Natural Magic

Chapter 26 - Stationery

Trevor Tweesly held out his tray. Cookie took it and placed on it a slate of hard tack, a puddle of vegetables, and a paperweight of fossilized meat.

“Thanks Cookie,” Trevor said with his usual mealtime enthusiasm.

“Welcome, lad,” the dwarf said hurriedly. He was already serving the next in line.

Trevor carefully took the tray back, lest he slosh the vegetables or drop the bread or meat down through the floor and out the hull. He sat at one of the available tabletops and put his bread in the vegetables to soak. While he waited for either to become palatable, he gnawed on the salted meat.

The mess hall, for what it was on this ship, was at full occupancy with fifteen people lined up for their rations. A few more were sitting around the room, either at tables or bracing themselves against the wall.

It had taken Trevor some time for him to grow accustomed to the way rooms and the floor would rock about, but by now he could keep his head up and food down.

He pulled a tome out from his robe with his free hand and set it on the margins of the small table. Emblazoned on the cover was a thin silver circle with SPELL written within, with a cockeyed E. Gripping the salted meat in his teeth, he used both hands to unclasp the pages and open the book. He opened it in what might be called an unorthodox fashion for those who use books for any kind of reading, though probably not by those who prefer books for their centerfolds. The back cover lay flat on the table with the front cover and half the pages standing straight up. There was a click as the internal mechanism locked the book open.

"A weird way to read a book, Tweesly," a voice came from over his shoulder. There was never any privacy on a ship. He regretted not taking his food back to his bunk.
But then I’d seem isolated and weird, and people would inquire on principle, he thought.

"Hey Yggril," Trevor said idly.

“Usually you’re supposed ta hold it with a page on the left and a page on the right,” the halfling continued, unencumbered by things like greetings. “Unless… Is there a centerfold in this one?”

Trevor gave him a look, seeing the halfling for the first time. Yggril had two slates of hard tack and was chewing one of them.

“You should really consider eating some vegetables instead of trading them for more bread,” Trevor chided, ignoring the question. “You need the nutrients you can’t otherwise get when you’re at sea.”

Yggril noticed Trevor’s own bread. To his growing concern, it was laying in the vegetables, growing soggy. He had to act quickly if he was to get it off Trevor while it still had some backbone to it. “So what’s the book, Tweesly?”

Trevor allowed himself a moment of gratification. It wasn’t often people asked him about his magical studies, and this halfling seemed persistent enough to listen.

“I have an idea for more efficient magical usage,” he said in a casually academic tone. “Do you know the basics of spell theory?” He asked it as one would for the definition of rain, or if he knew how to tie a bowline. Yggril could tie a bowline with his hands down his pants, but he didn’t know diddly about magic.
The halfling shook his head and munched his bread. Cookie’s hard tack was the closest thing you could get to leather with a wheat product, Trevor noted.

“Spell theory is the basis of wizard magic, you see. The spells have to be crafted from ambient aether, which is simple enough for immediate use, but since the advent of vellum,” and here Trevor motioned to his half-open book, “we can store less complex spells for use at a later date.”

The halfling looked up from Trevor’s book with a blank blink.
“It’s like canning strawberries in the summer so you can have jam in the winter,” Trevor hazarded a second time.

If this took too long, the bread would soak through. “Ok, but you still didn’t answer my-“ the halfling started.

Trevor cut him off. “Magical tomes are full of pages of vellum. In them, spellcasters press their creations like flowers. I have a few minor creations lingering in the earlier pages, myself.”

He swiped a finger on the flat page. It was trailed with a multi-color line, vanishing a half second after the motion was done, but leaving tie-dye colors on the eye before it did.

“Usually, field spellcasters perform somatic and verbal components to cobble together living spells from the air.” He pantomimed with meaningless gestures as he said this.

“But scrollmakers use runic thaumaturgy to express these same notions. I’m practiced in such, and with each finger I can simultaneously trace out a series of runes for the binding of magic.”

“Trevor, mate-“ the halfling started, but Trevor bent over his book, both hands on the flat page, with the cover side propped up in front of him like a screen.

