Jennifer Harwood-Smith
Centuries ago, the Sartan thought to defeat our ambition by sundering the world that was ours by rights and throwing us into their prison. As you well know, the way out of the Labyrinth is long and tortuous. It took centuries to solve the twisting puzzle of our land. The old books say the Sartan devised this punishment in hopes that our bounding ambition and our cruel and selfish natures would be softened by time and suffering.
You must always remember their plan, Haplo. It will give you the strength you’ll need to do what I ask of you. The Sartan had dared to assume that, when we emerged into this world, we would be fit to take our places in any of the four realms we chose to enter.
Something went wrong. Perhaps you’ll discover what it was when you enter Death Gate. It seems from what I have been able to decipher in the old books, that the Sartan were to have monitored the Labyrinth and kept its magic in check. But, either through malicious intent or for some other reason, they forsook their responsibility as caretakers of our prison. The prison gained a life of its own - a life that knew only one thing, survival. And so, the Labyrinth, our prison, came to see us, its prisoners, as a threat. After the Sartan abandoned us, the Labyrinth, driven by its fear and hatred of us, turned deadly.
When at last I found my way out, I discovered the Nexus, this beautiful land the Sartan had established for our occupation. And I came across the books. Unable to read them at first, I worked and taught myself and soon learned their secrets. I read of the Sartan and their ‘hopes’ for us and I laughed aloud - the first and only time in my life I have ever laughed. You understand me, Haplo. There is no joy in the Labyrinth.
But I will laugh again, when my plans are complete. When the four separate worlds - Fire, Water, Stone, and Sky - are again one. Then I will laugh long and loudly.1
The opening prologue of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle series, published from 1990 to 1994, is entirely in the voice of an as-yet unnamed leader of an as-yet unnamed people, plotting to send a man named Haplo to the “Realm of the Sky”, with orders to find their ancient enemies and not to betray their people.2 There is a great deal to unpack in only three pages; the language suggests that the speaker is from a race that was imprisoned by ancient enemies, that the jailers —and, indeed, anyone who can confirm the prisoners’ crimes— are long gone or dead, and perhaps most chilling of all, that vengeance will soon fall upon the other worlds. However, more questions are raised than answered, as is the case with the maps that precede the prologue,3 which make sense only once the reader learns in Chapter One that Arianus, the Realm of the Sky, is a series of floating islands. It is this strange and mysterious beginning, with its difficult to interpret maps, that introduces the reader to the sundered worlds, the Sartan who created it, and the Patryn who are seeking their revenge. Over seven books,4 the reader learns how a catastrophe on Earth sparked the appearance of elves, dwarves, and two races of demi-gods, first the Sartan and then the Patryn, the animosity between the demi-gods, the Sundering of the Earth into four elemental worlds by the Sartan to prevent the Patryn taking power, and the consequences that followed, including the near-extinction of the Sartan race and the trapping of the Patryn people in a semi-sentient prison gone mad. It is also a story of the Patryn Haplo and the Sartan Alfred forming a friendship as a direct result of exploring the various worlds and their own history, finding the balance between their peoples that could have prevented the Sundering. (Haplo is originally a spy sent by the Patryn leader Xar to learn about the other worlds, report back on the Sartan, and help Xar in his plan to recreate the Earth. He is accompanied for much of the narrative by a dog which is actually a portion of his soul he subconsciously partitioned to keep himself alive. Alfred is one of the Sartan who were sent to Arianus to guide the humans, elves, and dwarves who live there. He was the only survivor of a mysterious event that killed all other Sartan on Arianus, and so spent centuries pretending to be a clumsy human).
