Bingo 23: Take the skies
Telepathy is essentially brainwave communication, wireless and thus air-born communication. Telepathy or shared mental space is also a major factor in Locklands. Also, a good chunk of time is spent is what might be this world’s very first “airplane”. A key thing to know about Locklands is that it is the third of a trilogy, so a lot of the tech/magic references and some critical background plot will not make sense without the first two. There’s been s several year time-skip and most of humanity is now struggling for survival in a war against the entity known as Tevanne whose exact goals are not quite known, at least at the beginning. A group of humans including Sancia and Clef, both scriving creations who have special abilities, Berenice, a prodigy at scriving now married to Sancia and also the general of the human forces, as well as a handful of allies who include a new element: networked humans called a cadence. The secret to mind-twinning was worked out previously but now it has been expanded so humans who want to can become part of a collective, and these collectives often seem to specialize in things like scriving (magical engineering {name: Design}), feelings {name: Greeter}, childcare, etc. You don’t have to be part of a cadence to be twinned; a cadence is actually a bunch of people twinned as a unit; some mind-melded twins include smaller groups like Sancia, Berenice, and a few allies.
There is a known connection between Clef and a former villainous entity Crasedes, who seems to be less of a threat but still a factor, but what Tevanne wants and why it seems focused on taking over everything is unclear. So Sancia and company go on a mission to get into Tevanne’s stronghold, and hopefully destroy it. This is where the flying comes in; a decent chunk of time in the middle is spent explaining the flight into Tevanne; because this is unknown technology, there’s no way Tevanne could expect a group of spies to sneak in this way, except of course, our heroes are in for some surprises. Some of them are almost ironic, like realizing how cold it gets the higher up you go. Crasedes, once he reappeaars, also spends a good bit of time flying because he can just do that having worked out the magical engineering to do this a long time ago. These flights don’t’ take up substantial parts of the novel, but they are almost always pivotal to the plot progressing.
There’s one more potential journey too; Clef needs to rediscover his memories which might help explain some of the mysteries, including the existence and location of a door which may or may not be a gateway to a different reality. More travel and trying to figure things out ensues. Obviously, not everyone is going to make it out alive or at least in the same plane of existence as everyone else. But there’s no story without the brainwave sharing, or the flights. Or the trying to figure out what’s going on now, and what might have been going on the whole time. Most of the story feels a lot like meandering and confused, but the flying parts at least mean there is action, so something making progress. That’s a little rare for this story, and it’s very needed.