Of Force, Defence, and the Ordering of Violent Magic

I will begin with things Your Grace appreciates: the hammer and their wall, in several forms.

Of Physical Effect

Volta’s Fist

Projects concentrated magical force as a directed impact. This is often taught as being equivalent to throwing a brick at someone’s head. Most Adepts can handle this, but Masters are expected to have much more nuanced control. The Fist can be made sharper, like the tip of a dagger, or a weaker but broader blow; think of it as an invisible blade or arrow hovering around a magician at all times. Quite a few assassins have made the mistake of underestimating it.

However, this Ritual is easily detectable and easily disrupted. Among other things, a skilled Master can turn it back on its user. An actual brick is, in many circumstances, more efficient. Thus the Fist is considered a good student exercise and the last resort of a Master.

Rehobaum’s Forge

The Forge was originally designed to weld metals and bring other materials to ignition or explosion point. The Iron Sutra presents a specific constraint - magic cannot work effectively on most metals - and the Forge navigates this by roundabout reference; only the magic generates and directs the heat. It was not long before we figured out that it could be used offensively. It takes time for the Forge to heat up, as the saying goes, but the result is a devastating burst of pure heat and incineration. Some Masters have twiddled with this spell enough that one of its variants - called Fireball - is the equivalent of getting hit by a flaming trebuchet (and similarly difficult to aim compared to the precision of the original).

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 heat must have a prepared exit, and hasty use of this Ritual has been known to accidentally boil the blood of the magician attempting it. This is one of the most commonly used Rituals, especially useful in plumbing. Can be used offensively by supercharging the Ritual, making it explode in devastating waves of heat and cold (depending on the size of the Ritual, of course).

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 complexity, definitions and very slow charge-up time, 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 manufacture. However, there are at least two active Paragons we know of who can use it to superheat and pressure-cook flesh.

Meena’s Catapult

Uses a moderate force to redirect the motion of masses. Though termed the Catapault, it is more accurate to say that it’s similar to the moves that champion fighters do, when 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, however: 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. Used defensively to protect against archers and siege weapons.

Yamuna’s Defiance of Heaven and Earth

A tremendously costly Ritual that forces local laws of reality to conform briefly to the target’s expectations, creating a window in which normally impossible actions become possible. It fights the action of every known Sutra of magic. Requires two casters - one to cast, and the other to be the target. The price is ultimate; it invariably takes the life of both its users, and, if possible, the lives of anyone around them as well. The Adhiraj’s personal guard is trained extensively in this Ritual, and only the Adhiraj and a select few others know how to defend against it.

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’s 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.

Of Barriers, Thresholds, and Containment

Benjamin’s Gourd

Lusian alchemists have long known how to capture the energy of lightning. They use high metal spires that channel the lightning into immense clay pots of concotions, 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 can stave off the costs of a Ritual almost indefinitely - provided the Ritual is set up with the ability to connect to a Gourd and convert its energy. 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. It is therefore considered good practice to form batteries made of 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 creates a zone in which other magic can be created or redirected at will with perfect precision at no cost. This is immensely technically sophisticated, since it practically suspends many of the principles of magic for a short time. It’s also of limited value outside theory, requiring multiple Masters to cast and prodigous amounts of energy to redirect even in a square foot. The Paragon Sangamitta developed it during the early days of the Iron Pagoda as a tool for her many experiments. Today it is mainly studied and 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 - to convince a given target that it simultaneously occupies two states, both present and absent. The target is held in what the Pagoda called superposition until the Ritual is released. It is a very fragile Ritual, easily broken by so much as a mosquito touching the target. It is also famous for not working on cats. Sangamitta postulated that cats possess access to a third state, known 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 and is the basis for all others. This set is cheap to cast, scaling in requirement with the size of the threshold, and is used extensively in fortresses, prisons, and schools. And in plumbing, again. And in mines and warehouses.

Poojakandha’s Second

Seals the threshold against all passage except a defined class of entity, specified at casting. Anything outside the class has to supply more energy than the working has to break through it. 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. Famously, such a Ritual, designed to keep out male visitors to an Imperial Princess, failed when her lover, who thought of themselves as female, simply walked in and eloped with her. This led to a certain revision of laws (and slowly, attitudes) on gender . . .

Poojakandha’s Third

Does not seal the door at all. Instead, it decouples the threshold’s actual location from its apparent one and puts the real passage elsewhere. Redirection is cheaper than denial, so the ongoing cost of the Ritual is lower than any of the seal formulations. Often used as a security measure by the rich and the powerful to thwart assasins. 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 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 are a nightmare. This is especially a problem that compounds over generations, as the world changes, language evolves, and people’s understanding of what words mean shifts over time. This makes for some interesting challenges in inheritance law and storage. Many doors in the Waste, for example, can be solved by riddling; the general 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. A sustained assault by multiple parties is not manageable on a single practitioner’s budget. When the working runs out of energy, it typically destroys whatever it was cast upon. Some Chapters of the Military Orders use this spell on shields which can then double as incendiary explosions when thrown.

In Conclusion

I have, of course, omitted the vast number of workings in favor of the basic ingredients. I do not expect Your Grace to learn every Ritual and every variant; only to impress on you what is well-known. You will agree that several of these workings allow us to turn even ordinary Charter Knights into absurdly lethal weapons - with proper training and resources, of course. There are improvements that are easy to make and there are improvements that, given Daub’s resources, should only be limited to a handful of people. Perhaps this also will help explain why getting into a battle of any sort with Singhapura forces is a terrible idea: if one knight can become an unholy terror, imagine tens of thousands of heavy infantry empowered by hundreds of mages, and you will perhaps better understand why it is necessary to stay in the good books of the Empire.

Folio IV · Of Magic

Transcribed by Victor Konara