Running through the narrative is a deep interest in interconnectivity, balance, and the consequences of disrupting such a balance. In fact, interconnectivity is considered to be the foundation of the universe, as explained in the first Appendix of the series in Dragon Wing (1990), where reality is defined as the point where two waves of possibility meet.5 The runic magic used by the Sartan and the Patryn is the manipulation of the waves of possibility to alter reality.6 In Elven Star (1990), Patryn magic is further explained as the ability to understand an object, represent it with a rune, and how even poorly drawn runes will balance themselves (though not always behaving as expected), and the difficulty in exerting too much control through runic magic.7 While both these Appendices are quite technical —as is fitting with documents which are meant to represent archival evidence, as will be discussed later— they can be ultimately understood to describe a system where a user of magic, understanding the structure of an item and its associated rune, can choose from all possibilities a new reality, and bring it into being for the duration of a spell. Consider the battle in Serpent Mage (1992), where Haplo’s “steel chain still hung in the air. Haplo instantly rearranged the magic, altered the sigla’s form into that of a spear, and hurled it straight at Samah’s breast. A shield appeared in Samah’s left hand. The spear struck the shield; the chain of Haplo’s magic began to fall apart”.8 This battle shows both the extent and the limits of possibility magic; while Haplo can change a chain into a spear, he must rewrite the spell first. However, he cannot have the spear act any differently from a real spear, thus a shield is sufficient to stop it. This exchange further shows the balance between the performance of magic; for the Sartan, runes are sung or signed, where for the Patryn, they must be spoken and written, and so Samah can create a shield out of thin air, where Haplo’s chain originally came from the runes tattooed all over his body.9 However, despite their differences, both forms of rune magic are actually complementary, strengthening each other when used together, as seen when Haplo and Alfred finally use their magic together.10 This is reinforced by the explanation of the Wave provided at the end of the series:
‘All of us, drops in the ocean, forming the Wave. Usually we keep the Wave in balance - water lapping gently on the shoreline, hula girls swaying in the sand,’ said Zifnab dreamily. ‘But sometimes we throw the Wave out of kilter. Tsunami. Tidal disturbances. Hula girls washed out to sea. But the Wave will always act to correct itself. Unfortunately’ - he sighed - ‘that sometimes sends water foaming up in the opposite direction’.11
For the Death Gate universe, balance is not merely a desire but an inevitability, and chaos and order are mere tools to ensure this. The rise of the Sartan necessitated the rise of the Patryn, and, as will be seen throughout this essay, this secondary creation will not allow for imbalance or disconnection for long. The need for interconnectivity is also highlighted by the use of portals; the worlds of Air, Fire, Earth, and Water are reached by a portal called Death’s Gate, which also reaches both the Nexus and the Labyrinth. In the Labyrinth, gates are not only physical structures for escaping, but also temporal markers, as they are used to tell time, albeit unevenly at first.12 However, Weis and Hickman do not only use balance and interconnectivity in the narrative of The Death Gate Cycle, but also in their use of four discrete world-building techniques: textual world-building, footnotes, Appendices, and maps. To fully appreciate just how much balance permeates this subcreation, it is necessary to explore the balance Weis and Hickman have created in how the reader engages with the subcreation. However, it is first necessary to discuss the core of The Death Gate Cycle, the very thing that allows its various worlds to be explored, and that which both disrupts and restores balance: the portal.
When a speculative fiction text introduces a portal, that device often becomes the driving force of the subcreation. From the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to the free standing portal doors in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the portal becomes the linchpin of the series, driving the narrative and either assisting or hindering the characters. In The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987), portal doors along a beach are used to find and extract the companions Roland Deschain will need on his quest to the Dark Tower, but they also serve as signifiers in other texts. In the Haven (2010–2015) episode “Lost and Found”, the appearance of a free standing portal door acts as an indicator to an audience familiar with King’s other works that Haven is not just a King text, but also a Dark Tower text.13 Farah Mendlesohn describes the portal fantasy as being “about entry, transition, and exploration. . . it denies the taken for granted and positions both protagonist and reader as naïve”.14 Rarely is such denial of the reader’s expectations of reality more extreme than in The Death Gate Cycle. The history of the Earth in the Death Gate Cycle already crosses into fantasy, as a world that, after a nuclear catastrophe, saw the rise (or return, as some claimed) of elves and dwarves, and the Sartan and the Patryn.15 However, when Weis and Hickman introduced the series (with Lord Xar’s words above), this Earth is long gone, sundered and replaced by four primary realms, along with the Patryns’ prison the Labyrinth, and the Nexus. What each of these worlds shares is Death’s Gate, designed to allow two-way travel between the various worlds (this differs from the one-way conduits in the series, which are intended for the transport of energy, supplies, and perhaps prisoners).16
