After my declaration, the Grandmother looked me over once more, nodding to herself as if lost in thought but obviously pleased.
"Follow me, child.", the Grandmother said to me, before turning to Sigmir, "You can join Kallista and the child you brought with you. I don't think you would find our talk very interesting."
With that she rose, turning to one of the doors leading out of the room. Sigmir looked at me with insecurity in her eyes.
“We can trust her. Or rather, no amount of caution on our part could stop her if she wanted to harm us. There is simply no need for her to play games. I will see you later, dear.” With that said, I pulled her into a short kiss before sending her on her way, out the front-door. Then I followed the Grandmother just to stop dead in my tracks. After walking through the doorway, I was standing in a moon-lit forest glade, the doorway I had just stepped out of was built into a large tree. The air was feeling warm and a slight breeze played with the leaves in the trees around us. I looked around and the Grandmother was sitting on a log, next to the small pond in the middle of the glade. As I stepped closer, I saw that the pond was not quite reflecting the moon above us, it was more as if the silvery light of the moon had taken liquid form and was making up the pond.
“Sit, child. The night has always been the time for secret knowledge, the time for rituals, the time for magic.”, the Grandmother called out to me and pointed to a log a few steps away from the one she was sitting on. I slowly walked over, trying to comprehend my surroundings, trying to make sense of the input my eyes were giving me.
I activated Lenore's Sight almost by instinct and was blinded by the maddeningly complex colours around me, shining in every colour I could imagine and a few I couldn't, varying in intensities and moving in impossible motions. I had never taken any mind-expanding drugs but damn, what a trip! Again, I stood still, trying to take the sight in, this time not the simple glade but the magic behind it. Just looking around created more questions than it answered and Lenore stopped the sight before I could drop down a rabbit-hole of intricate magic designs. Blinking like an owl, I resumed my steps, until I was seated in front of the Grandmother. The only thing I had truly taken in was that the pond looked just the same as the Nexus outside, but the vegetation was all wrong.
“Where are we? Or should it be when are we? This pond looks like the Nexus but it can't be it, can it?” My mouth was trying to keep up with my racing mind, blurting questions out as fast as I could.
The Grandmother smiled at the word-vomit I had just spewed out and my wide-eyed look of wonder. “We are still in my house. What you see is a very high level Illusion, made out of my memories. So both questions are quite good. What you see is the Nexus when I first saw it, a few millennia ago. The world has changed a great deal since then. Not all change is positive, just like not all stagnation is negative. Both are necessary parts of life. But I wanted to give you tools so I should start at the beginning. Tell me, what is magic?”
What is magic? It was a simple question but not really. I had read a great many fantasy novels in the real world and a lot of them had some form of magic in them. But what was true in this world?
Maybe the best thing was to start at what I knew it was not? I knew that runes were not a necessity, I knew that gestures were not a necessity, I knew that chants were not a necessity. Not all magic was projected outwards so that was out as well. So what was left? Will? A mental Image? Astral Power?
After my contemplation, I gave my answer. “Magic is the ability to alter reality using one's will and Astral Power.”
“A good answer. And an answer that shows you the necessity to specialise. You are a Sorceress, one of the Trailblazers. You don't walk the path of another, you make your own path. To find your own path, you will need to look around you. Something that touches your soul, something that encompasses you and your magic as much as possible. That something will be your guide-post.
For me, it was the cycle of birth and death. I was always good with healing magic, strengthening the healing ability of the body to the points that I was able to heal everything, even age to a degree. Sadly, only to a degree. I found my guide-post the day I lost my oldest daughter. She did not die from disease or injury, she died because she wanted to move on.” she stopped for a moment, wiping a small tear from her eyes before continuing, voice awash with emotions.
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“Age had taken a toll and not even I was able to turn back the clock for her as I was able to do for myself. I was standing at her bed, trying to find something to help her, looking over her children, my grandchildren, their children and so on. There was some sadness in their eyes but they were the celebration of her life. In that moment, I realised that Birth and Death are two sides of the same coin and both are necessary. Without Birth, there is no life, without Death, life has no meaning, it turns into an unending torment. Change, Mortality, those are the strengths of mortals. Immortals stagnate, even I slowed down, almost to a stop. The Gods could not change, even if their very essence depends on it. So the cycle of birth and death became my guide-post, I had learned a lot about magic to keep a being alive, to thwart death, but I also had to learn about death, the soul and the cycle of rebirth. The Barrow Den is part of my studies of the soul and it's mysteries.
