Of Force, Defence, and the Ordering of Violent Magic

What follows concerns the direct application of magical force and the construction of magical barriers; the hammer and the wall, in their several forms. These are the workings most often discussed in the councils of soldiers and those who rely on force for their living.

Of Physical Effect

Volta’s (Mountain Crushing) Fist

Projects concentrated magical force as a directed impact. This can be likened to throwing a brick at a distance of a few feet. Most Adepts can improve this; it can be made sharper, like the tip of a dagger, or a weaker but broader blow, which is why those who plan violence against magicians are well advised not to rely on surprise alone. However, the Ritual is easily disrupted; among other things, it can be easily turned back on its user. An actual brick is, in many circumstances, more efficient. The Mountain Crushing Fist is among the first workings most practitioners learn and among the last that experienced magicians use.

Rehobaum’s Forge

Focuses and directs heat, used to forge-weld metals and bring other materials to ignition or explosion point. The Iron Sutra presents a specific constraint here — magic cannot directly touch alloys — and the Forge navigates this by roundabout reference; only the magic generates and directs the heat. Because of this property it can also be used offensively, but its nature is such that it takes time for the Forge to heat up.

Fourier’s Withdrawal of the Sun, also known as Fourier’s Frost

Drains heat from a target area, leaving complex frosty patterns in the resulting cold. The Ritual works only when understood correctly: it is heat redirection, not heat elimination. The heat, therefore, must have a prepared exit, and hasty use of this Ritual has been known to accidentally boil the blood of the magician attempting it.

Fourier’s Five Elements Dissolution, also known as Fourier’s Fork

Uses heat, cold and pressure to rapidly change a given target between a solid, liquid or gaseous state. Due to its definitions, it works best with water and substances that are largely water; Taprobane, after much research, managed to use it for soup cubes for army rations, although field trials found it considerably less helpful than simply making soup the ordinary way. It is now chiefly used in expensive plumbing and in precision forgeworks.

Meena’s Catapult

Uses a moderate force to redirect the motion of masses. Though termed the Catapault, it is better to think of this as moves that champion fighters do, whether they use the force of a rushing opponent against them. The cost of the Ritual is in proportion to weight and speed of the target, with one additional complication: when redirecting, accurate control of the speed of the redirected object requires losing control of the direction in which it is thrown; fine control of the direction makes the speed uncertain.

Yamuna’s Defiance of Heaven and Earth

A tremendously costly Ritual that forces local laws of reality to conform briefly to the caster’s expectations, creating a window in which normally impossible actions become possible. It fights the action of every known Sutra of magic and is thus named honestly. The price is ultimate; it invariably takes the life of its user, and, if possible, the lives of anyone around them as well.

Volta’s Ripple

Expands magical effects from other Rituals outward in diminishing waves. This creates area effects at the cost of severely reduced effects. The rate of decay is predictable and calculable, but the original magic needs to be extremely strong for this to work, or it will devour the energy behind whatever Ritual is attached to it. It is common for batteries of archers in the Military Orders to be deployed with steles worked with Meena’s Catapult and Volta’s Ripple; while this greatly weakens the Catapult and requires prodigious energy, it slows and nudges aside enemy missiles falling within its radius while leaving the archers’ aim unimpeded. Combat magicians and nobles have been known to wear similar devices, of much smaller size and intensity, for their personal protection.

Of Barriers, Thresholds, and Containment

Benjamin’s Gourd

Lusian alchemists have long known how to capture the energy of lightning by means of high metal spires that channel the lightning into immense clay pots of vinegar, in which are suspended copper tubes surrounded by iron rods. These batteries discharge energy slowly but at a regular rate. Using similar principles, Benjamin’s Gourd stores magical energy and discharges it slowly over time, thus allowing us to keep Rituals active for a period; by periodically recharging them, we may prolong a Ritual almost indefinitely. This, Your Grace, allows Singhapura to build potent and long-lasting works, especially wards. Note that Gourds drain themselves over time; it takes some magic to both initialize and to keep itself going. The larger the Gourd, the bigger this effect. Thus it is common to use many smaller Gourds, each of which are individually easier to replace or recharge.