Death’s Gate itself is barred when the series begins, shut down by the Sartan leader Samah when he became afraid of the dragon-snakes which appeared on the world of water, Chelestra after the Sundering.17 Passage through Death’s Gate is an experience that is at first difficult to understand; in Fire Sea (1991), Haplo’s journal entry informs the reader that, in each journey through Death’s Gate, he has lost consciousness: “One moment I was awake, looking forward to entering the small dark hole that seemed far too tiny to contain my ship. The next moment I was safely in the Nexus”.18 Indeed, it is only when Haplo is accompanied by Alfred that he actually experiences the interior of Death’s Gate. At the heart of the portal which links all the worlds, Weis and Hickman built in interconnectivity and balance; both Alfred the Sartan and Haplo the Patryn lose consciousness when travelling through Death’s Gate alone, but together they remain awake, to experience the dichotomies of it together, from moving too slowly and too fast at once, to their bodies exploding and imploding at the same time, and hearing screams when deaf, among other experiences: “‘Death’s Gate. A place that exists and yet does not exist. It has substance and is ephemeral. Time is measured marching ahead going backward. Its light is so bright that I am plunged into darkness’”.19 Death’s Gate, then, exists in a quantum state and appears to respond in some way to the animosity and polarity between the ancient enemies, as their journey through Death’s Gate forces both men to swap consciousness for a short time, with each seeing the most traumatic event in the other’s life.20 While Death’s Gate itself does not appear to be sentient, it would appear that it abhors extremes and sought to balance how each saw the other; from then on in the series, Haplo did not see Alfred merely as his jailor, and in Serpent Mage, Alfred gives a moving speech about the love and loyalty the Patryn have for each other.21
However, as with all elements in The Death Gate Cycle, Death’s Gate is also balanced by the Seventh Gate, the physical/magical location which allowed the Sartan to cast the spells for the Sundering of the worlds. It is also the place where a higher power can be felt, the one which controls the Wave and brings balance where it is needed.22 Where Death’s Gate is a corridor where all possibilities exist at once, the Seventh Gate is room which is “a hole in the fabric of magic wherein the possibility exists that no possibilities exist”.23 Where Death’s Gate is a maelstrom of chaos, the Seventh Gate is calm, “a room with seven marble walls, covered by a domed ceiling. A globe suspended from the ceiling cast a soft, white glow. . . the words of warning remained inscribed on the walls: Any who bring violence into this chamber will find it visited upon themselves”.24 The Seventh Gate is a null place, with doors leading to each of the worlds of Air, Water, Fire, and Stone, the Labyrinth, the Nexus, and finally, Death’s Gate itself.25 While Samah, the architect of the Sundering, claimed to have created Death’s Gate, it could be surmised that he did not design the chaos of it, but that it was instead the Wave correcting itself; in this universe of balance, the null possibility of the Seventh Gate could not exist without its counterpart. However, these two portals created the greatest imbalance in the series, between the living and the dead, as the existence of Death’s Gate prevents the souls of the dead from leaving. This led to the Kenkari elves of Arianus storing the souls of their dead, and the necromancy which trapped the Sartan dead on Abarrach. Indeed, the trapping of souls by Death’s Gate could be seen as the counteraction to the Sartans’ violence against Earth in the Seventh Gate, as the raising of the dead on Abarrach likely killed Sartan on all the other worlds. (Even Alfred is not sure that this was the cause of the death of his fellow Sartan on Arianus, but it seems a likely explanation). By closing Death’s Gate at the end of the series, the gate to the afterlife is opened.26 The sacrifice for this spiritual travel is that the four worlds of Air, Water, Fire, and Stone are no longer physically accessible; however, this too is a restoration of balance, as will be explored later in this essay.
Having understood the groundwork of how magic and movement work in The Death Gate Cycle, it is important to understand how Weis and Hickman use the techniques of world-building to facilitate the reader’s understanding of this world. It is telling that much of the information on how magic and Death’s Gate operate does not come from the text, but rather from the Appendices. This is related to the structure of the novels; in The Seventh Gate (1991), Appendix I reveals that the series has not been written for a human reader, but rather is a history for the Sartan and the Patryn who now live together in the Nexus and the Labyrinth.27 The text is intended to be structured as an historical account, and so the means Weis and Hickman use to engage the reader become part of the subcreation itself, beginning with textual world-building.
