Imagining a world in which sorcery plays a similar role as technology here. Again.

Inspired a little by Psychic Academy, I started writing another fiction story. The connection is pretty far from plagiarism, as usual. When I say one of my stories is inspired by another story, it usually happens like this: I condense the other story down to a short paragraph or even just a couple sentences. Then I expand those again. So basically if you were to tell the two stories in a short paragraph each, they would sound the same, but if you were to read them, they would be completely different.

The short version: A teenage boy comes to a high school for gifted youngsters who can wield extraordinary powers. He does not know exactly what he can do, and people tend to mis-estimate him, but he turns out to have talent. More importantly, there are girls! Very different girls. What kind of relationship will he have with each of them?

Actually, I am more interested in the magic, but there is no way anyone would read it without girls. I should probably throw in a pretty boy too just in case.

To the matter at hand: Worldbuilding! This story is actually in the same timeline as one I started on last year (or was it the year before?), but takes place a few generations later, when society has started to depend on sorcery, rather than it being a disruptive technology (and generally outlawed) as in the first story.

Sorcery (in this and all of my stories) is the art of drawing magic from other worlds, generally from worlds in which it is more plentiful and into worlds where it is scarce. Magic is by default a chaotic force, breaking the rules of nature. As such, it needs to be bound by powerful spells. Rather than the willpower and talent of the individual, as in traditional magic stories, the magic here is bound by arcane sigils, elaborately drawn patterns that in this case just happen to look vaguely like Japanese or Chinese characters.

Both this method of binding magic, and the five colors of magic, were used in the NaNoWriMo Novel That Deleted Itself And Its Backups, two years ago this fall. However, that novel was set in a modern version of the world in the game Master of Magic, so the magic was native to that planet, and there were magical crystals, magical metals, and various non-human races common to fantasy worlds: Elves, dwarves, lizardmen and catgirls. In today’s story, however, there are only humans (although they had a brief visit from an elf-like race that taught them sorcery). And the magic is drawn from worlds where there is (supposedly) too much of it, one world for each of the colors of magic.

The colors of magic are the same as in Master of Magic and the more famous Magic: The Gathering. I may have tweaked them slightly. There are five colors, or rather five and a half:

Red is the color of fire and direct destruction. However, it can also be inverted to create cold. It is the easiest color to bring into being, but hard to control in large quantities. Red wielders tend to be extremely energetic.

Green is the color of nature, life and fertility. It also has healing powers. Green wielders tend to be extremely erotic. They also have longer lifespans.

Blue is the color of water, air and the mist of illusion. Control of air and water is important for transportation, and Blue adepts can also control the weather. Blue wielders tend to be unpredictable and unfathomable with a quirky humor.

White is the color of light, protection and knowledge. It reveals secrets, sees through illusions and protects the innocent. White wielders tend to be lawful and pious, or at least somewhat sanctimonious.

Black is the color of death and draining other magics. It is strictly forbidden, but supposedly it is possible for a sufficiently advanced sorcerer to figure out how to create black magic. If there are Black wielders, they are by definition evil.

Gray is the magic of summoning, teleportation and item enchanting. It is considered a stunted magic, with many limitations, and only taken as a secondary color. In this world, it is also referred to as Yellow.

After the Coming of the Strangers came the Age of Witches, in which sorcery was an underground and illegal activity in Scandza (formerly Scandinavia), though it may have been legal somewhere else. As of this story, however, society has come to depend on sorcery. In an age where modern technology is mere legends and natural resources depleted, even a barely adequate magic wielder comes in useful, and the most talented sorcerers can turn the tide of a nation’s fate. The adepts, or A-level sorcerers, are the mega-stars of their age, like movie stars, top athletes or presidents in our world. At the bottom of the scale, E-level sorcerers are dowsing for water, tending gardens or working in kitchens. By far the majority of sorcerers are E or at best D level, while A sorcerers are so few as to be known by name.

In West Scandza Youth Academy of Sorcery, the first year is spent learning the basics and choosing one’s primary color. The first year exams decide what class one will start in next year. Once you are in a class, it is rare to move up or down more than at most one class, and usually not even that. So the pressure is extreme, as the fate and fortune of whole families or towns may hang in the balance between a bunch of geeky high school juniors with trace amounts of blood in their hormone stream.

