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Encyclopaedia Arcana #41: Earth Magic

The last of the four basic elemental types, earth is the element of strength and stability.  Earth magic revolves around manipulation of matter (especially stone and earth) and reinforcement.

Forgotten Earth

Earth magic tends to be one of the less talked-about types.  Earth mages don’t get much publicity, are rarely featured in mage stories, and don’t have a particularly strong reputation one way or the other – most members of the magical world just tend to ignore them.  If pressed, people might describe them as reliable, or tough, or boring, but even that’s unlikely.  It’s far more common for mages not to have any strong feelings about them at all.  Earth tends to get treated a bit like the magical equivalent of mashed potatoes – it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that no-one finds it all that interesting.

It’s hard to say exactly why earth magic has the reputation it does.  It’s extremely useful to have around – earth mages are very good at what they do – but for whatever reason, as a magic type it gets mostly ignored.  On the plus side, this does mean that earth magic doesn’t attract a bad reputation either, as many of the other magic types do.

Earth and Stone

The most basic use of earth magic is its ability to reshape matter, and this tends to be what most earth novices start off with.  An earth mage can manipulate the structure of earth and stone, sculpting it like clay, although the substances they can affect are limited – they have trouble shaping worked stone or artificial building materials like brick and concrete, and metals are generally out.  They can also extend their senses through solid substances, analysing their composition or sensing vibrations with enough accuracy to navigate without sight.

Their reshaping abilities make earth mages one of the two primary types of mage that specialise in engineering.  Even without tools an accomplished earth mage can build an entire structure from scratch, and once they combine their abilities with modern technology they’re even better.  An earth mage can fix a damaged building better than new, or reconstruct it to a new design, or both, and it’s common for earth mages to support themselves building huge elaborate houses to the specifications of other mages.  Having a mansion ‘earth-built’ is a mark of prestige among mages and, at the higher status levels of magical society, houses built by earth mages are the most common residence.

Battle Ground

Although earth mages don’t have the reputation for destruction that fire and death mages do, they can fight when they have to.  Earth battle-magic usually focuses on enhancing and reinforcing, and tends to be short-ranged – an earth magic user is less likely to throw blasts of energy and more likely to beat their opponent unconscious with supernatural strength.  Earth mages are particularly good at self-protection and tend to be very hard to hurt.

Probably the most intimidating ability of an earth battle-mage is their ability to petrify.  Earth mages can turn fabric, wood, metal, and even flesh into solid stone, causing enormous damage to whatever they target, and at higher levels of skill they can transmute a human into a statue with a single spell.  There are stories of mages who keep whole collections of petrified subjects in their homes, using their ex-enemies as a highly lifelike art collection.

Questions for Luna

For those who’ve sent questions to the Ask Luna column lately, don’t worry, I’ve received them!  Just haven’t had enough to make a full article yet (I save them up until I have enough to make it worthwhile to do them all in one go).

Encyclopaedia Arcana #40: Death Magic

Death mages are the most combat-focused mages of the living family, and among the most combat-focused of all magic types of all families put together.  They’re sometimes referred to as negative energy mages or necromancers (though strictly speaking necromancy is more accurately considered a branch of ritual magic).

Death and Taxes

There are two ways to understand death magic.  In one interpretation, death magic is a hybrid of life and force magic, sharing some traits of both the elemental and living families.  While most ‘hybrid’ mages are idiosyncratic, this particular strain is common enough to be recognised as a consistent sub-type.  Under this approach, death magic is considered a hybrid because it shares some distinctive traits of life magic (the ability to sense living creatures and drain their life energy) with some of the broader abilities of the elemental family (gate magic and the ability to shield).  As always, though, the problem with ‘hybrid’ interpretations is that there’s no real reason to consider life magic a more basic building block than death magic is.

Probably a better way to look at it is to understand death magic in terms of its purpose.  Death magic, more than any other type, is designed exclusively for combat.  All elemental mages have at least some destructive ability, but in the case of death magic it’s their focus – just about every spell a death mage can use is either offensive or defensive.  The powers a death mage has access to derive less from the concept of death and more from the ability to directly deliver it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this doesn’t give death mages the best of reputations.

