The magical research institute was a fairly formidable building. It was one of the three largest buildings in town, the largest being the Church. It was constructed with the white stone that most of the town was built with, but unlike the common buildings had some stone carvings around the doorway. The double doors in the entrance were huge and made of some kind of dark wood with decorative metal hinges and knobs. It was one of the rare buildings with glass windows I had seen, and even some stained glass above the front doors. My father was holding my hand as we walked up to the stairs leading in, while my mother was holding satchels full of parchment.
“So big,” I said absently as we approached.
“Magic is a powerful force,” Horg told me, nodding. “Strong magic casters can do a lot for the people, so a lot of resources go into the research of magic and tutelage of mages.”
We climbed the front steps of the building and entered through the large double door entryways. The doors stood ajar into the lobby; there was a decent amount of traffic to and fro, and while it had cooled off quite a lot in autumn, buildings would still get unnecessarily stuffy indoors without airflow. It was common to see open doors and windows in this town.
My mother led the way towards and down a hallway to the left, and we wound our way through the building before reaching the lab. The whole building reminded me of some of the buildings of the college I attended in my former life. It felt academic, sometimes sterile, and seemed easy to get lost in. Any sign of ornate pretentiousness was left to the outside.
We entered and I looked around the lab. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, maybe beakers and cauldrons and shrunken heads or something like that, but what I got instead looked suspiciously like a math classroom. There were large blackboards, like my mother’s slates but bigger and free-standing, and parchment all over the various tables. The boards were filled with what looked like grade-school geometry.
“Be polite,” my mother said to me as she set her satchels down on a table. “Master is a busy man, and earned his title from mastering both 4-point and 5-point magic. He has lots to do, so he might not have time to answer any questions.”
Just then, a wild-haired old man burst through another set of doors with a pair of pupils following him. He was gesticulating wildly while lecturing at them. They were nodding seriously at his words. It took a few seconds before they noticed me and my parents.
“Ah! Sharma!” the old man exclaimed, coming over and leaving his pupils behind. “Was wondering when you’d show up. And Horg, been a while since I’ve seen you last. All’s well with the town guard, I hope?”
“Good to see you, Vorel, and yes, everything is great. Just accompanying my son for his birthday,” my father said, lifting our held hands as if to show the man I was present.
“Well, hello there young man, and happy birthday. Good of you to accompany your mother as she dropped off her work on your special day!” the man exclaimed.
“Actually, Master,” my mother said. “He’s the one who wanted to come here. He said he wanted to see the institute.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I think he might have an interest in magic,” she said in a lower voice. “He even asked me to teach him to read already!” She laughed. “Master Vorel, this is Pilus. Pilus, Master Vorel Bargolson. Introduce yourself,” she said, motioning from me to the man.
“Hi,” I said with a smile. Then, while I had his attention, I pointed at the blackboard with a large encircled square drawn on it. “What’s that?”
Vorel glanced at the board, looked back at me, then laughed loudly. “An interest in magic, indeed!” he exclaimed. “Come, young Pilus, I’ll show you the basics.”
My mother had a worried look on her face and opened her mouth to object. “Mas–”
“Oh, don’t worry Sharma, he’s much too young to be able to actually make a magic circle or imbue it with magic. He can’t even read yet. There’s no danger, we may as well indulge his curiosity. It’s his birthday, after all.”
My father let go of my hand and I walked over to the blackboard with Vorel. He lifted me up and sat me on a stool, then grabbed an eraser and wiped off the rest of the board, leaving only the drawing of a square in a circle.
“This is a 4-point magic circle,” he explained, tapping each corner of the square. “The 4-point shape represents the four basic magic elements: fire, earth, water, and air. Fire and water are opposites, like so,” he said, gesturing one corner of the square to the opposite. “And earth and air make up the other pair of opposites. The 4-point magic theory has been the dominant understanding of elemental magic for hundreds of years,” he went on to explain.
“Ah, so, that’s a 5-point magic circle?” I said, pointing to an encircled pentagram that was on a board across the room.
Vorel’s eyebrows rose at that. “Correct,” he said, then expertly drew a perfect pentagram inside a perfect circle next to the square. “5-point magic covers what we now call sensory magic and was formerly called light and darkness magic. The five points do indeed contain light and dark,” he gestured to two semi-opposing points of the star, “but also contains sound, silence, and solidity,” he continued, pointing to the two remaining adjacent points for sound and silence, and the fifth point that lay between light and dark for solidity. “It’s through solidity that we erect light barriers, and of course you need sound and light to create convincing illusions, not just–” he paused his lecture, perhaps remembering that he was talking to a four year old.
I shook off my inherent biases. I had assumed that the pentagram would be some kind of evil magic, but it sounded fairly evenly balanced in this world. My curiosity was growing.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, as you can see, 5-point magic can get very complicated, as there are multiple factors that go into a spell. The 4-point shape is the simplest, and represents some of the most basic elements of existence, and so is where a budding mage like you would start,” he said with a wink.
I cocked my head and made a face. “But what about–” I stopped myself from saying triangle in my former language, and instead said “–the 3-point shape?”
“Pilus!” my mother exclaimed. “You don’t–”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Oh, Sharma, it’s fine. How many times do I have to tell you students, it’s fine to talk about and study, we’re only forbidden from practicing!” He drew a triangle inside a circle. “As you can see,” he told me. “There’s no such thing as a 3-point magic circle. This is simply an incomplete 6-point magic circle.” He drew a second triangle, upside down, creating a hexagram. “But no one outside of the Church is allowed to cast 6-point magic,” he said, as though it were obvious. “This is the divine magic the Church uses to heal. Without a holy relic, the danger is too great. The magic needed can far exceed your power, which can result in the caster’s death.”
