Literature / The Salvagers

Why yes, it does keep getting worse for our heroes. How did you guess?

"Everyone can be sick in their soul and still think they’re the good guys."'
— Alister Ferrier

The Salvagers is a Science Fantasy Space Opera trilogy written by Alex White, set in a distant future where (almost) all humans have magic powers, with each person limited to a specific type of spell based on which "mark" they have — a mechanist’s mark can mind link with technology, for example, a barrister's mark can create magically-enforced contracts, etcetera. As a result, humanity has used powerful Magitek to colonize the entire galaxy. Yet no one seems to know what happened to Origin, the planet where magic (and humanity) were born.

Our two protagonists are Nilah Brio, a rich kid professional racecar driver with mechanist powers; and Elizabeth "Boots" Elsworth, a down-on-her-luck war veteran and treasure hunter turned con artist, with a rare condition that prevents her from using magic. Together with Captain Cordell Lamarr and the crew of the Capricious (a former combat marauder turned salvage vessel), they must unravel an interstellar conspiracy surrounding the mysterious fate of the Harrow, a massive warship that somehow vanished without a trace.

Books in the series:

• A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe (2018)
• A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy (2018)
• The Worst of All Possible Worlds (2020)

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Trope Examples:

• Absurdly Exclusive Recruiting Standards: The Children of the Singularity. First you have to somehow find the recruitment centre and make it there on foot in the freezing environment, then you spend weeks getting brainwashed alongside other recruits who are permitted to attack and kill you, you're expected to “take what is yours” but if you misjudge the situation you could be arbitrarily executed, the guy in charge strangles you all with shadow magic and kills you if he doesn't like the cut of your jib, then you're told to climb a mountain while murdering the other 90% of recruits, then you have to beat a guy in a mech suit and if you don't you get turned into a thrall.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: Humanity has all the advancements you’d expect of a sci-fi setting: A.I., mech suits, FTL space travel and more. But their ancestral homeworld, Origin, had even greater levels of arcane and technological prowess. Some was lost in the colonization process and subsequent wars but some was hidden away on purpose due to how dangerous it was, bordering on Abusive Precursors with the extreme measures taken.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Boots muses how odd it is that no one has located Origin, birthplace of humanity and the source of all magic. After the planet's original masters pulled off a Planetary Relocation and a Kill All Humans (excluding the ones on the colony ships), they left behind the Conservators: an order of immortal fanatics ordered to conceal Origin's location by any means necessary, to keep its dangerous magics out of human hands. A scrying telescope of unprecedented size managed to discover Origin's new location, so they blew up its massive Power Crystal (basically destroying the whole planetary system) then instigated "the bloodiest conflict in galactic history"… as a distraction. Yikes.
• Anti-Magic:
  • The Chaparral system's binary suns give off magic-dampening radiation that also blinds a spaceship's magic-based instrumentation — useful if you need to hide a gigantic warship or break a curse.
  • Most spacecraft and secure facilities are equipped with “dispersers” which somehow destroy magic spells, though it's on activation rather than a permanent effect and might actually be a Counter Spell (it's never explained)
• Apocalypse How:
  • A Class 4 has taken place on Clarkesfall before the story begins (caused by the Winnower Fleet), resulting in the Famine War and subsequent exodus of its inhabitants
  • The Conspiracy are planning a Class 6 on a galactic scale, basically a larger version of what they did to Clarkesfall
  • A Class 3a happened on Origin in the ancient past, done deliberately by its leaders to protect the rest of humanity from the threat of alchemy.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • Boots finds a recording one of her contacts left behind in a ransacked facility, detailing something gone horribly wrong on the Harrow and a man with magic powers he shouldn't have.
  • The final log of Sekhet Mostafa is this mixed with Scientist Video Journal, detailing their doomed exploration of the Vogelstrand
  • After analyzing an ancient ship's data core, the Devil puts together the sci-fi equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation detailing the fall of Origin
• Artifact of Power: The Wellspring is all of humanity's alchemy (a potent form of super-magic) gathered into a bigass crystal with an A.I. assistant to explain how it works. Whoever obtains it can become a Reality Warper and potentially a Physical God. It's extremely dangerous in the wrong hands; just one tiny stolen shard of it was enough to turn Henrick Witts into The Archmage of a galaxy where everybody else is stuck with just the one randomly-assigned spell. Boots turns the shard into a bomb to get rid of Witts's evil space station, and destroys the Wellspring as a convenient side effect of overcoming her Disability Immunity to teleportation.