Necrophobia

Death mages have a reputation for being evil, unfeeling psychopaths.  It’s somewhat unfair – while their close proximity to negative energy does make death mages appear a little callous by normal standards, it doesn’t make them any more likely to resort to cruelty or violence.  While it’s true that an unusually high fraction of death mages fall on the Dark side of the Dark/Light divide, this is more to do with the fact that death mages are very good at combat, and brute force will get you a lot further in the Dark hierarchy than in the Council.

It’s possible that the stories about death mages are the reason they’re classed in the living family rather than the elemental one.  While death mages share some of the abilities of life mages (they can sense living creatures, although in a different way, and they possess their own modified version of a life mage’s draining touch) they can also use shields and gate magic, which are normally considered exclusive to elementalists.  All in all, they probably share more with elemental mages than living ones, but the story goes that elemental mages (who outnumber both the living and universal factions) got them categorised in the living family so that their bad reputation wouldn’t rub off on elementalists.  No-one’s really sure if it’s true or not, but it’s possible.

Death Dealers

Death spells are focused around the use of negative energy, which has no effect on inanimate objects but which is deadly to living things.  At full strength a blast from a death mage will kill a target, shutting down their body and stopping their heart, while scaled back to nonlethal levels the energy ‘only’ causes nausea, spasms, and crippling pain.  Unusually for mages, death mages have a secondary specialisation in kinetic effects:  death shields can deflect physical attacks as well as magical ones, and their attack spells can punch through armour to strike living targets on the other side.

Death mages are the quintessential battle-mages.  There are types of magic that can match death magic for combat effectiveness, and there are types that can outperform it in specialised circumstances, but for general all-round combat ability death mages are right at the top tier.  They aren’t unstoppable by any means but they’re very dangerous, and few mages will pick a fight a death mage if they have any alternative.

2013 Conventions – US

Currently making tentative plans for a trip to New York next year.  I’d like to schedule it to match up with some conventions, but haven’t yet decided which ones – I’ll post on here when I know more!

In the meantime I’ve been making plans for Alex Verus #5 and catching up on urban fantasy books that came out while I was spending all my time writing.  So far I’ve gotten through Cold Days by Jim Butcher and Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch, and I’m about to start Kate Griffin’s Stray Souls.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #39: Other Worlds (Part Four)

Although shadow realms are very handy things, they do come with associated problems.

Paying the Utility Bills

The most basic issue with a shadow realm is logistics.  Being a fully isolated pocket reality means that the only way something is going to get there is if a mage specifically gates it in.  In a lot of ways a shadow realm is like a small space station, with all the associated problems – mages have it easier than astronauts in that they can just gate back to Earth whenever they need to, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have to supply nearly everything themselves.

This, more than anything else, is the reason mages don’t like to live in shadow realms.  Everything from food and clothes to tools and equipment to batteries, paper, and shampoo has to be manually transported in.  You can forget about anything like electricity, gas, or hot water (or running water at all, for that matter) and getting a repairman in to install something is difficult to put it mildly.  It’s an enormous inconvenience and a constant drain on a mage’s time and energy.

Creative and patient mages can try to alleviate these problems by turning their shadow realm into a small ecosystem.  The metaphysical link between a shadow realm and its tied location usually takes care of issues such as atmosphere and energy, which means that it’s quite possible to make the realm hospitable enough to support life (though this does depend on the qualities of the tied location).  It still won’t help if you want all the conveniences of a modern home, but it does make the shadow realm more self-sustaining.

Long Distance

Shadow realms are also really bad when it comes to communications.  Any kind of modern telecommunication is obviously out, which means no Internet or phone service, and even magical methods don’t work very well.  Most mages just end up resigning themselves to the fact that while they’re in their shadow realm, they’ll be cut off from the outside.

All of this gives shadow realms a very isolating effect, where anyone spending extended periods of time in one ends up missing most of what’s happening in the wider world.  It’s not a problem for short stays, but it causes issues for mages planning to live there.

Beat A Path To Your Door

There’s a less obvious problem with shadow realms that’s easy to overlook.  Shadow realms are very useful . . . but they’re also widely known to be very useful, and their demand exceeds their supply.  Shadow realms might be easier to create than bubbles, but ‘easier’ doesn’t mean ‘easy’, and there’s no guarantee that a newly grown shadow realm is going to match up with its creator’s requirements.  For someone who can’t make the kind of shadow realm they want or who just doesn’t have the patience to wait, the alternative is to take someone else’s.

