Chapter 20 Magic and Wonders

There is magic in the stars and the sky, in the way the wind blows and sings through hollow trees. It is not mana, nor will or thought, but magic in the most honest form. The tears of a crying child, the smile of an old man, and the glimmer of the fading sun. It is true and false, chaos and order, something real but incomprehensible at the same time. A paradox of the world I would call it. That is the nature of true magic.

-Archmage Cornelius Fringe, Forward on The Ancient Past: True Magic, Witnessed But Not Known

“There are many subcategories of magic, but there are only two types as we know it. True magic and practiced magic,” I said.

Niff, the ever-talkative creature she was, had started asking me about magic.

“What’s the difference?” She asked me, ears perked with interest. She was really expressive like that.

Velin walked, fidgeting on his oracle and ensuring it was still capable of communication. It was like our early warning system. If the oracle went out, then we’d know that we were being attacked.

“Practiced magic has rules and consistent methods, whereas true magic… doesn’t.”

“Oh? Like how?”

“Well,” I said as my eyes scanned the sky back and forth, searching for any more crows or flying spies.

“You’ve heard of the boy who broke a realm?” I asked.

“Of course,” Niff nodded. “It’s an old fairy tale.”

“It’s not a fairy tale,” Velin interjected. “We thought it was and for a long time, we assumed it to be so. But after ages of research, we found irrefutable evidence of the broken realm and the boy himself.”

“Really?” Niff asked.

I nodded.

“It’s one of the few documented cases of true magic that anyone knows of. You see, true magic, unlike practiced magic, makes no sense.”

“Oh,” Niff said, ears perked up in attention. “How?”

“Practiced magic has many different variations but there are two fundamental things to it. Cost and calculation. To cast magic costs mana and to direct that magic requires calculation. But true magic ignores both of those things. Like the Boy Who Broke a Realm, he wasn’t a mage, nor was he celestial or some sort of god. He was just a boy who made a wish and that wish became reality.”

“Wow, so he had no magic at all and he still did that?” Niff asked me.

I nodded.

“But how would ya know that, lad? How would ya know the boy had no magic whatsoever? If it happened so long ago how do you know it’s not some ancient forgotten spell or some undetectable power?”

“Because,” Velin said, raising the oracle up to the sky in annoyance. “They found the boy. When the realm broke he had been frozen still and preserved for all of time. An archeologist magus discovered the realm while wandering through unknown parts of the branchways. It happened a few millennia ago and the mage was gifted five blessings from the God of Wisdom for it. His name is Cornelius Fringe, he’s retired and lives at top-side. I can’t believe you people don’t know this,” he grumbled.

“Why would we know something like that?” Darvind scoffed.

“Because it’s history! It changed the way we look at magic and mana forever!” Velin cried, lowering his oracle to himself.

“Well, it’s right useless to us then isn’t it? We’re not mages,” Darvind replied.

“Neither am I, but it implies some unknown and unseen facets of our reality that far exceed our comprehension. Don’t you want to know that?”

“Does it pay?” Darvind replied.

“No,” Velin replied with an eye roll.

“Then I can’t be bothered,” Darvind huffed.

The dwarf was spinning his huge battle axe in one hand. The axe itself was a little larger than his torso but he seemed to have no problem keeping it up and spinning. His other hand carried a wine sack of ale that he sipped on now and then. The sack was tied around his shoulders and hung against his pale armor for most of the way. He’d been drinking from it since I’d met him actually, and I had never once seen him refill it.

“What about the other one?” Niff asked.

“Other what?” I replied, still looking at his wine sack.

“The other magic-”

“Is that wine sack enchanted?” I blurted out.

Darvind pulled the sack from his mouth and nodded.

“Dwarvin made,” he breathed out. Then he put it to his mouth and continued gulping.

“Yes, his kind does love their drink,” Velin murmured. “It’s poison for most of us but it’s almost like water to them. And it’s a hard thing to get, so some of them resort to downing barrels of regular alcohol.”

