INDEX:
Link here to a general overview of the novel
TANGLED MAGIC
“Know the dark or you’ll never know the light. You’ve been warned.”
~Lady Adira Jung
Prologue
The Ides of March, the year of our Lord 1957
Dearest Sir,
I hope that my correspondence finds you well and that you will do me the service of entertaining the following thoughts from a man with whom you have never had chance for formal introduction. I am Sir Tristan Crane, former member of the Conclave of Orreance. We have had no cause to meet in our lifetimes, but I did once meet your father when I was much younger at a trade negotiation conference in our capital city and he was most congenial. In addition, I feel a familiarity with you after years reading your speeches published in our newspapers. Your position at the helm of our fair neighboring country of Staltz keeps you ever present in the public’s attention. And I find it is to you I now wish to direct my current musings, hoping that you are able to take my descriptions and put them to good use.
My own name is fairly common on the lips of my countrymen, although it may be hubris to mention such. Ironically, it is my effort to overcome such hubris that causes me to write to you. My illness and the lingering bedside visits by the Angel of Death, promising me or threatening me depending on my attitude in the moment, has been a superb opportunity for the simultaneous death spasms of such excessive pride. This past year as I have declined and the tangles of my Verse have become dimmer, more stubborn rascals resisting my call, my thoughts are drawn to my country. Ah, Orreance, I love her so, but I fear she will meet the end of all blind fools who think they have solved the alchemic mystery of turning iron to gold but have been unwilling to bite down on the nugget to see the shiny gilt of its surface crumbling to dust.
A hundred years ago when the pulsating, phasing asteroid fell through the grassy plains inside our borders and seemingly out the other side of our planet, leaving us with a half mile wide crater yet no evidence of debris, we called it the blessing of our day. Its passing woke the mage powers of the chosen of our people, and some few others of our neighboring countries within our Europealtan continent.
Even now many call it a visit from God, and not the piece of another universe scientists insist. Not the piece that ruptured space and time to rip open access to other realities, other universes.
Yet my close companion hubris, marching by my side for these decades living as a lauded mage with access to a Verse and its magic, kept his hand tight on my own. Hubris promised me that the tangles of the Verse could be plentifully harvested by such as me and my fellow chosen for time unending. The Conclave offered me rich income and a home of collegial mages to marvel at the Verse together and offer our nationalistic sentiment and service to Orreance. We scoffed at the scientific age and technological advancement gained through plodding persistence as it paled next to the energy sources of the tangles. Your Staltz never made such foolish choices.
How easy to forget that magic is simply science that we have yet to understand. Other nations such as your own, less blessed by proximity to the asteroid’s effects, studied the phenomenon as they buckled down to the necessity of the hard work the scientific process demands of the non-magical.
At least some here who have bothered to seek out the research of other countries learned explanations about the ruptures of space and time. Orreance tries hard to either ignore or banish this inconvenient information. But those of us bored enough to seek knowledge out during the free moments of our privileged lives, learned of it, although knew well to keep it hushed or face Conclave wrath.
Yet a few mages, weak ones from the start, live across other borders such as yours and have allowed fellow nations to study their magic. From that study we learned that when we focus we are opening up access to those other planes and that the potential energy source we draw upon is in the slip and slide of these conflicting universes.
The atoms and molecules of our own are different enough from those others to offer a rich source of power we can direct at our whim. Our tangles we call them. Those like myself lucky enough to be paired to an infant Verse were the most powerful of the powerful.
Until, we were not.
The constriction of magic power has sent Orreance into panic. Across our world I hear that the physicists believe the ruptures have started to heal themselves and hence our lessened ability to convince the tangles to power our daily lives in Orreance. This weakening has come quickly over the past year and Orreance’s fortune has turned. And with good cause the other developed countries of the world who have been pressed by our ersatz Imperialism now react with glee as we are forced to pull back.
It seems reasonable that after a hundred years this healing might occur, the effects of the asteroid’s passing dwindling. Although a small group believes that the rifts are not so much healing as the universes are tearing further away from one another. Maybe so, as the diminishment of my magic with the dimming and resistance of the tangles has cost my body and left me bedridden and forced to spend my final days taking pen to paper and arguing with the Angel of Death and my arthritic handwriting. I imagine my soul being torn and bleeding out into the space between my universe and the other I have visited so often it has become a second home.
My greatest fear? That the reduction of magic is not the worst of what could happen if the universes tear away completely.
Ah, even now I fall back into the comfort of religious linguistics with my talk of soul as I wrestle with understanding my loss. And then there are the dreams. Dreams every night all the same. A figure walking through the Verse, building a stable bridge between our existence and the other, and welcoming back the expansive, powerful tangles to dance in our world. Tangles coming to their call in waves like some pied piper, and again sinking energy into the chemistry of everyday life to explode our possibilities. A figure made up of both light and dark haunts these dreams and I wake every time giddy and despairing, with chills running through my impoverished body.
Part of me longs for the truth of this vision, even now wishing for a return to my golden state. Yet another warns away this figure, begs him not to build those bridges and re-establish the full potential of magic. The end of my life brings realization that Orreance’s dependence on the easy road of magic to economic supremacy, where it has lived the past hundred years, only made us forget our own human strength, the sharpness of our minds and our wit, the ingenious creativity and stamina that brought humanity into the scientific age the century before the random visit of a phasing asteroid.
And now that the tangles and the Verse do not cooperate, we are left hobbled and at the mercy of the rest of the world, Stlacz included. Let my hubris die. Good riddance for this is where it has led.
At least our Conclave, among whom I used to walk tall with the ultimate status of their leadership, keeps me in comfort during these last days. Is it because they care due to the years of my renown, or to keep my voice from loudly proclaiming the doubts that litter this page? They are my jailers, wishing they could turn the lock and then explode my cell, but counting on my fast encroaching mortality to do the trick.
But fie on them, my thoughts and dreams will not all die with me. I have found the means to deliver this letter to you along with my personal journals, defying Conclave machinations. Countries like yours who respect science have studied our mages from the sides. They are the ones I want to have the full descriptions of my magic, of what it is like to step inside the Verse and dance with tangles at their full glory. We have been stingy with sharing our stories and it is time to break down the walls. Let others dissect us more. It can be no worse than where we have landed thus far. Or maybe the continents of the New World Coalition across the ocean are luckiest of all, untouched by the temptation of magic and asserting their isolation from us to build their own empires.
In truth, I have no sense of the future, only a sense that it is a fragile thing. Both for Orreance, Staltz, and all of humankind.
Will the dark and light figure of my dreams make or break that future? I do not know. Be well in your own intrepid path forward and may my journals shed light on your country’s journey.
Most Sincerely,
Sir Tristan Crane