While I was beginning to write Sign of the Wolf I started reading a book that one of my Latin teachers recommended called The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer which is a wide-range study of comparative religion . In one of the books sections it talks about magic and how different cultures viewed things like sympathetic, or imitative  magic (think voodoo doll or rain-dance) and contagious magic.

The idea of contagious magic intrigued me. With contagious magic the power that one wields is directly linked to that person’s body. This made me think more about where my characters derive their abilities and what rules would then have to be followed. Hence the idea of using a type of bloodline magic made sense. So a werewolf is a werewolf because one or both of his parents are werewolves, or because he has been bitten by a werewolf. But there is also a sense of some incompatibility between some of the bloodline based magic. For example if a vampire married a werewolf and they had a child they would not have created a vampire/werewolf hybrid but the child would be all vampire or all wolf. In contrast if a magical creature has a child with a non magical creature the offspring would become like their magical parent, but the magical blood would be weakened and they would not have all of the abilities or weaknesses of their magical parent. (An example of this is the Dhamphir who are the offspring of a vampire and human). These limitations to blood magic also helps in my particular story since I couldn’t have Bledri’s wolves just going around biting everyone and turning them into werewolves. But since in this world there is an aspect of magical blood incompatibility and a line of non-pure magical bloodlines it becomes a gamble when a werewolf bites someone whether they’ll change or not since the person might have enough of their own magical blood that they do not change but are killed by the inflicted bite.

Like English grammar, however, there is always an exception to the bloodline magical rule. In Domo Terra that comes in the form of what I like to call Bi magic. While I was researching creatures that I would like to incorporate into this story I came across the multi-tailed fox of Near Eastern lure known in Japan as the Kitsune. I found the shapeshifting abilities of the kitsune a useful characteristic and was interested in the concept of the hoshi no tama which is a ball that the kitsune carries with them. Some accounts say that it holds part of the kitsune’s magic while it is in human form others say that it contains the kitsune’s soul. So here was a creature who derived its magic not only from its corporal body but from its soul as well. So I took the liberty of borrowing this concept and applying it to the Travelers allowing them to be from different magical backgrounds, though being a traveler is still mostly an inherited trait. I could tell you more about this type of magic but as River Song would say, “Spoilers.”