“What do the six points stand for?” I asked. I knew I was pushing my luck, but this had got very interesting.
He paused, glancing at Sharma, but then shrugged. “Healing injury, invoking divine power, and curing ailments,” he said, tapping the three points of the first triangle, “which are intertwined with smiting, weakening, and magic ailment. Part of the danger is keeping straight in your head which side of the divine magic you are casting. One could intend to cast healing magic while accidentally casting smite, or invoke weakness instead of empowering an ally. That, alongside the tremendous magic cost of healing, makes divine magic too dangerous for those outside the Church.”
“But more importantly,” my mother said, stalking over and wiping the star from the board, “it is forbidden. You must never attempt to cast 6-point magic!” she said sternly.
“Of course,” Vorel said. “Yes. As your mother says.”
I could tell the mood in the room was getting tense, but something was nagging at me. “If 3-point magic is incomplete 6-point magic, isn’t 4-point magic just incomplete 8-point magic?”
I could feel all three adults’ eyes bore into me, but then the mood broke and my parents chuckled while Vorel guffawed. “Hah!” Vorel exclaimed. “8-point magic doesn’t exist. No one has even survived casting 7-point magic. The amount of magic power you’d need for 8-point spells is impossible!”
After the adults composed themselves and discussed a few things, Vorel glanced at his pupils who were looking anxious and he finally made to leave. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to get back to, but it was a pleasure to meet you, Pilus,” he said with a smile. “I think you could be an excellent mage one day!” He gave me another wink and turned to leave the room.
Before he could leave, I quickly appraised him.
Vorel Bargolson (Lv 74)
HP: 374/381
MP: 588/1046
Status: none
EXP: 823/7400
Skills: 4-Point Magic(+++), 5-Point Magic(+++), 6-Point Magic(+), Cooking, Enchantment(+), Inkmaking(++), Literacy(++), Negotiation(++)
Master Skills: Fire Mastery, Illusion Mastery
So much for “forbidden magic.” Not that I cared about following the rule of the Church; I had no doubt I would get along better with a curious heathen than people of faith.
I left the institute with far more questions than answers, and a wealth of new ideas.
* * *
So, what have I learned? My main takeaway was that this world’s magic theory was completely, objectively, incorrect.
Obviously, geometric shapes didn’t induce magic. Rather, it seemed this world had settled on using polygrams as a language with which they channeled their magic. Vorel had effectively confirmed this when he stated that 4-point magic was the “dominant theory” of elemental magic for this age. That suggested that prior to their use, there was a different theory about how magic worked, and possibly even during the current magical age there were other theories in use in other parts of the world.
I wondered how advanced this world’s scientific method was. The fact that the Church forbade a subset of magic suggested that the world was pre-enlightenment. Vorel had clearly practiced forbidden magic, so there were people pushing the boundaries, but when magic was potentially dangerous enough to end your life during experimentation, it might be difficult for this world to organically pursue magic with the scientific method.
The thing that frustrated me the most was the fact that elemental magic was cast through a 4-point shape–which is to say, a square–which is a simple polygon, but then all advanced magic was cast through star-shaped polygrams. Why was 5-point magic not cast through a simple pentagon, a 5-point but also 5-sided shape?
Still, I wasn’t that upset that magic used geometry as its base language. Math was a forte of mine, and I was sure I could use this.
Nonetheless, I also knew things about the nature of scientific reality that were hard to shake. To begin with, 4-point magic was this world’s take on Aristotelian elements. That didn’t surprise me, since it was common in all sorts of stories about fantasy for these elements to make up magic. My own original world’s ability to see beyond that required a lot of scientific and technological advancement. For the layperson with no education, these four elements–fire, earth, water, and air–made up a lot of the practical aspects of their reality.
I could assume that this magic theory was formalized before the widespread adoption of metalwork, which was already in use in this world, based on my father’s sword. Otherwise, metal might have been considered a base element, as is the case in some different traditions from Earth. I also assumed it was created in a part of the world like where I lived, which didn’t experience freezing cold winters, as no one mentioned anything about ice, and I had not yet ever experienced ice magic despite my mother clearly having skills with water magic. I could understand why there was no wood or plant based magic, as the complexity of living creatures and molecules far exceeds the complexity of elements, but knowing how to make ice would be a delight in the summertime.
Thinking about elemental magic from a biochem perspective was difficult, though. I had to consider what was actually being controlled by the magic. The only obvious one was water, which was controlling H2O. That said, “water magic” might have been able to control other liquids as well, so perhaps it’s magic that controlled a state of matter, not an element. In that case, maybe magic was more physics than biochem. Air magic could control the oxygen in the air, or the carbon dioxide, or even nitrogen… but maybe it just controlled the gaseous state of matter? Earth magic could have been controlling silicon or silicon oxides, thinking about “earth” as rocks, but if it controlled humus and organic compost as well, that got confusing fast. Then perhaps earth magic simply controlled the solid state of matter.
Fire magic was the most confusing, though. Fire was actually just a product of combustion, which was itself a result of oxidation. Fire was not a “thing” like the other elements could be considered, but rather, a process or even a by-product. One would be controlling energy itself with fire, or maybe the process of oxidation. Maybe fire magic could be the process of creating carbon oxides…
Maybe all elemental magic was the formation of oxides? Carbon oxides for fire, silicon oxides for earth, hydrogen oxides for water, nitrogen oxides for air? It was an elegant theory, but would be hard to confirm or deny without very, very strong microscopes, or a much better understanding of chemistry than I had available to me. It also only explained magic if magic only worked in those very specific contexts, which I didn’t know absolutely one way or the other.
I needed to steal my mother’s grimoire and see if I could learn more about this.