Thesis on Magic and the Elements

The Thesis on Magic and the Elements is the second of the two theses that Castor defended for his mastery at the Archon in the Mürekkep ve Çelik ("Ink and Steel") campaign. Its subject was set by his teacher Herrenhal. It argues that magic works by handling matter and the elements, a view set against the accepted teaching of the school, and it remains Castor's own theory rather than a settled truth.^{1 2}

Another account of magic's foundation holds that the goddess Zeolet wove the wilder, uncontrollable Eidar into the Aether, a form that mortals could use.^{3 4 5}

The argument

Castor agreed with Horus Maxwell that mages create nothing from nothing, but widened the point: not only conjuration but all magic, he said, is the handling of matter. All matter is built of elements, and a mage makes fire by kindling certain elements in the air through a focus; by changing the element used, or the way of handling it, rather than using a stronger spell, a mage can reach new results. Dividing magic into fixed words and gestures for fixed effects was useful for teaching but limiting; the mages before the Archon, he claimed, bent matter to their will, a way harder to teach but bounded only by the mind and its power rather than the number of spells learned by heart. As an example of rare mages working where magic should fail, he named Xeratos, who walked by magic on planes where he should not have been able to.^{6 7 8 9}

The board asked about places where magic does not work, above all the great footprints of the goddess Zeolet, mostly lying under the sea. Castor suggested that such places might be thought of as matter armoured against arcane meddling.¹⁰

He first held that a mage cannot raise the dead, since life is a divine creation. Asked about the spell Wish, he granted the exception, explaining it through the intervention of the gods. He went on to hope that one day the functions of life in a dead body might be restarted by acting on matter, while allowing that this might prove wrong.^{11 12}

The demonstration

The defence moved to the open amphitheatre in the old garden, where the Golden Arrow meets. Castor threw a purple ball of force that burst in the air, a second ball of water or ice, and a ball of fire that he sent about a mile up before he himself stepped through the air to the same height. He then raised a wall he called ice; the board judged it a wall of fire turned to cold by Herrenhal's method, not a barrier of true ice.^{1 13 14}

Reception

The grandmaster Exolkar warned that outside the Archon people might take such a strange fireball for a pact with a devil, and said a demonstration alone did not prove a theory, though the ideas were worth arguing. The history teacher Hemme set against it the example of Xeratos, who had put magic into teachable books, the very method Castor scorned. Herrenhal said that much of it might be wrong, but that someone had to say it.^{15 16 17}

Horus Maxwell disagreed with nearly all of it. He found little outright error but too many untested claims: the model of shaping energy had flaws but had been tried far more, and he himself sensed a different energy in conjuration. He judged the work valuable in the long run but unfinished, a field that might outlast Castor's life, though it might one day change how magic is learned. Imralis Silvarel of Starsong found it innovative. Castor chose to go on with the research.^{18 19 20 21 22}