[Dragon's Gift 01.0 - 05.0] Complete Series

by Linsey Hall

The Dragon’s Gift series is a product of my two lives: one as an archaeologist and one as a novelist. I’m fortunate to have friends from my other life who are experts on historical sites. I’d like to thank Dr. Ayse Devrim Atauz for her help with the ruins at Ephesus (the real life location of the final battle) and Julia, a Roman archaeologist for her help with the Roman brothel and prostitutes.

  There was one aspect of combining my two lives that took a bit of work. I’d like to thank my friends, Wayne Lusardi, the State Maritime Archaeologist for Michigan, and Douglas Inglis and Veronica Morris, both archaeologists for Interactive Heritage, for their ideas about how to have a treasure hunter heroine that doesn’t conflict too much with archaeology’s ethics. The Author’s Note contains a bit more about this if you are interested

  Thank you, Ben, for everything you’ve done to support me in this career. Thank you to Carol Thomas for sharing your thoughts on the book and being amazing inspiration. My books are always better because of your help.

  Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for various forms of editing. The book is immensely better because of you! And thank you to Rebecca Frank for the beautiful cover. You really bring Cass to life!

  Stolen Magic Author’s Note

  I hope you enjoyed reading Stolen Magic as much as I enjoyed writing it. Writing Cass’s adventures are a labor of love for me because in addition to being a writer, I am also an archaeologist. The Dragon’s Gift series allows me to combine my two loves—writing and history—which has been amazing.

  As with my other stories, Stolen Magic features historical sites. The most important historical site in Stolen Magic is the Museum of Magical History, which is a based off the Natural History Museum in London. It’s an amazing museum, but the building itself is also historic. It was completed in 1881 and features incredible architecture that made it a perfect setting for Cass’s third adventure. Not only is it full of old stuff, the building is also old stuff as well.

  For the purposes of the story, I cleared out all the dinosaur skeletons and replaced the collections with magical archaeological artifacts. The cover image is meant to be one of the windows of the museum’s main hall, though I’ll confess that we actually used an image of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh because it worked better from an artistic standpoint.

  But one of the most important things about the Dragon’s Gift series is Cass’s relationship with the artifacts and the sense of responsibility she feels to protect them. I spoke about this in the Author’s Note for Ancient Magic and Mirror Mage, so this might be repetitive for some folks (feel free to quit now if so), but I want to include it in each of my Author’s Notes because it’s so important to me.

  I knew I had a careful line to tread when writing these books—combining the ethics of archaeology with the fantasy aspect of treasure hunting isn’t always easy.

  There is a big difference between these two activities. As much as I value artifacts, they are not treasure. Not even the gold artifacts. They are pieces of our history that contain valuable information, and as such, they belong to all of us. Every artifact that is excavated should be properly conserved and stored in a museum so that everyone can have access to our history. No one single person can own history, and I believe very strongly that individuals should not own artifacts. Treasure hunting is the pursuit of artifacts for personal gain.

  So why did I make Cass Cleraux a treasure hunter? I’d have loved to call her an archaeologist, but nothing about Cass’s work is like archaeology. Archaeology is a very laborious, painstaking process—and it certainly doesn’t involve selling artifacts. That wouldn’t work for the fast paced, adventurous series that I had planned for Dragon’s Gift. Not to mention the fact that dragons are famous for coveting treasure. Considering where Cass got her skills from, it just made sense to call her a treasure hunter (though I really like to think of her as a magic hunter). Even though I write urban fantasy, I strive for accuracy. Cass doesn’t engage in archaeological practices—therefore, I cannot call her an archaeologist. I also have a duty as an archaeologist to properly represent my field and our goals—namely, to protect and share history. Treasure hunting doesn’t do this. One of the biggest battles that archaeology faces today is protecting cultural heritage from thieves.

  I debated long and hard about not only what to call Cass, but also about how she would do her job. I wanted it to involve all the cool things we think about when we think about archaeology—namely, the Indiana Jones stuff, whether it’s real or not. Because that stuff is fun, and my main goal is to write a fun book. But I didn’t know quite how to do that while still staying within the bounds of my own ethics. I can cut myself and other writers some slack because this is fiction, but I couldn’t go too far into smash and grab treasure hunting.

