Unlike A New Frontier, Corrupted Divinity started as a single thread: why were Earthlings being kidnapped? I knew it wasn’t for slavery; frankly, that made little sense. Tier Zero slaves weren’t worth much, especially not Tier Zero mages, and fooling the Voice is not at all easy or cheap. They had to be looking specifically for Tier Zero and One people without much information on the outside universe; more than that, they couldn’t know about Earth’s special properties.

The reason was greenstone experimentation and expanding the Legion. As it happens, they hit an absolute jackpot in Earth’s people - enough of a jackpot that they actually had to slow down how quickly they were bringing new Earthlings in. They expected to have a much, much lower reaction rate to the birdseed and a far lower survival rate. The “novices” should not have been left at the holding churches so long; in fact, Alanaeon originally expected to funnel them through her original facility as fast as they came in. The fact that she was moved to the Underground was helpful in many ways, but the Underground didn’t have nearly as extensive a setup for handling “volunteers”.

Birdseed (or, rather, Phorus the Terrorbird) will come back up in the future; for this book, it’s simply a reference to the past. I don’t think there’s any way for me to really tell you where they came from, but Alanaeon found the birdseed in an old ruin on Lyka. It’s called birdseed because of the limited information she was able to gain from the ruin.

I’m not entirely happy with a few elements; I need to have some time off from it then read the whole thing all at once to know if it’s coherent and hit the beats I wanted. I’m definitely ready to move on; the situation on Asihanya is far more interesting to me right now.

Raz would agree, he’s been waiting months for this.

Now we just need to arrange a babysitter and get Blaze to decide where he’s going …oh, and have a discussion with Guildmaster Tirmanak and find out how Helen’s doing.

Speaking of the next book, I’ve tentatively titled it Space Invaders, but I’m pretty sure I picked that in a fit of sleep deprivation. It’s almost certainly going to change; I’m seriously considering Skylords instead.

See you there!

~Lillene