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Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Friday, April 4, 2014
The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 11
By Christopher Leeson
FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL
My life was changing incrementally; every day I became more aware of my inexorably strengthening link to the world of magic. I had never asked for such a life and having to accept it was a daunting prospect. Did this reversal of fortune bode aught but ill, or did it offer valuable opportunities? During that cold night in Moyarien, I was nowhere ready to answer such a question.
Looking back, I realized that Cawdour had lived long and well by magic, but he ultimately died at the hands of his enemies for having become a magician to be feared.
Should I have pitied the man for his being cursed with magical skill? Without magic, he would have died at least a century before I had ever come to know him. And I had to ask myself, what would his life have been if he were born into to an ordinary life? I could, perhaps, see Cawdour as an officeholder of some sort, possibly a magistrate striving for fairness and justice, or, even more likely , a pedagog at an academy, fashioning the young minds that were destined to inherit the future.
What would Cawdour have taught? Alchemy? Perhaps; I understood that most alchemists were not wizards, but scholars of well-schooled intellect. Or, more likely still, Cawdour would have excelled as a philospher. Everything that he cast his gaze upon, he seemed to see deeply, more than the visible surface showed. I envied him for his acumen and wished that I could, one day, discipline myself do the same.
“Are magic and alchemy brothers,” I suddenly asked my patron one afternoon as we lunched in the roofless court at the heart of the ministerial palace. “Or are the two studies entirely different?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Ahh, my boy. That is an interesting question. I would gauge that the difference between alchemy and magic is even greater than the difference between magic and sorcery.”
I blinked in surprise, but held steady. He was playing with me, trying to make me ask, “What are the differences between magic and sorcery?” He had, time and again, admonished me to focus, like an archer concentrating on a target, and thereby avoid irrelevancies. Even so, the possibility that sorcery and magic were not the same fascinated me. I wished to please my patron, however, and so refused to take the bait.
“Then the difference is small?” I ventured.
“No, not small. I would say it is fundamental,” the mage replied. “Think of magic as the application of a diverse body of knowledge that the best minds have compiled, knowledge regarding the forces that energize the world. Alchemy, on the other hand, is a philosophy which focuses primarily on the properties of materials and how to change them into nobler substances. It is, by comparison with magic, quite a much young discipline.”
He paused, as if expecting some sort of a response. “In other words alchemy has grown from its origins as a subset of magic?” I offered.
“Not precisely. Magic and alchemy together seek all wisdom. But neither can discover it all. One study goes where the other does not, and so both are needed in order to understand the entire working of the spheres.”
“Then you say they are compliments? How do they comprise the whole?”
“Understand that two forces rule the universe –- what is chaotic, and what is orderly. Man's spirit is an ember of the gods' spirit, and his will is like the will of a god, though on a diminutive scale. The willful spirit is, by its very nature, chaotic. It tries to channel the free energy, the original creative force, to is own end. But while the gods at the beginning of the world sought for order, they used the power of chaos to achieve it, and whim follows no set rules. What you must remember is that the primordial creative essence still exists and that the magician seeks to channel it, like the gods once did, to bend reality to his own desire.
“This is to say, though the gods created order, they did so by disorderly means. Paradoxically, the world they forged could not exist unless it existed on the basis of established rules. Rules were needed because the workings of the world is vast and the gods did not want to be bound to it, forced to create every new horse, or pig, or insect by a new act of will. They instead established a dictum for how the world and the creatures in it would develop and interact. That is, how animals would breed, how plants would grow, germinate, and flourish.
"They made rules governing how the weather and the other elements would come together, like the working parts of a finely crafted machine. The interacting properties of the world produce wonders, but they are wonders that follow an established pattern. They operate so predictably that mankind has come to call them Nature and overlooks how wonderful the patterns is. He considers Nature a given and sees no marvel in it. It is the alchemist who knows better and studies all his life to ascertain what the rules of the world are, and he strives to bend these rules to his own ingenious ends –- for example, how to plate base metals with copper.”
“So the magician works by understanding chaos, and the alchemist by understanding order?”
“Approximately. But any scholar, however learned, is doomed to go adrift if he obsessively embraces his own field of endeavor and ignores –- or, worse, derides –- the other field. Both are valid, both have much to teach us, and together they comprise the team that pulls the cart of intellectual discovery.”
