The End is Nigh!

Paradise Lost by Emile Bernard, 1868 – 1941

I'm up to 77K on The Valleys of the Earth and about to launch into the final extended scene. Things may be about to get a teensy weensy bit violent, but I'm sure that's fine in a romance, ahem. At least I now know exactly how the novel ends! (I also know how the first three chapters of the sequel go, but that's just got to wait.)

So there are no more surprises awaiting me for this volume ... probably. My heroine Milja managed to broadside me this morning, mind...

It's repeatedly asserted in The Book of Enoch, my go-to sourcebook of angelic craziness, that those women who slept with the fallen angels were taught magic as a consequence and became "witches" or "sirens" (depending on translation). I've treated this as an organic bodily change wrought by angelic influence/body fluids, not learned spells. So Milja has been developing some interesting new abilities throughout the series...

Vol 1: Cover Him with Darkness

• She finds it physically impossible to cry
• Cats love her, dogs hate and fear her
• She can see ghosts, sometimes
• She can tweak chance to give herself unusually good luck (small magics)
• She has vaguely prescient dreams
• She can pull other sleeping people, and angels, into her dreams to interact with them

Vol 2: The Valleys of the Earth

• During a sexual encounter she can speed-heal her own wounds, or her partner's
• It's very possible she can reverse this to do harm through hate-sex, though she hasn't actually tried
• She's immune to disease (which is very helpful when visiting Ethiopia, believe me)
• She can see in the dark
• She can order certain animals around ... or at least scare them away

I'm trying to keep her powers witchy and low-key, and not to just pull another one out of the hat whenever it's convenient for the plot. But given that she started off as an ordinary human and she's hanging out in the major league with the big angelic boys, it's nice to be able to redress the balance of power slightly and give her some more effective agency.