[Apocrypha] Magic, Magnus and Mundus

People ask "what is magic?" They say "how does magic work?" They say "where does magic come from?"

I would humbly submit that these are the wrong questions. Magic is the default state of the Aurbis. Outside of time, magic is everywhere, so much so that the slightest imagining becomes instant reality. This is why they called it the War of Manifest Metaphors. Outside time everyone has the power to wish whatever they want into reality.

Now, in such an environment, what can it mean to be a God of Magic? The idea is nonsensical! When the supply of magicka is unlimited, then everyone can be a god of whatever they like. Among the et'Ada, Magnus was celebrated not for his access to magicka but for the breadth of his imagination, the depth of his concentration and the force of his will. Magnus is not the god of Magic, but of Magicians. He is the God of The Art where many would have him be merely the God of Paint, so to speak. In this he is widely misunderstood.

It was because of these prodigious mental gifts that Magnus was asked to take the Lead in Project: Mundus. He alone had the mental capacity to encompass such a project: a vast arena thousands of miles across and tens of thousands of years long, with a multi-threaded, protected timeline and carefully managed access to magicka with all the creatia carefully graded to be of a uniform intent and luminosity. This was an Arena that would allow theories to be tested under carefully controlled conditions. Arguments could be settled once and for all! Battles could not only be fought, now they could be won! Or lost! It was going to be wonderful!!

And it would all have worked perfectly too, except that Time Engine refused to Eventuate and the Wheel refused to Revolve. And then Akatosh and Lorkhan (who were responsible for those subsystems respectively) both looked at Magnus expecting him to fix the problem. Meanwhile all that carefully graded magicka was swirling around at random and gathering together in pools and getting dirty and degraded, and all of a sudden you couldn't put one boot in front of the other on the Mundus deck without magic flaring in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

So everyone expected Magnus to sort it all out, but that would mean him having to sit and micro-manage the entire operation personally. Well, he wasn't having that! It was one thing asking him to design and build the the damn thing, but he never signed up to spend the rest of Eternity driving it. Not so Akatosh could avoid worrying about his old age, and certainly not so Lorkhan could run off and sulk in a universe of his own making. It was time to go home.

Well, when Magnus announced his intention to depart, the others sealed the exits and refused to let him leave. So Magnus just flew up (in so far as "up" meant anything with space and time both on the blink) punched a hole in the shielding that was supposed to keep the wild magic out, and flew off to Aetherius. Seeing this his friends and companions followed suit, as did most of the contractors working on the project who had a sudden feeling they weren't getting paid for this one. Most of the carefully calibrated creatia were drawn off in the wake of this departure, and wild magicka began to trickle in through the holes.

Well, there was no way the Mudex Arena was going to be fit for purpose after this. Any hope of a controlled environment vanished when Magnus poked a hole in the Sky. So of course Akatosh blamed Lorkhan and Lorkhan blamed Akatosh, and then of course, Trinimac had to go and stick his oar in and there was blood on the decking before the end, but eventually they managed to get the World jury rigged so that it worked, in a kind-of-sort-of sort of way. So maybe the project wasn't a total write off, but the only people really satisfied were the Daedra who laughed themselves silly before wandering off to create their own, less ambitious realms.

And so now we all get to live in the broken down wreck of a once-grand experiment. Akatosh and Lorkhan still squabble about who was supposed to do what and to what end, but time still flows, for the most part at least, and some of the towers are still keeping the Wheel from impacting the Hub, so we should probably count our blessings.

As for Magnus, nobody knows. He's probably off in a realm of his own design by now, busily doing things we have no words for to things we couldn't describe if we tried.

So remember: the important question is not "how does magic work?" but "why is there so little of it around here?" Magic works because the universe naturally responds to will and imagination, but there's so little magicka filters down to Mundus that most people live and die never understanding that fact. And it's not the amount of magicka you can access that defines a great magician, but the skill and precision with which you can manipulate the stuff. A great magician can achieve wonders with very little, while a bumbler can make a complete mess regardless of the resources available.

And remember that Magnus is the the God of The Art, and not merely God of Paint. If you ever meet him, you'll be glad you remembered the distinction.