Worldbuilding (cont)

[aliaspseudonym]

 Apparently I had an awful lot of ideas about this floating around.

E "Changelings" and so-called magical beings

 

Past literature, I have discovered, is quick to dismiss the existence of fairies and magical beings as myth; however, my own experience has proved that dismissing anything at all in dealing with magic is exceptionally dangerous. Certainly, however, it is true that there exist no separate races of magical beings. If there are fairies, they are human by blood. Nevertheless, there do exist certain persons who possess such a peculiar outlook upon the world, and such an affinity for the magical (even if they lack any true magical talent) that they might well be considered fae. Modern medicine is liable to diagnose such persons with one thing or another with varying accuracy, but I have met several (and also rather more madmen than I should have liked) and can confirm that they are not mad, even if they sometimes see things other men do not or carry strange voices in their heads. They are alike to madmen, however, in that they are peculiarly agonistic to magical workings, and as many magicians keep them as companions they are likely the source of many stories of magical familars and fairy servants. Changeling magicians, which are doubly rare, are related only by their complete immunity to categorization. Each one seems to have a completely unique and strikingly unusual set of abilities and characteristics.

Changelings are born, but magically transformed individuals also have existed, historically. The creation of such a being constitutes a miracle, meaning they are extraordinarily scarce. A surprisingly large number are magicians or magic-users altered by their own power, such as Mr Asking or one of my own acquaintances, known variously as Autumnborn, The Drowned Man et cetera. Others are afflicted by curses or blessings, or imbued with mysterious powers. In a few cases the actor of the magic is difficult to ascertain and in some of these the magic is commonly believed to be divine in its source.

Some magical beings are mad or malicious or both, but all contain essentially the same mind they were born with. There is no spell that can reduce a truly sane mind to slavering bestial madness; such madness must exist, buried, and be unleashed through magic. As is attributed to a close friend of mine (though I rather suspect it to be the invention of a clever biographer) "There is no such thing as vampires, but there is such a thing as men."

 

Magic and Death

 

That said, evil spirits (and benign ones) do exist, though infinitely rarer than their reported sightings. Occasionally mournful, angry or particularly spiteful dead are able to delay their passing, and sometimes even those more content in their fate can be bound at the moment of death to linger based on some condition. The spirits of those who have truly died and passed on have historically been recovered, but I am hesitant call such a revival 'possible.' Such recoveries, even for mere instants, are miracles of the highest order and almost invariably require the intervention of a deity.

Disembodied lingering spirits can be sensed by the sensitive and seen by the very sensitive (who are unfortunately always quite mad.) Depending on the willpower of the person and the strength of the apparition, they may be able to enter dreams, influence minds, appear visibly to the sane, or in rare cases affect physical objects. The much rarer embodied spirits, which tend to take the forms of animals, have usually been bound by an extremely powerful spell or miracle and are able to speak to the living and interact with the material world according to the terms of the spell (which, being magical, are often subject to quite sudden and arbitrary change).

 

Rationality and Madness

 

The world is, to a much greater extent than most people realize, influenced by how we perceive it. Magic is particularly subject to this flux. Certain persons, therefore, or more precisely the world-views held by certain persons, can be either agonistic or antagonistic to magical workings. This partially explains the impossibility of proving the existence of magic, since it is nigh impossible to work any sort of spell while surrounded by people capable of making rigorous scientific observations upon it. In short, those who see the world as rationally ordered by predictable natural forces can serve as a sort of damper, making it difficult to perform magic in their presence or under their observation. Notably, this applies not only to scientific rationalists but also to firm believers in any ordered system, be it theological, mystical or (confusingly) magical. Magic is a product of the uncertainty between a question asked and an answer given. As I said before, you will almost never find a truly respectable magician, thus the clergy produces surprisingly few of them.

Inversely, persons with unconventional, uncertain and occasionally irrational, (though irrationality can also be a characteristic of some of the rigid belief systems above; the key here, I believe, is an amble measure of cognitive dissonance) or simply mad viewpoints serve as magical catalysts. For this reason, many magicians keep madmen as companions or assistants, and indeed most magicians are half-mad themselves.

Some magicians are rather more than half mad. Such persons are incredibly dangerous. Their magical powers are generally no stronger than any other magician, allowing for the constant empowering affect of their madness, but the intersection of magic and madness makes the madness strangely contagious. These persons are able to bend those around them to their whims with worrying ease, and in many cases are able to create great cults around themselves. Mad magicians, left unopposed, can unify or sunder nations, muster or pacify armies, conquer the world or burn it to the ground. They are actually not so uncommon, but for the most part they are defeated and destroyed or somehow bound and restricted by saner magicians who wish to avoid such widespread upheaval. In certain ways mad magicians are similar to prophets and some prophets are mistaken for them and destroyed by their fellow magicians.

As a final note, rationalist magicians exist despite the apparent contradiction. They weaken their own powers by observation and therefore are universally unaware of what they do, but of all magicians they seem to possess the greatest ability to perform magic consistently. A certain great scientist was once said to walk across a bridge that had been ruined for for centuries on his daily walk for most of his life without ever realizing a thing, and while the story has been attributed to so many different men I consider it almost certainly apocryphal it does, I think, provide a very useful illustration.

 

Magic and Art

 

The public image of magic tends to incorperate the idea of magical incantations which can be recorded or memorized and which, when properly recited, sometimes accompanied by rituals, produce a consistent magical effect. This is obviously not how magic works, but nevertheless there is a grain of truth in the idea of the incantation. Incantations themselves do not do magic. Generally they are either poetry which produces a certain effect in the mind of its listeners, generating an openness of mind conducive to the working of magic, or they are words with strong associations for the magician used as a sort of mantra to aid focus and call forth determination. Oddly, poets themselves are almost never also magicians. A fellow scholar once suggested that the two callings drew on the same source, and only truly incredible men contain enough magic within themselves to divide it between words and spells. They do often work closely with magicians, however, and some actually do create incantations designed to serve as the focal point for a particular spell or sort of spell. Rarely does the incantation actually produce the spell intended, but as a catalyst for magic in general they proved quite effective. More than a few poems have been tragically lost because they had rather too alarming a tendency to provoke magic in even particularly unmagical readers. Take warning that some such poems still exist and others are almost certainly being written. Certain works of art are believed to have a similar effect, and music is as bad or worse than poetry, particularly since the two are often paired. This sort of art is usually safe to read or listen too in solitude, but when performed for a great crowd there is significant risk that one or two members of the audience will be affected..