Advance warning: This post is fiction. I had a fun idea and I needed to make word count, so I thought I’d write it up. However it’s not short fiction. It’s just a fragment of a larger story that will probably never get finished.

Other advance warning: Note that I’m not actually very good at writing fiction. In particular dialogue is not a skill I’ve ever been good at and some of the conversation in this piece really shows that. This is somewhere between an exposition dump and a first draft level of quality.

---

I’ve always wanted to be a wizard.

I think part of it is that I grew up in a library. My parents are scholars, and it always felt like this was basically like being wizards but worse. They had the silly robes, the books, the slightly distracted look, they just didn’t have the power.

I really wanted the power. I wanted to make a difference.

Which is why every year since I turned twelve I turned up for the testing.

If you’ve never been to a testing: They sit you down in front of a crystal ball, you have about a minute to stare at it and try to make it glow. If you’re wizard material it looks like staring at a bright flame. Most people can barely manage a glimmer.

I thought I managed a glimmer once, but it was just reflected sunlight. The rest of the time the crystal just sat there completely dead, taunting me.

Every time I hoped it would be different. Maybe it was just taking a long time to manifest? It does with some people. It was never different.

And then it was.

It was the last chance I had – after you’re 18 they won’t test you – but for once I wasn’t nervous. Some time, about six months ago, I woke up and the world looked different – sharper, brighter, and as if everything was suffused with a gentle glow. Since then the struggle has been to not cast spells. Kettles have boiled before I put them on the stove, the object I was searching for came flying to my hands, and countless other small incidents. I wanted something to happen, and then it happened.

When I sat down in front of the crystal I did feel a little nervous. I knew this time would be different, but what if it wasn’t?

I needn’t have worried. The crystal blazed like the sun. I was going to be a wizard.

---

The testing is only the beginning of course. After that they whisk you away to the college and put you through the wringer. They invade your mind – making sure you’re not a spy, that your intentions are good, and that you have a personality they think they can trust with magic. Most people make it through this stage, but a good quarter of people who pass testing just quietly disappear.

This stage had me rather more nervous. With good reason as it turned out, though in the end I made it through without a problem.

At the end of the day I had a set of apprentice robes, a room of my own (hardly more than space for a bed and a cupboard, but it sufficed) and the most complete sense of exhaustion I had ever experienced in my life.

I lay down on the bed and passed out almost immediately. But first, a single thought crossed my mind: Well that went about as well as we could possibly have hoped for.

And then I slept, and I remembered.

---

 

Six months ago I’d woken up to find a strange man in my room. Naturally, I shrieked. Who wouldn’t?

Then I noticed the robes and the rings. The man was obviously a wizard. My concern immediately turned to excitement. Was he here to tell me it had all been a mistake? That I had some sort of secret power the testing couldn’t have picked up and that he wanted to take me as his apprentice?

Then it turned back to concern. A lot of wizards are… not nice people, and the fact that the strange man who appeared in your bedroom in the middle of the night has power beyond your imagining and is basically untouchable by all earthly recourse is not actually a reassuring thought when you think about it.

“Don’t worry, Asha, I’m not here to hurt you”. He smiled in a way that someone who didn’t really know how to give a reassuring smile might do when they wanted to do so anyway. It did not entirely achieve its aims.

“I am Kelmir, and I’m here to offer you a deal. First I must know: Do you know how to accept a wizard’s oath?”

I nodded wordlessly. My parent had made sure of it – between my interest in magic and our proximity to the college they thought it was important I learned all the arcane etiquette.

“Very well”.

He took a ring off his finger, placed it in the palm of his hand and reached it out to me. I clasped his hand and felt the magic take hold.

“I am Kelmir, a mage of the collegium. As witnessed here, I swear by my life, my soul and my magic that all words I shall speak no lies to Asha, either by commission or omission. I shall tell him everything I think he needs to know and answer all his questions without reserve. If he does not agree to the terms I offer I shall wipe his memory of this entire event, but I shall not otherwise cast any spells upon him or offer harm to those he cares about without his complete and uncoerced consent. I am bound by these words”.

There was a glow around him as he said the final words, the ring grew hot in between our hands, and I felt a complete certainty that all of this was true.

