knot of unstable relationships, and force him to face the very monster that blighted him.