  I consulted some of my archaeology colleagues to get their take, which was immensely helpful. Wayne Lusardi, the State Maritime Archaeologist for Michigan, and Douglas Inglis and Veronica Morris, both archaeologists for Interactive Heritage, were immensely helpful with ideas. My biggest problem was figuring out how to have Cass steal artifacts from tombs and then sell them and still sleep at night. Everything I’ve just said is pretty counter to this, right?

  That’s where the magic comes in. Cass isn’t after the artifacts themselves (she puts them back where she found them, if you recall)—she’s after the magic that the artifacts contain. She’s more of a magic hunter than a treasure hunter. That solved a big part of my problem. At least she was putting the artifacts back. Though that’s not proper archaeology (especially the damage she sometimes causes, which she always goes back to fix), I could let it pass. At least it’s clear that she believes she shouldn’t keep the artifact or harm the site. But the SuperNerd in me said, “Well, that magic is part of the artifact’s context. It’s important to the artifact and shouldn’t be removed and sold.”

  Now that was a problem. I couldn’t escape my SuperNerd self, so I was in a real conundrum. Fortunately, that’s where the immensely intelligent Wayne Lusardi came in. He suggested that the magic could have an expiration date. If the magic wasn’t used before it decayed, it could cause huge problems. Think explosions and tornado spells run amok. It could ruin the entire site, not to mention possibly cause injury and death. That would be very bad.

  So now you see why Cass Clereaux didn’t just steal artifacts to sell them. Not only is selling the magic cooler, it’s also better from an ethical standpoint, especially if the magic was going to cause problems in the long run. These aren’t perfect solutions—the perfect solution would be sending in a team of archaeologists to carefully record the site and remove the dangerous magic—but that wouldn’t be a very fun book. Hopefully this was a good compromise that you enjoyed (and that my old professors don’t hang their heads over).

  Stolen Magic Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Ben, for everything you’ve done to support me. Thank you to Douglas Inglis, for helping me to brainstorm great ideas. The book is so much better because of your clever genius. Thank you to Carol Thomas for sharing your thoughts on the book and being amazing inspiration. My books are always better because of your help.

  The Dragon’s Gift series is a product of my two lives: one as an archaeologist and one as a novelist. I’d like to thank my friends, Wayne Lusardi, the State Maritime Archaeologist for Michigan, and Douglas Inglis and Veronica Morris, both archaeologists for Interactive Heritage, for their ideas about how to have a treasure hunter heroine that doesn’t conflict too much with archaeology’s ethics. The Author’s Note contains a bit more about this if you are interested.

  Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for various forms of editing. The book is immensely better because of you! And thank you to Kathy Neibarger and Kaye Amis, who caught several embarrassing errors in the final manuscript. And thank you to Rebecca Frank for the beautiful cover. You really bring Cass to life!

  Eternal Magic Author’s Note

  I hope you enjoyed reading Eternal Magic. I love writing these books, be
cause they combine my two lives—that as a writer and as an archaeologist.

  As with my other stories, Eternal Magic features historical sites. In fact, this one probably features more than any other. In some places, I try to stick very close to history. In others, I make things up. So if you’re interested in knowing what was real and what wasn’t, read on.

  First, the pyramid. This was based on my own personal research into Egyptian Pyramids and also on the knowledge provided by my friend, archaeologist Veronica Morris, who has worked on Egyptian archaeological sites. Considering that all my research was done via computer and she’s actually worked on the sites, she provided all the really good stuff :-)

  The treasure room was based on King Tut’s tomb, which was discovered in 1922 and was filled with furniture, ornate boxes, and many artifacts. The Bastet statue she found was made of alabaster, the most common material for carved depictions of Bastet.

