Discussion of Magic

I’m curious about that last sentence. Is magic illegal or something? How do you plan to talk to a blood mage if that’s the case?

Oh. If it's dangerous it still sounds fun but not as much. But rock magic sounds nice to have.

Most books are just books, but some Books are something more.

The Art of Writing is a complex and difficult discipline. When a book meets the right criteria -- cut to the right dimensions, made of the right kind of materials, written with the right kind of ink, written in the right language, and with the text meeting some subtler and more complex requirements involving structure and consistency, the book becomes a Book by which one may travel between worlds.

There are two types of Book.

1. A Descriptive Book travels to a world, and a location within that world, matching the properties and features described. There is no known way to target a specific known world with a Descriptive Book; as far as I am aware, every newly-Written Descriptive Book leads to a previously uncontacted world.
   
2. A Linking Book travels to the world and location where it was Written. It is much easier to Write a Linking Book than a Descriptive Book, because the text is much less complex.
   

Any Book has a linking panel on the first page, which resembles a moving illustration that depicts the destination location. Touching the linking panel causes you to vanish and reappear at the destination. Traveling by this method is referred to as linking. When you link, anything you're carrying comes with you, except for the Book you're linking through. It is not possible to link to a different location in the same world; if a Book is taken into the world to which it links, then touching its linking panel will have no effect.

Altering the text of a Descriptive Book results in it linking to a different world. In addition, any Linking Books to the previously-linked world become nonfunctional. Some people think that certain kinds of alterations instead can result in corresponding changes to the linked world, but I don't know of any reputable reports of this being demonstrated, with the arguable exception of Relto but that doesn't really count. Experimentation is limited by the fact that we don't currently have the infrastructure to make more blank Books, so we're limited to what we can find in the D'ni ruins.

(Relto was Written by Yeesha, who seems to be able to get around several otherwise immutable principles of the Art. For example, Relto books can come with you when you link through them. Yeesha tends to cause people to throw up their hands and say "Yeesha! Magic!".)

There is some disagreement about whether Descriptive Books create the worlds they link to, or whether they merely establish a connection to already existing worlds.

So: what I know about the Spark. Most of this I learned aboard Castle Wulfenbach, and Baron Wulfenbach is the acknowledged authority on the nature of the Spark, so while it is incomplete it can be trusted not to be inaccurate.

The Spark is an inborn gift. It runs in families, and certain families are known to be particularly strong Sparks; the children of two Sparks is more likely to be a Spark, and to have a stronger spark than the child of one spark and one unGifted. Royal families regularly compete to marry Sparks into the line to produce more and stronger Spark descendants. My family line is very unusual in that despite intermarrying with Sparks regularly, we have never produced more than one or two Sparks ourselves at any given time; Suchi's position as consort and Prince(ss) of Thunder is the norm rather than the exception. Biologist Sparks have speculated that this is a less-common inherited trait.

Sparks are specific. Any Spark of similar strength can, with effort, comprehend the principles by which another's work operates, but they may not find it easy to apply those principles to new work, or even repair work. Spark styles generally run in families, so that, for example, the Mongfish family was known for their biological work; they both found constructs easier to create than clanks, and used biological principles and imitative patterns when they did construct clanks. Suchi's style is less easy to describe, but her devices tend to be situationally-focused and constructed from whatever is lying around rather than follow a common set of principles used all the time. It makes her more flexible, but she often finds it hard to replicate her own work on a larger scale.

Sparks break through, generally around the teen years but often later and very rarely earlier. Strength of Spark is associated with an earlier breakthrough. It is also associated with a more eventful breakthrough; there are significant mindwarping effects to the Spark, and adjusting your worldview to those effects is difficult. Aggravating this, breakthroughs generally happen under situations of stress or extreme emotion, and most first devices are destructive. Comparatively few Sparks pass through their breakthrough recognizably sane, which is half of why Sparks are often called 'madgirls' or 'madboys'; most are, in point of fact, mad.

Sparks have an endemic fugue state when in the process of experimentation and creation or during times of stress, which brings with it intense focus and distorted priorities. A Spark in the throes of battle, an interesting technical challenge, or an experiment will ignore biological needs, practical concerns, and, depending on how intensely they fall into the fugue state, ethical concerns and personal threats to life and limb. They will often see everything and everyone as a tool to be used to complete the current objective, and - by some mix of inspiring abject terror, projecting absolute self-confidence and certainty, single-minded momentum, and probably other factors not understood - it is very common for others around them to cheerfully acquiesce to be used. This is what gives the stereotypical Sparks their collection of minions, and is particularly common in families and communities which have a long history of minionhood. Particularly strong Sparks can inspire this reaction among lesser Sparks as well. (My family's histories claim that we are reliably immune to this, which seems to be true for me personally, but as my remaining family was killed in a Spark invasion when I was young I can't personally attest to it.)