If I was concerned before, now I was terrified. I’m sure a binding oath to cause no harm should be reassuring but I couldn’t imagine any circumstances which required something of that magnitude. I probably looked like I was about to pass out. Kelmir either didn’t notice or decided the best cure was to press on.

“First I must tell you one important thing: The wizard oath when offered to a non wizard may as well be a lie. If you had training and power it would be impossible to fake, but to someone such as yourself it would if anything be easier for me to create an illusion of the oath than to offer a true one. However I have actually offered you a true oath, which compels me to say this.”

I blinked.

“Uh. Is that supposed to make me trust you more or less?”

He grimaced. “To be honest I wasn’t planning to tell you that at all, but once the oath took hold I realised it would be a lie of omission not to tell you”.

That actually helped.

“The second thing I must tell you is that I believe you to be completely without magic and your dream of becoming a wizard is a futile one without my assistance. May I cast a spell on you to find out?”

Being told that felt like being punched in the gut. I had already known it was probably true, but I hadn’t wanted to admit it and resented being told. I nodded.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more explicit than that”

I swallowed. “I give you my explicit consent to cast a spell on me to determine if I have the potential to be a wizard”.

He put his hand on my head and I briefly saw double. He withdrew it, and the world returned to normal.

“It’s as I thought. No magic at all. As things stand, you can never be a wizard”

“As… as things stand?”

“I’m here to offer you a way, but it comes at a price”
“I accept”

He grimaced.

“No you don’t. I need you to understand the way the world works first. You have to understand what it is I’m trying to do here, and you have to agree to my goals with that full understanding. This can’t work any other way”

“I don’t care what you’re asking for. I’ve always wanted to be a Wizard. I’ll do anything”

He gave me a searching look and nodded decisively.

“Alright then”.

My heart leapt.

“The first thing we have to do is kill your parents”

I froze.

“I… uh. I guess I was wrong. I don’t want to be a wizard that much”.

“Good. This would have been a very short conversation if you had. Now stop being an idiot and listen to what I have to say before you agree to anything.”

I put on my best contrite expression.

“Now. How many wizards do you think there are in the college?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a few hundred?”

“Yes, that’s about right. Now, why are there so few?”

“Well, hardly anyone has magic. Less than one in a hundred I guess? And there aren’t more than twenty thousand people near here, so that sounds about right?”

“And why are there only twenty thousand people near here?”

“Well, how could we feed much more than that? We get famines occasionally as it is! Also the last plague killed a lot of us. I think maybe there were more like 30,000 back then?”

“And why are there plagues and famines?”

I was getting increasingly confused by this line of questioning.

“I don’t really know? The priests say the gods send them to punish us, my parents say it’s just the natural order of things”

“And do you know of anyone who is able to change the natural order of things?”

That gave me pause. Of course I’d fantasised about making things better when I was a wizard, but somehow I’d never made the connection that there were all these wizards already and they weren’t actually doing anything to make things better.

“OK. I get it. So, tell me. Why don’t wizards prevent the famines and the plagues?”

“It’s really very simple: We don’t prevent the famines and the plagues because we want there to be famines and plagues”.

I’m not sure how long I sat there completely poleaxed, but eventually he figured I wasn’t going to be able to ask an intelligible question and continued.

“As far as the college is concerned, the status quo is pretty near perfect. We have a stable world in which we’re at the top. Why should we try to change that? If there were more people, the balance of power might shift, and if there were more wizards then each individual wizard would be less powerful because there would be more of us to split the power amongst. So we keep the world as it is: Every generation we get more powerful and the rest of you stay the same.”

“That’s… that’s monstrous”

“I quite agree. Which is why I want to you to help me change it”

“What can I do? You just said I have no magic”

“A wizard can pass on their magic before they die. Normally this is spread amongst a small number of their successors, which is how we accumulate power. I propose to pass it on to you instead.”

“Why me? What’s the catch?”

“Why you is because you are idealistic enough that I believe you will share my goals, and desperate enough that I believe you will accept the, as you put it, catch. My power will come alone: I will also be giving you my mind. At first I will be there as a voice in your head, but over time I think it likely that we will start to share thoughts and memories, and eventually we will become one person.”

“So I won’t be me any more?”

