Magicka, Creatia, and Tones: The Narrowing of Possibility into Actuality

In a previous text, I described magicka as follows:

> Magicka, too, is a construct of Tones, and it is raw possibility, substance, and power. It comes in multiple forms, as creatia or magicka of various flavors, but fundamentally it is all magicka, and it is quite pliant to the desires of spirits.

In this text, I'll briefly explore how I understand the dynamic between magicka, its Tonal nature, energy, and material objects. I felt prompted to do so by this comment by /u/BrynjarIsenbana, who states that "everything in the Aurbis is magicka." Essentially, this text is all about me taking this one quote out of context and quibbling with it (sorry, Bryn!), then quibbling with my own quibbling and stumbling onto a new idea.

Quibbling

Magicka isn't everything in the Aurbis, after all. Just all the material bits, the matter and energy. In my interpretation, magicka itself is formed of Tones, and Tones are more diverse than just magicka. By way of example, when a spirit uses Thu'um, it doesn't require or involve magicka. If someone Shouts Fire into the world, it's just there, no magicka required, right?

Metaquibbling

Hang on... I just said magicka is all matter and energy. If the fire produced by Thu'um isn't made of magicka, then what is it? Is there some kind of magickal fire that is distinct from Tonal fire, while both of them behave exactly the same way? No, that just seems unwieldy and silly. So what's going on?

A New Idea

Magicka is a construct of Tones; so, which Tones? The defining, dominant Tone(s) would be something like Possibility, Potential, Maybe. But those Tones alone aren't all of what magicka is; there's also a bit of Substance in there (bringing forth creatia), or Energy (magicka used for spells, or in the form of Aetherial light). And those categories of magicka get further subdivided into things like azure plasm, with whatever Tones would narrow them down into those distinct forms.

And that's the key point here: Narrowing magicka down into more specific forms, by adding Tonal definition. The process continues as magicka and creatia get used by spirits to make any and all worlds, objects, forces, and effects, such that all of them have this core seed of magicka with layers and layers of definitional Tones causing that Possibility to become actualized into something specific, something concrete.

This is what spellcasting is, fundamentally. You take some magicka, and you use your mind to add in whatever Tones are applicable, and you project that effect into the world.

But this is also what something like Thu'um amounts to: Inserting a Tone into the world and converting magicka. The difference is, you're not converting your own personal store of magicka; you're converting the magicka embedded in the world around you. This magicka is just sitting there, in the form of objects, air, space itself, gravity, etc. All of those things are Possibility that has had other Tones mixed into it; when you Shout Fire, you're just overwhelming and blasting away those Tones in the area of effect, replacing them with Fire, and the raw Possibility left over jumps in, pairs with the Tonal Fire, and materializes fire.

Notably, Thu'um would be much more difficult than regular spellcasting, in terms of mental effort. You have to have the ability to undo, by brute force, the material reality around you, and substitute something else. Spellcasting, by contrast, involves using already pliant magicka, just waiting to be combined with some Tones to bring into actuality.

This would also imply that you could convert an object into magicka by stripping away definitional layers, making it less specific and more protean. Perhaps this is precisely how alchemical processes produce potions of magicka. The ingredients, or the process, or the act of ingestion, or some combination thereof somehow cancel out the definitional layers in the substance and leave behind magicka that you can scoop up into your personal reserves.

A particularly interesting example is the Equilibrium spell in Skyrim. The caster converts health into magicka, which, under this idea, would be quite literal: The caster's body is being stripped of definitional Tones and converted into magicka for their reserves. Since stripping away Tones by brute mental force is more difficult than casting this spell seems to be, it is likely this would require some magicka to kickstart the process, which would immediately be restored. And, as luck would have it, there's an (as-of-yet unconfirmed) bug in the game, listed on the UESP page, claiming that you actually can't cast Equilibrium if you have zero magicka when you start.

So, that's what I've added to my interpretation: All material phenomena of the Aurbis start out as Tonal Possibility, with more and more Tones layered on, narrowing it down into actualized, defined objects, effects, and energies.