Young Justice: Shadowcrest
July 7th, 2010
The idea that there were different ways to use magic was not necessarily completely foreign to me. Magic had existed before wands, and even now there were wizards in some parts of the world that disdained their use and practiced their own traditions. Even European wizards, who had been using wands since their invention during the final few centuries of the Roman empire, still had a few common magics that did not require wands. Very few potions needed a wand to brew, the animagus transformation was famously performed without one, and the ritual that had gotten me sentenced to Azkaban certainly didn’t need one either.
I’d even met a few wizards like that before. I once had the pleasure of speaking with Babajide Akingbade, one of the youngest members of the ICW in history and a brilliant spellcaster. The man was sharp as a whip and magically powerful enough that the air around him prickled with static electricity when he got excited. We’d had a fascinating discussion on theoretical spells designed to combat semi-tangible non-beings such as dementors and lethifolds (for all that my textbooks classified them as beasts, they were clearly no such thing).
The man had eventually demonstrated a spell he was working on that summoned fire made from intangible crystal, cast with nothing more but a sharp flick of his index and pointer fingers. The spell could not damage such non-beings, and was hideously difficult to control, but in his testing he’d found that ghosts could not pass through the flames––an impressive feat of spell design in and of itself.
Unfortunately, my own attempts to recreate the effect had been completely unsuccessful. I’d hoped to demonstrate the spell as part of my charms or defense OWL, but ultimately had abandoned the idea when I couldn’t manage it with or without a wand. There was a good reason that Akingbade was considered one of the greatest prodigies to ever come out of Uagadou.
However, from what little I’d heard about the way that Zatanna and her father cast their spells, the method differed greatly from the wizarding spellcasting I was used to. Similarly, Kent’s command of magic was a third, entirely separate methodology that I’d never seen before.
I had never been good at resisting the allure of new, powerful magic. It had gotten me in trouble more than a few times over the years and ultimately culminated in an Azkaban sentence, but it had also propelled me to the forefront of my generation in terms of spellcasting. Perhaps a few of my Ravenclaw classmates knew more in their own specific niches, but no one came close to my overall breadth and depth of knowledge and experience.
The idea of learning a completely new system of spellcasting with its own advantages and techniques was, to put it mildly, deeply alluring. Exploring the abilities my Planeswalker spark gave me was also an appealing idea, but I could do that anywhere and anywhen. Zatanna, her father, and their family library was my only shot at this specific form of magic.
Now, in my own world I absolutely never would have dared ask the youngest member of a wizarding family to share their magical secrets with me. That was the sort of foolhardy approach that started blood feud and could drive an Ancient house to extinction. Here however, I decided that perhaps my unfamiliarity with the local wizards might serve me well. I didn’t necessarily know that their techniques were considered secret, even if I strongly suspected they were. Thus, perhaps there was no harm in at least asking, right?
And, to my genuine shock, that just…worked. I brought it up subtly during breakfast after Giovanni had very reluctantly left Zatanna and I alone in the dining room so he could go take care of some business. Zatanna jumped on the idea, seemingly just as eager as I, if not even more so, to see if I could indeed learn her family’s style of spellcasting.
That was how, less than an hour later, the two of us had ended up in an impressively warded indoor training hall, a half-dozen thick tomes stacked haphazardly on a rather well-worn wooden table. We were sitting side by side huddled over a massive book filled with diagrams and pages upon pages of tiny, handwritten text in a language I definitely didn’t know a week ago but had no trouble reading after less than five minutes of trying to decipher the unfamiliar words written in mostly-familiar characters. That was definitely another skill I was going to have to explore in further depth, but that could wait for another time.
Zatanna was once again dressed in a truly scandalous outfit, though not quite as much so as the costume she’d performed in. She’d swapped out her lavender shirt for what I could only describe as a single length of blue cloth wrapped tightly around her breasts and little more, leaving both her shoulders and midriff entirely uncovered.
Below that she was wearing something that could have easily passed for an undergarment in my time. Instead of pants––in and of themselves an unusual garment for a young woman––she wore a thin black garment that hugged her body like a second skin and stretched around her every curve. It was completely opaque, but still revealed every detail to the world and I could literally see the outline of her true undergarments beneath the fabric.