Sangamitta’s Still Waters

A rewritten version of Yamuna’s Defiance; within a defined boundary, it suspends either the Fire, Water, or Wheel Sutras for a brief but exact period, creating a zone in which other magic can be created or redirected at will with perfect precision at no cost. This is of immense technical sophistication, Your Grace; in effect it briefly suspends known law of the universe. However, it is perhaps of limited value outside the theoretical. It requires multiple Masters to cast, and great energy is expended according to the size of the domain thus suspended. The Paragon Sangamitta developed it during the early days of the Iron Pagoda as a tool for her many experiments; it is, today, used by the likes of the Pagoda, the Applied Accidents Division of the LTU, or High Energy Philosophy Department at Taprobane.

Sangamitta’s Sleep, or Sangamitta’s Prison

Uses a pioneering branch of mathematics - again, developed by the Paragon Sangamitta for the Iron Pagoda - to convince a given target that it simultaneously occupies two states, both present and absent; thus the target is held in what the Pagoda called superposition until the Ritual is released. It is a fragile Ritual, easily broken by so much as a mosquito touching the target. Curiously, it is famous for not working on cats. Sangamitta postulated that cats possess access to a third state, causing the Ritual to fail unpredictably; her original notes describe this state only as bloody furious. This discovery led to the universal ban on cats for magical experiments.

Poojakandha’s First

The Poojakandha Rituals are in reality a single Ritual in which minor changes in the configuration of Patterns produce different effects. The first seals a targeted threshold against passage in one direction only. What passes in the permitted direction meets no resistance; what attempts the sealed direction finds it absolute. It is cheap to cast, scaling in requirement with the size of the threshold, and is used extensively in fortresses, prisons, and plumbing.

Poojakandha’s Second

Seals the threshold against all passage except a defined class of entity, specified at casting. Anything outside the class finds the door absolute; anything within it passes without resistance. However, writing the class specification with sufficient precision is difficult, and often lawyers are consulted for the definitions involved; many Threshold Ritualists have gone on to second careers as criminal lawyers after retirement.

Poojakandha’s Third

Does not seal the door at all. Instead, it decouples the threshold’s actual location from its apparent one, so that what appears to be the door opens onto somewhere else entirely, and the real passage is elsewhere. Redirection is cheaper than denial; the ongoing cost is lower than any of the seal formulations. Those who govern by misdirection rather than prohibition may find the principle congenial. However, while it is easy to cast and maintain, Water Sutra workings will route anyone who finds the illusion unconvincing towards unintended destinations. In my time at Taprobane there was a locked door that, having been poorly configured, would by turns deposit curious students into the sealed section of the library, the armory, or into a toilet bowl in the women’s dormitory.

Poojakandha’s Fourth

Seals the threshold conditionally — the door remains sealed until a specified condition is met, at which point it opens freely. Well-specified conditional seals can run unattended for centuries. Poorly specified ones open for reasons the original caster would not recognise. This is a problem that compounds over generations, as the world changes, language evolves, and the Heart Sutra’s understanding of what words mean shifts over time. Many doors in the Waste, to cite a familiar example, can be solved by riddling; the scholarly consensus is that these are the effect of such ancient seals malfunctioning.

Poojakandha’s Fifth

Seals the threshold in both directions and returns external force at double magnitude to its source. The caster pays the difference between what is received and what is reflected on every impact. A sustained assault by multiple parties is not manageable on a single practitioner’s budget, and when the working runs out of energy, it typically destroys whatever it was cast upon. Your Grace should consider this Ritual an illustration of a universal principle: a defence that costs the defender more than the attacker is merely a slower surrender.