The summers were my idea. "Years" is a rather modern-sounding measure of time to me, and it also sounds culturally-based. Every different culture has a slightly different measurement of time, but summer only comes once a year.
I actually was influenced a little bit by Voldemort's Horcruxes, but if you play Dungeons and Dragons (which this is based on, the character is one of my avatars in Guild Wars but she's always been the D&D Sorceress to me) you might have figured out that this was a preliminary version of the
Clone spell, from the school of Necromancy. Since Elegrin is the most powerful Necromancer of the time, it's not a difficult leap to assume that he created the spell, starting from an earlier version of another spell,
Magic Jar.
Yeah, D&D is awesome.
I'm working on the next chapter right now. I have about 300 words, I'm trying to make every sentence worth it because there is a 15,000 character limit on posts here and I don't want to double-post. It's proving interesting.