The Magic of Anieth - The Queens of the Tualárach

Without getting into politics, we wanted to show this cycle calendar again to you. When we say "Animal Queen" here, it means that the princess was the daughter of an Animal shaper. This structure among the Nations was extant because of an effort made by the Clans to balance the power of the Nations and make it impossible for factions to form that might offer a united front against the Wood in another attempt to grab lands. Karen goes into great detail about politics on her pages.

Rule One: the father of the changer can have very diluted powers and still sire a child who has full-on abilities. We've seen in families related to queens (an thus to shapeshifting men) that sometimes the other children of queens will inherit some magical abilities. It is not very common for anyone to have powerful skills, but it is not uncommon for whole families to share telepathic abilities of more or less or foretelling abilities of more or less, and etc. Please see our article on the queens for more elaboration.

As you can see from this little chart, we have listed the Patron Clans and the more well known of the queens with whom we associated. As we mentioned, Susan was Cuadhe, Marion played Morga, Karen played LiHara, and Valerie played Cuadhe's daughter, Briau. The idea of the queens was two-fold. First, a daughter and a mother would never share abilities, magic, or even a common family in the father. This was set up to cause natural strife between generations, but also to lessen the risk of either madness in the queens, or a build up of magical power that might exceed the powers of those in the Wood. It was also designed to spread out the influence that any one Clan might have among the humans.

Sceta Gwaranacca makes her appearance first in the book, Thorn. Her powers of attraction were legendary and she had the best ability at telepathy and foretelling in many generations of Gwaranaccii. This, however, was not much. She possessed a superficial telepathy, knowing the surface thoughts of people and their feelings. Teig noted that she lacked the ability to hear past his numbers that he constantly recited, especially after he discovered that they blocked thoughts. Sceta's mother did not trust her king, Raol Aveldonacc because he had the ability to block listeners which he had learned from his mother. Sceta's small gift of foretelling created a great problem for her and her brother, Teig, in that she "forced" the visions along the lines of what she wanted for Teig, even after her father, the Thorn King, pointed this out to her. She was dependent upon language to hear thoughts, yet she was gifted with reading emotions and influencing people to "try it her way." Marsyas o Gallanis was completely charmed by her upon their first meeting.

Morga Riaffacca, played by Marion Stanford-Shields, was an Animal Queen, the daughter of the Lynx King. She possessed the abilities of the Lynx including seeing in the dark and sharpened senses. She could smell fear and other emotions as well as sense lying in people and feel if they were good or evil. She was shy because of the Lynx and her upbringing, but very open and incapable of deceit. However, her charm was so high that Marsyas o Gallanis had her husband killed to possess her. Morga did not know how to use or control her charm. She was much the innocent, unlike her mother who was the most gifted seer the Nations had ever seen. Morga's mother, Sionna Riaffacca was a cousin to the most gifted seer among the Rowan, Lonrach, who was also cousin to Lorg Arinn and Ellie. It was also no secret that Morga's best friend, Luaith, was herself a Lynx, although neither of them knew it when they first became friends. Sionna Riaffacca was possessed of the disease that struck down many of the seers across Anieth when the Invasion loomed up heavy in their visions of the future. They called the vision, the hunllef because it took the form of a huge whirl of clouds where all the paths of the people twisted into the vortex and very few came out the other side (for those who could see the other side.) Sionna could see enough to see that Luaith was one who would survive the invasion and help Morga when they began to fall into the storm. Sionna became very dark and almost mad with the vision despite the Rowan's efforts to help her overcome the future making her present life miserable.

The Veldonaccii Queens were among the most proficient at hearing thoughts. Telepathy ran through the entire family and part of their training was to block telepathic invasion. Briau (seen here) was a typical Holly Queen, ambitious, a bit controlling, finding it too easy to influence and charm people as well as influence their thoughts and feelings. Briau is an example of a queen with borderline madness which grew in her as her ambition grew and she felt more and more like no one appreciated her efforts to hold the Nation together under her paranoid rule. She had failed her initiation, a year-long ritual that the princesses underwent. Usually taken by force from their homes, the girls were subjected to rigorous psychological humiliation and training to test their boundaries of their powers as well as their tolerances. The initiations varied, with the Rowan being more benign and the Ash, Oak and Holly initiations being more strict. Usually overseen by an elder of the patron Tree Clan, the girls were quickly assessed of their weaknesses and then tormented in a way to "wake them up" to their psychological failings that might be a window to madness. The initiations were terrible enough that many of the princesses would not speak of their experiences. Yet, despite the rigor, most of the girls felt that they were alive for the first time among others of their "kind" and felt more comfortable than they had among the humans where they were feared. Not so with Briau, who needed desperate to feel needed and better than those around her. She was eaten up by envy of her mother and powerful grandmother and knew she would fail the tests. This she did, but rather than return home as she was told, she conceived a child by a commoner and returned home, unknown to the Holly who were embroiled by that time in internal strife.

Queen Cuadhe, Briau's mother, was very different, but also said to have failed as a queen. She was accused of poisoning her husband and being too weak of a queen to master the forces arrayed against her on the brink of the Invasion. She was introverted and wanted nothing of the noisy court where she could hear everyone's thoughts as if they spoke aloud. Cuadhe, daughter of the Wolf King, was not gregarious as most wolves, but very quiet, very solitary and sensitive to the point of being mad herself. She had the potential to be a poor queen or a great queen. Her mind was there, her abilities were amazing, but her personality did not allow her to use charm or mental influence to rule her people with the strict hand that they needed to face off the internal strife of the Holly and the foreign threat that was destroying the East.

LiHara Druacca was exceptional for an Ash Queen, extremely gifted with animals, having the ability to see auras and general health and emotional states in others, slight telepathy and some clairvoyance that got her into more trouble than not. LiHara, too, failed in her test, but not because she did not produce a princess, but because of her mother's interference and the interference of the White Doe. The White Doe produced a boy to father a child on LiHara and made a mockery of the ritual. LiHara's connections with the Ash made her a good queen, yet her mother feared to turn the Nation over to an inexperienced princess when they were on the brink of war. The Zelsosians had just killed off one of the treats that Queen Ula feared: a Veldonaccii alliance, yet Ula knew that without control of the Zelosians, she was replacing one threat with another. Ula was a typical Elk Queen, very ambitious, combative, sensitive and able to charm anyone to do anything, except her daughter. LiHara was an example of a queen with abilities inherited from her father, but also from her mother. The gift with animals was typical of the Elk Queens and not the Ash, who were often more interested and gifted with manipulating people than animals. LiHara was so good with horses that she was wildly popular with her people for her ability with the chariot team or trick riding. LiHara's cousin, Duvan Adruacc, (seen here) was also extremely gifted with animals.