MALISON: Reader questions & answers

Reader Edward asks about the recently completed MALISON series:

“Just out of curiosity was Dragon imperator of the mailison series a dark elf or a dragon of some type? Also how come the Valdictor did not command a few of his subjects goblins or something to overuse magic and become dragons to have an even larger force of dragons. Why do the dark elves of the malison world have normal titles instead of mocking titles?”

1.) The Dragon Imperator was a dark elf.

2.) The dark elves in general don’t force people to transform into dragons because it’s extraordinarily dangerous and it doesn’t always work. The Malison is a danger to everyone who can use magic, but not everyone has the strength to push themselves over the line and succumb to the Malison, and some people (and goblins, etc) have such an aversion to the Malison that it would be like ordering them to put their hand on a hot stove. You could force them to put their hand on the stove, but since the transformation requires the voluntary use of power, that wouldn’t work.

Additionally, dragons quite frequently go berserk and start killing everything in sight immediately after they transform, and they’re difficult to dominate in that state. Eventually they calm down and are easier to dominate, but not at first. So, a dark elf forcing someone else to transform is a “heads I win, tails I get my head melted by dragon fire” kind of situation, and most of them aren’t willing to take that risk.

3.) Because the dark elves are addicted to cruelty since the shadow of Incariel warped their characters, so they give each other these titles and use them among kindreds they consider “inferior”, which is basically everyone. And the dark elves are addicted to cruelty to a point where it causes them to make bad decisions, where they’ll go out of their way to be cruel even when it is plainly self-defeating. Like, think of an alcoholic who decides he’s going to clean up, but winds up skipping a job interview to get a drink. That’s how the dark elves are with cruelty. The smarter and more powerful ones can hold themselves in check when necessary (the Confessor spends most of the last several books of SEVENFOLD SWORD stopping himself from mocking the Visage because he needs her help), but they still have those impulses.

The idea for the dark elves acting that way came from CS Lewis’s classic book PERELANDRA, where when the devil isn’t busy with his grand plan to corrupt the new race about to awaken on Venus, he tortures small animals, and when he can’t catch any small animals, he amuses himself by irritating the protagonist in petty ways.

-JM