There and Never, Ever Back Again, page 10
Personally, I think you can't get farther from being an island unto yourself than to be a maker of maleficent magics, living in a fortress keep. Here I have a realm’s worth of strange things known and unknown, creeping out of darkness underground, walking upright in the shadowy alleys and sidestreets. I'm self-contained, and yet, I am quite connected to the world. The world and I have a deal: they won’t stop talking about me and my supposed crimes; I won’t stop remembering to make their lives unfortunate.
Disconnection is no virtue. I am quite certain that if I simply turned my back on everything, pretended that I was never an ape, I would end up, not in some glorious postmortal state, but simply in denial.
If you were that human, isolated on the aforementioned island (let’s make it a desert island for an extra note of inhospitable unpleasantness)--perhaps you'd have to make up a cosmogony centred around the existence of only one sentient, a solipsism of comfort. Even then, I imagine you would talk to yourself quite a lot, and in so doing, you’d make an “other” with whom you debate.
(That’s assuming you’d already learned language before being placed on that island, of course. Otherwise, you might simply go feral, be without words, be without the ability to name things. But then, you would not be a part of the same humanity as the one that has words. Maybe you wouldn't be a lesser thing. Maybe the rest of humanity might be the lesser thing; mortal words represent only a fragment of the world they describe, and one might argue they’re part of the problem of being human. But if you're a beast and not a Man, then you're outside of my scope; speak your truths to wolves, for they are nearer kin.)
When I was first taking up dark magic, one of the clearest goals was to be immortal and unkillable, which, I felt, would make everything ever so much easier.
It turns out that if there’s any way to make magic do that, I can’t figure it out. I still look from time to time, because who wouldn’t, really? But the Universe abhors stasis, and making yourself into an unchanging, undying thing is about as stuck in place as you could possibly get. I’ve lived quite a lot longer than I would have otherwise, of course. And it is quite difficult to end my life. But it’s very possible to do so. More than I’d like, certainly.
I don’t want to die, which is why I still chase immortality, but aside from the technical problem of, oh, the Universe resisting with extinction-level force when you go up against that particular part of natural law, I also recognize that creating endlessness in myself would come at the expense of many of the other things I want to create or have created.
That is the thing for anyone who generally moves through time at a consistent rate of an instant every instant: the use of your limited time is the measure of what you are. The distribution of your hourglass-sand is important. One of the most critical steps towards self-definition is the choice of how to invest your passion. Because it's one of one of the temptations of sorcerous power, let me remind you again: Immortality dilutes urgency, makes it less vital that a thing happen in this place and at this time. It makes you less likely to create things for the sentients who are, now, just mayflies to you. It’s hard to make deadlines when your checkout time is “never”. Contrariwise, it focuses the mind something fierce to know you’ve only got an hour or two left.
Art and creation require attachment, not avoidance. Making something involves connecting, even if you connect in a negative way, even if you arouse anger or pain or fear. If it is to be meaningful, it must mesh with the tellurian and if you are to connect with humanity, regardless of how you feel about that horde, or how it feels about you, then you cannot be immortal. I need to be able to end, because I fervently want to create meaning and I know, if my back's to the wall, I absolutely would die for that.
I know that even more now that the possibility of said extinction is close at hand. After all, The Prophecy—with the help of the White Wizard—has been bringing about an exciting shiny new Chosen One every time the last one takes a dirt nap. They've been getting closer and closer, and this latest one is, admittedly, particularly extraordinary. The odds aren't good. Statistics are not generally on the side of Dark Lords, especially since our plot armour tends to have a big giant hole in it saying "Insert Protagonist Here".
But then, Magic Really Wants To Kill You.
There's not really such a thing as "White Magic", and if there was, it would be no more forgiving than any other sort. The kindest priest of healing in the most compassionate temple in the land...is nevertheless engaging in hazardous activity with each curative invocation. If all he knows is a simple healing spell, just a little tiny one granted by a superior, passed down for generations, known to be safe, well understood—even with all that, nevertheless, magic, disruptive by its nature. dangerous without exception, seeks to pull free of any binding. Healing someone more rapidly and effectively than might be possible without sorcerous intercession? Seems benign. But what if you heal the wrong person? The eternal struggle of What Might Be picks sides pretty easily. You could end up sworn to Law or Chaos or Broccoli with extraordinary swiftness. Because, as noted earlier, it’s not like magic itself thinks about these things. And the kinds of divine forces which do keep score have neither time nor inclination to check everything out. They’ll just sort you into wherever’s most convenient, and go on looking for more worshippers or making new planets or whatever it is they’re doing with their time this aeon.
Meanwhile, there remain many people, even on this world, who don’t know what magic is, or who fear it. Actually, there may be more magical skeptics here than in worlds without magic. Anything which might make your neighbor unfairly more powerful than you ought to be viewed with a certain suspicion. Have you met your neighbors? They’re terrible.
(Some of them, anyway.)
