Chronicles of Pannithor, part 7: magic

For six parts of the Chronicles now, magic has been everywhere. The elves' troubles started with it, necromancy grew out of it, Calisor used it to build the Mirror and the Green Lady used it to flood the Abyss. Time we took a closer look.

Part one: what magic is

The spark of life

Some call it the soul, others the spark of life, others still the essence. There must be a hundred poetic names for it, and not one of them quite does it justice – apparently even the elven tongue isn't up to the job, and that's saying something.

In the simplest terms, magic is the pure stuff of life. It's what makes a heap of flesh and bone breathe and think, and it's what binds together everything that lives. As you'll remember from part one, the elves were the first to learn how to reach for it – much to the surprise of the gods themselves.

An experienced mage can bend magic to their will and use it to do all sorts of things. The trouble is, it's a bit like a river. You can build a mill on it, you can turn it back with a dam, but if you don't know what you're doing, sooner or later you'll drown. Magic is powerful and unpredictable, and only someone who has been through proper training can keep it in check.

Do you have to be born with it?

In Pannithor it's widely believed that you need an inborn talent for magic. Different communities – and even different schools within the same people – have their own traditions for picking out the “worthy”. The Order of the Ardent Light in the Golden Horn only accepts as pupils the children of noble families that can trace some link, any link at all, to Valandor himself. In Therennia Adar, only the firstborn son or firstborn daughter of a noble house can become a mage.

The truth, though, is that with the right discipline, study and focus, a great many can learn to control magical energy. The limits are set by stamina, physical fitness and the capacity of the mind.

There's one more catch. Scholars simply call it the Fatigue. Every spell a mage casts takes something out of them, both physically and mentally. Every single time. There's no such thing as a free spell.

Part two: everyone casts spells their own way

Orcs and goblins

Orcs and goblins have magic of their own too – crude, but magic all the same. The raw energy they were moulded from builds up whenever a lot of them gather in one place. That's when their shamans act as lightning conductors: they draw that energy in and direct it, though more by reflex than according to any kind of plan.

The forces of nature

The druids and shamans of the forces of nature approach magic in an entirely different way. To them, its flow is simply part of the natural balance of life – one more thread, with an ebb and flow you have to learn to sense. They don't try to control it or steer it, because they find that uncouth. They see themselves more as its guides.

Dragons

Where does a dragon get the fire in its lungs? And how on earth can it force its will on others with a single look? The answer is simple: magic. Dragons draw a good part of their power from it, and their abilities grow with age. The older the dragon, the more dangerous it is.

That's why the famous dragon masters of Alandar bond with dragons while the beasts are still practically fresh out of the egg. Even these elves wouldn't be mad enough to try to impose their will on a fully grown dragon. Or at least not if they were hoping to live through it.

Dwarfs

Dwarfs steer clear of magic. It's deeply ingrained in them that the only honest work is the kind where the sweat pours and the muscles strain. On top of that, as a matter of principle they don't care for borrowing other people's customs, and they see the story of Calisor Fenulian as a cautionary tale about where getting carried away with magic leads.

Mind you, dwarfs, like all mortals, are physically capable of using arcane power – it's just that few of them do. And in their case, it shows itself in a most peculiar way. Dwarfs have a special bond with the earth and the rock on which the whole world rests, and they call those gifted with this power “stonewise”. Stonewise dwarfs can be dangerous, because if nobody keeps an eye on them, they can set off tremors in the very heart of a stronghold. Small wonder the other dwarfs look on them with a mixture of suspicion, admiration and fear.

Once they come under the wing of the Order of Stone and learn to master their power, though, they're worth their weight in gold. They can command the earth itself and summon earth elementals – half-aware colossi of soil and stone that smash the dwarfs' enemies to smithereens on the battlefield.

Necromancers

The darker kinds of magic lurk in every mortal heart, but only a fool goes down that road. And necromancy is more varied than the uninitiated might think. Some necromancers track down the soul of someone who has died and drag it back into the body by force. Others split their own soul and move fragments of it into a corpse. Others still steal energy from the living to work corpses like puppets.