“Think of it as just a more extreme form of how you’ll change over time anyway. I think we are compatible enough that you won’t find the changes too objectionable”.

We talked for a lot longer than that, but the outcome was never in doubt. I accepted his life, and his magic, and then he showed me how to bury the memories so deeply that the tests at the school would never find them.

---

I woke up the morning after the tests feeling refreshed. The memory blocks were gone, and I knew exactly where we were and who we were.

Do you remember the plan? Kelmir asked me.

Oh yes. I remembered the plan rather well. Play the part of a powerful, intelligent, but very inexperienced student. Make alliances with anyone who could be persuaded that change was essential, or at least persuaded to acquiesce to it. Deal with the rest. If necessarily, permanently.

---

 

So that’s it for now. As mentioned I will probably never actually write more on this. We’ll see.

As you can probably tell this is a thinly veiled analogue about entrenched capital, and it doesn’t even attempt to veil that it’s about how shit being in a feudal society is, it’s just that there are wizards instead of lords.

Essentially this is mostly a reaction to the fact that I enjoy wizard school books but find their politics almost uniformly terrible.

 

This is a fairy tale that popped into my head a few years ago (I believe inspired by Lord Dunsany’s Time and the Gods). I didn’t ever write it up because it feels incomplete, but I was rereading Sandman this weekend and it reminded me of this and I figured I might as well.

In the dawn of the world, there was a boy. He was not a terribly unusual boy. Perhaps a little cleverer than most, perhaps a little more prone to trouble. He had many adventures, but the world was young and full of adventure then.

There was a girl he loved, or thought he loved. Unfortunately she did not love him, and spurned his advances, yet he pursued her anyway.

Most likely he knew this was wrong. He was not a bad boy, but very proud (as boys often are) and he thought that through persistence he could win her heart.

Eventually in order to get rid of him, she began to set him tasks, claiming that he needed to prove himself to her.

“If you really loved me”, she would declare in the dead of winter, “you would bring me a perfectly ripe peach to show your love”.

And so he would search far and wide, and he would return with just the perfect peach.

As time passed and he refused to be frustrated she would set him harder and harder tasks. With each task, he would learn new tricks and his skills and alliances would grow. He befriended animals and trees and spirits and winds and fairies and they would show him the way to fetch what she desired.

“Bring me a flower from the top of the tallest mountain” she would ask, and a wind would carry him there to pluck the flower for her.

“Bring me one of the moons on a necklace” and the fairies would fetch a moon from the sky for him (this is why we only have one moon).

At last, so frustrated at his persistence, she set him one final task.

“If you truly loved me, you would bring me the names of all the stars in the sky”

For once, the boy paused. He knew, at last, this was a task beyond him. He pleaded for her to accept some lesser gift – a necklace of burning jewels, the egg of a dragon, a cloak woven from the finest spider silk, but she was adamant.

“You only seek to deny this gift because you are afraid that it is beyond you”, she declared triumphantly.

This was of course true, but it stung the boys pride deeply. He could not refuse.

“Very well”, he said. “I will find the names of all the stars in the sky, and I will bring them to you. I swear before the gods that I will not rest until I have done so”

At this, both  boy and girl knew that they had perhaps gone too far, but it was too late. It is dangerous to swear an oath before the gods, because they might be listening, but it is more dangerous to go back on one, because they will be vengeful.

So, his fate sealed, the boy set out on his quest to find the names of all the stars.

---

There is a man who stands upon a dead world. He knows the names of all the stars but one.

The sun has long gone out. It is a blackened cinder that now burns cold where once it lit the world.

The sky is empty but a single point of light. It was once the least of all the stars. It burned the dimmest, and thus has lasted longer than all the others.

The stars are a guarded lot, careful to give out their names, but the man has spent many aeons earning their trust and one by one they all gave their name to him, save this last.

Whenever he has asked its name of it, it has replied “I will give you my name, but not yet”.

So, to pass the time, he has learned many other names, always returning to the star that denies him.

“I have learned all the names of all the animals in the world”, he said. “Will you now give me your name?”

“I will give you my name, but not yet”

“I have learned all the names of all the trees of the forest”, he said. “Will you now give me your name?”

“I will give you my name, but not yet”

The world has died around him, and as it has died he has learned the name of every thing in it, but still the little star has denied him its name.

