Concerning Iron Sickness and Once Upon a Time

so how does iron sickness work in OUAT exactly? Because human blood can make Dylan's brownie sick and Nuada hates the smell of blood but it doesn't hurt him and the iron chains his dad used were magicked to stop him from resisting the iron but in the first few chaps he had iron fatigue? was it b/c he was sick? Does Sreng have a sensitivity to iron since he was made immortal by fae magic? And how come the cubs don't worry about iron? Or Wink?

Iron sickness only affects certain fae. I’m not sure why iron affects faeries (apparently it’s a holy metal because it’s an element, not an alloy? And it’s hard to manipulate which I guess makes it constant??? I dunno) but in a lot of western euro-centric mythology, it does. However, for some creatures, even western euro-centric ones, it clearly doesn’t. Redcaps, for instance, wear iron shoes and have hats that bleed human blood (which has iron in it). Dwarves obviously don’t have an issue with iron, and dullahan are said to fear gold, not iron, because it’s such a bright and cheerful color.

So Becan would get sick if he had to handle human blood (wash it off the floor, etc) because he’s one of the Wee Folk and doesn’t have a lot of magic, but Nils Fjonisse, who’s a tomte (the farm/barn equivalent of a brownie) can handle iron because he has magic that concerns horses, which wear horseshoes. Wink isn’t sensitive to iron because he’s a cave troll (so he has immunity similar to Dwarves).

Nuada is sensitive to iron - it smells really bad to him, though he’s become accustomed to it over the centuries - and if he’s unwell, it can cause mild irritation, a rash, or even burn him. He can smell iron in Dylan’s blood very strongly when they first meet because she’s bleeding, but as she heals it becomes bearable and by now he doesn’t even notice unless she’s injured.

Although sensitive to iron, as long as he is otherwise okay - not sick, not hurt - mundane iron doesn’t affect him other than to make him a little twitchy/uncomfortable because he’s a royal and he just has sooo much innate magic, the iron can’t deplete it enough to make him sick or kill him. If he were to become king, he wouldn’t notice it at all except for the smell. So the magic would have to be enchanted - only a very powerful fae could enchant iron - with magic-killing spells in order to hurt Nuada. Which is what the king used on him for the whip and the shackles when he was flogged.

In the first chapter, Nuada was suffering from iron fatigue because a few weeks earlier, he’d been bitten by a dipsa serpent. A single bite can kill a human in less than a minute, and kill most fae, but Nuada was at peak health when he was bitten, he spent most of his recovery time in a healing-spelled chamber, and his blood is saturated with royal magic. But he spent the first couple weeks after being bitten so sick that Wink had to take care of him and he couldn’t get out of bed and he barely ate anything, which left his body weakened to the iron and lead of the city above him once he moved out of the healing sanctuary to a normal hideaway.

Sreng has iron sensitivity like Nuada - royal magic made him immortal - because of the magic flowing through his veins, but he also has iron in his blood, so he is in constant pain. It’s one of the reasons he’s insane - he’s been in mild agony for over three thousand years and he has iron sickness, but can’t die from it because he’s immortal, and the pain is exceptionally bad because he’s a human with raw, wild, royal magic poured into his body to keep him alive without any sort of buffering spells to balance him out.

The kids don’t have to worry about iron because as far as I know, Cherokee otherworldly beings don’t have iron allergies.

Empress of Ice and Oceans Mythology Influences

It’s actually only 1/3 in Africa. 1/3 of it is in a country modeled after Yoruba, 1/3 is in a country modeled after Russia, and 1/3 is in a country modeled after Persia. Because the male and female leads have to do a lot of traveling.

But! So my male lead is essentially Koschei the Deathless, but instead of being his love, Marya Morevna is his enemy. I’m combining the story of Koschei with the story of “The Firebird” and several others. My female lead is a water-witch from this kingdom called Ilfe.

The “Hades & Persephone” thing is more a winter vs summer deal. My male lead, Katschei, is from the country of Zima, where it’s always cold as frack and snowing and awful. Thing Siberia. Ayao, my female lead - her people call it the Winter Kingdom and refer to Katschei as the Ice King and the Winter Jackal (they also call him Nunda, Eater of People).