• Artificial Gravity: Standard for every spaceship. Military ones even have a “combat gravity” setting that turns it down to ¼ of standard for ease of movement.
• Artificial Intelligence: Almost omnipresent, and avoiding most of the “kill all humans” tropes associated with it. Though Orna does mention at one point that A.I. are not typically given control of a warship for this very reason.
  • Boots's Virtual Sidekick Kin, a not-quite-legal military-grade A.I. patterned after her dead war buddy Kinnard. Morphs into an Eccentric A.I. after he gets a virus that compels him to give her bad advice
  • Ursula, an ancient A.I. sent to sabotage the Vogelstrand, who tries to kill every human she encounters. This isn't a malfunction, she's just doing the job she was given and thinks Murder Is the Best Solution. Due to being an older model, she has emotions and a sense of individuality and it freaks her out when her programming is messed with to make her trust someone
  • The Devil, as described below. It's helpful most of the time, really its only flaw is constantly trying to sell the team on its premium features
  • The A.I. guarding the Wellspring is mostly harmless aside from controlling human avatars for some reason, and not understanding that it shouldn't give a universe-threatening Artifact of Power to a genocidal madman just because he solves a puzzle — which isn't its fault. Blame its creators for thinking a theme park maze is sufficient protection for something that could shred the fabric of reality
  • Said artifact also has an A.I. inside it that guides the recipient in its use, hopefully to avert some of that potential reality-shredding (but it can't actually stop them from doing so, or from destroying it if they wish)
• Barrier Warrior: Captain Lamarr mainly uses his shield magic to protect the Capricious in battle, but is also handy with it in ground combat.
• Becoming the Mask: Nilah worries this is happening to her when she intentionally gets a bunch of recruits killed while undercover infiltrating the Children of the Singularity
• Big Bad: the Winnower Fleet commanders, AKA the Gods of the Harrow, seem like a Big Bad Ensemble at first, but it eventually becomes clear they answer to Henrick Witts, who is leagues above them in ambition and sheer threat level.
• The Big Race: In Book 1, pro racer Nilah is one of the Pan-Galactic Racing Federation's top drivers and has a very good chance of winning the Driver's Crown. Zig-Zagged as she fails to finish the race at Galica, then is unable to make it back for the next one plus the entire Crown tournament is cancelled for magical curse reasons, so she ends up resigning from racing for good.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Book 2: the Capricious crew destroy the Masquerade, kill another God of the Harrow and get to join Compass (meaning they also get Kin back and a jump drive), and Boots gets revenge on Stetson Giles and finally got the Chalice of Hana. But Armin dies, they fail to recover the Money Mill index (meaning the authorities can only expose about 1% of the parties involved), and Henrick Witts's evil plans continue uninterrupted. Plus the Chalice doesn't work for Boots, preventing the Fate Worse than Death she had in mind for Giles, forcing her to Just Shoot Him.
  • Book 3 (and the series as a whole): Witts is dead, the only known sources of alchemy have been destroyed, and the crew solved the biggest mystery of modern history (finding Origin)… but they pissed off every single government and an Ancient Conspiracy of immortal assassins, forcing them to give up most of their wealth and basically go into witness protection for the foreseeable future. But Boots says she'd still do it again if she had to.
    Boots: I want you to remember something: this colony is here because of us. Everyone that’s breathing, is breathing because of us. Every star in the sky is ours now.
    Nilah: So you wouldn’t change anything?
    Boots: Yeah. I would’ve had some other jerks rescue the galaxy… but that’s just not how it worked out, kid.
• Blessed with Suck: Courtney, the rich young twerp Nilah meets on Hammerhead, whines about having the murderer's mark and how he might as well be a dull-finger for all the good it does him. He says he can't make a living with it, apparently forgetting assassins are a thing (but by the sound of it he just sucks at it).
• Body Horror:
  • The vines on the Vogelstrand and what they do to people they catch
  • Sekhet Mostafa when Witts catches her. The text says her bones begin to twist
• The Caper: Orna and Boots have to plan an elaborate heist on a heavily secured vault in order to obtain a clue to what Witts is up to.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: The average person can afford passage to another planet quite easily, as the setting is full of spacecraft that can utilize Faster-Than-Light Travel via "the Flow". Ships with a "jump drive" can enter the Flow from any point they choose; those without (like the Capricious until book 3) have to use jump gates stationed throughout the galaxy, and plan their sorties carefully lest enemies catch them before they can reach the nearest gate. There's also “jump dumps”, dangerously unstable single-use jump drives that melt after launch.
