Basically a massive massive thing that will never make it off my hard drive.
In summary: imaginary world, people have magic, some people don't die and congregate in weird centres and them and the mortals get on badly at best. Two thousand and a bit years ago there was a massive war and a lot of history before then is lost / not discussed by the people old enough to remember it. At this point the world was visited by a large sentient being who prefers to take the form of a rather large fire which spurred on two millennia of further questioning about the nature of possible higher powers. People have magic powerful enough to create a momentary death-world-judging thing and ghosts are fairly omnipresent in the obviously bright and cheerful world of the living. (The sun is also often obscured in large parts of the northern hemisphere due to some rather nasty Speller work.) Two absurdly powerful children are born in the present day so everyone gets in a tizz and tries to kill each other and most of the characters are dead after sixteen years.
Most of the names are still kind of ten-year-old-inventing-fantasy-names-bad so I've used initials instead. I think.
- Absurdly Youthful Mother - a few examples. Not C., as D. is still in early teens and C. looks in her mid-thirties, but most of the semimortal mothers with adult children look the same age as they do.
- The Ace/ The Cape/ Hair of Gold - all L. in earlier years, but not exactly celibate.
- The Ageless - pretty much everyone older than forty or fifty.
- Alas, Poor Villain- Aph. towards the end, being the only villain still alive not to go completely off the deep end.
- Altar the Speed - L. and C. at thirty and twenty-six, thinking they wouldn’t live to do it otherwise.
- Ambadassador - Generally found in Arnedra.
- Antagonist in Mourning - most of the southern party, after Acc.’s death.
- Anti-Hero - L. is type II/III, C. crosses into type III/IV, M. becomes type III towards the end, well-established by the time he poisons Cal., and D. is probably type I.
- Anti-Villain - No. is probably type II, overlapping in motivation with My Master, Right or Wrong, and Aph. looks like type III after the bias in D.'s narration becomes obvious.
- Badass and Child Duo - L and D, although D is a little old for it and not quite childish, and they are, distantly, related.
- Badass in Distress - C. through parts 7 to 10.
- Becoming the Mask - M.
- Big Bad - Aph. early on, then degenerates more or less into a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Then P.
- Big Bad Ensemble - Aph. and P. Lesser ones are Sa., Mor. and Arlis.)
- Black and Nerdy - H. Quite probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet, though more from age than true genius.
- Blond Guys Are Evil - Sa. and P. are unquestioningly blonde; Aph. sort of verges on brown.
- Broken Ace - M; see Becoming the Mask above. By part 10, at seventeen, he commands the respect of all his allies and a fair chunk of his enemies, he's extremely clever, charming, and good at pretty much everything... there's just the small matters of his fast-eroding morals and how he feels about his sister.
- The Chessmaster - Most of the fire cards. Some are better than others.
- Cain and Abel - Acc. has been Abel to both his brothers in the past- P. now, and through two thousand years it has generally been P., but mostly N. in the last few years before his death.
- Chekhov M.I.A.- And.
- Child by Rape - D.
- Child Soldiers- some of the Recruited.
- Conflicting Loyalty- H. is torn between D. and Acc. on the one side, and Aph. his former guardian on the other.