Then there are people who really won’t accept the idea that you’ve healed someone out of the goodness of your heart. They might make the very, very human choice of believing that the unnatural has struck and that where something is unnatural, it threatens them, regardless of the form it takes. (They’re not wrong; I don’t think they’re wise, but they’re not strictly incorrect. Unknown powers are a threat; it's just that if you destroy all threats, nothing ever gets a chance to become assets.) They might deify you. Or they might kill you. Or, again, going back to the general history of humans, the pattern is often to do the first, then the second, and then do the first again.
What have I done with my own magic? Less than I would like, given the time I have left. But I've made a few things I consider worthwhile.
Over the past several decades, I've raised up great circles of stones, a feat of magic which was remembered for about one generation, after which people started saying, much to my annoyance, that the great monoliths had “always been there”.
I’m not the first to do this sort of thing; not by a long shot. And I’m certainly not the first to choose to make enigmatic monuments with meanings that are astrological, runic, metaphysical, and historical. But I would like to think the ones I built are unique in at least one way. The megaliths are, like many such things, made to align with certain configurations of stars. The difference here is, mine don’t match the stars in our sky.
I have built foundations for cities, diverted water, changed the nature of soil, altered some of the ecology of a particular place as best I could. It is remote from pretty much any habitation, but it could house a population of thinking beings, should some come to live there.
It's often noted―it's hard to miss―that at the edges of my realm, I've raised very high, very sharp towers. At the top of each burns a flame which cannot be extinguished. These towers are not extraordinarily practical as architectural objects. But I find them most useful. Each is a message to myself, like a note you might place on your own pillow. They're a defiance. They’re visual mnemonics, and they’re both simple enough, and strangely vast enough that, no matter how often I see them, they always make me pause and smile.
It's not a complex metaphor, nor an obscure one. That's not what I wanted. Simply put: they remind me of the unquenchable fire inside. The world will try to dowse that combustion in anyone; it’s the nature of material reality to weigh heavily on the body, and for the brain to trick itself into believing that the body’s complaints are complaints of the spirit. They are little acts of rebellion because each stands, as noted, a bit beyond my own territories. It means, technically, some poor fools can try to extinguish them. And I've been careful not to make it impossible; just very difficult. Those who painstakingly climb the towers to put out the flames become, at worst, frustrated, and at best, they’re scorched.
(I see no need for subtlety in my metaphors. If I wanted subtle, I wouldn’t live in a vast keep and give myself a flashy name. Standing out makes you a target; but sometimes you know you’re doing your job if you have to dodge Fae-poisoned arrows.)
Oddly enough, I don’t hate the people who take it upon themselves to scale my edifices. In fact, I rather like those who are burnt through determination and not sheer stupidity. Perhaps I am extending too much hope to believe they share a little kinship with me. But perhaps not. The more badly you are blistered, the more badly you are scarred. The more you are scarred, the more others know fear, because they see your scalding and associate it with their own vulnerability to injury and death. They see it as disfigurement. And you can tell a lot about people by how they treat those who are, like me, ugly.
I find that those newly seen as un-beautiful tend to turn, to change in their attitudes towards me. I still don’t rejoice when it happens, though; I've been an outcast, and I wouldn't easily wish it on others. (It would be a little like caging people in order to shout speeches at them; outside of ethical questions, I want my bar set a little higher than "what will satisfy an audience which is literally captive". It leads to deep mental weakness when you play to a crowd which must laugh at your jokes or else perish on the spears of your guards. And a weak mind is no friend to the spellmaker.)
I mention it often, because I live by it: All magic has its price. Magic is not limitless, any more than any other thing with which we can interact directly. Not even the Gods have enough mana to inflict their every whim on this world. (For that matter, the fact that there are so many Gods, with so many opposing stories, is peculiar. This is a world of magic; the Gods have walked the Earth within the sight of reasonably reliable witnesses. They’ve wrought ridiculous changes which couldn’t come from nature. And yet, we’re not sure which Gods actually rule what. This suggests that the Gods themselves are quite limited. In fact, in what communion I have with the Gods, I have often wondered if they are happy. I have often wondered if immortality suits them. As someone who committed a terrible act of necromancy, one night very long ago, with a very deceased God, I sometimes wonder if it is the dead Gods who got the best of the cosmic deal. But that's another tale.)
Say it, repeat it, tattoo it on the inside of your skin: All magic costs. It is the first thing you learn in my vocation; or at least, it should be. It is a principle to be found everywhere. But the simplest piece is that once you know magic exists, it’s real, you can work with it yourself—then you have two basic choices. You either abandon it for reasons of morality, or difficulty, or lack of courage--or take it up, knowing that having a reach beyond that of an ordinary mortal means entirely new dangers hitherto unseen. You begin to realize that, though magic is constrained, it is also vast. You can do many things that are otherwise impossible; most of them will probably kill you, and many of them would ultimately be terribly fragile, but you can do them. You could walk to the Moon, with enough preparation; oh, it’s more likely that, at some point, you’d lose concentration or energy or get a rune wrong and fall into space. But it’s not impossible.
And every magical act is an experiment unto itself. It's thaumaturgy, not cooking. You can bake the same recipe a hundred times, and your stove might eventually give out, but if you duplicate the recipe, you’ll duplicate the results. Not so with magic. Magic has a certain amount of sentience. Sometimes it gets bored. Sometimes, there is some unknown factor, some ambient remnant of sorcery lying around. Sometimes it acts through its favorite agent, coincidence. You trip or you stumble or you use a wrong component, and the spell mutates. Coincidence is how magic replicates itself under the very eyes of those who would most disbelieve it.
