Transactions of the Royal Society of Mages

Special Volume 3 of 3

Published on the 83rd day of Spring 1209

Editor's Note

Below is the third installment of groundbreaking discoveries submitted to the board by the death mage Kharon. After multiple conflicting reports we sent a delegation to Cinder to investigate rumors that Kharon was present in the city. They reported that a death mage was identified in the city last Winter. City officials told us that the mage was disposed of quickly and that there has been no death or sickness that could be attributed to death magic poisoning either before or after his discovery.

Reports and descriptions were extremely conflicted. By some accounts he was a refugee from a distant land, others told us he was a member of a prominent mage family, still others described him as a son of a baker. Our investigation continues but I doubt we will find concrete evidence of their identity at this point. Everyone we spoke to emphasized the importance of not causing a panic in the citizenry so we will be clear that our own search for evidence of death magic came up empty as well. There is not any risk to the people living in Cinder.

Perhaps this person was Kharon, perhaps not. Speaking only for myself, I rather hope it was not Kharon. I would like to talk to him, despite my fear and the very real risk of death. He brings such insights to some of the hardest topics. The letter that follows describes several experiments with magic cores. This paper was delayed in its publication to allow time for our group to try and replicate some tests and report on our findings. Due to their utter simplicity, I am happy to say that we have managed to successfully replicate all three.

There is a feeling like stopped time that occurs when one's view of the world is upended. When someone is able to point out repeatable observations that your previous understanding of reality has no method of rationalizing. I experienced this as a young boy many times as I learned about the world. As I grew though, less and less surprised me. Now again I experience the joy of discovery. It makes me feel young again.

With best regard,

Thadious Opel

Mage of the seventh rank

Premier and Chair of the editorial board for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Mages

***

The dilemma of human magic

Manuscript revived on the 11th day of Spring 1209

Manuscript accepted for publication on the 81st day of Spring 1209

To the Esteemed Royal Society of Mages,

When I first opened the pages of these transactions I found an active debate between two groups. The debate was on the very nature of what magic is and how best to explore it. I believe it was best summarized by Zenihear when they said “Whether you think the mage’s presence affects experiments or not, you're right.” The mage’s presence is the term given to the power a mage has to affect the outcome of an experiment even without intending to. The best tests of this phenomenon were performed by Adamson, who conducted water freezing tests with and without mages, and Windwillow, who replicated those experiments while controlling for temperature and pressure.

I was stumped in my own investigation of this until I had a chance encounter with a demon. The details of this encounter are irrelevant but suffice it to say we found ourselves not trying to kill each other for a while and she brought up something they refer to as “the dilemma of human magic.” Now, I must caution your readers that second hand information from a conversation with a demon must not be trusted. But as it gave a hint toward further investigation that later bore fruit I need to relate what she told me to have you understand.

The dilemma of human magic was a ‘discovery’ made in the demon lands over thirty years ago. It states with certainty that human mages, if left unchecked, will destroy the world. This is most likely war propaganda but the detail I heard and believed was that there is something different about human and demon magics. Of course this is obvious. It is well known that humans, of all magical creatures known, have the greatest degree of control and longest range for indirect effects. Opel wrote the key text on the topic with Limits of Magic Control where he exhaustively studied how far away different creatures are able to cast the effects of their spells. He found that humans have an order of double the range of the next longest range creature, the desert roc, while demons tend to be at the low end of the range.

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Having already conducted an investigation of the inner mechanics of magic cores I procured a human mage core, following the strictest of ethical guidelines, and compared its structure to a demon core of the same type. I found that the cores were nearly identical with one tiny exception. There were crystal patterns, smaller than could be seen with the naked eye, present in large numbers in the human core but not in the demon core. It is here that I must caution anyone who would attempt to replicate the tests I describe as I found them to be horribly dangerous. However the danger seems to be limited to my attempts to isolate one crystal pattern from the rest in the core. Doing so nearly killed me and destroyed my lab but I doubt that any non-death-mage could even attempt it so it should be safe for others. When activated through a controlled pulse of lightning, as is present in the human body, the patterns in the core exhibit strange properties.