Textual world-building is perhaps most common across all fiction which engages in world-building. The first line of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger reads: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”.28 This is narrative, but it is also the reader’s first glimpse of End-world, of a desert and a world where gunslingers still existed. At this point, the reader is unaware of who the villains and heroes are, or why one is chasing the other. It is not until The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997) that the relationship is fully understood; in fact, King halts the quest narrative for an entire book to fully explain the nature of the man in black’s betrayal of the gunslinger.29 This is perhaps the greatest weakness of textual world-building; as Mark J. P. Wolf points out:
One of the cardinal rules often given to new writers has to do with narrative economy; they are told to pare down their prose and remove anything that does not actively advance the story. World-building, however, often results in data, exposition, and digressions that provide information about a world, slowing down narrative or even bringing it to a halt temporarily, yet much of the excess detail and descriptive richness can be an important part of the audience’s experience.30
It is the disruption of narrative pacing that is the greatest risk in textual world-building, particularly in the “infodump”, defined by Jeff Prucher as “a large amount of background information inserted into a story all at once”.31 The long quote at the beginning of this essay is something of an infodump; it is explained away by Lord Xar of the Patryn claiming that he is rambling, which is likely the result of his sharing a drink with Haplo.32 However, the reader cannot rely on the potentially tipsy ramblings of characters to describe these worlds, and although Haplo is the logical conduit for world-building as an Innocent Abroad, acting as the kind of guide Farah Mendlesohn describes,33 Weis and Hickman do not introduce him again until Chapter 17, page 120, when he is rescued by the dwarf revolutionary leader, Limbeck. However, where Haplo differs from an Innocent Abroad is that his apprehension of Arianus is not overt; rather he listens in to the conversations around him before speaking up to join the revolution.34 This denial of Haplo’s role as a potential Innocent Abroad is in keeping with his intended role as the harbinger of Patryn sovereignty over the realms; he is in essence a spy, intended to understand the sundered worlds so that Xar may reunite and conquer them.
In lieu of an Innocent Abroad and their associated guide, and in order to avoid infodumps, Weis and Hickman instead opt for using footnotes to enhance their world-building and give the reader needed context, and, in the later books, reminders. It is also in keeping with what we finally discover to be the historical nature of the series. According to Mendlesohn, the “experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text”.35 It can also be argued that footnotes can prevent world-building from being too intrusive in texts. Perhaps the two best known recent examples of footnotes are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (1983–2015) and Susanna Clarke’s Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), which use footnotes for different primary purposes, but both of which have the secondary purpose of ensuring the integrity of the secondary world. Pratchett’s footnotes are for the purpose of expanding on a joke:
She still wasn’t sure about Maladict, but Igor had to be a boy, with those stitches around the head and that face that could only be called homely.⋆
⋆And even then it was the kind of home that has a burned-out vehicle on the lawn.36
Pratchett’s footnotes function as a jocular wink, an almost Shakespearian aside to the reader, inviting them into a joke, but more importantly they prevent the expanded joke from interfering with the narrative, particularly in the case of this example, where the footnote is more evocative of the Primary World rather than the Discworld. Clarke’s footnotes are more focussed on world-building, in two ways. The first is in providing verisimilitude to the text, with the first footnote acting as an academic reference to an in-world text following a quote: “The History and Practice of English Magic, by Jonathan Strange, Vol. I, Chap. 2, pub. John Murray, London, 1816”.37 However, Clarke’s footnotes also serve an important world-building function, as demonstrated by footnote 6 which follows this line: “Mr Segundus took down The Instructions of Jacques Belasis and, despite Mr Norrell’s poor opinion of it, instantly hit upon two extraordinary passages”.38 The footnote then proceeds to take up over three quarters of the page, describing the two passages, which also give the reader information about the past of Clarke’s world, as well as some details about fairies.39 While this footnote is interesting, it is too much information to be included without disrupting the narrative. So for Clarke, footnotes are for the information which help construct her secondary creation, but which has no place in the narrative. It is, in fact, a way to present an infodump without boring the reader.
Weis and Hickman’s use of footnotes is similar to Clarke’s, though they have several variants and make interesting uses of them. The first footnote is in the first chapter of Dragon Wing and is used to explain what a tier is. What is unusual about this is that the footnote is not introduced until the fifth use of the word “tier” to explain that the tier is a large, mostly useless bird with powerful legs, used as a beast of burden by humans.40 This footnote also gives the reader one of their first impressions of the cultural differences in Arianus, as it specifies that elves consider tiers “unclean”, with strong implications that this view might extend to humans.41 Weis and Hickman’s use of the footnotes also allows them to give explanations for phenomena like Arianus’s water-based currency42 and floating islands43 without interrupting the flow of Hugh the Hand’s attempted execution.44 As the Sartan and Patryn who are the intended readers for the series have no way of travelling to the other worlds, these footnotes give them the information they need to understand the text, without the need to refer to other documents.
Weis and Hickman also use their footnotes for more than just pure world-building. In Dragon Wing, there are 25 footnotes, with one in the Appendices, and all are dedicated to world-building. However, as the series progresses, footnotes become more referential for the series, as The Seventh Gate contains nine footnotes in the main text, with six in the Appendices. Of the nine footnotes in the text, eight engage in world-building, and one refers to the book’s Appendix. Of the footnotes in the Appendices, the first is an explanatory note from the “author” of the Appendices, while the rest are references to other books in the series. In addition to providing new information, Weis and Hickman also reinforce their existing world-building. The 35th footnote in The Hand of Chaos (1993)45 revisits the living stone coralite, which is explained in the third footnote of Dragon Wing,46 giving new information and refreshing the reader’s memory of what the substance is, particularly as it has not been mentioned for the intervening three books.
