Thank you for reading to the end, this is the first story I ever wrote, and at the time my English was absolutely awful. I cannot say it is great yet, but still a long way from then.

My choice of the first-person story was both to avoid the pitfalls of narration, and to make it more personal in order to better illustrate the steps the main character makes along the way.

As you have probably noticed, the character doesn’t use contractions. I did it to give a sense of archaism and politeness to his speech, but this was quite the pain to write.

Another quirk you might have noticed is the use of “IT” until he learns the common language in chapter 12. He doesn’t mean it as an insult, it’s just a reflection of his species lack of care for gender as a whole; consider it an equivalent of how the articles they/them are often used to refer to an unspecified generic person.

As for the Queen, English does not have gender-specific pronouns beside she/he – same as French - and conjugation does not reflect the gender - French does - I had to be a bit forceful and have the main character specify the change.

About the words of power, I do not want to dwell too much on that; I want the reader to decide for themselves. I thought of them as the constants, variables, and function of this universe, but I could be wrong as the final story is very different from the one, I set out to write.

Finally, when I chose which crystals the character would get to grow, I did not make enough research, I just picked a list of crystal that could easily be grown, then sorted then by density, but it has come to my attention that copper sulfate – the crystal hinted at in the story… or at least I think it was based on the color – is very reactive to water. Even so, I will not change the story, the managed to use a salt gem in the beginning, I assume he can deal with this much.

THANK YOU FOR READING, AND SEE YOU NEXT TIME.

Best wishes,

E.G