HoF Retrospectives 17 - Chapters 31 32

HoF Retrospective 17 – Chapter 31&32

*Of COURSE, this contains possible spoilers regarding The Heart of Fire series... read at your own risk.*

These chapters are all about Cyllin’s dragon outbreak and how to deal with it. Of course, this could have been a way longer situation, a whole mighty quest to get him back to his usual self, full of rampaging and death and all that.
Instead, it’s a couple of chapters and much more calm than one would expect.
After all… Cyllin was always a dragon, he doesn’t really change his personality just because he got to look like one. So, after the initial frustration, he’s himself.

The way in which Cyllin is mysteriously and suddenly brought back to being his old self looks like such a Deus ex Machina, right?
Still, as the story progresses and the benevolence of the Father of the Forest is shown to be less and less real, it becomes clear that it was hardly a miracle or an answer to prayers… it was Chaos’ attempt to have its own dragon to use as a weapon, nothing more and nothing less.

And here seems like a good point in which to talk about Striding. As Kyle himself puts it later on, Striding is “reverse magic”… ‘cause it really works in the opposite way.
It’s also the reason why Striders can’t use regular magic, but only their special ability.
Magic, in general, converts ‘energy’ (in this case life/magical energy that is present everywhere) into something physical, an effect of some kind. It’s a bit of a stretch with Glamor, maybe, but that too affects something physical… like the brain.
Striding, on the other hand, converts matter to energy. This change can’t really be maintained for a long time, but it is enough to move around in a blink of an eye, which is the base thing that all Striders can do.
Kyle, being a very badass Strider, can do all sorts of other things with it, like phasing through attacks, destroying enemies and stuff like that.
The basics of Striding is that moving stuff is not really that much EASIER using Striding than doing it by normal means… so physical strength is still used in calculating how easy it is to Stride an item or person. Which is Kyle’s main advantage, as he is a very massive giant and easily the strongest person in the whole trilogy.
Being able to see the target to Stride and/or the final location greatly helps in the whole process, which is why, in general, dividing a long journey by Striding into several shorter Strides to the farthest point that is visible, rather than doing one single teleport, is usually better… and the way in which the power actually got it’s name. It’s kind of like the Boots of Seven Leagues… with each stride, they disappear and appear a looooooong way ahead, seeming as if they have just done a single stride miles long.
The mark of a Strider is having very weird colors for hair and eyes… Kyle was lucky in having them blue, ‘cause seriously ALL sorts of colors are possible for a Strider.