Footnotes are also used to refer to the next technique Weis and Hickman use: Appendices, with Chapters 26 and 27 of The Hand of Chaos containing three footnotes to refer the reader to the first Appendix of the book, which explains the assassin’s society called The Brotherhood of the Hand.47 This is where Weis and Hickman’s ability to balance their world-building techniques is at its height; the encounters with The Brotherhood of the Hand are tense, filled with intrigue, and to interrupt them to explain the assassins’ society, even in a footnote, would interrupt the narrative flow. Instead the Appendices are designed to enhance the world-building and engage the reader once the action has finished. The Appendices of The Death Gate Cycle are prolific, encompassing 12 distinct Appendices, and eight songs, and ranging from treatises on Sartan and Patryn magic to discussions of the nature of the living islands on Chelestra, to explanations of the workings of the great machine, the Kicksey-winsey, on Arianus. However, like Clarke’s first footnote, the Appendices of The Death Gate Cycle seek to insert verisimilitude in the text by having different authors, ranging from unknown Sartan and Patryn to reports from Alfred and Haplo, and even a sales brochure for the submersibles of Chelestra, with explanatory footnotes by Alfred.48 It is the Appendices which serve to demystify Sartan and Patryn magic, with in-depth and highly technical descriptions of the possibility magic which both use. This complements the in-text references to drawing runes with magical effects, as the technical detail has no place in the narrative. In Chapter 54 of Dragon Wing, Sartan magic is described as follows:
Slowly, gently thrusting aside the dog, Alfred rose to his feet. Walking to the center of the room, he lifted his arms into the air and began to move in a solemn and strangely graceful —for his ungainly body— dance. . .
The air around him began to shimmer as his dancing continued. He was tracing the runes in the air with his hands and drawing them on the floor with his feet.49
In comparison, the Appendices of Dragon Wing has the following description:
The key to rune (or runic) magic is that the harmonic wave that weaves a possibility into existence must be created with as much simultaneity as possible. This means that the various motions, signs, words, thoughts and elements that go into making up the harmonic wave must be completed as close together as possible.50
The difference is stark. The in-text description of magic is almost lyrical at times, whereas the Appendix is scientific. This is easily explained by the nature of the intended Sartan and Patryn audience, who, from a young age, must be educated in possibility magic. The technical details are meant to assist them in understanding their world, using language that they would be immediately familiar with. This reinforces the role of the Appendices as being for further edification and information, and not immediately necessary for the reader to understand the narrative. This is what differentiates Appendices from footnotes; footnotes are what the authors feel the reader needs to know immediately, while Appendices are meant to be engaged with after the action, with both serving to bolster and enrich the existing textual world-building.
The final world-building technique is that of maps. Mendlesohn describes how in the quest narrative, “the portal is not encoded solely in the travelogue discovery of what lies ahead, but in the insistence that there is past and place behind, and that what lies behind must be thoroughly known and unquestioned before the journey begins”.51 However, this sense of history, of people creating and naming places in a map, is thrown over in The Death Gate Cycle by the fact that the maps are fairly incomprehensible on their own. The expected roads, rivers, mountains, towns, and oceans the fantasy reader expects are often absent. Arianus is a series of floating islands divided into areas called High Realm, Mid Realm, and Low Realm, all contained within an ovoid shell, with a sun at the top and a maelstrom just above a smaller ovoid labelled “Death Gate”. The other two maps of Arianus show Mid Realm in greater detail, and the Volkaran Isles, a small archipelago in Mid Realm, where most of the action of Dragon Wing takes place. The second and third maps also include something not normally seen in fantasy maps: orbit lines. However, these maps do not make sense until the reader has begun reading Dragon Wing, particularly its footnote on page 14, which explains how the islands float. The maps are more than something for the reader to refer to during the quest journey, but rather something for the reader to interpret and understand in conjunction with the narrative, and a great machine, the Kicksey-winsey, which is meant to bring the islands into alignment and turn the world into a manufacturing base. However, the Kicksey-winsey is not working as it should, and the islands are out of alignment. So not only is the map of Arianus difficult to read without the text, but it is also a map of a failed system; when the islands come into alignment in Into the Labyrinth (1993), there is no map of how they were always meant to look. Like the intended Sartan and Patryn audience, the reader is left to imagine what a balanced and functioning Arianus looks like.
