Sources of Magic – Part Two
If you know where something comes from, it gives you a head start on guessing where it’s going, doesn’t it? So when you’re reading or writing a fantasy tale, understanding just where that set of magicians draws their magical energy from can point to some of its best storylines.
In the other part of this list I mused on the idea that seemed like the simplest (until we look closer), that power’s simply lying around for use, as well as the hardcore drama of drawing it from someone’s life energy. But I’ve seen two other types as well:
Magic from… Stuff
This is the great catch-all approach: if the other magic systems are fueled from places and people, this one draws from specific things. And just how those “things” work sets so many of the limits of magic.
Note, this isn’t all the “enchanted items” and magic-enhancing wands that are usually part of a world’s magic; those usually seem more like the kind of tools or power batteries a magician might make because of the power he has. I mean worlds where magic itself can only start from one kind of source, ever. Such as:
- Magic is Mine(d): In Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books, magic comes from a talented person consuming bits of the right mineral; from using tin for enhanced senses, to “atium” for a near-invincible glimpse into the future. Other stories might use herbs, fresh dragon’s blood, or whatever the writer comes up with. So for any world where raw power can be dug up or literally snatched from people’s hands, it’s primed for stories about searching out, bargaining for, conquering, and hoarding supplies of the best materials. (Or beating a magician by simple disarming her.) All in all, this can lead to many of the same clash-of-nations story possibilities as the setting-based sources, but even more open to characters getting control of them.
- Weirder yet. Metals are a nice simple source, but stranger sources can fuel stranger stories. Brent Weeks fuels his magic from light in the Lightbringer books… in fact it’s light’s color, so we see a man floating in the bright daylight ocean and out of luck because he doesn’t have the gift to tap into blue. Or in Nat Russo’s Necromancer Rising and Necromancer Falling, magic comes from energies left behind by death—so a battlefield is the last place you’d want to take on his heroes.
Come to think of it, the most famous magic of our time uses a touch of this. The Harry Potter books are full of creatures and plants that are inherently magical, but a human witch or wizard is (usually!) powerless without a potion, device, or a wand, and those all seem to be built from pieces of those wizardly materials. Of course the stories didn’t make much use of that angle; Harry never used up his wand’s phoenix feather and had to replace it. But it is still a possible limit… imagine a world, or even a Potterverse future, where wand-empowering creatures became all too rare. Or where only a few magic schools had succeeded in raising the things, or where Muggles realized they could destroy magic’s power by hunting down the creatures that generated it. (So why is the new movie called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them…)
Magic from the Gods
I’ve put this last, but of course it’s the oldest idea in magical fiction, and the myths and beliefs behind it. It says magic is never a human power, it can only be given by spiritual forces, of one kind or another.
And what that means in a story… if the other systems can stories around how people get control over different power sources, this puts the focus on what gods the story has, and what it takes for a person to serve them. With a benevolent god, a story could trap a character between that god’s demands and his own human wishes of he wanted the power for. (Say, Ciara Ballintyne’s In the Company of the Dead.) With a more evil spirit, the same conflict could get dark much faster (any devilish-deal story) or settle into the horror of the people who have to fight that kind of dark power.
And if a story has multiple gods (like the Dungeons & Dragons pantheons with their assorted clerics), a character having to choose one plays up the contrast between their different natures even more. Serving a god of justice and courage might seem an easy choice for a hero… until Mercy offers to give his brother that second chance, or Vengeance holds out a shot at his oldest enemy …
So magic could be based on the difference between places, or making use of people, or managing things, and the last might well be about following ideas. (Hmm, aren’t those the four categories of nouns, that make up everything?)
And like so much else of storytelling, a magic’s source might come down to contrasts. Whatever one point magic depends on, what about that makes the difference between have and have-not characters, and what—or better yet, who—is likely to change that? If the magic takes different forms, is it because the source does too? And all of those might become the choices that heroes and villains have to struggle between.
Looking back at my own writing, it’s clear I built The High Road to mix Place and Thing ideas. Mark and Angie discover they can draw out gravity-controlling magic from only one secret spot that’s been hidden away in the city park… but it’s also dependent on the old family belt that’s attuned to it. Most “objects of power” in stories don’t count as true sources since they always seem to be tapping into a larger system of magic, but here the belt (and some leather scraps that obviously came from it) are the only way to access that magic and fly. If my heroes were separated from those talismans, would it be more or less of a handicap than keeping them away from the park? –By the end of the book, the odds are that our heroes will be able to compare…
And before that, in Shadowed? Paul Schuman isn’t so sure where his power to enhance his senses comes from. When that book ends, he’s only begun to understand.
One last question, if you’ve seen the manga and anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Its alchemy draws on a single, consistent system. But the way its power involves currents of energy, stored power, and what’s beyond the Gate… it spills into all four.
Now that’s impressive.