A castle from the role-playing game Daggerfall.  I remember daydreaming that I could own one of those…

The muses in my head have gracefully given me some background for another story, though I don’t think it is enough for a whole novel. That’s OK, I don’t finish novels anyway. Actually I probably won’t finish this either, but I still find it interesting. It is a mix of fantasy and some allegory, though I think it is pretty subtle. Then again there are people who think C S Lewis is subtle.

As usual I make worldbuilding notes in my journal. In this story, there is an old forgotten stone circle, broken and overgrown, that is actually a portal to another world. But it only opens at special times and to people with a special mindset – those who feel they have nothing left to lose in this world except life itself. Or that is what the Keepers say. We don’t know for sure. We know that the main character is pretty close to that, though, after an unlikely string of misfortunes. He feels drawn to the place and falls asleep among the weathered and broken stones, only to wake up to find them in much better shape. He is now in another world, although it takes him some hours to realize it.

It is a world similar to ours, but its magic is stronger and slightly different. It is nothing like the magic of Harry Potter or Dungeons & Dragons though. (Or Daggerfall, for that matter.) Rather, it is very similar to the magic of our Earth, a magic of the earth and the sun and the human heart.

You may not think of it as magic, because you are so used to it and have read long explanations of it in your school textbooks, but think of it. You dig a hole in the ground and plant a small seed. You water it if it gets too dry, and a plant comes up. You may have to remove competing weeds, and add more water if it does not rain, but eventually the plant bears fruit. It may be a herb or a vegetable or a berry bush or even a tree that gives lots of fruit for decades to come. Or it may be a flower of great beauty. In either case, the most skilled men and women of the world would have been unable to make something as wonderful as this, and yet it grows like magic from the earth and the water, the sun and the air, and a little help from human hands.

The human mind is a bit like a dog. The dog will compulsively seek out new places and pee on them to mark them as its own, and then it is satisfied. The human mind likewise will put words on all new things it has found, and then it is satisfied that it owns them. We have done this with the magic of our own world, which we call “life”. It would not take long to extend this a little if we came to a world where there were also the occasional living stone.

In the land of the Keepers, there are stones that grow. These are the building material for the Keeps, the castles of magic stone that the Keepers live in. The Keeps have many beneficial effects, like improving the health and lifespan of those who live in them, and improve the fertility of the land around them.   But they must be built from these special stones that are alive with magic.

You have to learn to look for the living stones, for there are many stones in the world and only a few of them are alive with magic.  They don’t shine with magic, at least not when you are new to them.  In time they will stand out at a glance, but at first you have to learn about them from books or have people point them out to you or even give them to you. Existing keeps drop some small stones randomly, or you can find them by combing the countryside for them.

The stones must not be cut, you have to find other stones that they fit together with.  Depending on the kind of stones you find, your first little keep – no larger than a small play hut – will have its own unique shape.  Because the stones are so rare, it will take years to make something you can curl up in on a rainy day. But once they get together with enough other stones, and given time, they will begin to grow. Where they only fit roughly together, they will fill in the gaps until you cannot get a paper in between them.  And the whole place will expand, so slowly that you cannot see it from day to day or even from week to week, but look back a year or two and it has definitely grown bigger.

A fully mature keep has great magic powers.  Its inside will even amplify light, so that a single candle can make a room brightly lit.  It makes crops grow faster and bigger around it. Inside it heals wounds and illnesses, makes you stronger and wiser, and extends life with decades or even centuries.  A keep has a special affinity with its builder, though it will also extend great benefits to his family and even some to visitors.  A Keeper – the builder of a keep – will not exactly die from old age even after centuries. Rather, he just fades away. Sustained by the magic of the keep he no longer needs to eat or sleep, and eventually he becomes less substantial. He finds that the keep becomes in a way transparent to him:  He can see anything that happens within it no matter where he is, and eventually he can move from any place to another in it by merely willing it.  But to the others, it will seem that he is gradually becoming transparent, appearing at will as an image or even just as a voice.  But this only takes place once  a keep is several centuries old, and the keep may live for millennia after that. At this time the appearance of the Builder is forgotten, his soul infused in the stones, so it appears as if the Keep itself is a sentient being of great intellect.

***

Actually, given my history with writing, chances are that someone has done this already, and better.  Or failing that, will do it before I finish it.  For instance, I still have the first chapters on this story about a teenage boy who went to study magic in a  school in a big stone building and met various boys and girls and became a main character in an epic battle between good and evil in the world. From the printer I used, it seems I wrote it around 1990…

Pre-industrial road from Oblivion.

