Of Greater Hidden Workings

Out of everything I have listed here, these Rituals are the least visible and the most expensive to cast. They are not all the exclusive province of villains, but a wise ruler is aware and always warded against these magics.

Of the Emotional

Rehobaum’s Agony

Converts pain into one of five physical effects: heat, cold, speed, strength, or toughness. Originally developed as a military Ritual, this is now also used in construction, where teams of workers sustain supernatural strength by channelling the pain of labour; this, Your Grace, is why Taprobane magicians so readily find work as site foremen. The downside is that the consent of the participant is absolutely required and it takes a great deal of time to set up, and usually one body can only support one effect. It cannot be cast on oneself.

Kanishka’s Iron Mourning Shield

This is a specific invocation of Rehobaum’s Agony; it converts emotional pain into a physically protective barrier. There is some consensus that it follows Heart Sutra ideals - using grief as a shield is a motif of great narrative importance in every we’ve examined. This has led to the saying “pain is how we know we’re still alive” and the theory that suffering is the universal shared experience across all intelligent beings.

As for military applications - if Your Grace ever sees an army of Singhapura, and wonder why sometimes there are graybeards and old women who fight as if they had hides of iron - well, this is because they have probably lived long and suffered a great deal, and thus have frightfully effective Shields. Former Sin-Eaters tend to be this way. Like the Agony, it cannot be cast on oneself.

Genova’s Burning Wrath

This Ritual, too, is based on the Agony. It turns anger into focused heat or force. There’s a certain degree of feedback based on Mirror Sutra principles - channelling anger requires focused attention upon it, which intensifies it, which increases the fuel, which intensifies the channel. I say this because the Wrath always builds on itself, and many have gone berserk with rage and turned into juggernauts of death, especially in battle, burning until even their own bodies are hollowed out husks. Such magicians are rarely captured alive. Fewer can be actually restored. General policy is that a kill order goes out on anyone suspected to be compromised by the Wrath.

Saddhatissa’s Peace

Another a modification of the Agony. It converts happiness into a soft, calming aura, spreading outward from the caster in diminishing waves. It reduces agitation, fear, and hostility in those it reaches. The aura does not discriminate between ally and enemy. Unlike other Agony spells, it can only be cast on oneself. There is a natural ceiling; the Peace, sustained over time, depletes the emotional state that powers it, and thus depletes its caster. Saddhatissa reportedly spent considerable time in prison before devising this, which might explain a lot about the working.

Of Narrative and Belief

These are workings I include to as to illustrate to Your Grace the nature of condition-dependent magic. These Rituals are enormous, so much so that the world itself will often react with omens and portents. Anyone capable of attempting these workings is classified as a Paragon-class mage and forced into an oath of loyalty to Singhapura - or immediately executed, if they cannot.

Odiris’ Lotus of World-Shaping Belief

An expensive ritual that binds participants to specific roles within a defined narrative structure, imposing story patterns on local reality. The story must already be in motion - the unlikely hero must already be in unlikely circumstances, the betrayal must already be possible, and so on. Without this narrative substrate, the Ritual has nothing to attach itself to.

The Ritual ends when either the story ends or the caster dies. It has a habit of killing the caster if any of the participants become aware of the nature of the story they are trapped in. A full Lotus has only been cast thrice in recorded history without killing the caster, and all of those casts were by Angamma the Mad, who ruled the underworld of Basnapura for a decade before being caught and executed.

Any attempt to cast it earns a kill order.

Ahubudhu’s Invisible Hand

This Ritual is the opposite. It nudges a situation toward a desired but unexpected outcome through apparently coincidental events. The mechanism is not fully understood; the timeline is very difficult to control. The Ritual produces no magical signature after the initial cast, but the costs are vicious, compounding with the complexity of the chain of events that must happen. It is banned and sanctioned for use only by with the combined, direct approval of the Adhiraj and both Red and White Councils of the Haugris Church and the Dean of Taprobane and the Head of the Merchants’ Guild. Any attempt to cast it otherwise earns a kill order.

Of Detection and Operational Support

Volta’s Lantern

This Ritual reveals magical beings, residue and active workings in the vicinity. In its weakest form, it announces the caster’s presence to anything it finds; but when set up in one of its more evolved forms, it allows a magician to grasp and control other workings, effectively subverting magics. Volta discovered a way to minimise the energy cost of the more evolved form by flickering the working too rapidly for the eye to follow - this is considered very clever design, and this Ritual is taught as both a utility and an example of efficient, structured magic. In battle, defensive Ritualists routinely use it to disrupt or turn an enemy’s magics against them: for example, wards can be easily subverted into Threshold Rituals that trap the people they are supposed to protect.

Sangamitta’s Mirror of True Reflection

Based on Volta’s Lantern, the Mirror reflects the caster’s understanding of a Ritual back at them as a structured assessment. It is the first Ritual Taprobane teaches; it is critical for students to self-evaluate and learn from their mistakes. Sangamitta supposedly designed it after observing a member of the Order of the Sound of One Hand Clapping negate a working by a Grandmaster who did not understand the inner depths of his own Ritual. This may seem like a strange thing to include here, but it also means that any talented Ritualist can, given time and enough books, evolve and improve their Rituals to a degree that would generally take a more intuitive practitioner decades to learn on their own.

Volta’s Iterations

Operating on similar concepts as Volta’s own Ritual, the Iterations executes any attached Ritual a given number of times. The iteration count is set at casting, and each count multiplies the cost of the original Ritual plus the cost of the Iteration itself. A poor implementation set to too high a number will kill a caster. The use is obvious: it is immediately a power multiplier to anything a Ritualist wishes to cast. Even a simple Volta’s Fist can be turned into a devastating blow that lands several times in quick succession (and is often used for exactly that purpose).

The Taprobane Lattice

This Ritual has many complex components - it would be accurate to call it a set of interlocking superRituals - but is it essentially a communication and Burden-sharing framework that can connect multiple practitioners, with defined load-bearing nodes, redundant routing, and capacity limits per participant. It enables the working of large-scale magics in tandem, and is generally used before any large group working. A well-cast Lattice can shed costs gracefully rather than catastrophically collapsing on its casters, and typically reduces aggregate casting cost significantly from the first large working onward. This, arguably, is the Taprobane System’s single greatest contribution to magic, and Singhapura’s great weapon. A Paragon may be capable of killing a a dozen individual Masters, but the Lattice allows even a hundred individuals to merge their strength and work together as one.

In Conclusion

There are three points to this section, Your Grace. One, it lets you understand the upper limits of what magic can do. Two, it illustrates what happens to those magicians who can or think they can work magic on such scale. Three, it lets you understand the hidden might at the command of powerful empires and conglomerations. Beyond the flash of fire and frost is a level which cannot be seen but is far deadlier. Singhapura is not alone in this tier of talent; this is why it can coexist alongside Lusia, the Rosantic League and Ealdorfold, even though the way they percieve the world is so different. Mutually assured destruction is a powerful deterrant. Within this framework is Wattle, and thus Daub, and everything else: your collective prosperity depends on being useful and partaking in the benefits of entities that have access to this degree of power.

Folio III · Of Magic

Transcribed by Victor Konara