Wizards who forgot their magic
We are wizards who have forgotten we can do magic.
Every morning, millions of us sit before our scrying mirrors, weaving spells that can topple governments, birth new economies, or connect every human mind on Earth. We write incantations that make machines think and pixels dance. We are the most powerful practitioners of applied magic in human history.
So why do we feel so powerless?
I've spent most of my life honing spell-casting skills. I can write spells instructing millions of machines digital spirits to enact my will. It's a craft that frees its practitioners from the constraints of physical reality. The only limitations are the ones we created.
Wizards like to make their lives hard. At least that's the conclusion you reach after observing them for a while.
Some wizards lose sight of their goal and fall in love with spells. They are no longer tools - crafting the perfect spell is now a goal in itself. Honestly, a lot of beautiful spells were written by such wizards. Shame they're employed as magical engineers.
Others avoid writing spells like a curse. As if their hands hurt after minutes of holding a quill. They've discovered that spells can cast other spells. Spells can cast other spells! Oh, how much time we can save! Instead of writing a custom spell for the task at hand, we can find an existing spell and use its True Name to cast it from another spell. These wizards will talk at length about the benefits of spell recastability.
Casting other spells by their True Name is a dangerous activity. You see, sometimes spell requires a small tweak. Maybe it was dangerous to cast nearby a wheat field so a change was needed on line 13. Or maybe it was too hard to cast reliably by lower level mages and adding a touch of protective incantations was necessary.
Sometimes wizards just don't like the colour of the parchment the spell is written on.
Whatever the reason for changing the wording of a spell, whichever other spells used its True Name will now work slightly differently. That will inevitably catch other wizards by surprise: yesterday reliable magic becomes today’s headache.
Consequences can be disastrous. Maybe the spell just fails to cast. Maybe it destroys a nearby village. Sometimes, it rewrites every spell in the local Magical University library into gibberish. And we can't have that, can we?
The Council of High Mages published the Spell Writing Principles: you should not change the spell behaviour without changing its True Name. Every spell should have a Pretend Cast version, which shows what its effects would be when casted (it's shown to the casting wizard in a vision the following night).
Council's action succeeded: accidents are rarer now. There is a cost which we all have to bear: learning magic became difficult.
Each spell depends on thousands of spells written before. You need to learn their True Names, their casting conventions, their little quirks. Fluency takes years.
Each Magical University has their own sacred tomes, full of spells used for writing new spells. They're all so similar! But it's like everyone speaks a different language.
There's so much ceremony around writing and casting spells. Other mages won't let you make a small change to an existing spell. They'll insist on reusing spells even though writing a custom one would be straightforward. Other times they'll work for months crafting a spell not so different from an existing one.
You feel how wasteful it all is, how divorced from the raw magic. Magic is powerful, why do we need thousands of tomes of existing spells for simple demon conjuring?
You don't feel like you're learning magic, you feel like you're learning an arbitrary system we build on top of it. You can't be sure but you feel it in your bones: we can do better. We can write shorter spells, robust spells.
I believe you are right. But there's a hard battle ahead: you need to convince your fellow wizards that the problems are of our own making. You have to inspire them to change their ways.
It's time people experienced the real magic again.