Yes, finally, the two sisters are doing battle at the dinner party.

I think I’ve made the right choice splitting the chapter into the two viewpoints – we get to see Listeria’s planning and Ciera destroying those plans, mostly using sheer dumb luck. That works so well that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t now write another chunk in Listeria’s viewpoint then another in Ciera’s. That would be fun.

I reflected a little today on the two sisters and I’d like to offer some explainations here : I’ve stated in the text that Ciera is the cleverest (by far) of the two. Yet, by their actions, Listeria is clearly driving the game and can appear as the most intelligent of the two.

To put it simply : Ciera has much more raw intelligence than her sister. The only thing is that she has trained herself not to use it. She’s trained so well that she has no idea about the wealth of intelligence that she has.

Listeria on the other side is a more regular person, but as she is very goal driven, she has used her intelligence at the top of her capacity for a long time. In that, she has more skill than her sister and can clearly win unless Ciera happens to start using her head.

I like the idea that raw power is not enough and that someone using minute quantities of power (be that magic, political power, whatever) can come to much better results than someone with much more power but without the skill to use that power efficiently. I plan to use that set of ideas in the next book where a character with low raw power would be able to kick a god’s ass.