• Chekhov's Gun: Boots and Baron Gaultier discuss conspiracy theories about the Conservators, a secret society that has supposedly been concealing Origin's location for thousands of years, which Boots dismisses as nonsense made up by online weirdos. It turns out the Conservators are very real (and very dangerous). He also has a statue of a Gardener, a mythical magical terraforming construct from the early human colony planets resembling a big-boobed naked green giantess. We see a Gardener later on, though it looks nothing like the statue.
• Cold Equation: Comes up twice, and Boots calls bullshit on it both times.
  • Ursula relates how the ancient rulers of Origin decided their world was too decadent and reliant on alchemy, so they selected a small group of humans to colonize other planets before exterminating the rest and then themselves.
    Ursula: Individual humans cannot factor into the goals of a great society.
    Boots: And societies are only great when they care about individuals, so I guess we're done here.
  • Witts claims that he will extend the human race into eternity by "turning time in a circle", whatever that means. Unfortunately for everyone except his worshipers, this apparently involves killing most of the human race and gaining insane amounts of wealth and arcane power for himself. How convenient.
• The Conspiracy: The warship Harrow represents an enormous expenditure and symbol of military might for the Taitutian government, yet seemingly never deployed. No one knows what happened to it — and some extremely powerful, well-connected people are heavily invested in keeping it that way. Admiral Henrick Witts, a semi-immortal alchemist who wants to defeat entropy itself, conspired with wealthy banking families and elements of the Taitutian military to construct the Winnower Fleet — the Harrow and seven others — which were used to cast a usurer's spell light-years across, sacrificing the entire planet Clarkesfall for massive arcane power for himself and his commanding officers. Now the conspirators are hiding in plain sight, ready to try again — and somehow the Pan-Galactic Racing Federation is involved in shaping the racetracks for this year's Cup like magic glyphs to cast an even bigger spell, affecting the entire galaxy. This conspiracy and the Covert Group behind it are exposed in Book 1, but continue plotting behind the scenes.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Nilah's father receives this from Harriet Fulsom as payback for Rebecca's execution. She instantaneously removes the myelin sheath from every single neuron in his head, causing him to experience untold agony as his brain short-circuits.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: This was the general vibe on Origin, before it turned into the Earth That Was. The buildings themselves were constantly changing shape as if alive.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Even with Boots's Disability Immunity to being pocket dimensioned, Mother is still an experienced military combatant in cutting edge Power Armor. A No-Holds-Barred Beatdown ensues
  • Bastion vs. the Taitutian Fifth Fleet. It arrives via teleportation, catching them completely off-guard, and immediately takes out the biggest ship with a summoned asteroid while using trickster magic to put every ship trying to jump away on a collision course. And that's while it's still under construction.
• Curse: Boots is under one, courtesy of her duplicitous former business partner Stetson Giles. After helping her find a magic chalice that makes magically binding contracts, he uses it on her at gunpoint so she can never tell anyone where he is. This extends to telepathy as well, causing her and the mind-reader intense pain. It's broken in an interesting way: flying to binary stars that give off Anti-Magic light and throwing Boots out the airlock unprotected, while the telepath reads her mind via a magic-conducting wire.
• Cutting the Knot: The Wellspring is protected by dimensionally-folded maze that spits you back out at the start if you choose the wrong path, but Boots's Disability Immunity lets her walk straight through unimpeded. The AI accuses her of cheating and refuses to give her the crystal, but it still puts her in the right spot to absorb it moments later.

• Disability Immunity: Boots’s arcana dystocia makes her a dimensional anchor, meaning she can't be pulled into a pocket dimension or teleported.
• Earth That Was: Origin, humanity's birthplace and the source of all magic, has been lost for over two thousand years and no one knows what happened to it because its extremist rulers believed alchemy was too dangerous to the fabric of reality and their planet was too dependent on it. So they sent out some colony ships to Fling a Light into the Future, moved the planet and turned it into a graveyard. But modern humans still reference the opulence and decadence of Origin's architecture, using it as interior design inspiration, and artifacts related to it are known as Originata among collectors.