Most people wouldn’t think of a shadow realm as something that’s easy to steal, and in a way they’d be right.  Shadow realms can’t be transported and resold in the way that jewellery or magic items can, and there’s no way a thief can simply pick one up and cart it away.  On the other hand, that also means that its current owner can’t cart it away, either – once a shadow realm’s location has been discovered, it’s a stationary target.  The relative isolation of shadow realms means that they act a lot like little strongholds in the unclaimed borderlands, and if something goes wrong, it’ll be a long time before anyone comes to help, if they even come at all.  Young and inexperienced shadow realm owners are at the most risk, but older mages aren’t immune by any means, and some of the most ancient shadow realms have bloody histories where the shadow realm has passed violently from owner to owner.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising that many mages are paranoid about their shadow realm’s security.  An undiscovered shadow realm is safe, but the more people that know about it and can access it, the less secure it is.

Alex Verus #4

The next book in the Alex Verus series is done!  I finished the first draft at the end of September, but now the first major edit is complete too, and the book’s all but finished – the final version that gets published will be about 99% identical to the one just sent off to my publishers.

Working title at the moment for Alex Verus #4 is Chosen, though I’m not updating the official page with that yet as it’s not settled.

It still won’t be out until around September 2013, though.  I know, I know, it’s slow.  Publishing always has these long lead times, which makes it a little weird for authors as the book we’re working on and the book next due to be published are usually different books.  I’ll put up sample chapters a month or two in advance as usual, in the coming summer.  For now I have to get to work on Alex Verus #5!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #38: Other Worlds (Part Three)

Shadow realms get a lot of use in mage society.  There’s a lot of things you can do with a pocket world, and over the millennia mages have come up with some very creative uses for them.  Here’s a brief look at some of the more common ones.

Laboratory

Magical research is slow, difficult, and often dangerous.  If a mage is trying to adapt a spell, develop a new ritual, or work on a magic item, it helps a lot to have a quiet, out-of-the-way location to do it in.  It’s always possible to find a sparsely populated area on Earth, but with the number of people in the modern world, finding a really deserted spot is harder than you’d think.  The more destructive and dangerous the process, the more deserted the place needs to be – you can make one-shots in your garage or bedroom, but if you’re practising inferno spells you want a REALLY big firing range.

For this purpose, shadow realms are perfect.  They’re as quiet and deserted as you’re going to get, and the chance of random normals wandering in while you’re in the middle of something is practically zero.  If a research-oriented mage doesn’t want or can’t afford a mansion in the middle of nowhere, their first priority will probably be to get access to a shadow realm instead.

School

Training apprentices has all of the problems associated with magical research, only worse.  With research, a mage can at least assume that the materials in his workshop aren’t going to spontaneously explode on their own.  If he’s training apprentices, it’s more or less a guarantee that sooner or later they’ll do something incredibly stupid.  In these situations it’s very handy to have a place to hold lessons in where bright lights, strange noises, things catching fire, explosions, monster summonings, and holes in reality aren’t likely to draw attention or endanger passers-by.  Whether the shadow realm is going to be in particularly good condition afterwards is another matter.

Home

Some mages who’ve found a shadow realm to their liking decide to cut out the middle-man and move in.  They pack up their bags and emigrate all the way out of our reality.

Shadow realms have definite selling points as residences.  You don’t have to worry about paying rent, and you can ignore those annoying zoning ordinances and property taxes too.  Spam mail’s no longer a problem and you rarely get visitors you don’t want.  On the other hand, mages who try to make a go of living in a shadow realm quickly discover the drawbacks (covered in the next entry).  Some mages stick with it and find workarounds, but they’re a definite minority – most eventually find that for all its problems, Earth works better.

Fortress

Shadow realms are very, very good when it comes to natural security.  The only known way to reliably reach one is via gate magic, and even then you generally need either to have been there or to have a focus to provide a link.  What this means is that for somebody else to reach your shadow realm, they have to first have access to gate magic (which rules out well over 99% of the population), then know that your shadow realm even exists (which rules out well over 99% of those that are left) and finally have the links and skill to pull off a gate spell to get there (which rules out an indeterminate amount of those remaining, quite possibly 100%).  All in all, the most likely way someone’s getting into your shadow realm is if you invite them in.

