I read Dune at a young and impressionable age. And one of the things I remember very clearly about the book was that each chapter opened with a short excerpt from a fictional history/encyclopedia/etc. That struck me as beyond cool. So any time I have tried my hand at SFF, I have always done the same. And The Burning Sky was, of course, no exception.

But we debated where to put these world-building tidbits. First they were chapter openers, then they became footnotes. In the end, they became endnotes. Because we took so long to come to that decision, the endnotes were not in the advance copies of the book.

So here then is content that is new, even for folks who have read the advance copies.

(I will be adding one endnote to this post every day, until I run out of them.  And I will add reference pages once I have final copies in my possession.)

[1] For centuries historians and magical theorists have debated the correlation between the rise of subtle magic and the decline of elemental magic.  Were they merely parallel developments or did one cause the other?  An agreement may never come, but we do know that the decline has affected not only the number of elemental mages—from approximately three percent of the mage population to less than one percent—but also the power each individual elemental mage wields over the elements.

Presently, quarry workers still regularly lift twenty-ton blocks of stone, the record of the decade being one hundred thirty-five tons by a single mage.  But most elemental mages make few uses of their dwindling powers and are capable of little more than parlor tricks.  All the more astonishing as we look back upon the great elemental mages of an earlier age, those individuals who set mountains in perpetual motion and destroyed—and created—entire realms.

—From The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages