The Science of Magic

by

Elton Gahr

Marrillo read the dusty, leather-bound book slowly. He was still convinced he had made a mistake. The book held the same spells and ideas wizards had been using for a thousand years. According to every expert in the world, the rituals to perform magic were aspects of the chaos of the universe and so entirely random. It wasn’t possible that generations of wizards had spent their lives memorizing every hand gesture, chalk drawing, utterance, and ingredient and missed the connections that seemed so clear once you saw them.

But there were connections. He didn’t understand them well enough to create a new spell without some trial and error that usually took a lifetime, but if he was right, he could not only do it much faster but create a spell that would do what he wanted.

He considered rushing to the elders, but Marrillo was only eighty years old and people dismissed the ideas of wizards when they were young and reckless. He needed proof. For that, he adjusted a spell rather than create a new one. Logan’s Longsight allowed a wizard to see at much greater distances.

Changing the spell still took almost four years. But the process had been more useful than he could have expected, and in those four years, he gained more understanding than in his first fifty years of training.

But in the end, he had created not one, but two new spells. The first allowed him to look at something far too small to see—a simple alteration to a couple of parts of Logan’s Longsight. The other let him look through things that were near him as if they weren’t there. Neither was as useful as the original, but they both might be useful in specific situations, and they proved his point well because of their similarities to Logan’s Longsight.

He wrote up his findings and was preparing for the trip to the academy to share his findings when he was approached by Erdorn. Erdorn was the third oldest wizard in this part of the world. He was a legend who had survived six major wars and nine centuries.

“I have been watching you,” Erdorn said, walking into Marrillo’s home without warning or introduction. He rarely spoke directly to anyone less than a hundred years old and then only to give orders.

“Why would you watch me?” Marrillo asked. Lying to a wizard was a bad idea, but they assumed everyone else was stupid.

“I’ve met far better liars than you,” Erdorn said, but he sounded amused, not angry.

“It’s just research,” Marrillo said.

“Exceptionally dangerous research. I need assurances you will not share this with anyone,” Erdorn said. He sounded deadly serious. He must know at least some of what Marrillo had discovered and wanted to keep that knowledge to himself.

“We could make the world better,” Marrillo said.

“Or far worse. How much power do you want the wizards to have? We already live ten times longer than anyone else and can destroy a castle or army. So, what happens when one man can burn down a kingdom or kill any king in the world with a simple spell?” Erdorn said.

The dangers had never really occurred to Marrillo. He had never cared about power. He was more interested in learning. Besides, wizards weren’t as safe as it might seem. Spells took time, so all you had to do to kill a wizard was to overwhelm him.

“There have to be ways to deal with the most dangerous wizards,” Marrillo said.

“Yes. The elders observe their students. After a few hundred years, we train those who have shown the wisdom to be trusted with the second secret of wizardry. And over a few hundred years, they become an elder,” Erdorn said, then added, “They do not begin learning that as a child of eighty.”

“May I continue my studies?” Marrillo asked.

“You have not misused what you have found. And discovering it without training shows some wisdom we look for. I will trust you. Something made easier when you can kill someone from anywhere in the world with a ten-minute spell. But your discoveries must be shared only with elders and we, not you, will determine if any can be added to the book of common spells,” Erdorn said.

Marrillo had no choice. Erdorn was more than powerful enough to back up his threat. A threat that proved things needed to change. The world had been kept in an endless cycle of devastating wars and poverty for generations of wizards who had hoarded power, so no one could challenge that system. He even understood how some of those wars had been started, like the sudden and unexplained death of the great warlord Aver the Just when he was only twenty-three years old.

He worked in an obsessed frenzy. He created new formulas that could change almost any spell. Some changed heat to cold or increased the strength of a spell, while others changed the way it looked or reversed its effects.

