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TALLANDER'S APPRENTICE

MAGIC: AN INTRODUCTION AND BRIEF LEXICON.

by Lord Salisor.

Firstly, and of utmost importance, I must state what should be immediately obvious to any who practice the fringe arts: Magic is not a science. There are no hard and fast rules as to its application, and you cannot become a Mage simply through the acquisition of knowledge. Nobody knows why some people are born with the ability to change the world simply by force of will while others cannot, and indeed if it were known why, it would cease to be magic and become a science. The very definition of the word, ‘Magic’ implies that there is something unknown and unknowable about it.

However, having said that, there are a handful of facts and suppositions (five: two suppositions and three facts, and the occasional aside) that can be used to gain an understanding of how magic works. These facts and suppositions I have taken great pains to list below, in some semblance of what I call order.

1) The first supposition is important: everything else is based on this supposition. Whether it is correct or not remains unprovable, but as of now it is the best explanation available. The supposition is that each and every rock, every droplet of water, every species of plant and animal, everything that is able to be seen, touched, tasted or smelled was created an unknown length of time ago by ancient and powerful Gods.

2) The second supposition is this: If a being of sufficient magical power creates anything, even something as simple as a piece of rock, that rock retains some magical properties. This ‘magical residue’ remains consistent over time — it is an essential part of the rock. If any Mage in existence were able to create in the manner of the Gods, this would be able to be proved or disproved. So far there has been none powerful enough to do so.

3) (This one is a verifiable fact, as are the next two.) Three things possess more magic residue than anything else. These three things are: A) a certain type of crystal, B) certain words and C) people. It is assumed that the reasons for these anomalies are that the Gods used the crystals and the words as tools to help focus their power, and as people are so much more complex than anything else, the Gods by necessity took much more time in our creation, and so that much more magical residue rubbed off.

4) The amount of magical residue is not the same for everyone. Some people have only as much as farm animals while others have much, much more. Nobody understands the reason for this — the variation correlates with nothing. But it is important. If a person’s magical residue is sufficiently high, that person can alter reality by force of will alone. Not everyone with strong magical residue manifests it in the same way. Some are good only at piercing the veils of time, for example, whilst others may have a particular ability for controlling weather. Oddly, the crystals appear to show similar affinities.

5) Finally, if a person of high magical residue is in contact with one of the magic crystals, their ability to alter reality is increased tenfold. If they utter the correct Godspoken words, then again, their power is magnified. This is not an indelible law, but rather a rule of thumb, for if a person whose nature suggests healing the sick is in contact with a crystal which eases the translation of iron into glass, there will be only a slight benefit, and indeed the powers may work against one another. (As an aside to this last point, there are other things not necessarily greatly endowed in magical residue which can assist in the performance of certain kinds of magic. It is known that living sacrifices assist in the summoning of demons, as do the drawing of certain symbols in the earth. It has also been suggested that the combination of certain vegetables and other ingredients generates such an interaction of residue that odd effects can occur. The fabled ‘love potions’ and ‘elixirs of life’ are the most obvious examples. I mention these last only because so many uneducated people believe in their existence. I myself do not.)

In the two hundred years before I put quill to parchment there has been no other theory that explains better why magic works than that described above. But such a theory cannot be called complete without an inventory of Godspoken words and their definitions. The following pages contain such records. They are not inclusive by any means, but are designed specifically to expose students to enough Godspoken words within each category to indicate where their aptitudes lie.

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