Here's the background to my current fantasy:
Magic is something like a life force, something like a psychoreactive shapeshifting creature that inhabits all the world. It could be sentient, or it could just be echoes of millenia of casting, praying, telling campfire stories etc. Magic is dying. It doesn't want to.
Social groupings reliant on practical magic for their legitimisation are in a bit of a jam: no more utility spells for the mages; lottery healing for the priests. So how do we heal our sick if the priests can't do it anymore? Well, there's this group of physicians who look promising (relying on various traditions - herbalists [pagans!], torturors [sadists!], and veterinarians [anti-humanists!]), but they do icky things like cutting up bodies to look inside. Yuk.
Then a series of disasters jumps up obliterating living things into an evenly spread goo. Magical disasters? Rumours spread "the Aimless One" has returned (if he was ever real in the first place, and you can't really trust rumour).
Then the Aimless One strikes in Feyshore, a free merchant's city at the southern tip of the continent, where a delicate balance of the three main factions (mages, priests, physicians) is in place. Envoys are sent to investigate.
The mages send an elderly battlemage who's been humiliated into teaching history of magic, and his assistant the fat female mage (and everyone knows women can't be mages). No, they don't take that seriously at all. Decadent academics the lot of them, they're just sending who they think is expendable. The "Aimless One's" dangerous after all. The elderly battle mage wants nothing so much as "feel the power again". His assistant needs money to keep survive, and a bit of reputation couldn't hurt either, to advertise her artifact identification workshop.
The Order of the Writ send a Knight Investigator, whose triple function is to investigate the Aimless One, "vanquish" him should it be necessary (i.e. if others - say the mages - could tap into that power), and also keep a check on the Feyshore chapter of the Writ, who on the whole support the heretical view that the Aimless One represents "the Wrath of God" (they don't believe in Gods, but for this thread the term should do) and it's directed at the Order. Bloody reformers. Knight Investigators can do as they like: lie, steal, murder... and get away with it, as long as it's for a good cause. Problem: the Knight Investigator in question doesn't quite buy that and brings his student to show him that it's really a crappy job. The student, though, must uphold a family tradition...
The physicians send a healer who's dying from a chronic blood disease. She's volunteered in a desire to be useful again (apart from documenting the progress of her disease, that is). There's a chance she could be healed by a priest (hey, it still happens; just not often), but she's too embarrassed to go for that. She's accompanied by her assistant from across the sea, who has special knowledge in anatomy; from where he won't tell.
So these folk meet in Feyshore, just at the time when the Roving Village arrives, out of schedule. The Roving Village is home to merchants, gamblers, circus folk, and other madmen and -women. They are said to have a sinister plan, but what they really have is a sinister guest:
The schizophrenic undead psychic the Order of the Writ has - in a moment of folly - called the miracle child and attempted to educate, all because she was born dead and resurrected shortly there-after. The voices in her head want her to be a goddess, but she doesn't want to do as she is told. Wayward child! Ungrateful child! Why do you hate us so! She wouldn't hate them half as much if they'd shut up once in a while. But they haven't - for about sixty years now.
The Aimless One's attack has left two survivors; a beekeeper who babbles about trolls and bees - people pay polite attention - and - poor darling - a girl around 12/13, everyone dotes on. But she's odd. For starters, why don't insects bite her? Could she be the... No, no way, impossible.
Quite possible, though. So sayeth a gambler who has taken a liking to her, as she reminds him of his own troubled past. Life would be so much easier if there weren't that nagging feeling that killing is "wrong". But a good gambler knows that imagination leads you astray. The only way to arrive at the surprise, though, is to play the game and indulge in your preconceptions.
So does everyone else, after all.
So what's the name of the game again?
(about 2/3 into 1st draft)