How To Magic
(So you wanna know how to Magic, huh.
Yeah, I know it’s a fantasy thing. I know. But really, magic (or at least my idea of it) is really just an especially fancy-lookin’ field of Science.
Every magician, witch, warlock, and sorcerer? A scientist. And possibly a scholar, too. Almost always self-trained, unless they have an apprentice, but that tends to go over poorly in the long run. Those who are obsessed enough with the acquisition of knowledge to pursue deep into the realm of magic and brilliant enough to emerge with useful information out of it are scarcely above doing things like seizing the knowledge of their peers by force, and bending them to their own will while they’re at it.
But anywho. Let’s get on with it.
Short version: magic is hard.
Long version:
There are, as far as we are aware, 4 planes of existence, or reality. There are probably innumerable ones, but there’s 4 nearby, and only 2 matter to this lesson.
We are on the plane of the Aether, or the Aetheric plane. They exist in or on top of a 7 dimensional space. The others are what you’d call ‘alternate universes’ in the most literal sense, in that they have nothing to do with existence within each other - though universes and worlds are not the same thing, and there’s also things like superspaces, spaces, and subspaces, but that’s not relevant either. The important thing to note here is that each of these planes are parallel to one another, and never meet.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the dotted line between the Magical plane and our own. For whatever reason, the plane of magic interacts with the plane of aether. It’s not clear if the opposite is true or not, and it’s not clear why, or how.
“Magic” (the force, not the plane; they get used interchangeably, so don’t get confused) is an extra-dimensional force, comparable to energy or matter or either nuclear force. It is utterly alien in nature, and behaves sort of like light does, in that it acts like a wave, though unlike light when you try to find a particle you realize it has either no mass or infinite mass. Its behavior is not unlike that of a fluid, in that it is constantly “flowing” into our dimension, and then proceeds to flow right back out again, back into the plane of magic. Points of entry and exit are what we’d call “ley lines.”
Magic does not obey the laws of physics. It’s insistent about following the beat of its own drum, and stubbornly refuses to play by the rules of the plane that it’s invading the space of, because it’s technically connected to the plane of magic still, and thus has its own set of rules to follow. It has no (calculable) mass, no (calculable) velocity, and honestly doesn’t technically exist at all. Magic also does not interact with itself. You can have infinite amounts of magic in a single place at any time, and it will never “fill up”, or in fact take up any space at all, because magic also doesn’t interact with any other force. The one and only thing magic interacts with is souls, which magic itself permits the existence of. It also technically exists outside of time, so it gets pretty complicated, however that’s quantum shenanigans and that’s hard enough to think about on its own, much less interacting with other stuff. Moving on.
Magic needs to have a closed circuit to and from the plane of magic in order to exist. If for whatever reason you break that arc, both ends of the broken arc immediately suck back into the plane of magic instantly.
Whatever is left, however, is where the real weirdness occurs: magic isolated on our plane completely loses its identity, and adopts any and all traits of forces native to the plane it exists on. Most of the time (about 90%) it’s heat energy. The remainders are generally random amounts of the strong and weak nuclear forces, and some other random bullshit we don’t really understand. There’s no way to reverse this process...except maybe shunting energy into the plane of magic, but that’s kind of useless to us.
Point is, sorcery, wizardry, witchcraft...whatever it is you call it, it’s all based completely around exploiting this property of magic. You manipulate it with your soul, channel it into specific formations, and force it to short in a very controlled manner, to alter the universe in ways the caster intends. Cool, right?
Infinite energy source, untold power at your fingertips...sounds great! I bet you’re ready to get started.
Good luck.
Magic is an utterly alien force that we have no comparison for. We don’t understand how it works, and in order to learn how it works, you have to study its properties. Okay, fair enough! So just manipulate it and see what happens when you short in specific ways.
Magic is noneuclidean in makeup. When you get into the specifics of it the force of magic is technically the plane of magic in its entirety, and you’re squeezing it and snipping bits of it to make it bleed. There’s infinite ways to make magic short. Literally incalculably numerable ways to fuck with magic and incalculably numerable applications to apply these incalculably numerable fuckings with. For all intents and purposes, any time you channel or short magic, you are manhandling an entire universe all at once. In order to understand its properties, you must be able to conceptualize that which we literally cannot possibly understand. It is, by all definitions, impossible.
But don’t get discouraged yet! There’s a bright side to this: magic wants you to understand it. In fact, it wants you to understand it really really fucking badly. So badly, in fact, that it actively alters its own characteristics, qualities, and behaviors to fall in line with the collective understanding of itself, from the perspective of (presumably) all intelligence trying to extract information about it. This includes, at least in part, us. Humans, youkai, spirits, gods, magicians.
How do they manage to extract information from it at all? That’s...a really goddamn good question, honestly. Even the magicians have no idea, but the process is described as being similar to beating your head against a wall so many times, so hard, with such enthusiasm and concentration, that instead of getting a concussion, you begin to reach a better understanding of life, existence, and the universe itself, in teeny itsy-bisty little bits at a time. If you can’t, you’re not alone. It’s probably a good thing. Good magicians are a very special kind of crazy and a very scary kind of brilliant, and they’re probably the last sort of person that you would want wielding this kind of power. Not only can they do so, they tend to do so better than everyone else! So that’s cool.
So yeah! Magic. Weird, cool, and above everything else, fucking hard to use, and you should be afraid of people who can use it well, because they’re the kind of people that would burn your house down, end the world, and create a soul-powered toaster oven that feeds on the next of kin of whoever puts bread into it, and find all of these ideas to be perfectly reasonable ways to spend their afternoon.)