“Don’t puncture anything important,” Will heard James say as he came forward, his voice mocking. Was he really going to do this? Hold James down and spear him with a horn? Thus, the first idea for the scene was born – Will would stab James with the horn – and the horn itself had a name, the Horn of Truth. I thought, how much more interesting if you have to stab someone with the horn to force them to tell the truth? But as with its supposed ability to cure poison, most of the writings about horns as a truth serum involved grinding them up to use as powder. Of the many miraculous attributes of the unicorn horn, its truth telling properties seemed to me to have the most narrative potential. “Hold it? Is that what they told you? You have to do more than hold it. Will said, half quoting Devon, “If you hold it in your hands, you’ll be compelled to speak the truth.” “You know what that thing does?” said James. As Virginia Woolf notes in one of her essays in The London Scene, “Mammoth ivory tends to warp thus if you buy a looking glass not of the finest quality it is likely you are buying the tusk of a brute that roamed through Asian forests before England was an island.” Ivory was already about trading in the parts of extinct or endangered beasts. It intersected too disturbingly and too well with the ivory trade of the 1800s, the period the book is set in.

The idea of a unicorn horn as a relic was too powerful to ignore. I was fascinated by idea of relics from that lost world, objects that might have survived and that could be unearthed in archeological finds. In Dark Rise the heroes and villains of a long-dead magical world begin to be reborn. One can imagine that it has been taken in powerful hands and wrung, as one wrings a wet cloth.” It also contained this arresting description of the unicorn horn. “I have hunted the unicorn chiefly in libraries,” was a phrase from Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn that seized my imagination while I was researching Dark Rise. This thrilling story of friendship, deception, loyalty, and betrayal is sure to find a passionate audience of readers. Readers will love exploring the rich setting of nineteenth-century London. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic and Shelby Mahurin’s Serpent & Dove, Dark Rise is more than just high intrigue fantasy-it’s fast-paced, action-packed, and completely surprising. Will is thrust into a world of magic, where he starts training for a vital role in the oncoming battle against the Dark.Īs London is threatened and old enmities are awakened, Will must stand with the last heroes of the Light to prevent the fate that destroyed their world from returning to destroy his own. Then an old servant tells him of his destiny to fight beside the Stewards, who have sworn to protect humanity if the Dark King ever returns. Sixteen-year-old dock boy Will is on the run, pursued by the men who killed his mother. Pacat is joining us today to talk about her novel, Dark Rise.

The dark rise book