The Science of Restoration: An Introductory Text

Hello everyone,

For my first submission here, in the vein of /u/zbzszzzt123 's excellent Winterhold College Textbook series, I thought I'd have a to at expanding on the School of Restoration. Criticism highly appreciated!

The Science of Restoration: An Introductory Text

The School of Restoration has an interesting definition and a great deal of significance, historically, politically, and most of all magically. Restoration has obvious uses in battle, of course, and Restoration magic also tends to be some of the best-received amongst the more magnephobic of Tamriel, for evident reasons.

A brief tangent before beginning in earnest: in recent years, amongst the wizards of Winterhold in particular, there has been a certain tendency to look down upon Restoration as "not real magic", the reserve of foolish priests and priestesses in their temples. This is an idea so mind-bogglingly stupid that, as my dear friend Urag might say, it would take months just to explain why the very assertion made no sense. Let it be said that life is of course the most complex and bewildering phenomenon known to Man or Mer, and to leave Restoration to amateurs, however well-intentioned, is not only nigh-suicidal (as any adventurer will attest) but academically criminal.

The School of Restoration focusses on energies, particularly of life and undeath, but this is an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong. A Ward spell, for instance, is absolutely a Restoration spell, yet it bears little resemblance to healing magic. With the dissolution of the Mysticism School as too broad a category, Dispelling magic can also be categorised as Restoration magic. The spells of resistance to magical or mundane fire, frost, lightning, poison and other elements are generally viewed as Restoration spells also. There is even a certain rather niche Restoration spell that allows a wizard to target another being with a self-targeted spell. As such, we might broaden the definition of Restoration to include some "meta-magic", or magic that undoes, reverses or otherwise affects other magic.

This is more intuitive than it might seem. We are all aware that it is possible to cast magic through brute force, to employ a physical analogy: rather than the delicate formulations of more careful wizards, a capable mage might choose to merely force their magic into a Flames spell by sheer will. Such a process is of course inefficient. But where does the information to cast the spell come from? Whence does the hasty Mage draw his or her spell's delicate and complicated structure? The answer to this question lies at the heart of almost all Restoration magic.

The complex formulae and arrangements of magicka that constitute spells can infer the necessary information for their own existence, given enough willpower and imagination on the part of the caster. This is more difficult for some spells than others. The famous Alteration text Reality and Other Falsehoods shows one approach to this issue: rather than attempt to teach the complexities of magic to the novice who comes seeking instruction, which would allow more efficient magic but take time to impart, the wizard of the story chose to provide an analogy that allowed the caster to shape magic more easily (though blindly).

Illusion magic that manipulates the mind relies on the caster's mind to model the target's and so get around the issue of information. This is why it is more difficult to cast Illusion magic on Daedra or the undead: their thought processes are unusual, and so must be compensated for in the spell. Restoration, as a rule, is the school that relies most of all on magically-inferred information. Take the simplest Healing spell, for instance. We living creatures are unimaginably complex. A minor paper-cut is in actuality a rough tear through innumerable tiny cells and vessels and minutely arranged tissues. The act of channeling magicka has been proven to increase intelligence greatly over time, but Shalidor himself could not possibly hope to directly visualise every particle affected during the healing of the smallest wound, let alone the unimaginably delicate and advanced magic involved in healing, say, brain injuries. As such, the spell must be shaped such that it can most efficaciously take the form required to heal the injury. This is also theorised to be why it is difficult to heal certain cursed or otherwise extraordinary wounds: the residual magic interferes with the formation of the Restoration spell.

Dispelling magic means unravelling the residual threads of a continuous effect and preventing them from acting upon the target. This can be brute-forced due to the nature of Restoration, which will infer the pattern, but it is of course more magicka-efficient to understand the pattern and direct magicka against it oneself. Undoing magic, however, almost always relies on Restoration magic to glean information. If you were to stumble across a gold ingot that some skilled Alteration wizard had transmuted from silver, it would appear entirely indistinguishable from any other ingot (short of employing highly advanced analytical magic). You may not know what the ingot was beforehand, or even that it used to be anything other. However, Restoration magic will still allow you to undo the transformation, drawing the necessary information from nowhere.

As such, it is clear that Restoration, being the School that most involves influencing the form of spells, is the classification for many meta-magical spells.

Future texts in this series will cover some basic and, later, more advanced aspects of Restoration magic with regard to how they are cast and under what circumstances they might be used.