1:032 on the 9th day of Winter
The Geiger-Muller counter project was a mess and I needed a break. Give days ago I set things up in an unused bay in the workshop and told people I was starting on a special project and didn't want to share the details yet. After I got my supplies organized I started working through problems I failed to consider in the original design. First was the minor oversight of what it actually meant that argon was only 1% of air. It ended up being only a small bubble in the very top of the wine bottle. I needed about half a wine bottle of the gas so I had to either repeat the process 49 more times or find a better method. I considered pressurizing the bottle, champagne bottles held around five or six atmospheres of pressure, but I would need to pressurize the liquid bath as well which was a design project all on its own. No, I just needed to get a much bigger vessel. I ended up using a water barrel, which was plenty big enough to make the gas in one batch, but I was still working through a bunch of bugs trying to do it that way.
Next there was the battery. I managed to get the lead and lead oxide I needed but they came in thick plates that would have left almost no room for acid in the 'ice cube trays' I commissioned. I ended up having to hammer and cut the lead until I could fit it through a plate roller. A plate roller is a device consisting of two steel rollers that are turned by hand crank and held with a fixed spacing between them by an adjustable set of screws. I would roll all the plates I had made through, tighten the screws a quarter turn, and do it all over again. Each finished plate took dozens of passes through the rollers and each pass was exhausting. My arms felt like jelly. Weak, painful jelly.
It didn't help that I kept being pulled into that strange gray desert with the black sky. Every time I got in the zone and really focused on what I was doing I would get pulled right back out into the other world. By now I had figured out that it was something related to the enhanced senses of a death mage but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Lastly, my decision to not use my magic, while entirely sensible for my continued survival, was catching up to me. I had an ever growing pain in my chest and a headache that would not abate. It got a little worse every day and I had no idea what to do about it. I could sneak into the underground lake to let loose but if I made a habit of it I would make others sick, get caught, or both. So, I needed a break from the project and luckily today was my regular day off.
At first I didn't know what to do. I thought about just sleeping in or maybe seeing if Ingo wanted to play board games. But the magic pains wouldn't let me rest or focus so I decided on another research project instead. That's why I found myself in the city library looking up books on magic pains.
Again, when I say library I don't mean it in terms that someone from Earth would expect. The city library is an eight story stone building set up in the government district. It had perhaps a few thousand books, but six of the eight stories were for government records including birth records, laws, contracts, and court files. It was also not a public building. I had access because of my family's position in the city, but most of the population was barred from entry. For this reason there was no real analog for a librarian whose job it was to help people find what they're looking for. So, I ended up paying a fee to get assistance and I was now working with two apprentice archivists, Leotholf and Husina, who had probably been pulled away from their regular duties to help me.
"Again, this book only discusses injuries from overusing magic, not it's prohibition." I said to Leotholf. "I need to know what happens if someone must avoid using their magic"
Leotholf looked like he wanted to roll his eyes.
"I understand that Sir. But that is not really something that comes up for most mages." he said. "Most magical injuries still allow at least a little use of magic. Even magical bindings are unable to fully prevent a mage from using their magic."
I thought about that for a second.
"Could you perhaps bring me a book that explains how magical bindings work?" I asked him.
He let out an exasperated sigh but left to find a book.
Husina returned then but instead of books, her arms were filled with a stack of thin journals. She dropped the stack on the table to reveal a broad smile.
"I may have a way to find what you're looking for." she said.
I raised my eyebrows and stood to see what was in the pile. The journals were made of corse papers, cheaply printed, bound by string laced through one side. The title page of the top one read "Transactions of the Royal Society Mages Volume 132, Winter 1205" Leafing through the stack I found seasonal volumes going back almost ten years.
"The Royal Society of Mages is one of the largest organizations in the world researching magic." Husina said. "If there is an answer to your question about magic they will likely be recorded in these pages."
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I could only stare at her wide eyed for a few seconds.
"Can I hug you?" I asked her, only half joking.
"No Sir, that would be weird." she said a bit flushed.
I shouldn't have said that. I was just so overwhelmed by what looked like early scientific transactions on the nature of magic. Coughing to clear my throat, I tried to recover from my awkwardness.
"Well okey, then at least know that you have my deepest thanks." I said turning back to the stack of journals. Time for some real research.