But I was talking about the thing that guides you. Some call it a Totem, others say that your Domain is such and such. I don't like either. It's a guide-post, nothing more. You will have to find yours if you want to cross the divides, it is part of your journey.” she concluded.
A distinct domain? Something that encompasses Darkness, Ice and Blood? Before my mind could start down the rabbit-hole, the Grandmother continued talking.
“Once you find your guide-post, you will need to understand it as much as possible. What your guide-post is depends on you, your experiences and your soul. It is one of those questions that have no wrong answer. Now, I said before that there are main-streams. One of the distinctions of the various main-streams is their guide-post, another is the question of natural or conceptual magic. Natural Magic is modelled after the natural world. As a simple guideline, everything that exists in nature can be mimicked with Natural Magic and strengthened or weakened to a point. It allows for highly varied spell-casting because it needs a balance. You can't just focus on one aspect, let's say the frozen winter and ice, you also need the gentle growth of spring, the fiery heat of summer and the furious winds of fall. All things in balance.
Conceptual Magic on the other hand deals with concepts and those can be one-sided and extreme. They don't need to follow the natural order, they can go to extremes that nature has no part in. They place greater limits on your spell-casting but allow for great power.
Neither conceptual nor natural spell-casting is superior, both are simply paths you walk according to your soul. Some cannot single-mindedly follow a concept, forsaking all else. I am one of those. As I said before, only when I tempered my life-magic with the truth of death, was I able to find my direction. By the main-streams I gave you before, you could call me a Druid. But labels are meaningless, they will be placed upon you by those that come later. True importance is for you to find your own path.”
I turned the two ideas she had just given me over in my mind. I believed that my magic was part of the conceptual side. Neither Fire nor Light gave me any warm fuzzy feelings, if not for the need to have a fire for cooking and warmth, I would never light one. Only blood didn't quite fit in. But what would be the other side of the coin for blood? I asked the Grandmother about it as it didn't quite fit as an element.
“Blood and Blood Runes you say? Blood Magic is part of Life-Magic. However it is internally balanced because blood is both life and death. Disease and Poison, those are the parts of death that come from blood. But obviously blood is also the carrier of life.
It is a lot simpler when you focus on the simple elements. The best way to look at those it to imagine a hexagon, split into six parts. If you start with light and go clockwise, next you have air, then water, followed by darkness opposite of light. On the other side of darkness is earth and last but not least, fire. Each element has its place and its opposite. However, calling light and darkness elements is a bit misleading. They are more states of being. Darkness is change and chaos. Light is stagnation and order. Now for one of the magic paradoxes. The elements next to light, those that are most easily paired with light are the least ordered and stagnant. Fire and air are both highly mobile and fluid and it gets worse when you add light to either of it. The combination of light and air gives you the volatile element of lightning, fire and light gives you the solar element - some call it ‘radiance’, I prefer ‘solar’.
On the other hand, water and earth are stable elements, especially earth. If you add Darkness and Water, you gain what some call the lunar element, the element of lunacy. It is opposite of the radiant sun and one of the least known elements, If you pair the solid earth with darkness, you get the highly structured crystal-element.
Truly interesting are the elements that exist between the prime-elements of Fire and Earth or between pairing of Air and Water. If you add Darkness to Air and Water, you get the frozen existence of Ice. If you add Light to the same mix, you get the highly volatile element of the Storm. On the other hand, Fire and Earth give birth to Metal if paired with Darkness and Magma if paired with light. Interesting, isn't it?”
It was indeed interesting. I wasn't quite sure what it meant in practise, maybe I would be able to learn air and water magic easier after I mastered my Ice- and Darkness-Magic? But if Blood Magic was an outlier, it sounded I should let myself be guided by Ice and Darkness on my search for a domain. I liked that term better than the guide-post term the Grandmother used.
The new information was useful, but there were a great many questions I wanted answered, and I finally had someone I could ask.