So any spell you cast could harm you. Any really powerful spell could destroy you. The same is true of technology, as is well-known. The same is really true of any extraordinary power. Magic differs from the others, not in raw force, but because it ultimately answers, not precisely to any set of laws or rules, but to itself alone. Aye, if you speak to the right Names in the right places, you’ll likely achieve something like what you desire. But Names change—as I know better than anyone. Magic is unique in that it need not follow an ordinary logical or natural progression. It can be self-contradictory. It can warp without any reason or need. It can affect its own nature. Like me, magic defies destiny and defies preordination; and thus, any magic worth doing is magic which could do hurt you real bad. Any sufficiently powerful magic could destroy you in a manner more total and painful than you’ve ever imagined. If you're not prepared to take that risk, you ought to leave the supernatural altogether aside.
Why do you think the White Wizard casts so few spells?
If you took all sorcery from the equation, if we lived in a world without it, the White Wizard's psychological state would display what’s going on, in the same way that a drop in sanguinary glucose leaves you exhausted. Even without thaumaturgical assistance, the natural chemicals of the body modulate in response to stimulus. That’s relatively obvious. When people are throwing their love and adulation at you in mass quantities, though, it’s mind-altering in ways you can’t easily imagine unless you’ve experienced it, and it happens on a level that isn’t even available to our cognizance.
It is scent and pheromones. It is in the way our language centers respond to tone of voice and subtle cues, the way our psyche responds to the perceptions of others. The White Wizard is covered in a glory vastly more physical than most people imagine. Without magic, it makes him powerful and with it, with the unconscious witch-energy of thousands of devoted believers, there is hypnotic command in his smallest words and there is psychic authority in an act as simple as walking across a room. He has all that power pouring into him, and it is glorious and it is delicious. I knew such things once, had them for my own. I possessed them for reasons that I now reject. The White Wizard has never considered declining that adulation, has never seen it as anything less than his due, has never seen himself as anything other than doing the greatest of works. That certainty is like a beam of deeply concentrated light, intense enough to carve through solid stone.
But the White Wizard does not cast many spells.
Spells are difficult, spells are tricky, and spells could go awry. He lives on the exaltation of others, but he does so to feed his ego alone; it’s his actual propulsion. For him, it’s a substitute for the will which is so necessary to enact magecraft. It’s an incredible feeling, as I know well, but to experience it in full, you need to have an unquestioning certainty. I can't do that. I've much uncertainty. I question quite a lot. I am not sure about the world. I don't believe that I know the truth of every cause. I don't believe that everything I do is right; I don’t even believe it’s all right for me or true to myself, much less universally true. You can make mistakes about those things, confuse what you want to be, or what you might become, with what you currently are. The Wizard is certain he knows what is about to happen; I’m not even sure I’ve made the right guesses.
I think he leads a happier life than I do. But a more rewarding one? We'll see about that soon enough.
Why Goblins Hide
Orcs live in caves. Goblins live in shadows. It's the pain of distance versus the pain of proximity.
Humans know the world as being full of creatures of darkness, a place simply pumped to bursting with all manner of Things in umbral spaces, things which hate them. Humans don't seem to have given much thought about who hated whom first.
(That’s odd, actually. You’d figure it would be extraordinarily relevant. If you’re going to have reason to jump at shadows, oughtn’t you wonder precisely what you’ve done to make your dark reflection pissed off?)
(Then again, while curiosity is essential for the growth of society, it also fuels that pesky discontentment thing. And discontentment either gets channeled into appropriate paths and used by said society, or it gets you kicked right on out. Or—this option’s my favorite—they use your ideas, and then they send you away.
Joke’s on them, though. I will always have more ideas. They will seldom find someone like me.)
All right. As an exile, as former person of the day, I am insatiably curious: Why do the things of the Underdark hate those who dwell in sunlight?
I’ve given it much thought. Consider:
As far as we can tell, human culture evolved along what appears to have been some logical paths. Early homo sapiens needed shelter, and sometime early on, they started using that which was already around—namely, caves. (They certainly left enough crude drawings therein.)
(And the new inhabitants of those places, oddly enough, seldom choose to erase those leavings or blot them out. But they do respond. It’s not unusual to discover a crude human cave painting next to an extremely intricate Goblin poem. Because taking the piss at others appears to be a nigh-universal trait.)
Cast your thoughts backwards. If humans are at a stage where they live in caves, they must be at a very early point in their development indeed. Perhaps they don't even have the resources to actually penetrate to the back of the caves with their vision, even at high noon. Perhaps they moved in simply with the hope that there was nothing inside… or the fear of something worse outside. Have you ever awakened at night with unknown breath on your head, coming from a place you can’t see? Likely not, and yet, it’s part of our programmed and collective memories. It does not endear to us those strange things who live in the inky places. We don’t know how long humans dwelt in claustrophobic stone, but they surely got out as soon as they were capable.