* * * * *
Custin the Magician
FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL
My life was changing incrementally; every day I became more aware of my inexorably strengthening link to the world of magic. I had never asked for such a life and having to accept it was a daunting prospect. Did this reversal of fortune bode aught but ill, or did it offer valuable opportunities? During that cold night in Moyarien, I was nowhere ready to answer such a question.
Looking back, I realized that Cawdour had lived long and well by magic, but he ultimately died at the hands of his enemies for having become a magician to be feared.
Should I have pitied the man for his being cursed with magical skill? Without magic, he would have died at least a century before I had ever come to know him. And I had to ask myself, what would his life have been if he were born into to an ordinary life? I could, perhaps, see Cawdour as an officeholder of some sort, possibly a magistrate striving for fairness and justice, or, even more likely , a pedagog at an academy, fashioning the young minds that were destined to inherit the future.
What would Cawdour have taught? Alchemy? Perhaps; I understood that most alchemists were not wizards, but scholars of well-schooled intellect. Or, more likely still, Cawdour would have excelled as a philospher. Everything that he cast his gaze upon, he seemed to see deeply, more than the visible surface showed. I envied him for his acumen and wished that I could, one day, discipline myself do the same.
“Are magic and alchemy brothers,” I suddenly asked my patron one afternoon as we lunched in the roofless court at the heart of the ministerial palace. “Or are the two studies entirely different?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Ahh, my boy. That is an interesting question. I would gauge that the difference between alchemy and magic is even greater than the difference between magic and sorcery.”
I blinked in surprise, but held steady. He was playing with me, trying to make me ask, “What are the differences between magic and sorcery?” He had, time and again, admonished me to focus, like an archer concentrating on a target, and thereby avoid irrelevancies. Even so, the possibility that sorcery and magic were not the same fascinated me. I wished to please my patron, however, and so refused to take the bait.
“Then the difference is small?” I ventured.
“No, not small. I would say it is fundamental,” the mage replied. “Think of magic as the application of a diverse body of knowledge that the best minds have compiled, knowledge regarding the forces that energize the world. Alchemy, on the other hand, is a philosophy which focuses primarily on the properties of materials and how to change them into nobler substances. It is, by comparison with magic, quite a much young discipline.”
He paused, as if expecting some sort of a response. “In other words alchemy has grown from its origins as a subset of magic?” I offered.
“Not precisely. Magic and alchemy together seek all wisdom. But neither can discover it all. One study goes where the other does not, and so both are needed in order to understand the entire working of the spheres.”
“Then you say they are compliments? How do they comprise the whole?”
“Understand that two forces rule the universe –- what is chaotic, and what is orderly. Man's spirit is an ember of the gods' spirit, and his will is like the will of a god, though on a diminutive scale. The willful spirit is, by its very nature, chaotic. It tries to channel the free energy, the original creative force, to is own end. But while the gods at the beginning of the world sought for order, they used the power of chaos to achieve it, and whim follows no set rules. What you must remember is that the primordial creative essence still exists and that the magician seeks to channel it, like the gods once did, to bend reality to his own desire.
“This is to say, though the gods created order, they did so by disorderly means. Paradoxically, the world they forged could not exist unless it existed on the basis of established rules. Rules were needed because the workings of the world is vast and the gods did not want to be bound to it, forced to create every new horse, or pig, or insect by a new act of will. They instead established a dictum for how the world and the creatures in it would develop and interact. That is, how animals would breed, how plants would grow, germinate, and flourish.
"They made rules governing how the weather and the other elements would come together, like the working parts of a finely crafted machine. The interacting properties of the world produce wonders, but they are wonders that follow an established pattern. They operate so predictably that mankind has come to call them Nature and overlooks how wonderful the patterns is. He considers Nature a given and sees no marvel in it. It is the alchemist who knows better and studies all his life to ascertain what the rules of the world are, and he strives to bend these rules to his own ingenious ends –- for example, how to plate base metals with copper.”
“So the magician works by understanding chaos, and the alchemist by understanding order?”
“Approximately. But any scholar, however learned, is doomed to go adrift if he obsessively embraces his own field of endeavor and ignores –- or, worse, derides –- the other field. Both are valid, both have much to teach us, and together they comprise the team that pulls the cart of intellectual discovery.”
* * * * *
Custin the Magician
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