Darvind held up his middle finger to the centaur and continued drinking.

“Wow,” Niff muttered. “So how much is in there?”

“Fifty barrels worth of liquid. It was his requested reward for one of the most dangerous missions of his life,” Velin replied.

“And it was a right good reward,” the dwarf replied, finally having peeled his lips off of the wine sack.

“Yes, alcoholism, how fantastic,” Velin replied.

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“I wish. That’s an elf and human thing. We dwarves can barely enjoy drinking, much less get addicted to it.”

“Dwarven spirits are basically poison,” I mumbled.

“Bah. It’s not our fault that you’re all weak and frail,” Darvind cut in. “We dwarves require hardy things to weigh us down.”

Then, the man started to sing.

“Long ago when we were young

The earth beneath our home.

Crawl and dig and crawl again

While singing all our woes.

Aching heart and smiling face,

We dig beneath the earth.

And she’d love and care

For our crawling race

And what little we're worth.

Oh, hey the Earth is dug

Oh, this is where we stand.

Beneath the ground will be our bed

And we’ll drink all we can! Ho!”

Then the man swung his wine sack again and took several more gulps for a good long while.

“AH! That’s some decent stuff,” Darvind spoke. Then he belched like an ogre.

“Ya know us dwarves came down here first, back when there were no levels to Asrin City, we dug down here before anyone else,” he said with rosy cheeks.

“Nonsense. All archaeological evidence suggests that the early runes of Asrin city needed to be dug down to manage the growing dungeon population itself. In fact, the land here was considered inhospitable because of the growing population of monsters in the first place. Then the Wood Elves came and made a pact with the Asrin Tree to-”

“Shut up you! No one asked for a history lesson, you wide-mouthed horse!”

Then the insults returned.

The two of them kept going back and forth for a good bit and a new pile of insults started to form between them.

“So,” Niff said scurrying to my side. “What about the other type of magic?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s called practiced magic and it varies from type and school but it’s the same fundamentals. You have mana cost and calculations, but it can get a little more complex than that.”

“Is enhancement a type of practiced magic?”

“Yup,” I nodded. “It’s the earliest form of practiced magic there is. In practiced magic, there are a lot of concepts but ownership is one of the biggest. It’s easier to use magic on something you own. And the thing you own the most is yourself, that’s why even beasts and monsters can use enhancement magic, even though they can barely think.”

The mouse girl nodded enthusiastically and waited for me to elaborate.

“What else?”

“Well, what do you want to know about? General practices or enhancement magic specifically?”

“Enhancement please!”

I smiled. She was like a child asking for a treat.

“Well, enhancement magic, in its basic form, enhances you. As long as you have a concept of what you’re enhancing and mana, it just takes some practice to use. So things like strength, senses, and health are easy enough to strengthen. Now the more ethereal the concept you try to enhance like stealth or presence or even mind, the more studying it requires.”

“What about speed?” Niff asked.

“Well, that’s a pseudo-ethereal concept. Most people increase their speed by decreasing their weight or increasing their strength and agility. But if you’re trying to increase your speed and treat it as an ethereal concept, that will also take some practice.”

Niff’s ears drooped a little.

“That’s what the guy at the guild told me,” she mumbled.

“It shouldn’t be too hard. By enhancing your strength and agility, you can indirectly increase your speed and help yourself have a better understanding of the concept. It’s the same with low-level glamour too. It’s just enhancing your confidence and looks till you get a better understanding of charisma and then you can directly enhance that.”

“Glamour is enhancement?” She asked me.

“Sort of, glamour is a school of magic, enhancement is a type. Schools are based on purpose and types-”

“Are based on method, yes, yes. No, what’s really interesting is how these two classifications have historically been used. For example-” Velin interrupted.

I guess we could only speak so long on academics before he came in here.

“The small alcohol-soaked hairball here-”

“Hey!”

