The first article I pitched to Gathering Magic was the first article I wrote and published with the site. The first article I had an idea for, though, was an article based on this line:

This is a modest but clever little device, for reasons I'll dig into momentarily. What really excites me about it, though, isn't just its merit as a literary device, but what it — and the nature of the viewpoint character here — says about the potential of Magic fiction, and fantasy fiction more broadly.

Just what is the device, though, and why am I so excited about this one random line?

Well, to start picking it apart, let's untangle the sentences themselves. The first sentence in the bolded passage is referred to in the second like this:

So what we've got here, if we ignore for the moment some of the hedging, is a pretty simple simile. Eating a roasted animal is like the sensation of my guest's pleasure. It's a metaphor, a comparison between two different things, a pretty basic literary device that I imagine pretty much all you Gathering Magic readers have run into. Even though I never metaphor I didn't like, it's not the simile alone that I'm really interested in.

Part of what makes this interesting, though, is the form we get the simile in, this slight delay between the things compared and the connection being made. The actual sort of connective tissue here, that "I imagine it's something like," comes after the two concepts have been introduced. If the simile was "Here I am, rock you like a hurricane," this passage would twist it into something more like "Rock you. Hurricane. Alike." And what's more, the first thing we're presented with is something that is actually pretty odd and unfamiliar, "the sensation of my guest's pleasure."

The "my" in the sentence is the key there, of course. This line comes from Alison Luhr's "Born of Aether," a story narrated by (if the title didn't give it away) an Aetherborn. Yahenni, the aetherborn in question, is a rich socialite who, as the wider passage indicates, takes great pleasure in throwing impressive parties. Yahenni is a delight. As of this article we've seen two stories from their perspective, and they've both been totally captivating. Yahenni's quickly becoming one of my favorite characters in the Magic canon for reasons that should be somewhat familiar to folks who've read my Xantcha article. Yahenni is a Black-aligned heroic character, already always great to see, whose narrative and narration has some queer resonance.

Of course the resonance is only resonance rather than direct analogy. Yahenni is, after all, a profoundly alien being whose senses are different from those of humans. They experience the world as a constant drifting cloud of sensory input from those around them: "A curious ability to accurately sense the emotional state of beings in a nearby perimeter." Other senses, such as the sensory experience of eating, are outside their realm of experience. While human, dwarven, vedalken, and elven society on Kaladesh seems to follow a gender binary, Yahenni is nevertheless part of an entire species and culture that is sexless and draws no gender distinctions.

And, of course, Yahenni, like all aetherborn, knows when they will die, experiencing an innate sense of time running out.

As such the correspondences — the close and non-nuclear adoptive families, the sense of not, perhaps, quite getting gender, the knowledge of death and loss which is community-wide, and the sense of humor and irony in the face of tragedy — these things that may seem familiar to some readers, readers like me, are always complex and ambiguous in their resonance, never quite overlaying onto the experience of any person — any organic being, as Yahenni would put it.

Some of this ambiguity is present in the metaphor itself, making it all the more intriguing. That hedging in Yahenni's narration serves to remind the reader that Yahenni's perspective is alien. And it enables a really interesting kind of back and forth game. We are presented with a metaphor that can help us as readers to understand Yahenni's empathy and how that empathy manifests for them in the context of a party. And it seems to be a good metaphor! Not only does it suggest taste, smell, texture, but also a range of other concepts — consumption, predation, luxury, nourishment . . .  many concepts that apply interestingly to a Black-aligned character, and a vampiric one at that.

But is it such a good metaphor after all? After all, Yahenni opens their comparison with open acknowledgment that they haven't got a clue what half of the simile is even like! They have, after all, no idea what it is to eat. Their concern for their guests' dietary needs, and the resulting serious attitude they show toward the art of catering, is entirely based on hypothetical knowledge (probably with some help from their empathic magic). So the metaphor as we receive it is already a little bit dubious. We might simultaneously WANT the metaphor to work, while being aware of how shaky the connection is.

There's a line that crops up in various ways in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, instances where one character will tell another something like "That's completely incorrect, but it's a lie you can understand." This sense of a metaphor being completely wrong but it being as good as we can get before our sparing human intellects assume the most ingratiating posture of surrender imaginable is a pretty handy device for speculative fiction writers, since it points toward alien experiences while hedging one's bets, acknowledging that these speculations are only attempts to express what might in fact be inexpressible.

Authorship seems pretty relevant here, actually. Allison Luhrs is, like most authors, human herself. At least I assume so. So Luhrs is imagining a line in a speculative fiction story in which a fundamentally alien character is imagining what it must be like to experience a human thing, and draws a connection between that experience and their own experience, which in turn allows us the opportunity to imagine their alien experience.

Wow.

The mirrorings taking place here, the attempts to model the minds of others, is what strikes me as really remarkable. I think one of the great attractions of speculative fiction is this opportunity to step into alien experiences, and even this ability, packed within a couple poetic lines, to create a whole series of simulations and speculations about the minds of others. All literature does this to some extent: one of the qualities of reading is the way that we set aside ourselves temporarily in order to model the mind of another, though that setting-aside is always tenuous and a process marked by movement in and out of a text's simulation. But fantasy, even fantasy for a trading card game, can encourage forms of simulation that are much weirder and multilayered, like we see here.

It's somewhat fitting to this discussion that Yahenni is an empath. We get a sense of the limits of their powers from this metaphor, actually — some physical sensations seem to be transmitted to them but clearly not all, or not complete. In Yahenni's more recent story, "In The Dead of the Night," their senses become even more acute as they near death, which also suggests some bounds to their power. But what's notable in that story, I think, is the way empathy, in Yahenni's desperation, becomes an oppressive force. Yahenni's empathy enables them to feel malice, violent intent, sub-human hunger, and ultimately the pain of another's death as they vampirically feast on a guard's life force.

We can't as readers know what it is like to experience what Yahenni experiences, but through our own ability to empathically model their mind, and through the kind of metaphorical technique in their line about roasted animals. Here, though, empathizing means exposing oneself to horror and pain! This can be desired by a reader, but it can also be uncomfortable or even upsetting.

That's ok. That's a good thing, in fact, I think. Speculation can be fun for its own sake, both in Magic set releases and in fiction, but it seems to me that part of the point of speculative fiction is to open up even these uncomfortable spaces, because part of empathy is connecting with not just the positive experiences of others but the negative experiences as well.

If identity is meaningful because it represents alternate experiences, being able to access those alternate experiences through literature is one way of making identity tangible and relatable. The parallels I've seen drawn between the Aetherborn and queer communities, particularly queer communities who suffered under the AIDS epidemic and the absolute failure of social and political institutions to take action in the face of that epidemic, can only ever be parallels, only lies we can understand. But there's a possibility of using this alien consciousness and metaphorical technique to bridge a gap between actual humans. I mean look, if a screwup like Jace can pull such a bridge off to become the Living Guildpact, surely we can. I think it's important, for that reason, to take time to examine lines like this, unassuming little techniques as they are, because beneath the fun game of inference here is a deeper mechanism, one that if understood might help us to understand one another.