The Magi and the Queen

Balthazar’s name is Vikram Singh. His family is from New Jersey, but he was living in the neighborhood around Union Square Park in Manhattan when the apocalypse happened. When he first tried to destroy Whitespire about five hundred years prior to the beginning of the story, he decided to call himself “Balthazar” because it sounded like the sort of name a wizard would have.

Gasper’s name is Meilin Tsai (蔡明林), but she goes by “Peaches” to her friends. Unlike Balthazar, she’s familiar with “ancient mythology,” so she decided to tell him that her name is Gasper as a joke. Her family was originally from Vancouver, but that doesn’t mean much in the world of the story. I maintain that most orcs are Canadian, though.

Melchior’s name is Octavius Marlowe, and he generally goes by Marlowe. Having met Balthazar and Gasper, he just sort of shrugged and said that he would be Melchior, but he pronounces the name differently every time he uses it. His family was originally from Chicago, but most of the land around the Great Lakes is underwater now. He grew up in New England, which is now called “the Northern Kingdoms.”

Ceres is just Ceres. She would be granted an honorary family name, title, and estate if she abdicated, but she has no intention of doing that anytime soon. The name Ceres was given to her by a religious sisterhood that supports the monarchy, and she was named after the harvest goddess of “ancient mythology.”

“Ancient mythology” is everything that survived from before the apocalypse, by the way. It’s a mishmash of all sorts of religious traditions, as well as movies and video games and so on. The world of the story has its own set of religions, but it’s been taking me a while to put everything together. Creating an interlocking set of religious systems from scratch takes time, who would have thought.

Balthazar's Magic

In Balthazar’s pre-apocalyptic world, magic is like music in that almost everyone is able to use it and has a basic understanding of how it works. Not everyone is talented at magic, and very few people use it professionally, but there’s nothing particularly strange or unusual or “mystical” about it.

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By the time the story begins – which is well after Balthazar decided to become “the Demon King” – he has completely discarded his moral scruples and uses magic just because he can. In particular, he uses time magic to get extra sleep, jack off without getting his clothes dirty, eat things he knows will make him sick, restart conversations after he’s said something embarrassing, and so on. In addition, he’s figured out how to use quantum dimensional magic to travel long distances, which involves a type of time travel as well. Balthazar’s reasoning is that none of this matters because everything in the current timeline will cease to exist once he successfully prevents the apocalypse. This is also how he came to justify murder (and, in the past, murder on an enormous scale), so everyday time magic seems relatively minor by comparison.

Re: Balthazar's Magic

When Balthazar was afraid, as a little kid, that he would be kidnapped and tortured because of his magic, he wasn't wrong. He doesn't learn this until he's much older, but he would almost certainly have been taken from his family and swiftly put to death if the nature of his magic had become known.

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Anyway, because of the nature of his magic, Balthazar is in constant danger of losing himself and becoming an actual "demon," and this is in fact what happens to him late in the story. So far I've managed to set up some vague foreshadowing, but I haven't actually explained what's going on in any detail.

I'm borrowing this idea from (mostly Japanese) pop culture coming out of a Buddhist tradition, but I need to figure out how to explain it within the world of the story without using Buddhist terminology. Karma demons are a well-hidden secret in Balthazar's world, so he doesn't really know what they are until he starts to encounter them after the apocalypse. The process of figuring out what a karma demon is and how the possibility of this happening to people has affected the culture and society of this world is one of the major mysteries of the story, and I have to admit that I haven't solved it yet.