Chapter 2Magical Theory

You may not believe this to be useful information to you. Skip ahead to the descriptions of spellforms in chapter 3, if so. I still believe this information to be useful enough to include. It will unveil some of the mysteries around magic. Let you begin the process of truly understanding what it is you do. Why the guidelines exist. Why we decay when we overdraw magic. Why certain magic is more costly than others. Even those that seem to be more complex and hard to keep in your brain.

For the future Luke that has decided to read this chapter, you will be glad you did. For those he shares it with, you will be glad he did. For the future Luke that did not read this, I hope your own intuitions and capabilities are enough to make your dream come true. Not all blind men are lost. May you know where to go.

This may not be the ground truth. It may be far, far off from reality. But this is the truth as I know it. The underpinnings to all magic as I have experienced. Future scholars may refine or disprove any or all of what I am about to say. Just because Newton's gravity was incorrect does not mean it wasn't enough to begin to understand. To jump off from to the greater heights those like Einstein reached.

Magic itself seems to be everywhere, now that we know where to look. In the ground. In the air. Deep out in space. In this magic exist currents, like those in the sea. Free magic, flowing to the whims of unseen and unfelt winds. It is, ultimately, this magic we must harness. Bend to our will. Coerce into doing our bidding.

Like a country digging a canal through an entire country to bend the oceans to their will, we, as mages, must find the right tools to perform these acts. These are the spellforms. Our shovels. Our back hoes. Our buckets. Our dump trucks. Each one has a specific purpose. All work toward the goal of reshaping the flow of magic. Not all do so the same way. A shovel directly cuts through the earth to begin the canal. A bucket carries that dirt to somewhere it will no longer matter. A back hoe can do the work of hundreds of men in half the time at greater expense. A dump truck does the same for buckets.

Like when digging a canal, you must weigh the benefits of paying hundreds of men over many months to dig your fancy trench with shovels and buckets against the benefits of paying the same money in gas to get it done in weeks with back hoes and dump trucks. Ultimately, the latter is almost always worth it. In some cases, the former is all that is needed.

There is no perfect analogy. The cost in conjuring water before freezing it by removing the heat is almost identical to directly conjuring ice. In some cases, it may be better to combine effects in such a way, such as turning kinetic force into fire in a fire ball. In many cases, it is better to just conjure the ice directly.

Using these tools is not without cost. Hiring an employee is not free. Gas costs money. Magic causes erosion. Subtle at first, then painful. If ignored, that pain will advance into decay and death. In enchantments, this can be directly seen as the magic cuts part of the enchantment out and causes the spellform given a physical vessel to stop adjusting the flow of magic correctly. Sometimes they turn directly to dust. In living beings, the pain is the stinging we feel. Our connection to our soul beginning to fray. If immediately halted, the damage can be repaired. Like a bruise, it will disappear given time. If ignored, the pain will lead to real damage to our soul. A finger lopped off, never to be repaired.

When we imagine a spellform, it forms that construct in the same non-physical space our soul resides in. As raw magic passes through it, as with enchantments, it reshapes that magic to achieve a desired outcome. To have it affect the physical reality we live in, we must channel it through the connection between our soul and our bodies, before allowing the magic into the world through our flesh and bones. The damage we receive to our soul would, theoretically, be possible to sustain without any decay to our bodies if we could transmit the magic from the non-physical soul realm to the physical without using that connection as a medium. The damage to our soul would remain. I can only imagine what that would look like. I will not elaborate here, as I have never seen such a thing. It is for those that come after to uncover.

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You might wonder why the magic overdraw decay always starts at our hands. So do I. Maybe it is because we must "construct" the spellforms and this, in some way, causes our hands to be the closest to the origin point of our magic. Maybe it is simply because it is the path of least resistance for magic. Maybe, with enough effort, you could make your legs begin to decay first in exchange for lower powered spells. The giants that stand on my shoulders will know. But as I am among the first in the pile, I do not.

You may also wonder how we are capable of performing feats of magic long distances from our bodies if the magic must pass through our bodies. How you can catch a falling fork without the magic needing to travel from your hands to the fork. How you do not need to gesture or point your arms to get magic to go where you desire. While I do not know the exact mechanics, I do know magic can, in some way, be shifted from the direct entry point into physical reality it relies upon. Like a light switch, the electricity comes from outside, enters the home, goes to the light switch you interact with, and lights up the bulb to allow you to see. In a similar manner, magic comes from outside your soul, is transformed in the spellform, begins its journey into physical reality through the boundary of your soul and body, and finally fully realizes its purpose in the conduit point of your choice.

This leads to the question of why we can't just create a needle inside someone's brain or crush their heart with telekinesis without so much as lifting a finger. The soul also acts as a barrier. It prevents conduit points of other origins from coming into physical reality through the body they connect to. Telekinesis can still work on other bodies because, after using a conduit point outside of the body to enter physical reality, the movement they create can be imparted upon the physical body. It cannot be used to crush a heart because the conduit point needed to do so must be inside the body of the target.

Additionally, moving the conduit point too far from your body causes an increased draw upon the connection between our soul and body. Almost like the boundary itself is made of spellforms we cannot begin to imagine. Engaging the enchanted parts of our soul that determine where conduit points are in relation to ourselves, in itself, causes the flows of magic to be interrupted and changed. Like any other use of magic, this will cause even more damage to the medium in which it is crafted. Our soul, in this case.

We subconsciously perform these conduit point shifts. We desire the spell to enter reality behind our target, so it does. We desire our telekinesis to fully encapsulate the falling fork, so it does. When actively attempting to negate these desires, all magic originates from the point that decays the fastest. Our hands. Our arms. Our torsos. Before falling down the fronts of our bodies and into our feet and back up the back of us. Into our necks and heads before finally killing us through our brains.

I am uncertain exactly what causes people to have different capacities for magic. The factors that go into it are obvious. Physical fitness. Mental fortitude. Ability to imagine the unreasonably complex shapes that are spellforms, whether or not they're able to keep the whole in their mind like they must to actually cast spells. Why these individual things affect magic capacity in the ways and degrees they do are unknown to me. Why the most fit humans are not always the most magically capable. Why those who can endure torture without allowing their pain to overwhelm them can not always cast even a basic fire ball. Why the most imaginative kids do not have the best magic capacities on the planet. While all three are required to perform any reasonable amount of magic, I am uncertain why those factors come into play in any way. I am certain that, at some point in our pile of giants, someone will learn. Someone will understand these mysteries that keep me up at night.

I am, once again, uncertain of the exact mechanics of how spellforms actually make the usually intangible magic all around us perform feats that were pronounced impossible only a few years ago. Spellforms affect the flow of magic. That much is certain. In the same way you can create a seemingly transparent glass that produces the shadow of a man when you pass light through it, the spellforms take the flowing magic and create ripples upon its surface, which then bloom into the physics-defying spells we know of. How and why those ripples and changes in flow direction have the results they do will remain a mystery to me until I die, I am certain.

You may have more questions. I may have had more answers. I have more questions. Their answers will be forever unknown to me. Now I am gone. Learn what spells you desire from the following pages.