Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(47)

KELLY: Apparently immortality is no cure for hypocrisy or insecurity. Or humanity. So maybe that’s how Camille manages her immortality. Magnus manages his immortality by flooding himself with new experiences and interests, by creating makeshift, mixed human and supernatural familial groups for himself in each new place and time. And yet he also seems to stay above it all. Camille, on the other hand, keeps herself occupied by manipulating power dynamics and personal status. How other people see her tells her what she is.

HOLLY: Yeah, sometimes I feel as though Magnus wants to be human, when he can’t help seeing humanity from a great distance, and Camille wants to be inhuman, but she doesn’t have his perspective. She’s down in the mess of life with the rest of us.

KELLY: Cassie, do you think of Magnus as a kind of author’s stand-in in the books? For saying what you want to say to your characters, about love and immortality?

CASSIE: Yes. Usually. Everything he says about burning a lot more brightly if you’re mortal, I think that’s true. He gives good advice.

KELLY: Do you think of him as the linchpin for the series? I mean, he’s there in all of the books.

CASSIE: Not the linchpin, no. I think he could die. Like Dumbledore.

KELLY: I guess that’s why the series is called the Mortal Instruments and not the Immortal Instruments.

HOLLY: One of the things that we sometimes forget about immortality is that it’s not invulnerability. Death can come to all the immortals in the world of the Mortal Instruments.

KELLY: Well, there’s an argument to be made that all forms of magic—including immortality—stand in as metaphors for money. Magic, in fantasy, often works the way that money does. Magic buys you things: long life, cool stuff, access to the kinds of worlds that people without magic can’t get into. But the one thing neither money nor magic can buy is freedom from death.

HOLLY: This is making me think, as a highly practical matter, how once you become immortal, you’d be well served to spend a couple of years doing nothing but working and amassing cash so that you could live off the interest forever. Because your retirement problems are really different from most people’s. Those charts that tell you how much to put away per year are not going to work for you.

KELLY: Readers of this essay, take note: If you plan to live forever, make good investments. It’s like being a time traveler, where you want to make sure you’ve done your research, memorized some lottery numbers and the names of really spectacular stocks when you go back.

HOLLY: I do wonder where Camille’s money comes from. I mean, Magnus works. He’s the High Warlock of Brooklyn. As long as Downworlders and Shadowhunters have magical problems, he’s got a job. Cassie, where did Camille get her money from?

CASSIE: I’ve decided that she had a string of lovers who bestowed many jewels on her because she is so beeyoo-tiful.

HOLLY: Really?

CASSIE: No. I figure many vampires have money from being around so long and whatnot. Remember there’s that part in Clockwork Prince where they talk about vampires leaving their money to themselves, masquerading as their own heirs? And they have big investments that pay out over time.

KELLY: And traditionally, vampires are good at getting more than blood from their prey. They can hypnotize their victims into signing over their estates, etc.

HOLLY: Like a sweetheart scam, but with blood.

KELLY: We haven’t talked about the Seelie Queen yet. Cassie, when you wrote the Seelie Queen, what sources were you drawing on? Which Faerie Queens were inspirations?

CASSIE [points to Holly Black]: Hers.

HOLLY: Ha! The thing I find interesting about faeries in general is that they were never human and that they are essentially other. The shorthand for that in Celtic folk-tales is “they laugh at funerals and cry at weddings,” but it alludes to the whole separate moral system faeries operate under. And in the Mortal Instruments, the Seelie Queen is not just untouched by her immortality but untroubled by it. For her, mortality seems skeevy. It grosses her out, the way you’d be grossed out by a rotting peach on your desk.

KELLY: I can see why you’re Cassie’s source. That’s good stuff. And of course, the Seelie Queen and her court, in the Mortal Instruments, are weirdly sideways to the rest of the Downworlders.

HOLLY: Awww, that’s nice of you to say. And I agree about the faeries being sideways. They’ve never been human. They’re separate from the realm of demons and angels. They may have originated there, but now they are a people apart, self-contained and (change-lings aside) self-reproducing. All other Downworlders continue to have to truck with humanity to survive. Vampires make more vampires by turning humans. Werewolves probably can breed more werewolves but mostly seem to make more through infection. And as far as we know, warlocks can’t reproduce at all.

KELLY: Humans and faeries, in fact, appear to be somewhat allergic to each other. Like you said, when the Seelie Queen looks at Jace and the other Shadowhunters, she sees not young men in their prime but their decay and their deaths. She doesn’t get it. She says, “You are mortal; you age; you die…If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”

HOLLY: Well, forever for her isn’t something to hope for or dread or dream about. It’s a given.

KELLY: I’m guessing that complicates her love life as well. In some way that we mortals probably can’t quite comprehend. Whatever it is, I’m guessing it works for her. (I keep coming back to how immortality and love intersect.) Cassie, what do you think?