On Magic

For an outsider, explaining magic is virtually impossible. Suddenly a boulder appears, or a tree shrinks – such things are – well – impossible to the uninitiated. Certainly, we Librarians see things as they happen in our region; it’s a random gift, uncontrollable. Sometimes, I think Traghnalach likes it that way. Maybe he sees events unfold the same way, jumping around from one perspective to the next. I hope he can direct his vision. The mere thought he is as much victim to random changes as we causes anxiety.

But I digress. Magic, the world is magic.

Origins

Legends passed down from the few sunargh sages of the eastern continents tell us of how Lady Ice gave birth to the sun and named him Lesganagh. That birth, magical as it was, started the Godswar, and almost killed Lady Ice as she was giving birth to Eanaigh to heal her own wounds.

And still Lady Ice melted. Lesganagh split the stone with his axe, to keep his mother from drowning. Lady Ice’s melted body rushed into the depths of the world, past the Master Stone’s children, dousing parts Lord Fire’s domain. Dragh, the Lord Fire, sent his children against Lesganagh to restore the order of things – for it is known that Ice and Fire are natural enemies and Stone kept them separate, thus preventing a war that was now coming. As Dragh’s Ones battled Lesganagh and Eanaigh, and their brother (whose gravestone is the moon), Lady Ice’s body melted and turned to vapor in the depths of the world, becoming air. She thus enveloped the world in the magic that was her frozen body.

Magic, as far as we know, was not a gift the Children of Ice gave the people. Sunarghs discovered it, and used it for their gains. The elves learned a different means of working it, and eventually taught humans. Firelings and, by extension, Dragonlanders employ the magic of their origins, the burning core of the world. The dwarves remain silent on their magics.

As magic permeates the very air engulfing our world, Lesganagh melted his mother, Lady Ice, who diminished, her body becoming the waters that plunged into the depths, turning into air and all the vapors engulfing the world. Magic is part of everything and everyone, but not all can use it.

Bloodmagic

Legend has it that the First Ones, the progenitors of the sunargh, discovered they could manipulate magic by means of their own divine origin.

It is said that Lesganagh, after Dragh’s defeat, imprisoned Lord Fire underneath the plinth that now is called Dragoncrest, and to prevent him from being freed, he awakened twenty-four great cats – his favored creatures – to act as his chosen guardians. These First Ones learned to use the spark of divinity that ran through their veins to tap into the magic surrounding them. Through willpower alone they changed the world around them to their liking, permanently altering the area surrounding Dragoncrest. They expanded the gorge so that it encompassed the plinth that was their home, made it so that water would never run down into the crevice, and they created the first growth of steeloak which they used for the castle’s drawbridge. They used the magic sparingly. Their offspring did not.

Over time the sunarghs realized their own blood fed their magics, weakening them. Soon the prides warred with one another, abducting others of their kind, sacrificing them to use their blood to feed their magic.

We decided to call this Bloodmagic. For millennia this was the only way that spells were cast.

The sunargh spread somewhat, but the prides remained on the continent of Taogh. Some individuals fled across the Bridge to Comhara, or learned how to build seaworthy ships to escape to the islands off Taogh’s coast and lands further to the west. (We suspect this is the first time people realized our world is a sphere, but none of our Loreseekers ever returned from the distant places thought to be sunargh enclaves. ~K)

After millennia of factions fighting each other for the blood of their enemies, the gods decided to seed a new people on the world: Elves. At first, the sunargh barely noticed the new arrivals, and for the first thousand years, elves managed to grow, in relative peace, on the other continents. Taogh was a different matter, the blood-deprived sunargh city-states fell upon the newcomers with a vengeance, capturing them and breeding them as livestock for their magical needs. Soon, Taogh’s elves, at least in a wide circle around Dragoncrest, were fully enslaved, and their cousins living outside the sunargh sphere of influence learned to hide from prying eyes.

Potential Magic

When the sunargh known as Lightbringer taught elves magic, but in a non-destructive way, all things elven changed for the better. She had learned that everything remembers its past – the magic that permeates all things, it remembers. And with understanding an item’s “life” one could also, albeit briefly, remind items of their future. But, unlike Bloodmagic, none of these changes are permanent. Yet what could be achieved via this form of magic (sages have coined the term Potential or Potential Magic), was devastating in its application.

Taogh’s elves rose against their butchers, obliterating their already feeble civilization. Potential spread throughout the world as other societies beyond the Bridge learned of it and came to study under the Lightbringer’s pupils.

We don’t know what kind of magic the hermit sunarghs employ. Do they still use Bloodmagic? Have they stopped using magic altogether? Maybe we’ll find out one of these days. There are places our visions don’t reach. Were these places created by Bloodmagic, or have the inhabitants of these areas used other means to shield themselves from prying eyes?

Potential takes time to master. Fortunately, we elves have time. Humans do not, and so, when that race appeared, we needed to teach them differently. Everything has a past. This past can be put into formulae, equations that demonstrate the lifecycle of a tree or the force and circumstances it takes for a boulder to become a pebble. These “spells” are easier to comprehend. Humans just don’t have the time to watch a tree grow. Scales, even elves are hard pressed to witness how the tides grind a stone into sand, but we have much more time still. So our ancestors taught humans “spells.” And humans had to study long and hard to grasp these concepts, these formulae, these spells. And then, to top it all off, they had to learn to trust the magic. Impatient as they are, these Wizards and Wizardesses tend to force into effect something they desire, giving of themselves to make it happen, unwittingly employing Bloodmagic instead of Potential. Thankfully, these humans don’t live long enough to learn from their mistakes as they continue to force magic, at the cost of their own lives.

Other Magicks

Fire magic is a secret the Dragonlanders, both native and immigrated, keep under wraps. Even embassies or traders, some even bringing with them a mage or three do not share their knowledge. But what others have witnessed can only be described as devastating. Dragonfire can melt stone, and while their magic is not as powerful, it’s been said they can obliterate a house in a matter of moments.

Can they create? Alter? Build? Only the Dragonlanders know. And they ain’t talking.

We know even less about the magic of the stonelords.