In contrast to the complete map of all of Arianus, Pryan, the world of fire, is only a partial map, of the known world of Equilan. This is because Pryan is so large —a fantasy Dyson sphere with four suns in its center and life covering the inside of the sphere— that Weis and Hickman chose not to attempt to show it. And even though Equilan has elements familiar to the reader, such as seas and what appears to be landmasses, the text undermines this: the seas of Equilan are actually on the top of a massive canopy of trees so deep that no one on Pryan has seen the ground. Even more confusing are the maps of the dwarven Kingdoms of Equilan, until the reader learns that this is a map of a quasi-cave system, which, while closer to the ground, is still within the trees. As with Arianus, the reader must engage with the text before understanding truly comes about.
Abarrach, the world of stone, and Chelestra, the world of water, are both slightly more traditionally represented, in that both are shown in whole in the void. Abarrach is the only world of the four which is spherical, but unlike traditional globes, it is the cross section of the immense cave structure which is shown. From the information he had access to before he left the Nexus, Haplo’s expectations are that of “a world of tunnels and caves, a world of cool and earthy-smelling darkness”, but instead he finds himself on a river of fire.52 This leads the reader to the realization that “fire sea” on the map is a literal description of the sea. So the reader realizes, along with Haplo, that the rivers and lakes on the map are filled with magma, not water. There is also an historical element to Abarrach’s maps which is not seen in the other maps; namely, sections with the words “Here the fire sea once flowed” and “Ancient Home of the Little People”.53 After two other books, the reader is aware that the “Little People” were the dwarves, and it is clear that some ecological catastrophe is underway.
Chelestra is an ovoid which is divided into four sections: Longnight, Goodsea, Barrens, and Newbirth, all of which are meaningless to the reader, as is the term Seasun. Throughout the novel, the reader learns that the sun of Chelestra is within the water, and warms certain areas as it moves. As a result, the four sections of Chelestra, of which Goodsea is the most habitable region, are constantly in flux. At this stage, however, the reader can expect to need guidance from the text to understand the maps.
The final map is found in The Hand of Chaos and shows the Nexus at the center of the four elemental worlds, as well as diagrams indicating the movement of materials and energy. The reader will be familiar with these connections, however, as with the technical descriptions of magic, there is more to the map than meets the eye. In Appendix II of The Hand of Chaos, a technical report from Haplo on Death’s Gate and the conduits reveal that all of the realms do not orbit each other, but actually occupy the same space, “harmonically shifted into several different realities. These harmonic realities manifest themselves into the various partitioned realities that we perceive as fire, water, earth, and sky, as well as special subrealities we know as the Nexus and the Labyrinth”.54 In a single Appendices, Weis and Hickman rewrite everything the reader knows about the subcreation they have been engaging with. As subrealities, the Nexus and the Labyrinth are essentially less real than the elemental worlds, and so the trapping of the Sartan and Patryn within them is essential for the final act of balance in The Death Gate Cycle: the sociocultural balance.
As a portal text, it is important to understand how the portal affects the sociocultural makeup of each of the worlds, whether or not the characters are aware of the portal. For Arianus, the portal is unwittingly the center of their world, as it is meant to power the very machine that keeps them alive by providing water. However, as the power is not being drawn from Pryan, the effect of the portal is to create a tiered society of vast injustices, bolstered by the inherent racism of the elves. When Dragon Wing begins, the humans have only recently won freedom from their Elvish occupiers, and the dwarves remain in thrall to the elves, who they see as gods. However, in Alfred’s final summation of the events of the series in the Appendix to The Seventh Gate, the reader learns that this was intentional; the Sartan had given the elves instructions on the proper operation of the Kicksey-winsey, which would unite the floating islands of the elves and humans, and give the dwarves control of the machine, and therefore the water supply.55 This serves to underscore a recurring theme in the series, which is the Sartans’ misunderstanding of the relationships between humans, elves, and dwarves, referred to as “mensch” races, and the effects of their own treatment of them. In Serpent Mage, Samah refers to the mensch races as children and is insistent that they needed Sartan guidance, and that the Patryn were trying to corrupt them.56 And although Alfred, who has spent years among the mensch pretending to be one, tries to defend them, the other Sartan are similarly convinced that the mensch need guidance. Even Haplo’s original mission, to sow discord and to find a disciple to help the Patryn control the mensch, makes a presumption that they are lesser beings. Indeed, it is notable that the work of Arianus, particularly of maintaining the Kicksey-winsey, falls to the mensch. Whether they are willing to describe them as such, the Sartan are using the mensch as a form of slave labor, allowing themselves to be worshipped and served. In general, the mensch are not aware of the Sundering, and do not realize that their long-lost gods killed most of their populations simply to maintain their own control. The divisions seen on Arianus can also be seen on Pryan in Elven Star, and given the favoritism shown to elves on Arianus,57 it can be presumed that this was in play on the other worlds.