Erdorn visited every few months. He walked into Marrillo’s home without invitation or warning and left just as abruptly. Twice he had come into the house, watched Marrillo silently for two hours, and then walked out without a word. Another time he woke Marrillo from his sleep, asked a single question that made no sense, and then walked out before he could answer it.

Marrillo grew accustomed to the strange visits. Then Erdorn came into his study with a cup of tea, set it in front of Marrillo, and said, “There will be a war in three months. You should prepare your defenses.”

The wizards were supposed to be outside of politics, and none of the spells he knew would tell them a war was coming. But he did not know what the limits of a wizard who understood the rules of magic were. Perhaps they could see the future, or perhaps they were just starting the war.

He spent the next three months preparing defensive spells. He had never learned any but the most basic of defensive magic. But his understanding of the rules made learning spells far easier. The difficulty was knowing he couldn’t change anything dramatically enough that the other wizards his age would notice. So he created a shield around his home that was barely stronger than average and used the rest of the time he experimented with ways to defend against magic.

Three months to the day after Erdorn’s warning, the war began. It was far enough away that for the first weeks it was only rumors, but when wizards started a war they spread.

The spells used in the war were directly out of the magical books, without a hint of creativity. That didn’t make them any less devastating. Fires burst from the ground, burning down blocks of buildings, and magical creatures appeared out of thin air.

As much as Marrillo hated the death caused by the war, it was valuable to him. He was given access to books that were usually restricted, and he felt safe in going further with his experimentation so long as it was connected to defensive magic.

The war lasted four years and killed tens of thousands of soldiers and twice that many civilians. That was no surprise. Most wizards didn’t care if people died, so used spells indiscriminately. Marrillo created shields in important places around his city, making it much harder to attack, and so it remained more intact than many others.

Near the end of the war, Marrillo found a nearly perfect defensive spell. Using a standard shield at the base, he created a bubble of altered reality. Inside the bubble, he had significant control over how things worked. One of the easiest things he could do was to make magic not work inside the bubble.

His own magic didn’t work inside the bubble, either. But he could still control the bubble, and that was more useful than magic. He could create food and water out of nothing, speed up time so he could spend a few hours inside the bubble studying, and days had passed outside, and many other things.

The spell wasn’t complicated, and its only real limitation seemed to be its size. He could enclose his house in the magic, but that was about it. That made him wonder if the elder wizards used similar magic. He couldn’t know without telling them what he had discovered. So his only option was to use it and hope it gave him the edge he needed.

Over weeks that were hours outside, Marrillo wrote letters to every wizard he had ever met and many he hadn’t. If his plan worked, he could start another war weeks after the last had ended. And this wouldn’t be a normal war. This would be a wizard’s war with the elders, forced to use their full strength if they wanted to win. But things needed to change.

Before he sent the letters, he took the time to study the books of magic. He could see more of the connections now, and more than that he could see how they were hidden under layers of pointless rituals that could be removed from the spells. He worked through that, making several useful spells take a fraction of the time. But then he had to stop. He could study for a lifetime and never be finished. So he mailed each of the letters.

Three days after the letters were mailed, Erdorn walked into his house. Marrillo rushed toward his sanctuary where he kept the bubble, but as he reached out for the smooth, rounded edge of reality, a spell grabbed him and pulled him back.

“Do you have any idea what you have done?” Erdorn asked, as he lifted the helpless Marrillo into the air.

“I told people the truth,” Marrillo said. There would be one last war, one last battle, and whether they won or lost the power of the elders' would be broken.

“Wizards, good wizards, all over the world, are going to die. A few will be elder wizards, but far more are going to be children unable to understand the power you tried to give them. I killed three wizards last night because of you,” Erdorn said.

“You could trust them and see what happened,” Marrillo said.

“It’s not that easy. Once they know the secrets, they become far more dangerous. Ordered magic will create an eternal slave race that will be treated little better than animals.”

And suddenly Marrillo understood why they had known there would be a war in three months. They hadn’t seen the future. The elders had started the war.