Terminology: Sparky creations are collectively referred to as devices, but this is not often necessary. An engine generally implies a mechanical device with low or no personal agency or intelligence. A clank is a mechanical creation with recognizable agency and intelligence, and usually at least a modicum of personality. Clanks do not have the same legal status as people, and except in very rare cases are not capable of the same creative thought as people, but can be given general instructions and carry them out, and may rebel against their creator. Constructs are biological; they may be created from pieces of dead beings, modified from existing beings by means of serums, surgery, etc., or grown from custom-created life. Many Sparks make themselves partially construct; the rumors that Baron Wulfenbach was reconstructed from the pieces of his parents' three sons as they were dying are probably scurrilous but not totally implausible, and it's common to attempt to increase the body's ability to heal or install some kind of biological jump-start device to ward off death. It is possible to regrow a body from recent remains, usually that body is viable, and sometimes, if the brain was mostly salvaged, the mind will be mostly intact; however, precedent maintains that for purposes of noble inheritance, people resurrected in this way remain legally dead.

It is possible in principle for the unGifted to recreate the work of Sparks by operating within the laws described by the original designer, but attempting to understand those principles more often drives lesser minds into less useful forms of insanity, though is can also lead to a new breakthrough on the part of a latent Spark. What I have understood of the principles used by my Spark peers suggest that they use more than the standard spatial and time dimensions to enable more computationally complex and energy-intensive processes to exist than could be sustained in the ordinary physical confines of their creations, but I am not a Spark and cannot tell whether that is accurate.
In any case, for most creations anyone, Spark or no, can operate a created device. If a gun cannot be operated other than by the Spark who created it, it is because it was poorly made and requires constant maintenance, not because of the nature of the spark.


Hmm. I more or less reproduced the Baron's lecture on the Gift, didn't I. I apologize for the length. In any case, I would be very interested to hear about the similarities and differences, particularly from Grigori.

That's theoretically possible, but the current state of affairs has persisted for at least 800 years. And despite the best efforts of several Sparks (Baron Wulfenbach most extensively), the true mechanisms of the Spark have remained mysterious, and no progress has been made replicating any of its effects. There are some very clever unGifted researchers, but to date none has ever successfully built on a framework of originally Sparky origins; some have systematized more thoroughly and attempted to draw parallels, but they have succeeded no more than chance.

The Study of Alethics in Entelechy


Magic in Entelechy is ... fundamentally simple, but complex to explain. This will be a long post.

First, then: Mana.

Mana

Mana is the stuff of existence and reality. Not only all things, but all extant concepts, have mana. A chair possesses mana, but so does a friendship, or someone's love for their dog, so long as they are real. It clings to itself, so that mana tends to grow, and things that start off ephemeral end up fully fledged. Thus was our universe born.

Mana is not the same as degree or power; a correlation exists, but not causation. A passing fancy and a deep and abiding love will, of themselves, possess the same amount of mana. Similarly, instantiating a spark and instantiating the first instant of a nuclear firestorm cost the same amount of mana in a vacuum. The most important factor for inherent mana is quantity. For an object, this is simply the number of moles of elementary particles. For an ephemeral thing, more complex measures are used.

In particular, entanglement. The more important something is, the more connections it has, and those connections draw more mana towards it. Similarly, the older something is, the more events it can have impacted, and the more mana is associated with it. Thus, a deep love that determines much of your identity and has lasted long enough to dominate many decisions will in practice have more mana than a passing fancy of a few hours and no great import. This is also generally the cost associated with large spells; where possible, it is easier to start with some small, but contagious or expanding effect. Of course, such effects can very easily get out of hand...

The result of sufficient mana is existence. This is most particularly true of the material world, where existence is fairly binary - if something has enough mana, it can affect the world normally, and if it does not it cannot. Extraneous mana can result in a synesthetic sense of "greater reality," and mana levels on the boundary of existence can result in inconsistently real objects that seem to glitch through collisions and occasionally forget to respond to forces. In more ephemereal realms, the scale is more gradual; to use what is becoming a standard metaphor, a low-mana love can look and feel similar to a passing fancy.