It took every fiber of my self control to sit calmly beside the beautiful young witch without embarrassing myself with ungentlemanly behavior. I was thankful that the topic of our conversation was as fascinating as it was, or else I feared that I may become distracted and offend my new teacher.
Before I could try learning the specifics of the Zatara’s magic, Zatanna wanted to give me a general overview of this plane’s spellcasting. “So basically, Logomancy,” the specific type of magic that Zatanna and her father primarily used, “is a specific category of Order magic. Most magic people use is Order magic, with a few rare exceptions, because Chaos magic tends to be unpredictable, dangerous to the person using it, and actively corruptive.”
She paused and began to rapidly flip through the book, stopping when she reached a two-page diagram filled with overlapping circles. “Order magic on its own is pretty dangerous too,” she poked the largest circle on the page, “but by narrowing the scope of what you’re doing,” she dragged her finger through the dozens of smaller circles within the larger circle, “you can end up with a system that keeps most of the power but negates most of the negative effects. I don’t really know very much pure Order magic, Uncle Kent is sort of the expert on it and he’s shown me a few things, but it’s really dangerous to learn without a proper teacher.”
“There are a few other types of magic too, but I don’t know very much about them yet. The Atlanteans have their own system that is compatible with Order magic, but doesn’t really work in quite the same way. They actually have a whole school that teaches their style of magic, but you basically need to be an Atlantean or get a recommendation from someone really high up to go there.
“Then there’s a few others that I’ve only really heard about. There’s this guy named John Constantine that my dad really doesn’t like who uses demonic magic, Captain Marvel’s powers are a type of magic too, and there are a few Chaos-adjacent magic systems that we have books for but dad never lets me look at those because they’re dangerous.”
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Zatanna paused and looked over at me. “Does that make sense so far?”
I nodded slowly, leaning over to read the slightly faded text on the diagram. “So this is all the types of magic and their subsystems?” I asked.
Zatanna nodded eagerly, “Yeah, and how they’re related to each other. See, Order and Chaos magic are direct opposites, while Atlantean magic overlaps with Order magic and Demonic magic is close to Chaos magic but isn’t actually connected to it at all.”
“Fascinating.” I murmured, committing the page to memory, “I don’t believe my people had anything similarly to this. We did have some classifications, but ultimately we believed that at its source, all magic was simply that. The most common classifications I’m used to relate more to whether or not a spell requires a focus and what sort of emotions are more closely connected to the casting process.”
Zatanna leaned down beside me, our faces a scant few inches apart. “So like, anyone could do any kind of magic that they wanted too?”
“Theoretically yes, but in practice, some people are better suited to one branch of spellcasting or another, and practicing a certain type of magic can occasionally make other forms more difficult to perform.” I hummed softly, trying to decide how much to say. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about light and dark magic––I had a feeling that Giovanni and his Justice League would likely disapprove of spells such as the unforgivables just as much as the Ministry did––but thankfully I had another excellent example I could bring up.
“For instance, my own family has a predisposition for transfiguration. Ah, magic having to do with transforming the shape and material of objects and individuals,” I quickly clarified at Zatanna’s look of confusion. “Occasionally some of us are born as metamorphmagi, wizards with the ability to freely shift their physical form without the need for specific spells. It is a very rare and powerful gift exclusive to my bloodline, though unfortunately the last one in the family passed away a few decades ago and none have been born with the gift since.”
“Oh, like the Martian Manhunter! He’s a shapeshifter too, though I don’t think he knows any other magic.”
“Perhaps? I do not know enough about him to say one way or the other.”
We spent a few more minutes discussing the topic, and then Zatanna moved on to the real goal of our lesson. “So anyway, Logomancy. That’s what me and dad do, and it's been our family’s primary style of magic for as long as anyone remembers. I’m a little biased,” she laughed, “but it's a pretty great system. It’s very flexible, a lot more than most Order magic, and can technically do everything, but it's not really the best at anything.