At last, as it begins to flicker its last, he asks it one more time.

“Little star, will you give now me your name?”

And it gives him his name, and then fades away.

And so he speaks the name of the girl he once loved and calls her spirit to him. In the time since he left to name the stars she grew into a woman and married a man. He did not bring her the moon on a necklace, or name the stars for her, but she loved him and that was enough. They had children, and then in the natural way they grew old and died.

To the man who named the stars, she still looks as she did when they grew up together.

“I have brought you the names of the stars, as I promised”

She bows her head to him in silent apology.

“I would love to hear them”

And so he speaks the names of the stars.

As he names each star, its glow appears above in the night sky, called out of death and into light.

By the time he speaks the name of the last star, the one that had long denied him, the sky is once more ablaze with light.

The woman he had loved smiles and thanks him.

He continues to speak.

He speaks the name of the sun, and for the first time in aeons it begins to rise.

He speaks the names of the winds, and the dead air stirs.

He speaks the names of the plants and the trees and the grass grows and the forests cover the earth again.

He speaks the names of the animals and the birds and the fish and the world once more teams with life.

He speaks the names of the people who have lived, and humanity once more walks upon the earth.

And, finally, he is able to rest. And so he does.

This story is pretty obviously inspired by The Road Not Taken, though I think it’s interestingly different in significant ways.

Interstellar travel (of sorts) is, it turns out, quite easy. It’s so easy in fact that entire species of animals have evolved to be able to do it naturally, including humans.

The ability is called “worldwalking”, and it allows you to move yourself and a reasonable amount of additional mass (say, on the order of about 100 people with associated gear as an upper limit) to other planets. The connection between these other planets doesn’t seem to map to positions in real-space terribly well, if it maps at all, and the planets you can move between are typically quite similar (so any planet you move to will probably have a broadly similar range of temperature, gravity, atmosphere, etc).

This talent is distributed unevenly, but typically in species that have it, more than half of the population can do it too some degree (carrying themselves between worlds) and some can do it to a much larger degree.

The difficulty of moving between planets varies. There’s effectively some sort of potential function which moving up it is hard and moving down it is easy. This potential changes gradually over time. There’s also some sort of distance factor. Imagining the placement of worlds as being on some sort of 2D mountainous land doesn’t put you too badly wrong.

At some point in the last 50k years or so, earth’s potential reached a peak where it was basically a worldwalking everest – quite easy to leave (there’s no equivalent of going “splat” when you jump off the peak), almost impossible to climb.

This created a very strong selection pressure against the worldwalking talent. If you ever worldwalked away (which was very easy to do even for extremely low levels of ability) you would basically never come back. So anything with non-trivial worldwalking talent very rapidly removed themselves from the gene pool as soon as their ability manifested. As a result the talent is basically entirely absent on earth.

Since peaking a while back, the potential level of earth has been gradually going down. It’s recently reached the point where travel to it has become reasonably feasible – as recently as 100 years ago, probably fewer than 1% of world-walkers could make it here and they probably couldn’t bring more than one or two people with them. The rate of decline seems to have increased recently and it’s got to the point where most world-walkers could reach earth if they had to and a reasonably large percentage can bring about a dozen people with them.

All of a sudden it’s become impossible to dismiss world walkers as random crazies and earth-bound humanity has basically been forced back into contact with humanity at large.

The rest of humanity is quite like us, by and large – most of them can probably interbreed with us just fine. They’re technologically much less advanced than we are, though they’re not primitives. They’ve likely got quite a decent grasp of basic science, maths, philosophy etc. but they’ve never been particularly driven to create a high functioning technological society because world walking was just easier. Sure we could build roads and trains and stuff, but why bother when we can worldwalk? We could build large cities, but there are entire virgin planets only a few hundred days travel away, so why?

They’re also incredibly racially diverse. There are millions of inhabited planets, each with their own subtly different selection pressures (different animal and plant species, more UV, more solar radiation, higher gravity, less water, etc) and there’s been a lot of time for those to take effect, but there’s also been enough migration that you can see ancestries from a wide variety of different locations wherever you go.

There’s also a lot of them. They’ve never experienced any population pressure or mass die offs, and they’ve been reproducing merrily for as long as we have. A million planets with maybe a million people apiece? Sounds plausible, though the true number is basically unknowable, but even given that we’re already outnumbered 100:1.