Speaking of glitches, that is actually a reasonable metaphor for mana in general - a measure of "computing time" given to an object. The magnitude of the object is relevant only insofar as its complexity makes it difficult to simulate.

As a side note, there is no conservation of mana, and indeed there is an infinite amount of mana in the world. In particular, logic possesses an infinite amount of mana: it is not possible to enact a true logical paradox, though there are many ways to make mere physical laws retreat or to bypass causality or otherwise cheat this rule.

Magic

Magic is fundamentally about altering truth - hence, alethics. It is about choosing a new truth for the world and enforcing its existence through the movement of mana.

To do this, a connection to the target concept must be made. Mana can move through any connection, but the ease and rate in which it does so is exponential in the "size" and strength of the connection. Since reality is already quite real (hence its name), in practice only a few connections are strong enough to allow the casting of spells: those that settled in the very beginning of our universe, the runes that make up our Truth, the ontological building blocks of reality. Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Lightning, Wood; Time, Space, Energy, Matter; Void, Boundary, Possibility; and Metal. Invoking a spell is essentially a matter of translating a target truth into the language of the universe, and then adding mana. 

The classic spell, then, consists of a circle that represents both Void and an approximation to the infinite fractal of Boundary: it sets up a clean space, outside the concerns of the rest of the world. Runes are layered within the circle, written in no particular, but consistent, order - though following an old tradition can lend your spell some efficiency and power - and occasionally connected with auxiliary lines. Sometimes, entire sub-spells can be included, either to define a complex concept to be acted upon or to be cast in the middle of casting the outer spell. An incantation is then written along the outside of the circle, to shift the entire concept rather than to foul the inner workings of the spell.

In general, the stronger the connection, the more efficient the spell, often by orders of magnitude. However, every rune must make its own connection to the concept it represents, and so there is a trade-off between representing one's concept in as many different ways as possible, and minimizing the number of runes. The most elegant and efficient spells fit in many invocations of the concept in only a few runes, through puns and wordplay and subsidiary spells built out of subsets of pre-existing runes. 

This seems reasonably simple from the outside. From the inside, however, it is not, for one simple reason: magic is unnaturally hard to learn. The universe is stable and tends to remain so; as such, there is a low-level statistical "force", an entropic curse, on attempts to alter it. Learning magic, therefore, results in the universe conspiring against you. There is not much force behind this attempt, but quite a lot of persistence, and in general students of magic must be equally persistent as well as intelligent to manage to comprehend alethics.

Aiding us in this attempt are two major conveniences: incantations, and Draconic.

Draconic is, as it sounds, the language of the dragons. As a language that existed only seconds after creation, it is nearly as old as the universe, and its conceptual affinity is unparalleled among mortal languages. It should serve to demonstrate one of my above points, then, when I say that using a character from Draconic tends to decrease the efficiency of a spell by a factor of one hundred. Nevertheless, when representing extremely complex or contextual concepts such as "mind" or certain emotions, it is invaluable.

Incantations apply a refining force to the final product. An incantation is generally written in an old language (though usually not Draconic, as that is powerful enough that it can foul the spell), and contains as many puns, rhymes, and allusions to ancient works as is hypothetically possible. In doing so, a well-written incantation can help account for the inevitable imperfection of the spell circle, and narrow down the possible effects of the spell to the one intended. Multi-line and multi-verse incantations are also possible, and there is essentially no such limit on their length as there are for the length of the spell circle itself; however, there is of course the practical limit of speaking or thinking the entire incantation during the relatively short process of casting.

Which brings us to...

Moving Mana

There are generally three ways to move mana: through sacrifices, through willpower, and through channeling. Technically, the latter two fall under the first category, but since the practical mechanics are wildly different, they are traditionally separated. 

The easiest way to move mana is to simply sacrifice an object. Any destruction of any object frees up the mana in that object as a whole, as well as any mana tied up in connecting concepts. For example, burning a chair releases the mana entwined with the concept of the chair as a whole, as well as that tied up in each component; it will also generally destroy, say, the attachment of someone who considered it a family heirloom, replacing it with (hopefully mild) grief. Note that such a replacement does not decrease the amount of mana that can be gathered from the chair - that mana is immediately accessible to local spells, and if more mana is needed to, say, produce an emotion, more will be created. 

