#sunder city

[assassin1513]

▪️🟤⚜️Sunder City⚜️🟤▪️

[shippingdragons]

The reunion we’ve all been waiting for, it’s happening and I will be there!!!

Reaction:

[coin-operator]

A little christmas present for my Fetch Phillips Archives friends. I love all 12 of you 💖

[tiofrean]

So... who else has been crying like mad about that unicorn and Frankie fight in Sunder City series? And about Fetch? And the Dragon? And Hendricks!!?!??!??!

That unicorn didn't wanna leave me, so I'm making it everyone's problem xD

[a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives]

Oh??? 👀

Big thanks to Sunder City discord member Sloan for sharing this news on long awaiting fourth book from Luke Arnold, to be published on 16th January of 2025.

Source: Waterstones UK

Correction: thanks to @hms-tardimpala for correcting me on the original source, big thanks to @narastories for providing the info!

[jeevesandwoosters]

crying waiting for Luke Arnold to write another Sunder City book

[madamrynodm]

"Sometimes the monsters look like monsters."

Reading through "The Last Smile in Sunder City" and having a great time! The vibes are super depressing but immaculate. Doodled Pete the Werewolf in the meantime, following his killer quote during his revenge trip

[rion-writes]

Real Wizard Shit (Part 1)

He kept going, but I couldn’t help feeling like something about the fans didn’t match up with the story. [ Dead Man in a Ditch, Chapter 62]

Happy Server-Versary Sunder City! Have a (mostly) articulate lay out of my breakdown of Wizards and their place in The Code

It would be real easy and entirely too convenient for Fetch to be right about everything. It would also be slightly naive to think that any party presenting information has a full understanding of the situations and that they were not lying.

On the surface level we're shown and told that there has also been some tension between Magum and Humans and yadda yadda yadda the Code happens…

…and blame rests entirely on the Human Army.

The Human Army sent their machines into the mountain but when they tried to harness the power of the river, something far more terrible happened. The shimmering river of magic turned from mist to solid crystal. It froze. The heart of the world stopped beating and every magical creature felt the change. [ Last Smile, Chapter 1]

The mechanical fans had been replaced long ago by magical technology. By the time the Coda happened, the lamps, factories, and the whole damn city was plugged into portals, not pipes. When the river froze and the Wizards lost their power, the channels closed up and the flames were trapped below.[ Dead Man, Chapter 63]

Seven years ago, when the Human Army pierced the surface of the sacred river with their machines, the soul of the planet responded by turning into crystal. [ One Foot, Chapter 52]

It's presented as such a concrete fact that these and other iterations of it appear in all the books and in multiple contexts. I'd we're validating the fact that the Human Army cause the River to freeze why do we ignore that, canonically, we have the confirmation that Wizards were mucking around too?

Fact is we(and Fetch) don't know exactly what happened at the river but there's more than a passing chance that are some shenanigans going around and every step of the way the reader is sort of validated to think about how exactly Wizard Magic works.

In Fetch's Flashback in Last Smile in Sunder City I've pulled some of the relevant quotes (Chapter 24). Bold emphasis mine.

Wizards do not create magic from their fingertips. They transport it. There is a commonly held belief among the Magum that pockets of pure magic – a “river” of magic, to some, exist deep inside the planet. The Wizards, somehow, are able to teleport pieces of that magic up to the surface. Different spells pull their power from different pockets, or so the story goes.

Instead of summoning energy from the source of power to a Wizard’s hands, this is a Wizard sending magic from the source out to a specific location.

But rather than bring the power from the source to their fingertips, they stand at the source and use the portal to push the magic somewhere else. This, I think you will all agree, is a far more likely explanation.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the Magum are working from this place, this gash in the earth, and they are using its power to destroy our cities without consequence.

His guilty hindsight is giving the context that Fetch was tricked and manipulated into reveling where he knows The Great River can be accessed. Our problem as reader is that the Human Army was partially right.

Were Wizards going wild and attacking human cites left and right? Probably not. The issue is that they might have been doing more with the Great River than s implying pulling magic from it via portals. We're told from other magical citizens int he know, "Using the four fingers to create specific, intricate patterns, we could open tiny portals from which pure magic would emerge." [Last Smile, Chapter 2] ; "Well, Wizards were able to summon energy from some far-off place to the space between their hands. But only for a moment."[Dead Man, Chapter 29].

Then we have the matter that if we're being told in each book that the Human Army froze the river, in every book we have more or less have admissions that Wizards were doing something as well- and that The Opus might have known. It could be very easy to play off the con run on Fetch by the Human Army was a one off.