I honestly still don’t know whether I will be able to take part in NaNoWriMo this November, as I usually have done.  It is the last month before I need to be out of this house and into a new place (which I still haven’t found), and experience shows that this is a lot more work than one thinks beforehand.

But just in case there is time to write, either this November or later, I have a seed for a story I have not used before.  I could just reboot an earlier story, I have a lot of them, most of which are not used for NaNoWriMo before; but as I change over time, so also do the stories I would write, and this is a brand new one. Well, it has a few elements that I have used before, but overall it is quite fresh.

The main character will as usual be a boy in his late teen. This is not random.  It is the age in which boys in modern times are (at least in theory) able to stand on their own for the first time, and make important decisions for the rest of their life, like who will be their spouse and what will be their career. If I write about someone younger, I will need to take into account their birth family. If I write about someone older, I will need to take into account their existing marriage (or liberal facsimile thereof) and career, possibly even children.  So for the simplicity of the story, especially a far-out story like this, the best time is around the end of high school. Probably a little later, these days.

I haven’t even come up with a name for the Main Character yet, so for now let me just call him MC.  MC is diagnosed with a slow but deadly disease, just as he thought his life was about to begin. He is not happy about it. Things are generally not good in other ways either.  Insert some well-deserved emo here.  He goes hiking in the nearby mountains (which should be pretty convenient if I set this story in my native Norway).  It is a favorite hobby of his and he wants to do it one more time, also he wants to be alone with his thoughts for a while.

While walking in the mountains, he gets lost in a sudden fog and when he exits, the landscape seems subtly changed.  He has lost his way, but not only that.  There is something different about everything, and the map does not quite fit the terrain anymore.  Off we go into fantasy land!  But not quite the standard fantasy.

Once he finds a road and follows it to the nearest village, it is obvious that we are not in Kansas Norway anymore.  Or, not quite.  People still speak a similar language, but not quite the same. Their houses are different and prettier, the people are likewise more beautiful and smart. It is as if the whole place is slightly upgraded from the world MC knows, and he is starting to feel more than a little inferior, although nobody is actually mocking him.

One thing that is not superior is communications.  There are no cars, no phones, no radio or TV.  The worst part is that people generally don’t miss these things. People tend to work in the same area where they live, and they don’t buy lots of imported stuff.  Their furniture is handcrafted by more or less local artisans, and so with most other things.  People take great pride in their work, and take good care of the things they own.  Mass production and mass obsolescence  are unheard of.

When they learn about his medical condition, his new friends decide to take him to a larger town to the east, where there are better doctors.  So with a couple others, he sets off  on a journey.  Various things probably happen here to fill out the story.  The thing is, as they come further east, everything become slightly more awesome.  The people here are even smarter, prettier and longer-lived.  Their things are of even better quality, and longer lasting.  The healers here treat MC with natural techniques and herbs, and manage to slow the progression of his disease.  However, he will have to travel further east to seek a cure.

As you may guess by now, the change repeats itself.  As they travel eastward and just gently upward, the land changes in subtle ways, and they come to an even more superior region.  People here live the same unhurried life, but in even greater depth and quality.  MC feels like an absolute moron when he tries to follow their conversations with each other, and he  learns that they usually live for a few hundred years. They also manage somehow to halt his disease, although they cannot cure him.  For that, he should travel to the next province eastward…

So basically this is a kind of fantasy story that is also a parable of our spiritual life, albeit very subtly so.  As the travel goes on, our MC witnesses ever more perfection, depth, quality and durability.  This makes him feel ever smaller, weaker, uglier and more stupid.  But eventually we learn that he himself is also changing and beginning to absorb some of the quality from the new world he lives and breathes in.  At some point he realizes that he would not want to go back to his own world even if he could, and if he did, he would be a very different person from when he left.

This story should also explain why not everyone is “going East” and upward toward the more perfect regions. Actually there are some who do, and our MC meets and becomes friends with some of these. But most stay where they are. They have family, friends, livelihood or property that they can’t leave behind. Perhaps there was some time in their life when they could have made a break and searched for something better, but that time is past or they are still waiting for it. Also, there are some who tried, but they couldn’t stand the feeling of inferiority living among people who were more perfect than they. Actually, some chose to travel westward instead: Even though they lose some of their abilities and lifespan over time, they still get respect and admiration in the meantime, and a feeling of being more useful to those around them who have less abilities.

Yeah, pretty transparent once you know it, but I hope to be able to write something that is at least a bit enjoyable in its own right. Also, the metaphor should be very generic. There won’t be deity namedropping, if I can help it, though there would probably be less personal concepts like the Light and perhaps the Way.

