In no particular order, here are the building blocks from which my story world is constructed.

1. Paraclesus. Published posthumously in 1566, Paracelsus’s De nymphis, sylvanis, pygmaeis, salamandris et gigantibus, etc. (“On Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, Salamanders, and Giants, etc.”) explained mythological creatures in terms of the latest scientific and philosophical speculations.

Yes, I know that Paracelsus made a lot of stuff up, and a lot of the rest he imported from Classical mythology whether it fit or not. I know that he tried to shoehorn a lot of folklore into an airtight system where it really didn’t fit. But from 30,000 feet, I simply note that he tried to link these otherworldly beings to the four classical elements: nymphs with water, sylphs with air, etc. And since I was already building a magic system around the classical elements, offering a nod to Paracelcus was a no-brainer.

One other thing thing: Paracelsus apparently coined the word sagani to describe these beings collectively, though I have not yet found a convincing etymology. I suspect it is related to “sage” in the sense of “wise” or “skillful.” At any rate, this curious word gave me Saynim as the name of my protagonist’s magical homeland, analogous to how pagani (“pagans”) and paganismus (“paganism”) gave us the archaic English word Paynim (“pagandom”).

2. Renaissance magic. Paracelsus led me to other philosophers, alchemists, and arcanists of the same approximate era: Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, etc. These thinkers straddled the line between “science” and “magic” as we usually understand those terms. This was, after all, the time when “chemistry” and “alchemy” had only begun to diverge. Trithemius and the rest drew from arcane traditions that can be traced through the Middle Ages and all the way to ancient Egypt.

While most magic in my story world is an innate property of creatures attuned to one of the classical elements, humans in the mundane world might tap into these arcane magical traditions.

3. Elizabethan fairy lore. In the British Isles, the last decades of the sixteenth century represent a high point in theorizing about the fairy folk. This was the era of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, where he argued that elves and fairies were in fact evil spirits. In general, the Fair Folk were still a real and terrifying figures in the imaginations of the country folk, though more so-called enlightened Londoners were increasingly skeptical.

4. Hominin evolution. Fifty thousand to 100,000 years ago, planet earth was a Tolkienesque landscape populated by several related human species interacting with each other in friendly or not so friendly ways. Just as Tolkien and most epic fantasy that followed him describes interactions among elves, dwarves, orcs, and the rest, Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and probably others once coexisted in our own world.

To me, this fact is the perfect setup for explaining the various fantasy “races” (as much as I despise that term) in a quasi-scientific way.

The shadow falls on October 1