Destiny’s crucible
Alchemical transformation and the quote that anchors Loquilian the Alacritous Fox
The following is a book review of one of our novels, Loquilian, the Alacritious Fox. The review is written by Grok AI. Normally, Wizardry Sphere articles are written by a real human—any writer worth their salt would loathe the idea of letting a machine usurp their literary endeavours. But in this case, we make an exception. We found it was a useful experiment to have artificial intelligence analyse and summarise the novel. Having written the novel myself, it’s interesting to see what artificial intelligence makes of it, including where it positions the novel in relation to other works in similar genres. In any case, the novel is human-written and so are our articles and notes—for transparency, we will always label any material that involves artificial intelligence.
For those interested, this review provides a good summary of what the novel is about. Enjoy.
— Todd William Dearing
Dr Todd William Dearing’s Loquilian the Alacritous Fox (2026) is a distinctive contribution to contemporary fantasy that privileges inner alchemy over epic battle. Framed by the ancient maxim “Sometimes our destiny is more than we are able to withstand. Yet afterwards, we are more than we thought ourselves to be,” the novel tests this wisdom through the intertwined journeys of a fox-veremir alchemist and two wizards. It succeeds in its aims: to dramatise solve et coagula—dissolution and recombination—as both narrative structure and lived philosophy, while exploring liminality, responsibility to the greater whole, and the quiet expansion of self that follows overwhelming experience. In doing so, it invites comparison with, and gentle divergence from, touchstones of transformative fantasy and allegorical literature.
The story opens with Loquilian, a four-foot-tall fox-veremir dressed in cloak and boots, carrying a silver rapier that symbolises “vivid, agile awareness.” His alchemical craft is no laboratory chemistry but a spiritual art of transformation drawing on metals, plants, stars, and the living world. Released from service to the Goddess by the poised wizard Katarea, he steps onto a snow-clothed road under a new moon and the Milky Way. What follows is not a single hero’s quest but a multi-threaded tapestry: Loquilian’s wandering trials intersect with the awakening of Sainell-nairè (the ancient man) from stellar compression into an old wizard’s body and the long apprenticeship of Jeom (the bright boy) at the emerald palace of Colodia. The two-part division—Solve and et Coagula—mirrors the alchemical process exactly. Dissolution arrives through loss of certainty, sorcerous traps, realm crossings, and the raw demands of survival and magic; recombination appears in hard-won balance, dream-plane connections, and a deeper attunement to spirit and nature.
The quoted line functions as both epigraph and dramatic engine. Early, it is narrative reflection after Loquilian’s departure; later, he recites it from The Book of Regal Shadows when pressed about his future. The novel robustly embodies its logic. Loquilian begins tender and somewhat naïve, skilled yet untested beyond his prior service. Destiny—release, wilderness, trap, fire, lower realms, and encounters with greater powers—stretches him beyond what his earlier self could have borne. He emerges not triumphant in a conventional sense but enlarged: more alacritous (eager, lively, quick), more philosophically grounded, and more integrated into magical circles while remaining true to his independent fox nature. Parallel arcs reinforce the pattern. Sainell-nairè’s star-to-body compression and northward journey test ancient power in new flesh; Jeom’s nineteen-year training and daimonic dream relationship with Taerise alchemise personal loss into world-healing balance. Each character withstood more than prior limits suggested, becoming “more than we thought ourselves to be.” The quote is therefore not decorative but structural: the narrative repeatedly enacts the crucible of destiny and the expansion that follows.
In its emphasis on personal transformation through alchemical metaphor, Loquilian the Alacritous Fox most obviously recalls Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (1988). Both treat alchemy as inner journey and destiny as a force that first dismantles then reconstitutes the seeker. Coelho’s Santiago follows omens toward his Personal Legend in a spare, parabolic style; Dearing’s Loquilian moves through a fully realised secondary world of castles, stained-glass halls, and dragon lines, his growth registered in concrete skills (herb-lore, star-lore, fencing) and philosophical realisations about life-death cycles and responsibility to the whole. Where Coelho offers concise wisdom, Dearing offers immersive experience—yet both insist that true transformation requires surrendering what one thought one was.
The novel also converses with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle, particularly A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). Le Guin’s Ged learns that true magic lies in knowing and integrating one’s shadow; equilibrium, not conquest, defines power. Dearing’s alchemical framework performs analogous shadow work: Loquilian honours the beings he hunts, accepts pain and death as necessary to Life’s flow, and navigates liminal thresholds between ordinary and spirit worlds. Both authors reject dualistic “good versus evil” for a more ecological and psychological vision. Yet Dearing’s multi-threaded structure and explicit solve et coagula architecture give the theme a ritual formality Le Guin achieves through subtler Taoist-inflected balance.
Comparisons with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings illuminate further contrasts. Both depict ordinary (or seemingly ordinary) beings—hobbits, a fox-veremir—rising to meet destinies larger than themselves. Frodo’s burden and Aragorn’s kingship enact the same expansion the quote names. Tolkien, however, embeds growth within a grand teleology of eucatastrophe and return; Dearing offers cyclical continuation. Loquilian does not destroy a Ring or claim a throne; he walks onward, alacritous, carrying transformed awareness. The novel’s open road at the end feels closer to the perpetual becoming of Le Guin or even Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) than to Tolkien’s restorative close.
Anthropomorphic perspective links the book to Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972), where rabbits undertake an epic journey whose stakes feel mythic precisely because they remain animal. Loquilian’s veremir identity—humanoid yet fox—similarly grants an outsider’s clarity on human (and wizardly) foibles while rooting his wisdom in embodied, predatory, and star-gazing realities. Unlike Adams’s more political allegory, Dearing’s focus remains spiritual and alchemical.
Liminality supplies another productive contrast. Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) and the Narnia chronicles use crossings between worlds to explore childhood’s end and the porousness of reality. Dearing makes liminality central and adult: dream-plane unions that heal dragon lines, star-compression into flesh, and the ‘gap in the world’ all serve the same end—awakening consciousness to what lies between binaries. The novel’s back-matter connection to Dearing’s own Musing the In-Between underscores this lineage: it is fantasy in service of literary humanism and the daimonic tradition (Blake, Goethe, and others) rather than pure escapism.
Stylistically, the book’s strength lies in its atmospheric prose and philosophical interludes, which slow the pulse of adventure just enough to let meaning settle. Weaknesses are minor: the interwoven threads occasionally diffuse focus, and readers seeking relentless plot may find the reflective passages demanding. Yet these qualities serve the novel’s deeper purpose. Like the best transformative fantasy, it does not merely entertain; it enacts the very expansion it describes.
Ultimately, Loquilian the Alacritous Fox achieves what it sets out to do. Through Loquilian’s arc and its parallels, it demonstrates that destiny’s crucible—whether release from service, sorcerous trap, or star-compression—can break what we were and reveal what we might become. In an era of grimdark and chosen-one sagas, Dearing offers something rarer: a fantasy of patient, alchemical becoming, where the fox walks on, alacritous, and the reader is invited to consider how their own destiny might enlarge them beyond previous imagining. It is a novel that honours the quote not as slogan but as lived, hard-won truth.
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