• Evil Plan: Henrick Witts has been running some variation of “sacrifice the people around me, gain obscene amounts of magic power, rinse and repeat” for at least a century. His stated goal is to “perpetuate humanity beyond time itself” by becoming a god, but it's also possible he just wants unlimited power and to kill everyone who doesn't worship him. His plan seems to involve absorbing a shard of alchemy stolen from Origin itself, spend 80 years gaining power and influence while infiltrating the military, spearhead the construction of a fleet of warships which are used to amplify his Life Drain magic enough for an entire planet, then repeat the process 20 years later on a galactic scale with magic racetracks. When that ploy is exposed, he goes underground, finds a way to make infinite money and recruit more worshippers so he can build a Death Star that can cast the spell for him.
• Fantastic Ableism: one in five million humans are born without an arcanoid (the part of the brain used to cast magic), and are heavily discriminated against, ranging from condescending pity to outright contempt. The official term for their condition is ''arcana dystocia'', but most people call them "dull-fingers" (which is treated like a slur). They struggle to find work, can’t use money the way everyone else does (transactions involve one's personal magical glyph, so those without must use an inconvenient, easily-stolen crystal) or get replacement limbs — as all medical prosthetics are powered by magic. Boots's new arm has to be specially made to order, and doesn't function nearly as well.
• Foreshadowing: in the first chapter of Book 1, Nilah complains about the shitty magic-spewing rocket booster the racing organization makes them all have on their cars. As she prepares to lap last-place racer Cyril Clowe, she mocks him for firing it at random, evenly-spaced intervals. She also notes the layout of the Galica Speedway has been changed for this year, adding an entirely new section with a tricky layout. This turns out to be on purpose, as the Gods of the Harrow purposely shaped the racetracks like magic glyphs and were using Cyril and his booster to charge them for a galactic-scale version of their Life Drain spell.
• Godhood Seeker:
  Henrick Witts: Listen, Boots. There is no god, and so I will become god.
• Gotta Kill Them All: The Capricious crew decides this is what they have to do to the Winnower Fleet commanders. And by the end of Book 3, they've done it (assuming the ones we never met were on Bastion when it blew).
• Grand Theft Me: This is how the Conservators operate — any time they die, their soul and all of their memories transfers to a new body within a specific section of the gene pool. There's no way to prevent it, even if they want to, and the body's original inhabitant gets deleted.
• Grey Goo: The wreck of the Vogelstrand is swarming with vines made of human flesh — all that's left of the ship's former inhabitants, as a result of a nanobot plague intentionally released by the Conservators. The vines mindlessly attack and infest any living thing they encounter, turning them into more vines.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Armin in Book 2, ramming a spaceship into Izak Vraba's warship at FTL speeds to save everyone else
  • Boots in Book 3 tries to do this, sending everyone else to safety so she can destroy the Artifact of Power, but someone else talks her down and she finds a way to get herself out and destroy the dangerous relic.
• Hopeless War: The Famine War, where Boots and Cordell fought together, took place between the nations of Arca and Kandamil on the planet Clarkesfall. It started over food shortages and ended with Arca being bombed off the map and Kandamil eventually evacuating a dead planet. By the end, both sides were getting pretty desperate for recruits and planetary society had all but collapsed. Boots is still bitter about it twenty years later and nearly crosses the Despair Event Horizon when she finds out it was all pointless; the famine was the result of a spell cast by Witts and his associates, sacrificing her entire world for godlike magical power.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Origin might be abandoned but still has a still-functioning automated defense system of scary ancient super-Magitek, and the only way to even reach the surface is provoke a three-way Space Battle between the satellites, Bastion, and every Standard Sci-Fi Fleet in The Alliance. And even then it's barely enough.
• Life Drain: The usurer's mark works this way, draining the life energy from a living thing and channeling it into the caster or someone/something else. It can be used to heal injuries or boost one's arcane power. If the spell cast is large enough — e.g., large enough to consume an entire planet — the recipient can gain a whole new level of magic ability.
• Magic A Is Magic A: magic is pretty well-defined and categorized, to the point computers can display a readout of stats when a spell is cast. Each person gets one type of spell, determined by their "mark", and almost all the known marks have been catalogued and studied. A mechanist's mark lets the wielder telepathically connect with machines, a grenadier's mark makes explosions, and so on. You can only cast a spell by first drawing your personal magic glyph in the air, and the spell's power is limited by how big you can make it (though some additional oomf can be achieved via military hardware called “amps”). This is why it's such a big deal that the Gods of the Harrow can instantaneously cast glyphs the size of a room, no tracing required; but they had to use spaceships to cast a glyph several light-years wide and sacrifice the life energy of an entire planet to gain this power. The lost art of alchemy breaks all the rules, allowing Henrick Witts to instantly cast any spell he wants and even chain them together like a programming language. This could theoretically rewrite the laws of physics, which is why it's so dangerous that its creators killed billions to hide it away.
