Chapter Text
Beginnings
Hello, my name, as you should well know if you are capable at all to read, is Maria Bellanova. This better not be a waste of my time. I wrote this as a quick way to catch you, my new apprentice, up to speed, none of this should take more than a night of reading. I will, in time, teach you plenty of things about doing magic, complex things, abstruse things, things which are downright esoteric, but if i am to do that i can’t be explaining to you the base principles of addition and subtraction every time i offhandedly mention that two plus two is four, understood?
Dear me, I hope you are not nodding along as you read this.
So here comes the first lesson, are you ready? Hang tight and listen: magic is not sacred. I care not what the priestess say, or what is the main narrative in this bloody planet, there is nothing special or mystical about magic, it has no moral weight, no ethical vector towards which it pushes on, it just fucking is, fine? We use it, and we might as well abuse it, but that is up to us and our purposes, not to whatever inherent worth the magic that we do has(1).
Ok, whatever, if by this point you are feeling your mind blown, if your moral compass is reeling, if your preconceptions of the world are suffering terminal whiplash, then just put the book down and jump off the nearest window as loudly as possible so i can know that i have to go to the orphanage to get a new apprentice, because you will never be able to keep up. If you are capable of digesting all of this, and more importantly of understanding it, then pat yourself on the head (those are the only kinds of pats that you will get, for you will receive none from me) and keep reading. Quickly.
First principles
So, what even is magic, right? at its most basic, it is a set of actions which can, on a fundamental level, change reality beyond our simple, mechanical understanding of the interactions between matter. So, much in the same way that matter, just by virtue of existing, can “generate” gravity and distort time and space, certain symbols, certain gestures, by the very act of being performed can also influence matter and energy.
So far so good, i'm not saying anything too complicated i hope, look at me, i’m holding your hand through it and everything, you better be grateful because i’m nursing a most sordid hangover as i write this. So anyway, much as I require the almost perpetual consumption of liquor to get through the day, magic also requires its own form of sustenance. After all, to do what we do requires fuel, it requires energy, and this specific form of energy we call Aether. Others may call it mana or spirits or worst of all, concordance. Those people are fucking r---------- fine, i guess i best keep the language here more or less clean, i don't need you going around repeating that and getting me into trouble(2).
Anyway, Aether, it gives us power, where do we get it from? Here are the good news, you can find it literally everywhere, though to be more precise, it has two main sources, our bodies and our environment. Every living creature generates it constantly, now when i say “every” your mind may be conjuring cute pictures of dogs and cats and rabbits and birds and maybe if you have anything close to more than a triple digit amount of neurons, some trees. How quaint. When i say every i mean damn every single one, every blade of grass, every tardigrade, every bacteria, understood? Don't you fucking nod, don't you fucking dare, do you think i'm not perfectly aware of how you are thinking to yourself “yeah i figured”, don't lie to yourself, and most important of all don't you EVER lie to me. You didn't know, period, end of discussion. Moving on.
Now when the time comes to perform a spell (which we will go into more detail afterwards) your first thought must be how am i going to power it, using my own personal reserves of Aether or by using the ones in the environment? Well, that depends. Your personal reserves will always be easier to channel and will tend to get the more precise or more powerful results, problem is, those are fairly limited and the more they run out the worse it will be for you. Expend over half of your reserve and your muscles will get weaker, you will get more prone to ailment, waste over three quarters of it and you will fall unconscious. If after falling unconscious you had so bad a fortune such that your spell keeps draining your strength, once 90 percent of it has been spent you will die. If you ever manage to be so colossally idiotic and self destructive that you find the way to spend all 100 percent of your personal Aether, first, congratulations you’d be the first to do so in history, second i have absolutely no idea what happens to you. Some have theorized that your soul goes to hell or whatever approximates it in the hereafter. Others have said that your very substance is eradicated of the planet, your presence scrubbed so thoroughly off this plane of existence that history itself gets rewritten so that you never even existed, so for all we know this might have actually already happened. Hell, it might have happened to five hypothetical predecessors of you this very morning, there is no way we will ever know. Fun stuff to think about(3).
One final detail about personal Aether, you can actually build up your production of it, you just have to get your body used to producing it on a regular basis. Deplete your Aether as much as it is safe every day and by the next day it should be back. Do that again and it will take a little less time to refill. Do this a bunch of times and eventually your body will become a perpetual conduit of it, where it springs forth readily, much like a fountain or a barrel with a hole in it. But there are dangers inherent in this, it does become a vicious cycle and if your body gets too used to consuming Aether it will start to spend it faster than it can replenish it. Worse of all, those who get too lost in the sauce, as it were, end up losing their own volition and turning into mere batteries without inner will, fountains of uncontrolled magic which will either destroy everything in its path or be bound to be used by some other unscrupulous practitioner as a power source. Let me tell you right now, that is what i plan to do if you fuck up and get yourself stuck like that, but if you are careful then you will be more useful to me as an independent agent that a mindless battery. Just be careful, ok?
The second alternative is environmental Aether, a bit harder to access and its results won't be as powerful but its one advantage is that it’s practically unlimited, as i said, every living creature generates it and that includes all living creatures since this planet was formed, so as you can imagine, there is plenty of it. Some people (i keep saying some people and that is because i can't be arsed to remember their names) have said that it is precisely because of this oversaturation of it that humanity was able to develop intelligence, self awareness and the capacity to manipulate magic, basically, like a million billion years ago a bunch of monkeys just happened to exist at the right moment that the earth was so oversaturated with the stuff that their brains couldn't help but start figuring ways to use it. So what until then had just been the useless and purposeless banging of rocks, suddenly it started to yield knives and wheels. What used to be meaningless rubbing of sticks could afterwards generate basic fire spells. But we are not here to bang rocks or make fire, are we? We want to make things that are actually interesting.
In order to do this we need to be able to channel Aether, and in order to do that what we need is the first ritual to be performed on us. The first channeling, before that you can move your hands about and make runes and lose your voice chanting intonations and very little will happen. Oh everyone can channel a little Aether. We can all cast the ancient spell known as “writing”, we scribe the right archaic symbols in a piece of parchment and suddenly anyone who reads those symbols will hear our thoughts in their mind, barely costs a few drops of Aether to pull that one off, but if you want to move mountains, we will have to perform the first rite upon thee so that when you do something, reality listens.
And in order to know what your first rite is going to be, you need to know what school of magic you are interested in. To my knowledge there are six: Wizards, Witches, Magicians, Sorcerers, Alchemists and Druids. Now i will go on to explain them but before that. If you managed to get here without stopping or having to double check or re-read anything, congratulations, go drink a glass of water, if on your way to the kitchen you find me passed out on the couch, DO. NOT. WAKE. ME. UP. or losing all your aether will be the least of your concerns.