Rewriting Radiance - The ancient mountains

Another addition to Radiance, this time in the second part, Yesod/Foundation, in between chapters 8 and 9, after Asher has met the Seven and before his encounter with the dybbuk.

My original intent had been to cut out as much of Asher's training as possible to get to the 'super-powered' part as quickly as I could but I found that it was both too fast and ended up giving the supporting cast too little air-time. Without some opportunity to get to know them, it seems that the readers have little reason to worry about the fate of each member of the Seven. This is my attempt at filling both those gaps.

But have I done enough?

I could easily imagining stretching some of these encounters into longer ones, or having Asher meet angels and take part in an exorcism. Would these be good additions or is this enough as is?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

    As Asher watched the sun dip in the sky, he found himself astonished that he was not as terrible at Hebrew grammar as he had always supposed. Two months in, he was really getting the hang of it, conjugating verbs like a master (or so he thought), beginning to read full sentences and complex ideas. The pattern of it seemed to make sense to him - there was a kind of music about it that made it stick somewhere deep inside in a nonsense poem of verb formation. I killed, you killed, you (f.) killed, he killed, she killed… Everybody killed.
    But in the growing frenzy of preparations for the oncoming shabbat, he couldn’t help but hope for some more peaceful verbs to work with.
    In the kitchen, Ostar surged around the counters, mixing ingredients together furiously to prepare the meal before the sun set and all preparations had to be complete. Even without his gleaming armour, the manifestation of Netzach, Divine Victory, was an impressive sight a bulking figure that seemed to fill the entire small urban kitchen, smiling and laughing out loud at his own near-unending jokes, even as the sweat started to gather on his brow. Mercury, the embodiment of Hod, Divine Splendour, and, as Asher had learned only a month prior, Ostar’s wife, was slicing carrots while drilling him on his verb forms, her long dark hair tied neatly behind her head..
    “What was that?” she said, never looking up from the silver blade that effortlessly divided the vegetables.

Rewriting Radiance - Tiferet Edition

Complete links to the first draft of Radiance (my kabbalistic fantasy novel) can be found here.

Progress on rewriting Radiance continues, albeit rather slower than I would like as real life complications, such as expecting our first child in the next 8 weeks, get in the way. But I wanted to share some revisions from the fifth section of the novel, entitled Tiferet/Adornment.

In the first chapter, entitled Good to Give Thanks to the Lord, Emma Grunfeld, Asher's mother, journey's through the heavens to encounter the divine. In the early part of the chapter I described roads of fire and ice, concluding:

"Emma’s mind was full of ice and flames. But she had to keep moving.
    A wall rose up before her eyes, a wall of sapphire stones, refracting the light into a million shards of green and blue. "

But I realised that this was a very abrupt transition from the heat and cold to the sapphire stones. I also decided that I wanted more phrases that were redolent of biblical and rabbinic texts. Combining both of these issues, I came up with the following solution:

"Emma’s mind was full of ice and flames. But she had to keep moving.
    And then the heat and cold was no more, like streams that overflow with thawing ice whose water vanishes in the dry season.
    A wall rose up before her eyes, a wall of something like the appearance of sapphire stones, refracting the light into a million shards of green and blue."

Continued after the jump...