I’m trying to resist the temptation of the bright, shiny new idea that finally came together last night, so let’s not talk about that. Not yet anyway.
Let’s talk about magical creatures, instead. Specifically those in the BECOME series.
There’s a nod to the Greek legend of Hercules that inspired this story in the BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.
There’s the dragon, though it’s neither nine-headed nor a water dragon like Hercules’s hydra. And a very large lion-like creature that’s meant to be a reference to the Nemean lion.
But throughout the series there’s another kind of magical creature. Cats. Now, a lot of people who’ve had cats as pets will tell you that the ordinary house cat is a magical creature. Some will claim that they must be able to disappear into other dimensions. And sometimes it certainly seems like it. And trying to get a cat into a carrier to go to the vet is likely to leave you swearing that they’re able to double their size at will.
But the cats in the BECOME series have a different kind of magic. In this series, every descendant of the Goddess has a guardian cat–a small grey cat, to be specific. Well, actually a succession of cats, since even magical cats don’t live as long as humans. These cats have healing powers, so their charges (the Goddess’s descendants) are healed of almost every scrape, scratch, and fever immediately. (Even the cats can’t cure death, though, so anything that happens too suddenly can still be fatal.) The cats are also opinionated and prone to letting their charges know when they’ve done–or are thinking about doing–something wrong or merely stupid.
Later, in BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM, these cats are still grey, but, for some descendants, not necessarily small.
And then there are the ravens. More on the ravens in the next post.
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Meredith Mansfield, Author 