The pattern appears to have an anticausal effect to stop whatever you use to try and trigger it. This was extremely strange to observe because the mechanisms seem like unrelated random failures. Consider the following apparatus and results. I set up a lightning trigger using a lightning magic core, a shock beetle's horn as the channel, and a lever switch to apply the trigger to the core. I ran twenty successful trials on the demon core. I then tried to run the same test on the human core only to find that the channel had degraded. Replacing the channel and testing again cause the leaver’s hinge to misalign. Replacing that and testing again cause the channel to degrade again. Dozens of frustrating experiments later I was able to develop a theory for what is happening.

These patterns, when activated, are eliminating outcomes of otherwise random processes that mages do not want to happen. If this theory is correct, then the mechanism by which we control magic is to eliminate the random outcomes of magic that do not result in the visual and other effects we desire. To project magic farther, we set up an expectation in our mind that it will go farther such that we would trigger the core if it didn't. My theory is that human cores eliminate outcomes of specific random processes related to our magic to control it. This theory allows us to make several predictions, first among them is the theoretical ability to make a magic item to direct a spell at range.

I then tested this prediction using a simple apparatus. I used the core of a horned rabbit for its water mana and confirmed the presence of the patterns in its structure. The core was then connected to the beak of a floating octopus for its ability to channel water mana outward. I confirmed that activating the channel projected a force that pushed directly away from it in a cone pattern. I wired two mechanical switches that both must close to allow the lightning to reach the core. I placed one switch within the area of the beaks cone at a distance of one meter, which I will call the target switch, and the other far outside its range, which I will call the control switch. Note that the target switch was oriented crossways to the direction of force emitted by the channel. I then attempted to close both switches starting with the target switch.

The result was that as soon as I closed the control switch the target switch opened. Before the control switch was closed, the water mana from the core was affecting the target switch but not pushing in the right direction to close it. Just before the control switch closes, the water mana changes the direction of its force to start to open the target switch such that no electrical impulse can reach the core. Unlike my previous experiments, I was able to repeat this one dozens of times with the same result. I then tried to repeat the test by closing the control switch first and then forcing the target switch closed. The first effect I observed was that the control switch was being held in the almost closed position by water mana. However, after pushing harder the switch closed and the pushing effect stopped entirely. The beak channel had degraded just like my previous experiments.

From these observations we can identify a few principles of how magic is controlled. First, it requires feedback from the environment. The enhanced senses that mages get are almost certainly involved in how we control magic. This is already known as binding a mage makes control of magic impossible. Second, the effects will be the simplest, most likely way that random chance can prevent core activation. The target switch could have been destroyed or thrown across the room to prevent switching but moving it to the open position was simpler and therefore what was observed. When I forced the target switch closed the control switch was out of range so it became more likely that the beak would spontaneously degrade than that the weak water magic core would overpower me. Third and most strangely, it is technically possible to affect the past in ways that impact the present. Consider that the water mana has to start pushing on the target switch before the control switch is fully closed. This happens before the triggering event so we actually still have time to change our actions and create a paradox. To test this I designed a slow switch that had to move some distance before it would open the path that the lightning would travel. However, as soon as the target switch took enough time to open that I could react, the water mana stopped affecting it and the only result of closing the control switch was the channel degrading.

In conclusion, I believe that humans control their magic through a strange property of our magic cores. The experiments I have performed suggest that the mechanism is anticausal in that it can technically affect the past in order to change present observations. Now I ask the magic community to help me replicate these results. As I said at the start, the presence of a mage can change results of experiments. Please try to perform these experiments and send them into the transactions so I may read your results. Only by replicating each other's data will we iterate toward truth.

Respectfully,

Kharon of the River Styx