Each of these methods demands enormous concentration and a vast amount of energy, so only the most gifted and best-trained can master them. Which is why necromancers are especially dangerous. Hardly any of them reach for power over the dead with noble intentions, and some of the greatest threats in the history of the world have been their handiwork. Just think of Mhorgoth the Faceless, or Mortibris himself. Remember how, back in part one, necromancy grew out of the human fear of death? Exactly.

Part three: magic as the scholars see it

Scholars from the universities of the Golden Horn, together with the keepers of the great Euhedral Library, set out to bring order to everything that's known about magic. The result was a treatise packed with diagrams and learned-sounding names. Here are the most interesting things to come out of it.

The five planes of existence

According to the scholars, there are five planes – five spheres through which magic flows: the Material, which is our world, plus the Empyrean, the Abyssal, the Etheric and the Astral.

Magic is present in all of them, but it's pulled in one direction: towards the Astral plane and the Arcane Mantle between the stars. When a mage unleashes a really large amount of it, magic can tear through the boundaries between the planes to get there. And flares like that leave passages behind them, through which beings from other spheres can slip into our world with unsettling ease.

In other words, the more powerful the spell, the greater the risk of opening doors along the way that nobody should ever open.

The elements and the Base Primordials

The first and best-known way of dividing magic up is the four pillars of nature: fire, air, water and earth. The magic of ice, known as glaciomancy, is considered the fifth elemental school.

Plenty of mages regard these four elements as the only true primordial magic. The scholars of the Golden Horn beg to differ. By their reckoning, there are also three Base Primordials, every bit as important, if not more so: Nature, Death and Life. And where they meet, forces are born that are fickle and hard to tame – Time, Spirit and Strife.

The Arcane Compass

The scholars' most important tool is the Arcane Compass – a wheel on which every known kind of magic is mapped out and divided into four strata.

The Universal stratum covers astromancy, Common Arcana and Petty Magic. The Primordial stratum takes in the schools of the elements and of life: aeromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, glaciomancy, erythromancy (the magic of blood and life), naturomancy (druidism, to you and me) and, last but not least, necromancy.

The other two strata are each other's opposites. The Noble stratum is Divinity – the magic of faith, about which the scholars write that “blessed in the light of Domivar are those who bear the Faith”. Yes, the very same Domivar who locked the Wicked Ones in the Abyss. The Corrupt stratum is Sorcery, and the treatise doesn't waste many words on that one: “ill, accursed and damned are those who tread the dark path”.

Three paths run around the compass. The Bearers of the Light are the side of good, the Followers of the Dark are the side of evil, and between them lies the Unswayed Path – the road taken by those who side with no one.

In the margin, the scholars pay homage to a single mage: Valandor. They call him the wizard whom no one will ever equal, born of the Celestian Schism.

The Sun, the Moon and magic

Some scholars believe that magic is bound up with the sky and the stars: it waxes and wanes in step with the journey of the Sun and the Moon across the Arcane Mantle. If they're right, then Ohmpek and Lonok, whom we met in part one of the Chronicles, still have a say in this story.

A mage's tools

Magic isn't just about flashy gestures. It can be sealed inside objects, or used to strengthen something that already exists. Hence spell scrolls, potent elixirs, enchanted weapons and artefacts. Hence, too, crystals born of magic. Even extracting power crystals from natural fissures, or riding dragons, counts as a magical craft.

What isn't on the compass

The scholars are honest enough to admit that their compass doesn't cover everything. There are schools of magic that someone has already come across, but which the mages who run the universities haven't yet officially recognised. Fledgling kinds of magic like these are studied under strict supervision before they make it into the official registers. And then there are the ones nobody has discovered yet, the ones that have survived in hiding, and the ones struck off the registers for good.

Who knows what's waiting in those struck-out chapters?

After so many wars – gods against mortals and gods against gods – Pannithor is quite literally steeped in magic. There's no escaping it, wherever you go.

In the final part of the Chronicles, we'll bring everything together in one place: from the Old Gods to the flooding of the Abyss, all on a single timeline.