Bonus Content: Playlist, Worldbuilding, and Edits Announcement

Hello everyone!

First a big thanks to everyone has read all the way to this point! I'm super grateful for all of your comments and votes in the polls!

Now, onto the fun stuff:

Playlist:

Here are some songs that helped inspire the Queen's Mage!

Serali/ Allandra Shipping Songs:

The Moon Will Sing, by The Crane Wives

Come Alive, by Beth Crowley

How Lovely, by Reinairy

War of Hearts, by Ruelle

What are We Waiting For, by Ruelle

Other:

Persephone, by Daisy the Great (how Avalusia sees Serali)

W.I.T.C.H, by Devon Cole (Serali, Allandra, Verya and Allandra

Kings and Queens, by Ava Max (Allandra)

Call them Brothers, by Regina Spektor (Allandra and Hagen's relationship, plus their grief about their parents)

Worldbuilding/ Lore

I thought it might be cool to share some of my original notes about the world of The Queen's Mage, for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing.

The Sun Fae of Avalusia:

Called: Avalusians/ Sun Fae

Language: Solvari.

The Avalusian tongue is called Solvari, from "sol" (sun) and "vari" (voice or speech). It is a flowing, vowel-rich language with a melodic cadence, and its written form uses a script of curved, looping characters that resemble stylized flames and waves. Solvari shares some roots with the older Faerie tongue, though most of those original words have been lost or transformed over thousands of years.

Regional dialects exist within Avalusia. The coastal dialect spoken in Myrae and the surrounding port towns is the most widely understood, used in court and official documents. Inland communities, particularly in the agricultural heartlands, speak a slower, more clipped version with distinct vocabulary for farming and seasons. The far southern dialect is the most divergent, heavily influenced by the trading languages of peoples across the Servalen Sea.

Common Solvari greetings often reference light and warmth. "Solven" is a standard greeting meaning roughly "light to you," while "Solven kara" (light and warmth) is used between close friends or family. Insults in Solvari often reference darkness or cold, reflecting the cultural association of the Night Fae with those qualities. The word for "enemy" in old Solvari is "nocthari," literally "shadow-born."

The Luinan royal family speaks a formal register called High Solvari, used in official proclamations and ceremonies. It retains more of the original Faerie tongue's structure and is taught to noble children as part of their education.

Customs and Traditions:

The most sacred Avalusian tradition is the Passing of the Mantle, held after a Luinan monarch's death. All noble houses of Avalusia are required to attend, gathering in the Hall of First Light within Myrae's palace. The eligible heirs stand before the Sunstone, a relic said to have been touched by the original Faeries, and the Mantle moves of its own accord. The chosen heir's hair blazes gold, they manifest sunfire wings and their eyes shift to emerald (if they were not previously) at the moment of selection. The Mantle gives Luinan monarchs incredible power; both martial strength and powerful light magic. Traditionally, the Mantle has passed to the king's eldest son, and the rare occasions when it chose a younger son were treated as omens of great change. Allandra's ascension as the first queen to receive the Mantle shook the entire kingdom, and the ceremony is still spoken of in hushed tones across the noble houses.

It is considered High Treason to question the wisdom of the Mantle, leading succession unrest and maneuvers to be extremely rare in Avalusian history.

Martial training begins young in Avalusia, with children as young as six starting basic weapon drills. Military service is considered honorable for both men and women, though the officer class has historically been male-dominated. Light magic training runs alongside weapon drills in military education, and healers hold a respected place in every battalion.

Harvest festivals are celebrated twice yearly: once at the start of the planting season and once at the close of the harvest. These are community events with food, music, and competitions. The Feast of Warm Winds in early summer is particularly significant in Myrae, where merchants from across the Servalen Sea bring goods to trade and the city swells with visitors from distant ports.

First Sun is the most important and highly anticipated holiday in Avalusia, ocurring on the final night of winter. The Kingdom celebrates the return of Spring by feasting, enjoying festival games, dancing, and lighting lanterns until Midnight. At Midnight, the sovereign of Avalusia lights the Eastern Flame from the Palace Square in Myrae. Then, the Avalusians sing traditional hymns and stand vigil until the sun rises, while runners carry the flame from the Eastern Flame stand to every district in Myrae. Other Avalusian cities, villages and towns will send representatives to carry a bit of the Eastern Flame back to their beacons.

Funerary rites involve burning the body at sunset, with the ashes scattered into the sea from the cliffs above Myrae. Avalusians believe the original Faeries dwell beyond the Servalen Sea, and returning the dead to the water is a way of sending them home.