***
2:156 on the 9th day of Winter
I may be totally boned. So completely screwed that I was rationally and thoughtfully considering the pros and cons of suicide. Let me take a step back and explain. I spent the whole day looking through the journals and I was actually fairly impressed at the scientific rigor of about half the letters. I managed to find a set of research papers from five years ago that tried to use magical abstinence as a method to help map the paths that magic takes through the body. They had a theory that the higher densities of magic in the body would make it easier to sense from the outside. The result was complete failure. It read:
Thirty one volunteer mages were selected for our experiment. Each agreed to not use their magic until authorized. Of those, twenty six made it past twenty days with the remaining five choosing to withdraw their participation by using their magic. On the twenty fifth day one subject, an earth mage, had an adverse reaction. They collapsed and started violently shaking. Observations of the environment were consistent with a powerful earth mage awakening. Non-living objects within fifty paces lost all weight while those out to one hundred paces lost at least some weight. On the thirty first day another subject had the same adverse reaction which we are referring to as a reawakening. We stopped the experiment after five more participants succumbed within the following tenday. All those who experienced a reawakening recovered in three to five days with no adverse impact to their magical ability. They describe the experience as simply loosening consciousness and waking later in bed. Still, reawakening was extremely taxing on the mage's body and mind and as we could no longer guarantee their safety we had no choice but to cancel the program.
So ya, totally boned. It probably wouldn't kill me directly but it might kill a lot of people around me and out me as a death mage. I will have to use death magic within the next tenday or two, or I could have a reawakening. But if I use death magic I could poison everyone around me. I scoured the journals looking for a method to discharge magic without using it but came up empty. Magical restraints, called bindings, simply made it more difficult to form spells which made magic weak and erratic. That wouldn't help me.
I also looked for anything on death magic but there was nothing but speculation on the topic. Even the speculation was basically just superstition. You know how I said I was impressed by about half the research. Well the other half was still in the age of philosophical alchemy. There was a whole article theorizing about the dark rituals that death mages would perform in cemeteries to replenish their magic. As a group they tended to report a lot on what I would call irrelevant details like the phases of the moon during their experiment or how many turns clockwise and counterclockwise they stirred their cauldron.
If I wasn't freaking out about the whole reawakening thing I would be fascinated by the apparent divide in the scientific community. Okay, I'll admit I am fascinated anyway and what if I am? Distracting myself with interesting research might be the only thing keeping me from running screaming from the building. The feud has apparently been going on for years. The core of the argument seems to be over something called the manifest presence of the mage. Basically the philosopher faction, for lack of a better name, points out that nature doesn't work like it normally does when a mage is around. They describe a bunch of really weird experiments where they set things up without a mage and they are extremely consistent. Then they put a mage in the room and suddenly a bunch of stuff that shouldn't matter, like the phase of the moon, has a reliable impact on the outcome. One of the clearer examples of the phenomena involved freezing water.
The following experiment was conducted on the 82nd day of Fall in the year 1203. On this day the weather outside was cold enough to quickly freeze water. We divided a pitcher of water into two identical bowls. One bowl was given to a mundane while the other was given to a light mage with no power over water. Two identical hourglasses were started and accompanied each subject as they went outside into the cold. Both subjects were told to stop the hourglass when they first observed ice forming on the surface of the water. This set procedure was repeated twelve times alternating with and without the addition of a drop of iceberry juice to the water. Iceberry juice is known in magical alchemy to increase the rate at which liquids freeze. Trials without iceberry juice and all trials with the mundane subjects took between 28 and 33 measures while all trials with the mage subjects and iceberry took between 20 and 22 measures.
Their explanation was that the mage bends reality to function by a different set of principles. Then they spend the rest of their ink on documenting these principles in ever greater detail.
The scientist faction explains these observations away as poor experimental design as they can never replicate the philosopher's results, even with mages. When they try, the mage and non-mage cases are always consistent. I saw the exact same study on freezing water repeated by four others, two of which, in the philosopher faction, were able to replicate the results and two, in the scientific faction, that were not. I was inclined to believe the scientist faction but magic has a bunch of strange mechanics that don't follow Earth's physics so who knows what is right. Really, they are probably both right as they have both been replicated. That didn't make any sense to me. My confusion told me that something I assumed to be true was probably false.
I looked up from my notes to see that Husina had fallen asleep in her chair. Woops. How late was it anyway? I guess I'd better go home now. See, this is why Earth's libraries let people check books out.