So we’ve just met our cousins. They’re more primitive than us, they look different and scary, and they have a large pool of natural resources they’ve never learned to exploit and a vast amount of living space for us to move in to.

This probably isn’t going to go well, is it?

(though a potential saving grace is that there is so much space and resources available that we’re likely not going to step on anyone’s toes too soon).

Today I am thinking about magic systems, inspired by a link from Dave and a conversation on Twitter with @palfrey.

It occurred to me there are basically two characteristics I really like in a magic system: The first is very well thought out magic systems which feel like they actually make sense and don’t completely disrupt the world they live in when you think through the implications. A good example of an author who does these very well is Brandon Sanderson – he’s got magic down to a science. For the sake of having a good word for this I will call this “Consistency”.

There’s another characteristic which I really like – the feeling that magic is deep and significant and contains powers beyond the ken of mere mortals. The feeling that magic being in the world makes it a fundamentally different and more mysterious place. I’ll refer to this as “Depth”. It is often associated with heavily ritualized magic, though I suppose there’s no intrinsic reason why it needs to be. An example of this being done well is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel.

These two seem to be fundamentally in tension – the more the magic makes sense, the less depth it seems to add.

One way I’ve seen this tension handled well is systems where magic is mostly fairly well understood and mechanistic but gives you access to higher powers and realms, and the more you draw on those the more mysterious and murky things get. For example, the Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz handle it this way: At the low end, Deryni magic is practically mundane, or at the very least looks like psychic powers. You can chat mentally, you can summon little balls of light, you can read letters without opening it. As the scope of the magic you’re performing increases, the amount of ritual required increases. At the grander scales of ritual you are invoking higher powers, summoning the archangels to watch over you and bless your working, and they… start to take notice of you.

Fundamentally though the two are still in tension here – it’s not that you’ve got the two side by side, it’s that you can trade off between the two of them in-universe.

So I started thinking about how you might go about getting both depth and consistency working together in harmony. Here’s what I came up with.

On the fundamentals of magic and the skills of mages

There is another realm, distinct from the world in which we live. Different cultures and traditions call it different things, and perceive it in differently. We shall call it Faerie.

Faerie is not a land of grass and trees and elves and unicorns frolicking in the sunlight. Those things are there, but Faerie is much more than that.

All our minds are reflected in Faerie, and joined to it. They shape it, and it shapes them. Faerie is a realm where our unconscious thoughts and imagination take form.

But it does not stop there. The ideas which are born in our mind linger long after we have stopped thinking them, whether through inattention or death. Some of them fade away, but some find new homes in others’ minds, or join with ideas spawned in other minds and take on a life of their own.

Many of these things which live in Faerie are wonderful. Many are terrible. Some are both.

Faerie is also extremely mutable. As it is spawned from our minds, so may it be shaped by them. When we perceive a segment of Faerie we may also shape it to our desires.

The skills required to perform magic are threefold.

The first skill is that of perception. The better you understand the world around you, the easier it is to spell cast in there. This includes both skills of observation with your mundane senses and additional ways of feeling the impression the world leaves on your mind and what it tells about you. An experienced mage can see in the dark, through walls and inside closed boxes. They can hear a pin drop and feel the heat of a candle from across the room.

The second skill is that of shaping. You must find or create a region of Faerie that is as alike to where you wish to cast the spell as possible, and differs only in the manner you wish it to differ. If you wish to summon a dragon, you must first find or create the region in which you wish to summon the dragon within Faerie. You must then shape this region, placing a dragon within it. Other minds will fight you – their perception of the world will impinge upon yours, and they will deny your dragon. You must persuade or overrule them and their wishes. This will be easier if they believe in dragons, and it will be harder if you are trying to shape something they have no familiarity with, or cannot believe would be here. In the desert it is far easier to shape Behemoth than Leviathan.