“The biggest downside is that it's really exhausting. Someone using basic elemental magic can keep it going for hours, but I get pretty tired after just a few big spells. Dad has a lot more endurance than I do and I’m getting better, but I’ll never have the same sort of staying power as someone like Felix Faust with his pyromancy.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” The fact that Zatanna had just gone and told me a major weakness inherent to her family’s magic was rather bizarre, and I was naturally inclined to distrust it, but she didn’t seem dishonest. Perhaps she was simply overly trusting? We’d barely known each other for a day!
“Anyway,” she shut the book in front of us and shoved it aside, then pointed her hand at the pile of books she’d brought with her. “Emoc koob,” she said firmly, and one of the books near the bottom of the stack shot towards her.
She easily caught the book and set it down, but the books that had been above it began to fall. “Oh fuck,” she swore, reaching her hand out towards them again, but I beat her to the punch. I flicked my wand and the unstable stack steadied, the books sliding into a more carefully balanced pile. “Whoa, that was fast!” she exclaimed excitedly.
“Certainly not my first time dealing with falling books,” I joked, “you have to be quick on the draw or the librarian will kick you out faster than you can apologize.”
She laughed, then opened the book she’d summoned and drew my attention back to her explanation. “So Logomancy looks pretty simple. Most people just see a couple of fancy words and some handwaving, but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that you need to focus on when you’re trying to cast a spell. Still, once you have the basics figured out, everything gets so much easier. Let's start with this one, this is the book dad used to walk me through casting my first spell. The first thing you need to know is…”
We worked through lunch and into the afternoon. Zatanna was only a passable teacher, but her enthusiasm and general bubbly helpfulness made up for any deficiencies in her explanations. It took more than five hours of effort and every shred of prior experience I could apply to our lesson, but eventually our efforts paid off.
“Nrub,” I declared firmly, my mind utterly focused on Zatanna’s lessons and my wand tucked away in an interior pocket of my robe. I felt an immense drain on my magic, compatible to what was needed for a large-scale transfiguration or powerful dark spell, and my eyes widened.
The piece of scrap wood lying on the floor a safe distance from the table burst into flames, and Zatanna jumped into the air, clapping her hands together in excitement. “Yes! You did it!”
I turned towards her, a pleased smile stretched across my lips. “We did it,” I told her confidently. “I certainly couldn’t have managed it without you, much less in such a short amount of time.”
Five hours for a new spell was pretty slow, especially since all it did was light things on fire. Five hours to learn an entire new way of casting spells however…that was impressive.
Zatanna rushed over to me and pulled me into a tight hug. “Now that you have the basics down, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out the rest much faster! Once dad finally agreed to start teaching me and I cast my first spell, it got a lot easier to learn more.”
“Knowledge builds upon knowledge.”
“Exactly!” She let go of me, a matching grin on her face. “Now, do you think you could––”
“Of course!” During our lesson I’d promised to show her some of my own magic as well, a horribly unequal exchange but one that seemed to excite her immensely.
I drew my wand and flicked it at the still burning piece of wood, extinguishing the flames before they could do little more than char the outside. “So wand magic has some similarities to your Logomancy, but there are a number of other elements you have to worry about like wand motions and specific incantations. Making new spells is also a lot harder, you can’t just make up the words and movements and it's a really complicated, dangerous profession.
“However, once a spell exists anyone can cast it if they know the steps. Furthermore, if you practice a spell enough, you can eventually learn to discard both the words and movements and cast a spell silently. Like this,” I waved my wand through the air and carefully enunciated, “AH-viss.”
There was a loud blast and a half-dozen tiny yellow birds flew from the tip of my wand and circled around my head once before perching on the edge of the table we’d been studying at. Then I repeated the spell two more times, the first time jabbing my wand forward instead of using the correct movements and the third time eschewing both the movements and incantation.
Judging from Zatanna’s reaction, I concluded that I’d chosen the right spell to demonstrate. She seemed delighted by the tiny little birds, and I mentally directed one to land on her finger. It was barely bigger than a golden snidget and Zatanna cooed softly as she stroked its soft feathers. “They’re adorable,” she whispered.
Probably best not to mention how the spell had been developed then. The Avis spell had a long and fascinating history connected to the endangerment of wild snidget populations and the replacement of live birds with enchanted snitches in professional quidditch, but a lot of people seemed to focus on how the spell had been specifically designed to make the birds easily crushable…