“You start the wars to get wizards killed,” he simply hadn’t seen it because wizards so rarely killed each other, but in every war about a quarter of wizards died before it ended.

“The wizards most likely to be killed in a war are the wizards who most enjoy war. An immortal wizard can turn his part of the world into a paradise or rule it as a tyrant,” Erdorn said.

“Until the next war, when they are all killed because it never ends,” Marrillo said.

“What other option do we have?” Erdorn asked, and it really sounded as if he might want one.

“We could leave,” Marrillo said.

“We’ve considered it, but there are too many wizards who wouldn’t leave, and more people with abilities will be born. It could make the problem worse.”

“What if we could go without leaving?” Marrillo asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I created a defensive spell during the war. It was a shield bubble to protect from magical attacks. Inside the bubble magic doesn’t work,” Marrillo said.

“An interesting idea how well will it work?”

“Once it’s in place, it will stay the same until someone uses magic to remove it, but it will give the person who created it enormous power while taking the power from anyone who would have been able to stop them,” Marrillo said. He understood he couldn’t be allowed that much power. No one person could be allowed to have that much power.

“It’s simple enough. The person who creates the shield will take a slow-acting poison. They take the poison, cast the spell, and then make the bubble as big as possible,” Erdorn said.

The poison wasn’t a problem. Many of the ingredients wizards used were poisonous. It was only a matter of ensuring death while giving him enough time to complete the plan.

There wasn’t much time, but Marrillo had become far better and the changes weren’t all that difficult. But he knew what he needed to do. And while Marrillo created the spell, Erdorn mixed a poison that should be mostly painless and kill a person in about three days.

Once Marrillo understood the magic, he prepared to take the poison, but while he was trying to understand one particularly impressive part of the magic, he felt a surge of magic strike him. For a moment, he was certain that Erdorn had betrayed him. That he was going to use the spell to make himself a virtual god. But when Marrillo woke up, he saw that the poison was gone.

Of course, he had no way to know if Erdorn had actually taken it. The poison he had picked was mostly painless, and wizards had high tolerance for poison thanks to the natural healing that using magic caused. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. They hadn’t chosen the poison Erdorn had, and Marrillo had simply trusted his word because if Erdorn didn’t want to kill him, he simply wouldn’t make him take poison. But now that he was the one who took it, things had changed.

But there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Marrillo could try to cast the spell himself, but if Erdorn had simply hidden the poison, he would kill Marrillo. He had to trust the wizard.

Since there wasn’t anything to do about it, he assumed the wizard had told the truth. And so Marrillo said, “I would have taken the poison, but I certainly didn’t need to be knocked unconscious to be convinced not to.”

“I couldn’t take the chance that you would resist me. You might be the only person in the world who can find a better solution to the current system than simply banishing magic. You understood the underlying rules of magic better than people who have studied it for lifetimes. I’ll spread this across most if not all the land, but you need to find an island somewhere outside of the bubble and study magic until you find a better solution.”

Three days later, Marrillo buried the nine hundred-year-old wizard in his backyard. He dug the hole by hand because his magic didn’t work. The bubble was intact, and wizards all over the world would be powerless, with no idea why.

The worst of them would almost certainly be killed by vengeful villagers they had forced their will on. Marrillo didn’t think he’d be one of them, and he hoped that those who had spent their lives helping people would find that now that they needed help, they would receive it.

Either way, few, if any, would ever use magic again. It would be at least a couple of hundred years before the spell began to weaken, and then it would shrink slowly. But by then no one who had been trained with magic would be in those lands, having long since fled or died of old age without their magic to sustain them.

As for Marrillo, he took the advice of Erdorn. He filled a small sailing ship with all of his books, and all the spell components he could fit on it and sailed. Magic, being weakened by water, would have left plenty of small islands free from the shield, and once there he could begin the search for a better solution than simply eliminating magic.