His fingers went wild, swiping and tracing on the page in front of him, leaving brilliant trails of complex and mystical signals, arriving and vanishing in half-moments. “It all takes a little energy from me, of course. The spellcaster acts as ignition and pilot. The book takes care of the rest, creating and expending spells in a cascading effect. Of course, it can’t do everything a spellcaster can. Like, making decisions.”

The vertical pages began glowing between themselves, almost thickening.

“I wouldn’t trust this thing to work with plaitonic ideals.”

Yggril felt dizzy, and he couldn’t tell if it was from Trevor’s endless words, or the bread turning slowly into diamond in his gut. But he pressed onward. “What are-?”
Before the halfling could get out three words, Trevor pounced. He got like this when explaining magic.

“Plaitonic ideals? It’s a foundational theory of elements. Of course you know the universe is a giant worm which eats a mysterious firmament from outside. But did you also know that when firmament decomposes in digestion, it decomposes equally into each of the elements?”

“Fascinating,” the halfling croaked. Yggril never used vocabulary like that, but right now it was a life raft in a sea of knowledge.

“Our tract – the material realm – is where the digestion happens. Entropy is in full effect here. But we don’t need a completely equal balance of all the elements. So, the worm has other tracts into which it siphons off the excess elements before they can become material, ready for use by those with the keys. Gods, mages, certain types of fungus…”

His hands were scribbling furiously on the book. Light trails criss-crossed Yggril’s eyes.

“These tracts – ours included – are braided, or plaited, together. You see? So, you get things like platonic fire. Or plaitonic-…”

“Spoons?” Yggril asked. He wasn’t sure why he said this. The torrent of words paused as Trevor thought about it.

“I suppose there could be a tract that’s just spoons. I’ll have to think about that.” He nodded, making a mental note. “But, you see, early magic users stumbled into all kinds of pitfalls when they were discovering their aetheric wings, so to speak. Some happened upon things like, say, an early version of Tragmagoor’s Sudden Beachfront Property – a spell which conjures a sudden flood of water, if you get the joke – and thought they were creating water.” He chuckled, both at the name of the spell and at the idea that water could just be created in large quantities. Yggril, energy spent, merely grinned. He was holding onto the conversation by the skin of his teeth.

“Of course, it would require ludicrous amounts of magic to actually create the water needed for a flood. It’s theorized that what they really did was open a gate to the plaitonic realm of water – the tract of elemental water braided with our material tract and the other elemental tracts, you see – and let the water come through. It’s easier to open and keep open a doorway like that than it is to create that much water.”

“I concur,” the halfling whispered. His eyes were glued to the bread.

“And my point, of course, is that if the book were to create a spell to, say, conjure a bunch of spoons,” here he gestured at Yggril, “it would default to establishing a connection to the plaitonic realm of spoons rather than create a spoon from thin aether. And once the door was open, it wouldn’t expend the energy to close it. More often in these cases, the spellcaster moves the opening elsewhere. It’s more energy efficient that way.”

Yggril was out of nods, yesses, and uh-huhs. Luckily he had a fallback. “Some people, am I right?”

“That’s exactly right. It was always some careless caster who summoned some plaitonic fire for a party trick and, instead of properly closing the link, moved the hole into some volcano or other. Then a week or a month down the line, catastrophe. The volcano blows, or in the case of plaitonic dirt, the mountain falls over or-…”

“Or suddenly there’s a giant spoon outside of the town?” Yggril asked. His creativity astonished both of them.

“That, too. There’s probably thousands of unclosed plaitonic wormholes, y’know? And if the tome started making connections randomly… I couldn’t even imagine what it’d cost me to close more than three. Catastrophic damage. The mind reels at the possibilities.”

All of a sudden, Trevor stopped.

“Here, I have prepared the incantations necessary for a demonstration,” and he reached into a pocket of his robes.

“That’s great, Trevor,” the halfling said, trying to sound less worried, “it really is. But I was just trying to get your bread off you. I’m coming clean. I’m not interested in plaitons, elemental fire, or digestive tracts or whatever. Aside from my own.”
There was panic in Yggril’s eyes.

To Trevor’s knowledge, the crew wasn’t especially superstitious. Sailors had some strange ways, and beliefs about dolphins and weather, but there wasn’t any taboo about magic.

No, he recognized this fear. He called it the common fear of education.