  Of the boobytraps that Cass and Del faced, the hematite powder and razor wire may have been actual Egyptian booby traps. When the Bahariya Oasis tomb was explored by archaeologists in 2001, they found an eight-inch thick layer of hematite powder at the sarcophagus. I was only able to find one (not very good) reference to razor wire being used in pyramids, so it could be totally fake. It was neat, though, so I thought I’d include it. And I’d rather write the next Cass adventure than do in-depth research to prove that razor wire actually was used, so I leave it up to you to decide if you want to believe it was real or not.

  But by far the most interesting part of Cass’s journey through the pyramid was her adventure with the boat. I’m a nautical archaeologist, so this part is my favorite. Several boats have been found buried at pyramid complexes. The boat that I used as particular inspiration for this scene was the Khufu ship, which was buried in a pit in the Giza pyramid complex around 2500 BC. The exact purpose of the boat is unknown, though it may have been meant to carry the resurrected Khufu to the afterlife. The dead may have also possessed magical items to defend themselves against dangers on the way.

  Everything that I wrote about Cass’s boat was taken from history (except the magical river:-)). There actually were symbols carved into the wood of pyramid boats to help with the reconstruction, just like a shelf from Ikea comes with stickers to indicate which side of the board goes where. The timbers were lashed together with ropes, and the planks even had roughly jagged edges that helped avoid slippage. This jogged-plank feature was found on the Abydos boats, discovered in 2000, rather than on Khufu’s barge, but it was such a neat feature that I had to include it. The little chips of wood that Cass and Del left on the floor because they couldn’t figure out where they belonged were actually tenons, little pieces of wood that fit into slots called mortises in order to keep the planks nicely lined up and firmly in place. For Cass’s purposes, the boat still would have worked, though you wouldn’t want to go to sea in a boat that didn’t have them if it was supposed to.

  The riddle that Cass and Del had to answer to get past the Sphinx was an old (and I mean old) Sumerian riddle, one of twenty-five found inscribed on a clay tablet discovered at Sumer, the southernmost region of the ancient Mesopotamia, which is now modern day Iraq and Kuwait. The tablet was dated to the 18th century BC (see? Super old). I’d have chosen an Egyptian riddle, but I couldn’t find one.

  The enchanted Celtic cauldron that Victor Orriodor stole was based on the Gundestrop Cauldron, a silver, Iron Age artifact that was found in a bog in Denmark. Specifically, it was part of the La Tene culture and was most likely laid in the bog as a sacrificial item between 150-1BC. I’ve always loved Celtic history and I was lucky enough to see the cauldron on a research trip to Denmark and Ireland, so I wanted to include it in the book. Any place that I can slip in real history or artifacts, I like to do so. Check out my Pinterest Page (under Linsey Hall) for pictures of this ornate, beautifully decorated cauldron.

  The Lyceum of Metis is an entirely made up place, of course, but the origin of the name is interesting. A lyceum is an educational institution and the name is actually a Latin version of the Ancient Greek word Lykeion. Metis was one of the ancient Greek titans. In the fifth century BC, during the height of Greek philosophy, Metis was considered the mother of wisdom.

  The passage tomb that Cass visited to find out about her past is based on two passage tombs that I visited in Ireland as part of research. Newgrange, the largest one, and Cairn T at Loughcrew, were both well preserved examples of these tombs and it was possible to enter them, which was really quite amazing considering that they are as old as the pyramids. As I wrote in Eternal Magic, the tombs often had a big stone blocking the entrance that one had to climb over (both of the tombs I entered were easier to access). The exterior stone was decorated with swirling stone carving and the interior stones in the main chambers were often carved with swirls and flowers. There were stone basins within the small interior rooms, which contained bones and artifacts when the tombs were originally excavated. But the most amazing part was the light that shined through the light shaft at solstice. I wished I had seen the real thing, but the reproduction that I experienced was amazing in itself and I just had to include it in a book.

  That’s it for the historical and archaeological sites featured in Eternal Magic. But one of the most important things about the Dragon’s Gift series is Cass’s relationship with the artifacts and the sense of responsibility she feels to protect them. I spoke about this in the Author’s Note for the other books in the series, so this part might be repetitive for some folks (feel free to quit now if so), but I want to include it in each of my Author’s Notes because it’s so important to me.

