Oh no, unlucky page number thirteen! ... though actually, thirteen seems to be one of my lucky numbers. I guess I inhereted it from my dad. Weird. ;D Aaaaaaaanywhoooo....
Well, first off: Otherkin Community, I tip my hat to you. I didn’t spend very long there at all… but, while there was some craziness, somehow everyone I met was nice. On the internet, this is a miracle of astronomical proportions. Between them, Therians, and a couple of Yahoo clubs/groups for text-based RP, I ended up opening up enough to participate in the internet and eventually get a gallery.
Now, about the comic… I know I throw a lot of stuff out on this page (and will do so more throughout the book) without a lot of real explanation, and am making some even more substantial deviations from myth. But Seamus’ll address that Next update. Nevertheless, I promise, I’ll come back to Leylines for a bit next book. But there’s a lot of other, more pressing things I need to get to, and let’s face it, the script is kind of dragging here, so please bear with me.
Anyway… Now, regarding Leylines, if I understand things correctly (and I’ve been wrong before), the concept of Leylines really isn’t all that old, as it’s only been around about ninety years. The term was coined by Alfred Watkins, and was really used to represent simple traveling paths between historical markers, with no supernatural elements involved. However, it seems our current ideas of Leylines are actually blended with an older, but similar concept: Fairy Paths. Both sets of paths connected monuments, but these were the roadways for the Fae folk, just as the name would indicate. If you were to stumble upon a Fairy path, you could find yourself suddenly lost, come down with a strange illness, or become enchanted (and not in the nice way). They were places where strange things happened… and if you built your house on a Fairy Path, well, god help you. (On a related note, the sea and sky aspect of the way I’m depicting Leylines, by the way, comes in part from how I think they’d work “Scientifically” but also from Australian Songlines, which, while not supernatural in the same way, are still interesting.)
Regardless, I chose to use Leylines instead of the more accurate FairyPath, because, frankly… I think that if magical lines of power existed, other magical races would be bothered by the lines being attributed to any one group. Thus, Leyline is more “PC.”
Hmm, you know, I think the first time I’d heard of Leylines, I was… maybe ten? To be honest, I don’t remember. But one early summer day, my Dad took my big sis and I out to a hill on my folk’s property, to show me a ring of grass that was growing higher and greener than the rest. (It comes back almost every year… here’s a shot of it from back before we put up an ugly fence: [link]) He informed us that it was a green Fairy Ring, and told us quite a bit about fairy lore. This was slightly unusual, because while my father likes the fantasy genre, he’s really more of a sci-fi buff.
As it turns out, my grandfather on my dad’s side was an …interesting fellow. I never knew him, but according to my dad, he told amazing stories, and was friends with the strangest range of people, ranging from carnies to astronomy professors. Anyway, he had a wealth of knowledge of Irish folklore, and passed some of it on to my dad.
I remember some time later hearing the term again on a documentary about mythical things… I think it was on the Discovery Channel and included the Cottingham fairies too, which fascinated me. But the first time I really came across Leylines in entertainment-based media was oddly enough, in The Vampire Diaries. The books were… Twilight before sparkles. But they’ve also shown up in The Dresden Files, and I’m told they also show up in everyone’s favorite MMORPG, World of Warcraft.
So… here’s to you Mr. Watkins. I’m sorry people didn’t take you seriously, but man, we’re all loving what you came up with anyway.
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