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I'd like to thank my beta readers, Rafffle my Daffle, Bird of Hermes, Nuclear, and aldeayeah. It was a really long story so I really appreciate you guys combing through it to find stuff.

First of all, I would like to thank Milbunk for organizing this event as he does every year, the judges of course, and as well as everyone who took the time to read the stories. Furthermore, congratulations whoever won. As I’m writing this, I have no idea who you are. Here, I want to go over some of the inspiration I had for this story as well as some concepts.

The story of Bram and Gordes is something that I wanted to work on for a long time. Last year, I had a conversation with Prix about her wanting to cross-over TNT’s “The Librarians” and the works of Type-Moon. After being persuaded to watch the series, I thought a bit more deeply about ways that the two series could interlock. I couldn’t really see them meshing. However, after spending a few showers and a few pre-bedtimes theory crafting, I really felt like there was a Type-Moon story that could follow the frame of The Librarians. That is, a team searching for magical artifacts on a weekly basis against a big bad that could last a season. Set after the Great Grail War, the serial would follow a team of magi affiliated with the Department of Spiritual Evocation who specialized in finding and retrieving catalysts. Its members would be those who have been affected by a Holy Grail War and Forte. Inno, I really want to write Forte. Either way, that serial was put on the back-burner because honestly, I still have to finish The Way of Serpents.

A little while before the annual fanfic contest came around, I decided that I would write and enter the little Kara no Kyoukai x Mahou Tsukai no Hako story about Ouji Misaya that I’ve always wanted to do. However, not really being inspired, I tried searching around for things I might possibly want to write. Running down the really short list I have of characters I really want to write about, I decided on Bram and wanted to focus on him being a victim of the Holy Grail War. With that in mind, I felt like it might be a good idea to write the prologue to that Librarian’s themed story. Things snowballed from there and that was how CCC was born.

The frame for the story is one that I didn’t notice until I created it. In fact, I intended it to be like the first part of the first Iron Man movie. Cocky, selfish, billionaire gets taken hostage. While being severely injured, mentor helps billionaire create machine to escape and become super powerful, billionaire becomes a hero after learning valuable lesson. And that’s when I realized that Tony Stark's origin story was just a retelling of the Nuada myth.

Thematically, I wanted to portray and I hope I portrayed the people that you don’t see after a Holy Grail War is complete. And even if Case Files does go into that, I feel like it does it a bit more hopefully. Related to that is the question Bram has to face, how do we move on after we have lost someone? How do we honor them, especially when they were brutally murdered? The people we love are still the people we love, regardless how monstrous they might be. From that, it’s easy to see why the remaining Icecolle family sacrificed themselves to try to avenge Celenike or maybe it’s because sacrificing things to curse others is all the family ever knew.

The series’ that I drew from came rather naturally. If I was going to be writing about the aftermath of Celenik’s death and how that affected the family, the only scrap of information they gave in Apo mats was that her current research was about cursing people through the internet. Extella materials having come out about that time, I was able to use the malignant information entry to explain the mechanics behind that.

In creating the magecraft behind this story, I did a lot of research into Siberian shamanism and tried to combine that with TM black magic and curses in a way that I thought Icecolle family would have tried to. As for Bram’s silver arm, I will admit I went all out down the rabbit hole on that one. The one juxtaposition I really wanted to show were Icecolle’s threads of curses vs the magecraft as weaving. I hope I explained Bram’s connection to weaving well enough in the story. The actual image of magecraft as weaves comes from Robert Jordan’s, Wheel of Time Series with how the Aes Sedi weave the One Power.

Finally, Bubo. My favorite scene in the original Clash of Titans is when Athena is like “Let great Zeus rage till even Olympus shakes. But I will never part with you, my beloved Bubo. Bubo.” If I’m going to have mechanical owl you bet its name is going to be Bubo.

Furthermore, I was pretty surprised when Goetia came out since he was also magecraft taken sentience which is exactly what I decided Icecolle would be. I guess I’m lucky and unlucky in that regard. The biggest influence I had for Icecolle was one of my favorite young adult novel series called “The Wind on Fire.” The main antagonist of the trilogy was known as the Morah, a collective of tormented, half-dead human souls. From that came the idea of the Icecolle family trapping the spirits of their ancestors in their workshop so they could be used for cursing, and also Icecolle being one entity yet all the pain and suffering that Celenik’s internet curses have done so far.

I would like to believe Icecolle fits the mold of an 80’s romance hero. She is a system that that somehow learned to love, no matter how fake that love was. However, because of this new-found fake humanity, in trying to do her best to both honor her dead loved one as well lay her to rest, she came to the conclusion that she was correct, that the optimal method is to take vengeance. Which is like a damn ton of videogame storylines these days. As for my Bram, he’s definitely a 90’s hero. Way too broken and way too narrow minded, but at the end of the day, even if he still can’t forgive himself, he found a way to live with himself.

The Bram that I tried to portray was a narcissist with a bloated ego – the stereotypical aristocratic magus. However, he is in pain. It’s not the pain you enjoy because it’s justice done to someone you despise. Like how tons of people reveled and cheered on Kiritsugu shooting Kayneth. But a pain that you cannot enjoy. People who you hate, the people you dislike feel the same pain as you do and break from that pain in the same way you might as well. You might not on see if on their faces or in way that they act, but it can be a pain that haunts them for the rest of their lives. No matter how much you may dislike such a person, there’s no way you cannot empathize with that.

Once again, thank you very much for reading this. It was a lot of work but I’m glad it saw the light of day. Comments, feedback, and whatnot are always welcome.