  I knew I had a careful line to tread when writing these books—combining the ethics of archaeology with the fantasy aspect of treasure hunting isn’t always easy.

  There is a big difference between these two activities. As much as I value artifacts, they are not treasure. Not even the gold artifacts. They are pieces of our history that contain valuable information, and as such, they belong to all of us. Every artifact that is excavated should be properly conserved and stored in a museum so that everyone can have access to our history. No single person can own history, and I believe very strongly that individuals should not own artifacts. Treasure hunting is the pursuit of artifacts for personal gain.

  So why did I make Cass Cleraux a treasure hunter? I’d have loved to call her an archaeologist, but nothing about Cass’s work is like archaeology. Archaeology is a very laborious, painstaking process—and it certainly doesn’t involve selling artifacts. That wouldn’t work for the fast-paced, adventurous series that I had planned for Dragon’s Gift. Not to mention the fact that dragons are famous for coveting treasure. Considering where Cass got her skills, it just made sense to call her a treasure hunter (though I really like to think of her as a magic hunter). Even though I write urban fantasy, I strive for accuracy. Cass doesn’t engage in archaeological practices—therefore, I cannot call her an archaeologist. I also have a duty as an archaeologist to properly represent my field and our goals—namely, to protect and share history. Treasure hunting doesn’t do this. One of the biggest battles that archaeology faces today is protecting cultural heritage from thieves.

  I debated long and hard about not only what to call Cass, but also about how she would do her job. I wanted it to involve all the cool things we think about when we think about archaeology—namely, the Indiana Jones stuff, whether it’s real or not. Because that stuff is fun, and my main goal is to write a fun book. But I didn’t know quite how to do that while still staying within the bounds of my own ethics. I can cut myself and other writers some slack because this is fiction, but I couldn’t go too far into smash-and-grab treasure hunting.

  I consulted some of my archaeology colleagues to get their take, which was immensely helpful. Wayne Lusardi, the State Maritime Archaeologist for Michigan, and Douglas Inglis and Veronica Morris, both archaeologists for Interactive Heritage, were immensely helpful with ideas. My biggest problem was figuring
out how to have Cass steal artifacts from tombs and then sell them and still sleep at night. Everything I’ve just said is pretty counter to this, right?

  That’s where the magic comes in. Cass isn’t after the artifacts themselves (she puts them back where she found them, if you recall)—she’s after the magic that the artifacts contain. She’s more of a magic hunter than a treasure hunter. That solved a big part of my problem. At least she was putting the artifacts back. Though that’s not proper archaeology (especially the damage she sometimes causes, which she always goes back to fix), I could let it pass. At least it’s clear that she believes she shouldn’t keep the artifact or harm the site. But the SuperNerd in me said, “Well, that magic is part of the artifact’s context. It’s important to the artifact and shouldn’t be removed and sold.”

  Now that was a problem. I couldn’t escape my SuperNerd self, so I was in a real conundrum. Fortunately, that’s where the immensely intelligent Wayne Lusardi came in. He suggested that the magic could have an expiration date. If the magic wasn’t used before it decayed, it could cause huge problems. Think explosions and tornado spells run amok. It could ruin the entire site, not to mention possibly cause injury and death. That would be very bad.

  So now you see why Cass Clereaux didn’t just steal artifacts to sell them. Not only is selling the magic cooler, it’s also better from an ethical standpoint, especially if the magic was going to cause problems in the long run. These aren’t perfect solutions—the perfect solution would be sending in a team of archaeologists to carefully record the site and remove the dangerous magic—but that wouldn’t be a very fun book. Hopefully this was a good compromise that you enjoyed (and that my old professors don’t hang their heads over).

  Thank you so much for reading Eternal Magic, and if you’ve made it this far in the Author’s Note, thank you for reading this as well! It’s an important part of the story and I appreciate when folks take the time to learn about the archaeological influences in my books. I hope you’ll stay with Cass on her journey, because it’s not done yet!