That said, every security system has a weak spot, and mages are nothing if not resourceful.  Given enough time and motivation, mages can figure out a way into even a shadow realm.  If you want your shadow realm to be truly secure, it’s wise to have additional layers of defences beyond the natural ones.

Prison

For all their wonder, shadow realms can be put to darker uses.  While most mages don’t discuss it, it’s common knowledge that many mages – notably, but not exclusively, Dark ones – employ their shadow realms for purposes of imprisonment, interrogation, and worse.  To anyone incapable of gate magic, such prisons are virtually inescapable.  Some rare shadow realms are even designed as prisons, and they’re truly hellish.

Wikipedia

Another author was telling me a few weeks back that I ought to get a Wikipedia entry – fast forward a few weeks, and it turns out someone made me one.

Amusingly, about 50% of what it says in the Biography section is wrong.  (I can kind of see where they got it from – it’s just a matter of getting the context wrong on my interviews.)  I did think of correcting it but I’m kind of curious to see how long it takes to correct itself.  I’ve never watched a Wikipedia article grow so I want to see how effectively their whole ‘anyone can edit’ thing works out.

It’s odd how misinformation can spread.  Fantastic Fiction has been insisting for six months plus that there’s an extra book in the Alex Verus series between Cursed and Taken called ‘Mage Wars’.  Said book doesn’t exist and never will, but that doesn’t stop people asking me about it (I tried emailing Fantastic Fiction to correct it, but never got a reply – oh well).

Encyclopaedia Arcana #37: Other Worlds (Part Two)

While the first part of this article covered bubbles, this second part will deal with the more commonly-used shadow realms.

Shadows and Bubbles

To an outsider, a shadow realm looks pretty much the same as a bubble.  They’re inaccessible except via magic, you usually get there by walking through a portal, and they often have the same fantastic, bizarre architecture.  While shadow realms and bubbles might be visually similar, however, they’re metaphysically quite different.

A shadow realm is an image, or ‘shadow’, of a particular place in conventional reality.  Unlike a bubble, a shadow realm exists in the same space and time as the location it mirrors, but the process of creation shifts the two locations slightly out of phase:  they share positions, but can’t interact with one another.

Your Very Own Shadow Realm

Shadow realms are grown rather than built:  the mage sets the process in motion and lets the shadow realm develop on its own.  Although a shadow realm starts off as an image of the place it copies, the growth process causes it to change:  there’s no way to be quite sure what the shadow realm will look like when its done (and poking your head in early to check how it’s doing is usually a bad idea).

What a shadow realm grows into depends both on the magical resonance of the chosen location, and on the personality and magic type of the creator.  A grove of trees might become a light and airy wood , a dark forest with a dense overhead canopy, a single massive tree rising up into the sky, an impenetrable jungle, a maze of living wood, or just about anything else.  In most cases the shadow realm bears a definite imprint of its creator, but the way in which that imprint takes shape is unpredictable.  Once the shadow realm’s growth is complete, it can be accessed and used normally.

You Can’t Get There From Here

Metaphysically speaking, shadow realms are much closer to our world than bubbles.  Sometimes, they can be close enough that the barrier becomes thin and almost permeable – images and impressions filter through from one to the other, causing passers-through to see shadows where nothing should cast them, or feel an unseen presence.  There have even been cases in the ‘closest’ of shadow realms in which people’s condition and actions align them sufficiently with a shadow realm to slip through the barrier without a spell, though such events are rare.

In most cases, though, the only way to access a shadow realm is via gate magic.  Gating directly to and from a shadow realm is possible (if dangerous), but the accumulated risk means that most mages who plan to regularly travel to and from a shadow realm will construct a focus.  By far the easiest way to do this is to create a link between the shadow realm and the place it mirrors.

