Of Emotion, Belief, and the Detection of Hidden Workings

The workings that follow are, of all those I have assembled, the most likely to be used against Your Grace without her knowledge. Emotional magic is difficult to distinguish from ordinary feeling; narrative workings are designed to resemble coincidence. 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. This Ritual is used extensively in construction, where teams of men sustain supernatural strength by channelling the pain of labour; this, Your Grace, is why Taprobane magicians so readily find work as site foremen. The consent of the participant determines whether the cost is fairly distributed or displaced back onto the caster, so it cannot be used on an unwilling subject. Curiously, it also fails if cast on oneself.

Kanishka’s Iron Mourning Shield

This is a specific invocation of Rehobaum’s Agony; it converts grief into a protective barrier. It is particularly strong because of the Heart Sutra - using grief as a shield is a motif of great narrative weight across every culture we have examined. Your Grace may sometimes wonder why, amongst the armies of Singhapura, there sometimes are graybeards and old women who fight as if they are invincible, who indeed cannot be easily pierced by spears or arrows; this is because they who have lived long and suffered much have frightfully effective Shields. 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. It relies on feedback based on Mirror Sutra principles; channelling anger requires focused attention upon it, which intensifies it, which increases the fuel, which intensifies the channel. Unlike the Agony, it can be cast on oneself. This, however, is dangerous, for the effect builds upon itself, and a magician may find themselves attempting to steer a flooded river; many are those who have gone berserk with rage and turned on their fellows in war.

Saddhatissa’s Peace

This Ritual, like the others, is a modification of the Agony. It converts happiness into a soft, calming aura, spreading outward from the caster in diminishing waves and reducing 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; happiness does not carry the narrative weight that grief does, and the aura, 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 may explain both the application and the mechanism.

Of Narrative and Belief

These workings I include in this corpus so as to illustrate to Your Grace the nature of condition-dependent magic. They do not generate power and direct it; they convince the universe to do something it was already inclined to do. They also announce themselves at any meaningful scale; if Your Grace ever commissions this class of working, she should understand that the working is visible to those trained to see it via omens and portents; it is thus easily countered or avoided.

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; with this substrate, the Ritual has nothing to attach itself to, and the full cost is paid for nothing. The Ritual ends when either the story ends or the caster dies; it has a habit of being ruinously expensive if any of the participants thus bound learns of the nature of the story they are trapped in, and thus resists. A full Lotus has only been cast thrice in recorded history without killing the caster.

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 Fire Sutra defers every cost to a later date at a rate that compounds with the complexity of the chain of events that must happen. It is banned and sanctioned only by explicit Singhapura authority in circumstances serious enough to warrant it. Your Grace should note that a working which looks like coincidence, from the perspective of those on the receiving end, is indistinguishable from good or ill fortune.

Of Detection and Operational Support

Volta’s Lantern

This Ritual reveals magical beings, residue and active workings in the vicinity. The detection is bidirectional by design: it announces the caster’s presence to anything it finds. Volta discovered a way to minimise the energy cost 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.

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. Practitioners who succeed on the first attempt are, in Taprobane, the ones to watch for greatness.

Volta’s Iterations

Operating on similar concepts as Volta’s own Ritual, the Iterations is a support Ritual; it executes any attached Ritual a given number of times. The iteration count is set at casting; however, practitioners must take care to calibrate it properly, as a poor implementation set to too high a number will unstoppably drain a caster of all life.

The Taprobane Lattice

Establishes a burden-sharing framework across 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 used before any large group working. The Lattice is a complex Ritual designed to shed load gracefully rather than catastrophically collapsing on its casters. A well-designed lattice typically reduces aggregate casting cost significantly from the first large working onward, such that at certain scales it is said to offset the cost of the Lattice itself. This, arguably, is the Taprobane System’s single greatest contribution to magic, and Singhapura’s great weapon; it allows many hands to make light of work.