This is related to my yesterday’s post about Alelon, a fictional world I’m creating. That post gave you an overview of the world, this one will go into more detail of the magic.
As I mentioned before, magic was brought to Alelon in the form of a substance discarded by aliens. By itself, magic is a form of energy that has reality-bending properties and becomes activated in presence of will and intention. In high concentration it is extremely toxic to all complex forms of Alelon life, because it literally causes cells to morph and move on their own. The zone surrounding the immediate impact place turned dead.
The impact created a dust cloud that reached the atmosphere and spread around the globe. Fallout from that cloud was not enough to kill life on the spot, but it had a range of negative effects of more intelligent forms of life, and was deadly for most humans. In low doses, magic can’t cause cell dissipation, but can latch onto more complex ways of mental conceptualization and kill the body indirectly.
Several groups of people survived (see the original post for details). Over the course of generations, they built up resistance towards magic and now can engage with it, although high doses, comparable to the moon or the impact zone, are still deadly. Currently, all living things on Alelon accumulated some amount of magic inside their bodies. Presence of that magic allows performing magical acts and the level of resistance defines natural talent limitations.
Magicians of Alelon have very different systems of rationalizing and utilizing magic, depending on their local cultural traditions, but all these acts serve one purpose: conceptualizing a desired outcome, channeling one’s body magic into it, and then recharging. A common way to recharge your body’s magical levels is food, because plants and animals already contain magic on their own. However, some people (predominantly ante nasin) carry magically charged totems with them, that can be used as a resource by themselves. Another purpose of these totems is enhancing conceptualization.
Many, especially sartamam, and, in the past, the currently dead civilization of micaolz, are interested in raising their natural resistance caps. Micaolz specifically were extremely focused on keeping their levels of magic at maximal capacity in addition to raising resistance, which gave them the amount of power not seen on Alelon before or after.
Some disconnected facts:
- Plants are very good at accumulating magic and cleaning up their surroundings, making it safe for more complex forms of life;
- Eating magicians is a more efficient way to maximize your magical abilities than eating plants, animals, or random people, and may even give your children higher natural resistance;
- One of the ways to raise your resistance is getting really big;
- The moon is far enough to not be particularly harmful for health, but it has so much magic that most people hear some kind of a buzz when it is in the sky and feel distress. Alelon cultures are much more interested in the moon’s actual trajectory in the sky than its visible phases;
- Despite 10 thousand years of coexistence with magic, most cases of its usage remain casual and small-scale and do not come close to the amount of transformativeness aliens extract from it, but that may eventually change.
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