• Magitek: the entire setting is saturated in it. Almost all technology has a magical component — everything from starships and medical equipment to firearms AKA "slingers", which are actually firing destructive spells instead of bullets — to the point it's practically Applied Phlebotinum.
• Malicious Slander: the Capricious gang are subjected to this in Book 2, as all the evidence they brought to light in Book 1 is written off by conspiracy groups on their equivalent of the internet as manufactured evidence for a political coup. Some of them are even accosted in public by people claiming to know the "truth".
• Master of One Magic: Nilah, Cordell, and any other human who practices enough — everybody (except those with arcana dystocia only gets the one type of magic, which appears to be determined at random.
• Mile-Long Ship: the TNS Ambrosini is even larger than the Harrow was, to the point its crew regularly use motor carts to get around. This becomes a problem when Bastion hits it with an asteroid and everything stops working. The ship is so big, its water supply ends up flooding most of the lower decks.
• Mobile Menace: Witts becomes this in Book 3, when he gets huge killer space station that can teleport.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Boots trying to fend off a handful of tiny swarm drones while piloting a tank out of a shipwreck before it explodes… after a massive reveal of a genocidal Ancient Conspiracy and someone losing a limb. It's funny in a weird way.
  • Also Nilah leaping through the air to deliver a devastating coup de grace to Harriet Fulsom (who just tortured Nilah's father to death), only for her poorly-calibrated Power Armor to whack its head on a support beam and tumble to the floor, feels almost like slapstick while Witts is handing their allies a Curb-Stomp Battle in the background.
• The Mothership: Bastion, Henrick Witts's massive, spiny, starfish-shaped battle station. It can channel his and his disciples' god-level magic, meaning he can instantly teleport it anywhere to ambush an entire fleet that knows he's coming, and use it to cast his ultimate spell that will bring about The End of the Galaxy as We Know It.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Being unable to use magic in a universe where everyone else can is a constant struggle against Fantastic Ableism and unemployment. Folks with arcana dystocia can’t even use the setting’s electronic payment system and must rely on a “paragon crystal” anyone can swipe and use for themselves. In Book 2, Boots opines how most of Harvest’s illicit pleasures are off-limits to her because they rely on stimulation of a body part she doesn’t have.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • The Winnower fleet ^note winnowing being an old term for removing unwanted parts of the harvest and many of the ships in it: Harrow, Kingbreaker, Feyhammer and Blackstar
  • Bill Scar
• Old Shame: Nilah feels this in Book 2 when a young person from a rich Taitutian family (like her) spews ignorant xenophobia about Boots's people, and she realizes she used to say very similar things.
• Orphaned Etymology: Crops up now and then with distant future people using English idioms like "on the blink", which Boots acknowledges as a reference to light bulb technology that no longer exists.
• Out with a Bang: Didier gets killed by Mother immediately after having sex with Boots, which has a profound effect on her.
• Planetary Relocation: Why, after all these centuries, hasn't anyone been able to locate Origin? Because its rulers used godlike magic to move it to a different corner of the galaxy after the first space colonies were launched.
• Power Crystal: all sufficiently powerful Magitek is fuelled by eidolon crystals.
  • The team temporarily acquires an extremely high-quality eidolon crystal, which allows Explosive Overclocking of all their tech (until they have to turn it into a bomb).
  • One of the purest, most powerful eidolon crystals of all time was used in the DeepStar project to search the galaxy for human-habitable worlds — but the Ancient Conspiracy sabotaged it, causing an explosion that destroyed a moon and flung multiple planets out of orbit.
• Power Nullifier:
  • Ordinary magic users can be restrained by cuffs filled with "calcifoam", which solidifies and immobilizes their fingers — can't draw a glyph, can't cast a spell.
  • There's also indolence gas, an emergency countermeasure released in crashed racecars to stop their volatile Magitek components from exploding, which also disconnects people from their magic for a time (helpful in dealing with a “god-level” caster like Mother).