While there are indications that other areas of Pryan have found peace between the races, the only world where mensch are fully described as living in harmony, despite their differences, is Chelestra, where the Sartan had the least amount of influence on their civilization, as the Sartan banished them from the comfortable Chalice structure once they began to quarrel among themselves. After thousands of years without Sartan interference, and forced to live together in relatively close quarters, the princesses of the humans, elves, and dwarves “became closer than most sisters”, with the dwarven princess appreciating her Human friend’s hurry as a sign of her mortality, and her Elven friend’s leisure as a sign of her long life. The importance of the absence of demi-gods to the mensch relations is best seen when their rulers first encounter Samah and the Sartan Council, a group used to the wonder of the mensch, and to their squabbling.58 Samah’s attempt to show favor by using human language falls flat, as the mensch have long understood each other’s languages as a sign of respect and kinship, as does his attempt to impress them by materializing golden chairs.59 The meeting devolves further as Samah is unable to understand that the squabbling “children” have evolved socially, to the point where they offer to negotiate peace between the Sartan and the Patryn, much as they did for themselves.60 When the Sartan offer to let them stay on their lands, and that they will govern and educate themselves, the mensch are offended at the presumption of their inability.61 When the mensch offer to make the Sartan an equal partner in their alliance, Samah becomes outraged, reminding them that they had once worshipped the Sartan, which serves only to confuse the mensch, who now worship one god, the one who controls the Wave, bringing balance.62 This interaction demonstrates the vast imbalance between the self-declared demi-gods and the mensch. The Sartan could never respect the mensch enough to trust them to govern themselves, to eventually resolve their differences and come together. As such, there could never be balance between the races as long as the Sartan and the Patryn were present to exert a controlling influence.
It is no coincidence that the only group of mensch who interact peacefully worship this power; the Sartan encountered the power before they sundered the world, and learned that they could have lived in peace with the Patryn without the Sundering.63 However, fear and doubt as to their experience of the higher power did not allow them to try another path. This fear and doubt combined with the violence of the Sundering to create another imbalance, as the “evil that had always existed in the world prior to the Sundering had now gained the power to take on physical shape and form. Evil was manifested in the serpents or dragon-snakes”.64 The Wave attempted to correct this by the creation of the good dragons of Pryan, but this was prevented by Samah’s fear of the serpents, as he closed Death’s Gate and sent the Seventh Gate away.65 The Wave corrected itself by Chelestra’s sun moving away from the Sartan and the serpents, both of whom were frozen for thousands of years.
It is at this point that it is necessary to presume some higher plan by the Wave in the series, as Chelestra’s sun’s return to awaken the Sartan and the serpents happens just as the unlikely friendship between a Sartan and a Patryn has sprung up between Alfred and Haplo. Both men are quintessential archetypes of their people, arrogant in their own way, mistrusting each other, each convinced that their own way is the right way. Alfred is convinced of the rightness of the Sartans actions, where Haplo has experienced first-hand just how cruel the results became. It could be surmised that the swapping of consciousness experienced in Death’s Gate was more than just the swapping of memories as a temporary, but intentional, sharing of soul and consciousness to bring them together to destroy the Seventh Gate and Death’s Gate. When Lord Xar attempts to ensure Haplo’s loyalty through emotional and physical torture, the dog, a part of Haplo’s soul, disappears.66 However, it reappears next to Alfred later in the novel, at a point where he defended the mensch’s good qualities against their bad, by saying “I found that it all balanced itself out, somehow”.67 The dog’s appearance is an indicator of their linked souls, reinforced by Alfred recounting Haplo’s experiences in the Labyrinth as if he were Haplo, and becomes the balance between their souls, emblematic of the loyalty they feel toward each other.68 The dog’s existence and link to Alfred later prevents Lord Xar from raising Haplo as a lazar, 69 but disappears once it enters the Seventh Gate, as Haplo’s soul is made whole in order to be revived and help Alfred to restore the balance. The disruption to the plan to restore balance is the presence of the serpents, feeding off hate, strife, and chaos, who seek to not only create a war between the Sartan and Patryn in the Nexus and the Labyrinth, but who also try to ensure that Lord Xar would attempt to reform the Earth and fail:
‘Thank you, Lord of the Nexus, for casting the spell to tear down the worlds,’ said the serpent, its head rearing upward. ‘It was, I admit, a plan we had not considered. But it will work out well for us. We will feed off the turmoil and chaos for eons to come. And your people, trapped forever in the Labyrinth.’70
However, the serpent does not realize that the Seventh Gate is a place of equilibrium, so its attempts to unbalance the world cannot succeed there.71 Once the green dragons of Pryan enter the Labyrinth, they act as the counter to the serpents they were meant to be, with the battle between the Sartan and Patryn ending with a truce between a necromancer Sartan and a half-Sartan, half-Patryn resident of the Labyrinth. Therefore, by their actions in sealing the Sartan, Patryn, serpents, and dragons into the Nexus and the Labyrinth, Alfred and Haplo not only create the potential for balance between their own peoples, but also give this potential to the mensch. With no demi-gods to claim their right to rule over them, the mensch have the opportunity to find their own balance.