Bursting the Bubble

Shadow realms have several advantages over bubbles.  First, they’re easier to reach – a proper focus allows safe and regular travel between a shadow realm and its linked location, and constructing such a focus isn’t significantly more difficult than making a gate stone.  Second, they’re much easier and safer to create.  It takes an entire team of master mages to create a bubble, and the process consumes a vast amount of magical energy, which in turn allows much more opportunity for things to go wrong.  By contrast, it’s perfectly feasible for a single mage to create a shadow realm on his own.  The result may be slightly unpredictable, and it won’t be fast, but for any mage with limited resources it’s a much more practical option.

By far the biggest selling point of shadow realms, however, is their stability.  While bubbles have a nasty tendency to become inaccessible or simply vanish, the organic way in which shadow realms are grown ties them closely to Earth.  A shadow realm can last for centuries – more than enough time for the realm to outlive its creator.  It’s common for a mage to guard the secret of access to his personal shadow realm so well that after his death, his successors are unable to reach it (and in some cases may not even be aware that it exists).  It is widely believed that there are countless thousands of such ‘lost’ shadow realms hidden throughout the world, invisible and almost undetectable, waiting to be rediscovered once again.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #36: Other Worlds (Part One)

Mages don’t spend all their time on Earth, and their gate magic can be adapted to allow for dimensional travel.  Out of the other worlds that mages visit, the two most common types are bubbles and shadow realms.

Bubble Bubble

A bubble is essentially a very small self-contained world, or (looked at from another perspective) a pocket universe.  A bubble has no spatial connection to our reality, and as such cannot be accessed by any known means other than gate magic.  Bubbles are typically very small, no more than a mile or two across, and often much smaller (though making a bubble too small brings its own problems).

The internal landscape of a bubble is highly variable, determined largely by its creator.  Since a bubble is entirely detached from our reality, here’s nothing stopping a bubble’s creator from messing around with such things as a bubble’s atmosphere, strength and direction of gravity, heat and light, and so on.  Once their creator starts using magic to modify the interior, the results can get really bizarre.  There are stories of bubbles with impossible geometries:  staircases that twist up, forwards, and sideways all at once, places where space warps in on itself so that you can see the back of your own head, and more.  In practice, since bubbles are generally created by mages for their own use, the vast majority of bubbles tend to be recognisably Earthlike in appearance, or at least close enough that humans can exist there comfortably (though usually with one or two unusual features).

Lost and Found

The art of creating bubbles is very old.  Bubbles were heavily used in the Precursor period but fell out of use after the Dark Wars, and the secrets of their construction were lost for over a thousand years before being independently rediscovered.

The modern technique for creating bubbles is laborious and time-consuming, and requires both the co-operation of a team of experienced mages and a significant expenditure of energy.  The ritual channels an extreme amount of energy into a pocket of space:  when the stress reaches a certain point, the section of space ‘tears off’ and loops in on itself, becoming separate.  The disconnected pocket of space can then be reshaped using the standard methods.

Numerous mage historians have argued that this method probably isn’t how Precursor bubbles were created.  The most common arguments in favour of this theory are that (a) surviving sources that reference Precursor bubble creation don’t make it sound anything like the modern technique, (b) the Precursors really shouldn’t have had the amount of power required to perform the (highly inefficient) modern method on a regular basis, and (c) modern bubbles have several distinctive features that don’t seem to match up with Precursor-made ones.  Mages who believe this theory generally also believe that the Precursors either performed their bubble creation with outside help, or used some unknown and much more energy-efficient technique that’s yet to be rediscovered.

Bubble Trouble

The major problem with bubbles is that once created, there’s nothing connecting them to our reality.  They can only be accessed with gate magic, and such gate magic is significantly more difficult to perform than normal, usually requiring a focus.  Every now and again gate magic to a bubble will fail, and once this happens that’s it – the bubble is gone forever, along with anything inside it.  Possible theories for this phenomenon include interference between realities, the bubble being altered by some unknown force (thus disrupting the gate co-ordinates), the bubble being eradicated by some unknown force (thus giving no location for the gate to go to), or the bubble ‘floating off’ into the void.  However, since there is currently no known method for reestablishing contact with a lost bubble, there’s no way for mages to discover which (if any) of these theories is correct.

The unreliability of bubbles has significantly limited their practical use.  In the modern era bubbles have been largely superseded by shadow realms, and are only used when their inaccessibility is considered a selling point, generally for mages who are extremely security-conscious.