Sacrificing something randomly splashes mana across concepts and objects in the local vicinity; if there happens to be a high-bandwidth connection to the Root in that vicinity, that spell can be enacted. This is by far both the most inefficient and the easiest way to enact a spell.

The second method of casting is through willpower. This is essentially the same as the above, except that the thing being sacrificed is your immediate agency, your desire to see this thing done, and any related thoughts. It is generally difficult to manage for novice mages, in particular since it is obviously somewhat dangerous - it is entirely possible to sacrifice too much of your mind in the process. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool for Mages above Second Order (which will be explained in a later post in the intelligent life thread, as that topic is rather complex and deserves a post in its own right.) It also maximizes the effect of your Hue without the overriding effect of a high Saturation, which can occasionally be useful. (See below for definitions.)

The third, final, and most difficult method of casting is through channeling. Channeling mana is a complex mental and occasionally physical action, creating some ephemeral and empty thing within your mind, filling it with mana, moving it to the spell circle, and then sacrificing it. Since every action in this step is a spell, this is generally only possible for mages that have successfully heavily enhanced their minds; by far the simplest method is to build an infinite railway of empty void-boundary spell circles within your mindscape and use this to ship mana as one might ship freight. The nature of this method is to maximize both Hue and Saturation, and since it is also the most efficient, can be used to exploit high Value.

Mana Aspect

As the person infusing the circle, a caster's personal aspect can have a large effect on the result of a spell, sometimes almost to the degree of an incantation. As such, many attempts at quantifying and parametrizing aspects exist; my favorite (and one of the most common) is explained below. It is known as the HSV scale, in reference to the same definition of "color," and a mage's aspect is occasionally known as their soul-color or by similar poetic names.

Hue - The actual aspect of someone's mind. Needless to say, this is very much not summed up by a single number, and indeed will very from moment to moment. Nevertheless, underlying mental patterns - a desire to save the world, to understand oneself, for vengeance, or for peace - can manifest in consistent patterns of efficient and self-sabotaged spells that create natural specialties. Certain nations have culturally associated colors for various common hues, but in practice this is best described by words.

Saturation - The degree to which someone's mind colors mana it touches. To some extent, this is a measure of how deep-seated one's Hue is; no matter how great one's resolve may be, a new resolution will result in a rather low Saturation for a time. An old grudge, meanwhile, can poison every spell the caster touches. However, this is also simply an aspect of one's soul, and an attribute passed down through family lines in that regard; certain personalities, often described mundanely as "addictive" or "intense," also tend to have high Saturation across Hues.

One who can entirely clear their mind and blank their Hue, and who nevertheless possesses high Saturation, essentially possesses a ready-made incantation for any spell they wish to cast. It is for this reason that meditation is often useful to a mage, as is minimization and prioritization of their desires. 

Value - Simply, the amount of mana one has access to at any given time, simply by existing. Mana is produced any time something is destroyed, and as such rapid computation can produce large amounts of mana quickly. In other words: high intelligence, whether through effective conceptual leaps or rapid thought, can lead to high Value. So, however, can flighty emotional attachments and mood-swings; as can age, which leads to high entanglement, various magical enhancements (I have an otherwise pointless computer in my mindscape that does nothing but sort and resort the Encyclopedia Eterniae for this purpose), and certain qualities of the soul-body connection. 

In theory, one with very high Value and Saturation and perfect control over their Hue could cast spells without circles, simply by willing it. (From my point of view, Gabriael's Arcane Might is simply an agglomerate measure of Saturation and Value in particular.) This is part of the theory behind ascension to the Third Circle, and acquisition of a Mantle.

... I believe that's everything. If I've missed something obvious, please let me know so I can edit it in.

There is generally no reasonable point of interference when casting a spell, and there are generally very many chances to notice that you have done something wrong or that you have forgotten the spell entirely. Given the same number of mysterious sabotage incidents by destiny, fewer spells will be cast if there are fewer mages than if spells are more difficult.

Draconic has deeper connections than, say, English, by several orders of magnitude. However, it is still not nearly as deep as that created by the runes, which shapes were determined in Time Not and are a fundamental part of our universe. The efficiency loss due to Draconic is that compared to the same spell written in runes, assuming that the words are identical - using the Draconic character for elemental Fire in place of the rune for Fire, for example. (It is possible to make up that difference if, say, one is replacing the massive spell-circle that represents the concept of a "mind" with the single Draconic character for such.)