Arts and Entertainment:

Avalusia's most celebrated craft is its glasswork, particularly the colored glass produced in the furnaces of Myrae. Avalusian glassmakers have developed techniques for capturing light within their pieces, producing windows and vessels that seem to glow from within even without a nearby light source. The royal palace in Myrae is famous for its glass ceilings and walls in the throne room, which fill the space with shifting colored light at different hours of the day. Ceramic work is equally prized, with Andalusian potters known for their painted tiles depicting scenes from history and myth, used to decorate homes, public buildings, and temples across the kingdom.

Music is central to Avalusian social life. The dominant instruments are string-based, particularly a long-necked lute called the saravel and a small hand drum called the toma. Music at festivals tends to be fast and rhythmic, while music at court is slower and more structured. Singing is considered a social skill, and it is common for groups to sing together at meals and community gatherings.

Tournaments are held several times a year in Myrae and the larger inland cities. These events include weapon competitions, mounted races, and light magic displays. The magic displays, called Solshows, involve mages competing to produce the most impressive or controlled feats of light and healing magic, and they draw large crowds from all classes.

Storytelling holds a respected place in Avalusian culture. Professional storytellers called Solverans travel the kingdom, recounting the history of the Luina dynasty, the deeds of the original Faeries, and the great battles against Lyehira. Their performances often include light magic to project images in the air above the audience, and they traditionally wear small mirrors on their coats to reflect light for their shows. Serali saw a Solveran storyteller when she attended the Harvest Festival!

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Capital City: Myrae

Myrae occupies the southern coast of Avalusia at the mouth of the Valin River, where the river broadens into a deep natural harbor sheltered by two curving limestone headlands. The city spreads across a series of terraced hillsides that rise steeply from the waterfront, with the port and trade districts occupying the flat ground along the quays and the older, wealthier residential quarters climbing the slopes above. The Luinan palace sits at the summit of the central hill, visible from every district in the city and from far out on the Servalen Sea. The harbor opens directly onto the Servalen Sea, positioning Myrae as the primary gateway for goods and travelers arriving from kingdoms to the south and east. Fishing villages that once dotted the coastline have been absorbed into the city's outer districts as it grew, and the road heading north winds through orchards and grain fields before reaching the Avalusian interior.

The Night Fae of Lyehira:

Called: Lyehirans, Night Fae

Language: Naeric

Lyehirans speak Naeric, a language with hard consonants, clipped vowels, and a tonal quality that makes it sound severe to outside ears compared to the melodic Solvari of the Sun Fae. Naeric evolved from the same ancient Faerie tongue that gave rise to Solvari, and scholars who study both languages can find shared roots in words relating to magic, the natural world, and kinship, though centuries of separation have made the two mutually unintelligible.

Within Naeric, there is a sharp formal register used at court and in official documents, and a rougher colloquial dialect spoken in the lower city and among servants. The court register uses elaborate honorifics that encode a speaker's magical status directly into grammar: mageborn individuals are addressed with a distinct second-person pronoun that has no equivalent in the common dialect, and using the wrong form is considered either a grave insult or a deliberate political statement depending on context.

The Xuiven royal family and high nobility speak an older, more archaic form of Naeric called Deep Naeric, used in magical incantations, royal decrees, and religious rites. Knowledge of Deep Naeric is tightly controlled; teaching it to a non-noble without crown permission is a punishable offense. This linguistic gatekeeping reinforces the dynasty's grip on magical practice, since many of the most powerful spells can only be properly cast in Deep Naeric.

Shadow magic has left its mark on the language itself. Naeric has over a dozen distinct words for different qualities of darkness (the darkness before a storm, the darkness inside a closed room, the darkness of a shadow cast by a living body) and similarly rich vocabulary for cold, silence, and concealment. By contrast, it has relatively few words for warmth or light, most of which carry negative or suspicious connotations.

Customs and Traditions:

Lyehiran culture is built around the demonstration and preservation of magical power, and nearly every tradition reflects this obsession. The most significant social ritual is the Rite of Revealing, performed when a child reaches the age of seven: a court mage tests the child's blood with a shard of enchanted obsidian to determine whether magic runs in their veins. Children who pass the test are celebrated with a feast and formally entered into the Mageborn Register, a record maintained by the crown. Over the past several centuries, the number of mageborn children has been on decline. This has been publically attributed to a "curse" cast on Lyehira by the Sun Fae King over 800 years ago. Avalusia denies such a curse ever happened.

Similar to the Mantle, Lyehira also has a magic that is passed from sovereign to sovereign, called The Night Crown. Over the past several generations of kings, the passing of the Night Crown has become more private and secretive, as opposed to in Avalusia where the Mantle making its choice is a very public affair.

Marriages among the nobility are almost never matters of personal choice. Unions are arranged by the crown or by family councils with the explicit goal of producing magically gifted offspring. Betrothal contracts include clauses specifying the expected magical lineage of children, and failure to produce a mageborn heir within a set number of years can legally dissolve a noble marriage. The Xuiven Dynasty has taken this further than any previous rulers, instituting forced breeding programs that treat mages as breeding stock rather than people (especially if the mage is common born).