Except in Dead Man in a Ditch there is a letter completely unprompted from anyone on the Human side of things to Lance Niles from Hendricks:

Mr Niles,

I have been informed of your plans for Sunder City and humbly offer my services. In the days since the Coda, I have spent every waking moment researching ways to not only return this world to its former glory, but to go beyond what was possible in the magical age. I am delighted to hear of another like-minded entrepreneur and believe that you and I should meet in person at your earliest convenience.

To whet your appetite, I will tell you that I have spent the last year traveling to the Keats University on Mizunrum and I have information regarding the Wizards there that I am sure you would find most interesting.

Congratulations on all your recent successes and I look forward to our meeting.

Your Friend,

Mr Deamar

Would the High Chancellor Hendricks not know that Wizards were experimenting on the Great River? Fetch and the us are brought to one of the entry points to the Great River in One Foot in the Fade and we're treated to the fact that yes, The Great River is frozen and that yes, Wizards are actively mining it. He even observes the following in Chapter 52,

But now a quarry had been dug into the river’s surface. Now there were chunks of the divine being dragged away in mine carts. If all it took was a single intrusion into the river to stop it flowing, then how could it restart after an assault like this? […]This pit must have been made back before the Coda – just the kind of thing a kingdom of power-hungry Wizards might create if they wanted to increase their connection to the source of all magic – and that meant that it was all ready to be exploited once the river froze up.

Which jives with both the Human Army's assessment and how Wizard magic was known to operate by people that were not laymen to Magic. Prior to the Human Army invading the mountain, Wizards were experimenting on The River and its not just conjecture. Keats, the University that Wizards learned at, had also been mentioned in each of the three books was visited by Linda. She filled in some of the gaps that Fetch wasn't aware of,

When I told them about the Unicorn horn – and the fact that pieces of pure magic could be weaponized – the Wizards I was working with soon turned their minds to Incava. They knew of the chasm that had been created here. How the Wizards here had spent years digging down into the rock, hoping to draw their magic directly from below to make their spells more powerful than ever before. It was a secret endeavor, rarely spoken of outside those in the castle.” [ One Foot, Chapter 52]

There is no one in canon that has actually described how the Human Army froze the Great River. We've had multiple characters forthrightly admit that Wizards were experimenting on it. We have taken it entirely for granted that Humans are the ones that actually cause the Coda and until we find out that "how" we should probably keep an open mind on it.

[vvitchchild]

Bit late to post but this was a delight and honour! What a genuinely lovely and funny, talented man

[brinnanza]

he fucked that old man

[magically-devious]

Sunder City Nights 6x9 Original Watercolor by @magicbubblepipe 🖤

Watercolor of a Sunder night with Fetch Phillips

[shippingdragons]

Luke Arnold signing at Forbidden Planet Part 1: Introduction.

[coin-operator]

Eliah is mixing up a Burnt Milkwood for himself and his very good boy :)

[agape-emo-eros]

It reminded me in a way of how Terry Pretchett writes about the first gun (or gonne as it's called in Men at Arms). It wispered the one holding it to do violence regardless of if they are good or bad.

I think I read Luke Arnold said he was inspired by Pratchett and I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the things.

Also I'm one of the ppl that don't get that feeling. I shot a gun before it just doesn't call to me in that way. I figured it must be something like the power people say they feel when driving a car since I don't get that feeling either (I am way to busy fearing the power I have). So it was really neat to me when Fetch directly compared it.

"I was behind the wheel of a machine that was just as dangerous as a firearm but ten times as hard to control."

The way Luke writes about guns in this Dead Man in a Ditch, in the context of noir and toxic masculinity, makes me feel so many things. I think it’s really easy for a lot of progressive folks to condemn people who like and want to have guns. And look, I’m there with you. So is Fetch, for that matter. But I often get the feeling that the tone of condemnation is often from folks who haven’t actually been around guns much, and don’t understand the horrible appeal. 

Keep reading

[a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives]

Back from short vacation trip, maybe I will see if I can post some from Gamon Fantasy's photos with Luke Arnold yesterday ;)

Anyway! I probably not so.. active to post his stuff due my commitment to real life (helping my elderly parent full time) and my interest shifted to another pirate show. So, I can't post anything new, and mostly I saved are last week or yesterday (forgive me), but his TikTok still new, maybe I can do that :)

Still, I'm happy to talk about Black Sails and others stuff!

Please be free to drop your message if you want to chat!

And lastly, if you want join Sunder City book club to discuss lore, his books, hover to @jaynovz to ask invitation.

Cheers!

[hadescavedish]

If you read Luke Arnold's book you will know he really said "I'm a dog" before Mitski wrote that song.