Sartorias-deles: The Underlying Concept

 The overall story arc, more than fifty years in the making, focuses a generation of kids with remarkable abilities who are born into extraordinary times; the secondary focus is their changing world.

The first set of stories are adventures, mostly with kids, who deal with some fairly hot action. Just as they are beginning to see a pattern emerging, and to look at the world—and what’s happening—in broader terms, they meet kids at least as extraordinary as themselves.

Unfortunately, those kids are enemies. That second arc of stories, The Rise of the Alliance, takes place when they come up against a group of boys who have been trained at least as well as them—or better—basically takes them through their teen years. The adventures they undergo as they come of age not only test talents, but moral and ethical dilemmas, responsibility, power, and all the permutations of friendship and love. And hatred.

The third arc, The Norsunder War, tests all to their limits, causing profound changes, and the insights that come of it when war is brought to the world. Norsunder has been waiting for millennia for the emergence not just of magic again, but a certain very powerful element exclusive to that world, and this time they will do it right.

The new adults experience adventure, humor, terror, heroic action—sacrifice—uneasy alliances, beauty, love. The great dance of time, and consequence, and meaning alters their focus, and one of the subthemes is what makes a family, particularly when life circumstances have guaranteed that some will always walk the borders of what culture calls normal.

And so the fourth arc concerns them as adults, with adult responsibilities in their post-war world. Governmental evolution and influence. Mannered societies, in which brilliance expresses itself by making life a form of art. Is the human spirit immutable? Weapons can sometimes be clashes of philosophy. Peacetime reformation. Skirlings of action here and there, as the detritus of the dark times tumbles down the timestream. Contemplation—and power. The clear passions of childhood are imbued with complexity—and the concomitant degrees of intensity. Some have children of their own, and their perspective must change yet again as they raise those children to… what? A look into the great unknown.