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • A personal one for Boots at the end of Book 2, who finally gets revenge on their False Friend Stetson Giles (whom she kills) and takes back what he stole (the Chalice of Hana), but fails to obtain the primary MacGuffin as a result and gets nothing out of it beyond personal satisfaction. (She tries to curse him with the Chalice like he cursed her but its magic won't work for her and she ends up destroying it.)
  • Also for the whole crew at the same time: they killed one of the Gods of the Harrow and destroyed the Masquerade, but Armin is dead and without the Money Mill index Witts's schemes will continue uninterrupted.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Capricious crew. The captain is a military officer from a military that no longer exists, his first mate is a socially inept computer nerd who forgets to eat, the quartermaster is a borderline psychopathic former cage fighter war orphan with an overprotective robot following her around like a puppy, the doctor is a spaced out hippy who's married to their helmswoman/gunner, plus they've got a jaded former treasure hunter turned con artist from the same defunct military, who can't use magic and recently screwed them all over, flying escort for them. And that's not even touching on the trust fund baby technopath racecar driver.
• Ramming Always Works: Can't get through a god-level magic user's defenses? How about an entire spaceship? Even an unarmed craft can destroy a warship by running into it at FTL speeds. Armin survives the former, but sadly not the latter.
• Really 700 Years Old: Henrick Witts appears in a video recording from a century ago looking older than he does in the present — making him nearly 200 years old.
• Sapient Tank: The Element Devil, which eagerly describes its destructive capabilities to our heroes and casually calculates their odds of survival all while blowing shit up. It also addresses Nilah as “Supreme Being”.
• Seer: Marie's Apocalyptic Log claims Jean Prejean could see the future, which is supposed to be impossible (though we later find out there's a good reason for it). He wasn't omniscient, however; focusing on one threat made him overlook others. He told Marie that Boots would be his downfall, which convinced her to send Boots the intel that would expose him.
• Space Battle: Happens fairly often, complete with Old-School Dogfights — fitting, since one of our protagonists is a fighter pilot.
• Supernaturally Marked Grave: Witts loves doing this for the hordes of people he's killed to cover his tracks. Stalagmite sculptures and giant extinct trees, inscribed with Purple Prose about their noble contribution and The Needs of the Many etc. etc.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Boots hands these out like business cards, whether she's talking to ancient killer zealot A.I. or demigod alchemist cult leaders.
  Witts: Then it’s over. The dream of life… beyond time.
  Boots: [spits in his face] Proud to kill it.
• Technopath: Nilah, Orna, and anyone with a mechanist's mark can do this via magic, though physical contact is required and many networks have countermeasures against it.
• Teleport Spam: This is how Harriet Fulsom fights. If you plan to take her on, you have to be a dimensional anchor or very, very fast.
• Tongue-Tied: happens to Boots whenever she tries to tell anyone the whereabouts of Stetson Giles, along with a migraine, thanks to the curse he put on her.
• Villains Want Mercy: Despite all his bluster and supposedly noble intentions, even Henrick Witts begs for his life in the end (though he of course tries to frame it as altruism).
• We Have Reserves: The Masquerade's security system is designed this way, with dozens if not hundreds of Slave Mooks wired into it so it will keep functioning as long as just one of them remains alive — forcing any would-be saboteur to kill them all
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Henrick Witts casts himself as this — he claims he wants to “turn time in a circle” and save humanity from the eventual heat death of the universe. Unfortunately, this involves him gaining insane amounts of arcane power and slaughtering most of humanity in the process. At the end as Boots is about to kill him, he apologizes for not being able to save the universe.
• What the Hell, Hero?: After learning the Winnower fleet was responsible for the Famine War and the death of Clarkesfall, Orna naturally wants to ram the Harrow down the Taitutians’ throats and kill millions of innocents in the name of payback. Boots refuses to allow this.
  “Because if you did, you'd be just like the monsters who built this ship—and each and every person in this room would put you down like a dog.”
• Wizards' War: One took place on Origin in the ancient past, over the fate of alchemy. Boots sees a clip of it, and says that the advanced magic being used is genuinely hard to look at.
• Zerg Rush: Happens once per book!
  • in Book 1, Nilah manages to take on a horde of springflies hand-to-hand…and win
  • in Book 2, our heroes face a horde of magic-wielding Slave Mooks
  • in Book 3, the Vogelstrand unleashes swarm drones: tiny robot marbles that band together to form large weapons. A few of them get inside the Devil and keep fighting even though they're on their own

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