The dead are interred in the mountain crypts above Naerith rather than cremated, as Lyehirans believe the cold stone preserves the soul's power for the afterlife. Mageborn dead are wrapped in shadow-silk, a cloth woven with threads of condensed shadow magic, while non-mages receive plain burial. The anniversary of a death is marked by lighting a black candle and leaving it to burn out in a window, a practice observed even by the poorest households.

Winter in Lyehira is treated as a sacred season. The longest night of the year is observed with the Feast of the Dark, a court celebration during which the palace lights are extinguished entirely and guests dine by the glow of shadow magic alone. It is considered a display of prestige to illuminate one's seat at the table using only personal magic. Those who cannot produce their own light sit in the dark, a pointed social humiliation that reinforces the hierarchy.

Public punishments are a deliberate instrument of social control under the Xuiven court. Queen Rania in particular uses them as spectacle, staging them in the palace courtyard where servants and lesser nobles are required to watch. Loyalty to the crown is expected to be performed as well as felt, and courtiers who fail to applaud a royal decree or who are caught in private dissent face swift consequences.

Arts and Entertainment:

Lyehiran art is largely functional in its origins, shaped by a culture that prizes power over beauty for its own sake, though the two have become linked in practice. The most prestigious art form is shadowweaving, the craft of shaping condensed shadow magic into sculptures, murals, and architectural details that shift and move like living things. The palace at Naerith is decorated almost entirely in shadowwoven panels, and the most skilled shadowweavers hold positions at court equivalent to master architects. Because the craft requires genuine magical ability, it doubles as a status display.

Ice carving is a widespread folk art practiced throughout Lyehira, from the palace down to village squares. During the winter months, elaborate ice sculptures appear outside homes and public buildings. Common subjects include wolves, ravens, and the mountain peaks surrounding Naerith. In the lower city, ice carving competitions are one of the few public entertainments not controlled by the crown, and they draw large crowds.

Music in Lyehira tends toward low, resonant instruments: drums made from stretched hide, bone flutes, and a bowed string instrument called the vael that produces a sound somewhere between a cello and a human voice. Songs are often unaccompanied and structured around call-and-response patterns, with one singer stating a line and a group answering. Court music is more formal and composed, while common music is largely improvisational. Love songs are rare; most traditional Lyehiran songs concern survival, war, or the power of winter.

Storytelling exists in Lyehira but does not carry the respected, traveling-performer tradition it does among the Sun Fae. Instead, history is preserved by the Naeric Scribes, a guild of court historians who record events in Deep Naeric and control what version of history is officially recognized. Unofficial storytelling happens in taverns and servant quarters, passed mouth to ear, and tends to preserve the versions of events the crown would prefer forgotten.

Capital City: Naerith

Naerith sits in a broad valley at the foot of the Naer Mountains, the central range that divides Lyehira from the uninhabited northern wastes. The mountains give the kingdom its name and its character: they block the warming winds from the south, trap cold air in the valley through most of the year, and make the surrounding land too rocky and frost-prone for reliable grain crops. The city draws its food supply from a combination of highland herding (goats and cold-weather cattle), preserved and traded goods that arrive via the kingdom's eastern road network, and a small but significant practice of magically extending the growing season in walled kitchen gardens maintained by lower-ranking mages. The mountain range also provides the black basalt that defines Naerith's architecture and the deep crypts carved into the lower slopes where the Night Fae bury their dead, with mages wrapped in shadow-silk and interred in the deepest chambers.

The city is organized in strict vertical tiers. The Xuiven Palace and the noble mage houses occupy the highest ground, closest to the mountain face. Below them, the professional and merchant classes live in dense stone townhouses, and the non-mage lower city spreads across the valley floor in a grid of narrow streets and shared courtyards.

The Xuiven Palace crowns the city's highest terrace, its towers built to look as though they are growing from the mountain face itself. Its halls are cold even when braziers burn in every corridor, the stone too thick and too dark to hold warmth. The palace's great hall, the Naer Throne Room, is hung with shadow-silk and lit by a chandelier of enchanted obsidian that refracts darkness rather than light.

The eastern road connecting Naerith to the border regions and trade routes is the city's economic lifeline, heavily taxed by the Xuiven crown and patrolled by royal mage-soldiers year-round.

Announcements: Volume 1 Editing

While I write Fault Line (which is already fully outlined, and several of the arcs already fully written), I may also go back to earlier chapters of The Queen's Mage to do some editing to improve clarity, flow, and pace. I will not change any of the story itself (characters, plot points, dialogue etc. will remain the same), rather just more stylistic updates to match the style of the more recent chapters. All this to say: If you have already read the Queen's Mage you do not have to re-read the edited version as it will not be substantively different. It's more for the new readers and my own sanity/ edification.