(this post is written on December 31, 2025 but backposted into December 17, 2025)
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| picture by Dylan Mirales |
There is nothing more to magic than to be a scar in the world.
A mage is a gap not fully closed, a wound not fully healed, plastered over with thin film of human skin, but under it all are raw cracks and broken connections, physics re-grown wrong, nature gone septic, poetry cluttered in scabs.
All it is to the magic is to reach into this brokenness, and with a tear and snap of the fingers widen the wound to create a wonder.
All it is to being a mage is to not be able to shut out sensation of the world's peeling skin, constant in certain places, in certain people; of air suddenly filling lungs with tiny glass particles – sharp dust that doesn't exist to anybody but this kin of walking scars. All it is to being a mage is to live with the truth of the matter that the slight sensation of falling, of failing, of falling apart inside and out is to never fully go away.
Teleport just snaps the exit position to the nearest preexisting
rents in the world, sensed only by mages themselves; there is never
an error in such journey, just lack of distortion conveniently
nearby. Name a spell, make a wish, – anything can be done through
breaking the world through running fingers through one's own inner
scar-tissue again and again. All that matters how much more and in which yet another way the mage breaks themselves again and again, how they cultivate their inner breaches as if a mutilated bonsai.
And with each cast out of mage's inside wrongness into outside world the invisible rents, the dry intangible dust filling the lungs, the roots twisting as they spread untoucheable in tainted waters (as inside as outside) grow just ever so slightly.
You have a way with words. I mean that sincerely. :).
ReplyDeleteTo extend the analogy, I guess that counter-magic would be healing the world. Could magic itself be used to heal people? Maybe it can heal people at greater cost to the world, or maybe wound-based magic just can't do anything so constructive at all.
And what wounded the world in the first place?!
P.S. Why did you backdate this post to "Thursday, 18 December 2025"?
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI think the magic in this case can be used to heal people but the trade-off is always more invisible harm done to the mage or/and the world than damage healed; so the mage healing themselves would be very minimal return overall: maybe at best a short-term help (such as closing the wound or alleviating the sickness) with longer term inner and thus outer scarring. It is like trying to feed the desert by desalinating the sea: all that salt still have to go somewhere.
In the world where this concept might be true, a mage might get it big if they, say, cure a child of millionare and provide themselves a financial stability for the rest of their life; for this many would break the world twice over.
I think it is just people being people was that wounded the world in the first place; and I don't mean that in sense 'humans are real monsters' (although it might be somewhat so). People experience despair and losses. People want miracles and power. It might be with best intentions that somebody had broken themselves to achieve what they want. It might have been despair, or desire for power. I think it is just side effect of sapience in general.
Although, if one wishes to hold humanity blameless one can always make a source some hostile dimension and definitely evil forces seeping in.
I backposted it because I didn't want it to appear in people reading lists when everybody was celebrating. It is a not a light text.