Oh, and there won’t be any Land of Aslan or some such in the ultimate East.  In fact, as far as this story is concerned, there is only the way, and the end of it cannot be seen.

The teacher appears, but the student is NOT ready. (From the anime Mamotte Shugogetten.)

Despite my age, I still occasionally dabble in the art of creative writing. It is less than before, for sure, but still sometimes I come up with a compelling idea or two. Unfortunately, you need seven compelling ideas and a lot of hard work to make a novel, according to the voices in my head, so I will not finish this latest attempt either, unless some serious inspiration (and transpiration) strikes. Still, making notes for later. (And because while I work on a story, it is not uncommon for someone else to actually write it, and then I come later and say “I thought of this too” and the world is like “riiite”.)

“When the student is ready” is, of course, a title inspired by the famous saying of Lao-Tzu, the Old Sage of ancient China: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”. It is generally quoted as a Buddhist proverb, but unless I dreamed this very vividly, the Old Sage said it in a very specific context, namely regarding the immortals or angels. (Some translations say, “…the master will appear”. Not a big difference, ideally. If not all teachers are masters these days, sometimes far from it, that does not apply to this situation.)

In fact, the striking contrast between the original meaning and modern school life was probably what motivated me to start on this story in the first place. And of course gigabytes upon gigabytes of high school anime. The anime / manga inspiration will probably be obvious if one knows it, but not to the complete outsider. The story takes place in Norway, but a Norway in an alternate timeline where the English and American cultural influence is at least partly replaced with Japanese cultural influence. (This actually was something I lifted from a dream I had a couple years ago.) For a foreign reader it is not easy to say what is Norwegian and what is Japanese culture if you know neither.

In anime, the sexy high school teacher is a common stereotype. I can’t say there weren’t any in real life either, althought they were pretty rare. I’d say my biology teacher qualified, but I did not spend much time thinking about it, as I was trying to stay pure. Well, mostly. Anyway! This is not about me, of course. When you first start writing fiction, you may have a lot of personal subconscious stuff that leaks into your story. But after 40 years (I started early!) I like to think I draw more on the collective subconscious than my own.

So we have a slightly Japanized (Nipponized?) Norway. We have a high school boy who is a bit of a bookworm. Not the caricature nerd that trips over his own feet and is painfully shy. Rather, he just has a high opinion of books and a low opinion of people in general, although he has a few good friends from grade school that are still hanging together. The three of them who are still single is Johan (the above mentioned bookman), Ove (the horny type) and Cecilie (standard childhood friend with romantic potential). And then comes the teacher (tentatively called Gudhild Hoshiyama, unless I come up with something better.) And yes, she is an immortal, or as close as you come.

The teacher is actually there for our main character. The immortals have divined that he has the potential to become one of them, something very few humans in each generation have. So she is there to keep track of him until such time as he is ready to begin on the Path, and help him make that decision.

Due to the beauty and perfection of the teacher, or simply because she has breasts, several boys are strongly attached to her, most of all Ove (the best friend of main character). Johan (still main character) has a very different reaction. Apart from being less interested in romance generally, he can somehow notice that she is immensely powerful, and is scared. He is also confused that no one else sees her strength, or generally that she is too good to be true.

So as the story begins to move, we have two love triangles both involving the MMC (male main character, for the non-romance-writers out there). His best friend is drooling for the teacher, who only is interested in the MMC. Jealousy arises when that interest starts to show. On the other hand, we have the childhood friend, who has vague plans for MMC and suspects teacher is out to get him. More jealousy arises.

And of course there should be supernatural stuff and tasteful preaching of Religio Perennis. The “immortals” actually spend much of their time on a slightly higher plane of reality, which they (unlike yours truly) visit physically. In order to survive that trip, our hero has to undertake various mental and physical exercises that seem pointless and conceited to those who don’t know what’s going on, that is to say, all mortals.

The device I have invented for their bodily transition is a pilgrimage to the mountain of Hoshiyama (Star Mountain) from which the FMC has derived her name. The path at the foot of the mountain begins in the mundane world, but after walking through the layer of fog or low clouds that always hang around the mountain when there is a pilgrimage, one arrives in the higher world. Magic and tasteful preaching ensues. Or perhaps I should postpone that to the next book and end this one as our hero enters the fog, thus leaving the reader in doubt as to whether he really is destined for greatness or is just plain insane. I love that. In fact, I think there are times when my journal conveys some of the same confusion…