Ayao is from Ilfe, which is islands and jungle and some desert, and it’s usually pretty warm there (summers in Zima are as cold as winters in Ilfe).

So we have essentially a summertime princess being forced to go live in the (in her mind, anyway) coldest, bleakest, darkest place imaginable when she’s used to sunshine and warmth and crashing ocean waves and jungles. Now she’s got ice and snow and dry wind and 30 whole days when the sun isn’t coming up. Luckily she’s allowed to bring some handmaidens and Katschei’s “cousin” Vasalisa is a good friend of hers, so she’s not entirely alone.

BLOG HOP: My Name Isn't Katie (Query+250)

GENRE: contemporary magical realism

WORD COUNT: still editing/revising, don't want to make promises. Somewhere around 60-70K max.

Note: my bio paragraph is missing because it's the signature for my emails. Also missing is my "why I'm querying you" paragraph, because this is highly individual depending on the agent.
 

QUERY

"The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter's Daughter" meets FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC in this 60,000-word novel about a young woman locked away from the world who claims to be a magical princess from an ancient Japanese fairytale.

Katie has been trying to escape the refurbished attic of her house for over six years. Her parents have installed bars on her single window and deadbolts on the outside of the door. She has no computer, no television, and no phone; a walkie-talkie is her only way to communicate with the outside world. Her only sources of comfort are dancing to her iPod, her carefully hidden collection of old Polaroids, and reading. Her parents, the social workers, and her psychiatrist all say she's there for her own good. That this way she doesn't have to be institutionalized. That her delusions are growing worse.

But Katie knows she isn't crazy. She knows she came from hundreds of years in the past, from a magical city on the moon, and that she was found inside a bamboo stalk when she was a baby. She knows she's really Princess Kaguya and that Jade the Moon Rabbit, her best friend and faithful servant, is searching for her. She knows that a terrible darkness from the past is coming to their small Alaskan town, bringing with it something terrible Katie can't bring herself to remember. And she knows she has until her seventeenth birthday to escape her prison, or she'll be trapped on earth forever.

Then she sees a boy named Mark through her window. Katie claims he can turn into a fox and control the dead. That Mark is her long-lost love from centuries ago. Her heart says they belong together and they're running out of time until the window home closes for good. But with no sign of Jade and a sympathetic but adamant Mark denying he's ever met Katie, she begins to doubt. The darkness is coming, Katie's desperation is growing, and as her seventeenth birthday rapidly approaches, the truth will finally come out—is she really Princess Kaguya? Or is her past all a delusion?

Using prose, verse, Japanese poetry, annotated interview transcripts, pictures, playlists, and Japanese folklore, MY NAME ISN'T KATIE tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who might be an alien princess trapped in a sinister mind-game...or who may simply be a deeply psychologically disturbed young woman.

FIRST 250(ish)

6 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes

They've let me in the downstairs bathroom because I cut my arm on a nail sticking out of my prison bedroom wall. The woman who claims to be my mom needs more room to stitch me up than she can find upstairs. The attic is large but the attic bathroom is small. The light isn't good, either.

I watch the moon through the tiny bathroom window. A sliver of white, a soft glow against black and the stars, so many stars. Is this the edge of the world? They're so clear. Like diamonds.

They don't twinkle. Only in sick cities do stars twinkle, their light battering futilely against the smog. There's no smog here at the edge of everything. No poisonous air. Only me and the people who say they are my parents but they're lying, no I can't think like that, don't think and this prison this house and the attic and the stars so bright you could read by their glow and the light of the moon.

They won't let me read for a long time after this. Not until they figure out if I did this to myself on purpose this is an accident. If something I read gave me the idea to use my pain as the key to escaping made me hurt myself.

Or maybe they think I'm trying to call him but this is all wrong. He doesn't want blood and a dying heartbeat, he is soft things, sweet things. Frost and snowflakes and winter and death, yes, but mourning. Passing. Moving on. Not pain and hurt. They don't know him, they don't understand he can't find me yet because there's something wrong here. I think this is a trap.

I think my parents are trying to kill him. 

But you can't kill Death. There will always be Death.