The exploration of the worlds of The Death Gate Cycle is ultimately an exploration of hope; the Wave is both a force for good, and a preserver of free will; it gave the Sartan the choice to fight for balance, but the freedom not to, a choice which they themselves denied the mensch. However, the Wave also used both a Sartan and a Patryn to begin the process of restoring balance; the dead would be free to move on, the mensch could solve their own problems, and the Sartan and Patryn found peace at last, by joining each other in their magics. The four elemental worlds remained connected by conduits that would allow them to function, because no one element could survive on its own. As with the peoples and magic of the series, the worlds functioned best when they worked together, even if it took thousands of years to create the balance between them.
1 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1990, page 2.
2 Ibid., pages 1–3.
3 Ibid., pages vii–x.
4 The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing (1990), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 2: Elven Star (1990), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea (1991), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage (1992), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos (1993), The Death Gate Cycle Volume 6: Into the Labyrinth (1993), and The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate (1994), New York: Bantam Spectra.
5 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, pages 418–419.
6 Ibid., page 419.
7 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 2: Elven Star, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1990, pages 361–367.
8 Weis , W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992, page 377.
9 Ibid.
10 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1994, pages 300–301.
11 Ibid., page 308.
12 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 142.
13 “Lost and Found”, Haven, Season 4, Episode 5, 2013, Syfy channel.
14 Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008, page 2.
15 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, page 296.
16 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993, pages 454–456.
17 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, pages 325–326.
18 Weis, W., and Hickman, T., The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1991, pages 1–2.
19 Ibid., pages 62–64.
20 Ibid., pages 64–69.
21 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 228–229.
22 Ibid., page 239.
23 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 321.
24 Ibid., page 233.
25 Ibid., page 238.
26 Ibid., page 306.
27 Ibid., page 334.
28 King, Stephen, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1982.
29 King, Stephen, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1997.
30 Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York: Routledge, 2012. page 29.
31 Prucher, J., Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007, page 98.
32 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, pages 1–2.
33 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 13.
34 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 147.
35 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 167.
36 Pratchett, Terry, Monstrous Regiment: A Discworld Novel, London, England: Doubleday, 2003, page 181.
37 Clarke, S., Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004, page 3.
38 Ibid., page 14.
39 Ibid.
40 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 7.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., page 8.
43 Ibid., page 14.
44 Ibid., pages 4–17.
45 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, page 189.
46 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 14.
47 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, pages 268–288.
48 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 427–436.
49 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 1: Dragon Wing, page 397.
50 Ibid., page 422.
51 Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, page 14.
52 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 3: Fire Sea. New York: Bantam Spectra. p. 71–72.
53 Ibid. p. vi–vii.
54 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 5: The Hand of Chaos, page 453.
55 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 330.
56 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 297–298.
57 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 330.
58 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 338–342.
59 Ibid., pages 338–340.
60 Ibid., page 340.
61 Ibid., page 341.
62 Ibid., pages 341–342.
63 Ibid., page 239.
64 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 326.
65 Ibid., page 326-328
66 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 4: Serpent Mage, pages 9–11.
67 Ibid., page 127.
68 Ibid., pages 228–229.
69 Weis and Hickman, The Death Gate Cycle Volume 7: The Seventh Gate, page 100.
70 Ibid., pages 274–275.
71 Ibid., page 285.