The third skill is that of summoning. You have created or found a region of Faerie which has what you desire. Now you must bring it through. This is at once the most straightforward and the most dangerous of skills. The ease with which you can do this depends crucially on how well you have succeeded at the first two steps – the more closely your region of Faerie matches the world where you want to bring it forth, the easier you will find this process, but you may not know how well you have achieved this until you try to bring the two into alignment. It is certainly possible to overcome a poorly matched shaping through brute force, but it is extremely taxing on the body and has on occasion proven fatal in its own right. Further, a failed summoning may have highly unpredictable consequences – you may lose control of Faerie as you bring it into alignment, and may bring through something you did not expect or change the world in wild and dangerous ways.

Not all magecraft involves all three skills. The skill of perception is highly useful in its own right, and the skill of shaping is the sole root of the mind skills. Summoning is rarely used on its own except by untrained wild talents, as it is so dependent on the other two, but it is not unknown for desperate or mad mages to bring things through from Faerie without proper preparation. We would strongly caution you against this, but the mere threat of it is sufficient to make most people think twice about giving a well trained mage no route of escape.

On summoned creatures

Many summoned things operate on principles that simply do not work in the world, and require active maintenance from a conscious mind to keep them in alignment with Faerie. Levitation will not sustain itself without the mage’s constant intervention, nor will magical fire burn eternal.

Many summoned creatures however are conscious entities in their own right, and many of them have a sufficient grasp of summoning that they can maintain their own link with Faerie and enforce the rules themselves. Thus a summoned dragon is not dependent on the mage for their powers of flight or fire, and a summoned demon is entirely capable of causing mischief without the mage’s consent.

On the reading and shaping of minds

Minds are directly linked to Faerie. A mage well trained in shaping can see into Faerie and use this sight to perceive other peoples’ thoughts and feelings. Further, they can manipulate these thoughts as the connection goes both ways. This sort of magic requires a great deal of skill to perform deftly and without damage to the other’s mind, but many mages specialize in just this sort of manipulation as it allows them to focus primarily on shaping to the exclusion of other skills.

This can be protected against. It is much easier to defend your mind than it is to attack it – a mage trained in shaping can erect walls and barriers around where their mind impinges on Faerie. Although they cannot cut off the link to Faerie itself, they can make it very difficult for others to affect. For this reason many people who are not otherwise interested in the study of magic learn enough shaping to guard themselves.

On healing

Fundamentally healing is magically simple – you match a region of Faerie to the body, you shape it healthy and you bring the change through to the world.

A word of caution though: Many things can sustain themselves in Faerie which are not viable in the world. The human body is good at adapting, but it has only so much capability to do so. If you do not understand the workings of the human body most thoroughly, there is a significant danger that you will merely make the problem worse.

It is much easier for a mage to heal themselves, because they are able to continually maintain the summoning and adjust it. They can perceive if they have created a problem and fix it, in the same way that a summoned creature sustains their link to Faerie themselves.

This is where the rumours of a mage’s immortality come from – it is untrue that a mage will live forever, but with enough training in the healing arts they can sustain themselves for a long time. As time goes on however an increasingly large amount of time and effort must be spent on maintaining themselves, and it is common for sufficiently old mages to voluntarily end their life knowing they will continue to manifest within Faerie.

On the raising of the dead

In many ways, the raising of the dead is the most trivial of acts. When a person’s body dies, the presence of their mind in Faerie remains. No longer routed to the world, it is now adrift in Faerie and may grow or fade or merge in a way that a living mind can not. As a result the older a mind is the less it resembles its human self, and it may indeed no longer exist in any recognisable form, but the mind of one recently deceased is present and may be readily conversed with. It is even possible to shape it to a new body and bring it through to the real world.

A word of caution: There is a question as to whether the person brought back is truly the one that died. Many religions believe that it is not, and that the person in question is an undead abomination. Many report that their resurrected friends lack some vital “spark” that they once had.

As further evidence that this is not a true raising, the same person may be raised many times, and indeed it is entirely possible to raise the living in the same manner.

On the denizens of Faerie

Many minds and beings live within Faerie. A mage trained in shaping may converse with them, and a mage trained in summoning may further enable them to manifest in the real world.

It is unclear whether these creatures are all the product of human imagination, or whether some of them arose spontaneously and indeed predate the human race (many of them claim to be this, but of course they would).

In particular many creatures we would recognise as gods or demons live within Faerie. They are unable to influence the world directly without a human being to bring them through, but they will be ever so grateful if you do so.

You should be extremely careful about granting these requests.