“His kind have a myriad of racial blessings, like their general resistance to poison. But when you peer into how this works, you’ll find it is actually just a type of genetic enhancement magic. The same can be said for my kind with speed and for you as well Niff. Your sense of smell, perhaps, may be a natural enhancement to your intuition, meaning the basic aversion to danger we all have has been enhanced in you and uses your mana to naturally alert you of such things.”

“Your kind can’t even wipe their own ass!” Darvind grumbled.

“Dwarves can’t even squat!” The centaur pushed back.

“Yes, we can! But you’ll never see a dwarf squat near one of you, naked bastards!”

Then the insults raged on again.

“What about realms?” Niff asked me.

“What about them?”

“Well, how do they work?”

“You don’t know?” I asked.

Niff shook her head. Well, I guess it wasn’t important for regular citizens to learn about this stuff, but still, it put a bad taste in my mouth that she didn’t know about them.

“Well, you have four types of realms. You have the inner realms, the outer realms, the astral realms, and the xylem realms. You know about Yggdrasil right?”

“Of course,” Niff replied with a somewhat insulted look.

“Well, the concept behind Yggdrasil is that our set of realities acts like a tree. The leaves on that tree would be the inner realms and the outer realms. The outer realms are the leaves close to the edge of the tree, they get the most sunlight and growth and that’s also the realms where the gods and celestial beings reside. You have the heavens at the crown of the tree and the hells at the very bottom. Now the outer realms are brimming with magic and power but they’re also the first line of defense against unnatural things. Threats that want to eat the realms or cosmic horrors beyond our comprehension.”

“Like bugs,” Niff added. “Bugs that want to eat the leaves.”

“Sort of,” I replied. “And celestial beings, including gods and dragons, are the first line of defense against those things.”

“The native bugs!” Niff replied.

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “The native bugs. Now that’s the outer realms, the inner realms are the realms protected by the outer realms, and that’s where we live.”

Niff nodded.

“Now the xylem realms are a bit weird but they’re named after the xylem of a tree, which are sort of like the veins of a tree. They’re accessible in every realm and provide the basic elements of the world to keep the realm running. The elemental planes, for example, provide the basic building blocks of matter, as well as the conceptual realms that maintain things like time and space. It’s a little complicated but if a realm is cut off from too many of these xylem realms, it can collapse.”

“Is that how the boy did it?”

“Well, we don’t know how the boy did it, he just made a wish, and time stopped for everyone within that realm.”

“Can people do that with practiced magic?”

“Hypothetically,” I frowned. “But I’ve never heard of it.”

“Eat some grass ya dirty ruminant!”

“Better to be a horse than a toddler-sized man!”

The two of them were really going at it, and Niff cast a frown their way as they went on. They’d been arguing all day, nonstop and it was even starting to grate on me at this point. It was almost time to make camp. They’d have to quit eventually.

“Now the astral realm,” I started, trying to drown out the insults. “There’s only one astral realm and it’s the only one of its type. Some people classify it as a xylem-type realm that delivers spirits and sentience to various realms. But technically, sentience isn’t a fundamental building block of any realm. Realms can exist without life.

“They can?” Niff questioned.

“Yeah, most inner realms have no natural life living there. Life takes up more resources and mana. It strains the realm it occupies. That’s why most life-bearing realms tend to be huge, almost infinite in size, they’re the only ones that can manage it.”

“Like the Woven Forest?” Niff asked.

“Yup, and the Wild Lands where most beastkin are from. The same for the dwarves from the Eternal Mountain and the wood elves from the Forest Den. All those realms are infinite in size and go on forever and that’s why they can support life.”

“Wow,” Niff replied. “There’s so much.”

“Yup,” I replied. “Then there’s the branchways, which are the paths between the realms, inner and outer.”

“What about the other ones?”

“Well, you can get to them from almost any realm. The xylem realms are accessible from almost any realm and the astral realm is connected to any sentient life-harboring realm. It’s just a matter of opening a portal.”

Niff’s nose twitched and she looked up to the sky.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “A vampire, I think. But I smelled them back at the entrance and in District 109. He’s an adventurer I think.”