❝
… And so it was, with no small effort, that the Io cracked their ribs and spilled their blood into the woman’s wounds. The droplets turned to pure color and light, wafting up like smoke. One by one, each pool of the god’s blood evaporated and left her body, leaving behind nothing but an aching scar.
The Dren had never experienced this.
“It is like a song,” He said.
The Io nodded. “Yes, like that.”
Metaphysics is the study of violence against the material world, otherwise known as magic.
History
Magic bled into the world in the year C0 (~122 years ago from the present day.) Before this, magic belonged to gods and other fallacies, and could not be used by anyone else. The so-called “birth of magic” delivered it to all things in the known universe. This event is thought of as a collective awakening, or perhaps a collective wounding.
Causes
We often say that magic came from a wound in the world, but this isn’t entirely accurate. Change like this cannot come from just one injury. It’s better to think of it as a “death by a thousand cuts,” because it took a thousand deaths to birth magic into the world.
A hundred years ago, the world was in crisis. Skies fell, seas rose, wars raged, empires collapsed, gods killed and were killed. Each nation bore its own wounds, as history unfolded separately but synchronously across the globe. There was no grand design that caused these events to occur simultaneously. Things just happened to converge, that day, and the world gave out under the weight.
Because of this, there is no single creation story for magic. Each place has its own. These include:
- Basedt: Taosinta’s coronation mothers the Storm that Will Not Die.
- High Asthaom and Scaiuq: Authoring of the river Roan and fall of the Tyrant-God Motu.
- Mercasor: Fish-Crow eats the heart of kings.
Timescale
Many historians now use the birth of magic to mark time. History is divided into two eras: the antesacrent world (the world before the birth of magic) and the sacrent world (the world after the birth of magic.)
Mechanisms
Magic comes from the metaphysical body, an “uncanny mirror of the physical body,” or an “intangible, ethereal substance that is breathed through the body like blood or water,” or “the second skin around which your first skin is wrapped,” or “the thing that becomes you.” All magic is created by tearing into the metaphysical body in order to tear into the material world.
This is the only “fundamental truth” of magic— that it is an act of violence against oneself that mirrors an act of violence against the world. There are many ways to do magic and many theories about how magic works.
Theories
Mind-body dualism
Mind-body dualists see the metaphysical body as the “soul” or immaterial animus of the physical body. This is evidenced by the fact that all living things have a metaphysical body, and this body disperses when the physical body dies. It is also supported by a phenomenon called exsacrenation, or metaphysical bleed-out, which occurs when the metaphysical body is so damaged that it begins to “abandon” the physical body. Because exsacrenation causes fatigue, blackouts, and even death, the metaphysical body is thought to be linked with consciousness and the so-called higher faculties of the mind. Some take it further and consider it proof of a certain je ne sais quoi, the spark of life, the intangible soul that defies definition.
The existence of living beings that lack a metaphysical body— though rare—is difficult to reconcile with the theory of mind-body dualism.
Mnemonism
Mnemonists propose that the metaphysical body isn’t a body at all. Instead, it is a “world-memory of how things are supposed to be.” Discrepancies between the physical world and the Memory of the World are what create magic. In order to change the material world, one must interfere with its ability to remember the fundamental laws of physics… And to do this, the hand that holds the tool must be forgotten, too. This “forgetting” creates holes in reality that can be manipulated to do feats of magic. In this way, a metaphysical “body” is really a wound in the world that can only be exposed by metaphysical violence.
Some prefer to compare it to a shadow, an absence of something that’s supposed to be there, because words like “violence” and “wound” hold moral connotations outside of the Satik-Sarikote language family.
Senkeretics
In Ser cosmology, there is only the physical world. There are no “other” realms such as a spirit world or a land of the dead. All beings exist in the physical world, even beings that are difficult to perceive or understand. When magic bled into the world, it did not come from another place; it was always here and it will always be here. The field of metaphysics, therefore, is just another branch of physics.
Following the old Ser adage “rauses sund; senke hin” or “all scatter; one remains,” the metaphysical body is the physical body. It can be thought of as another organ or a limb— albeit one that can do things like set people on fire.
Fields, Forms, & Traditions
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the scientific study of magic. Although the word “metaphysics” is used as an umbrella term for all forms of magic, the field of metaphysics comes from the Brundel sciences, and is strongly shaped by Brundel truth-seeking practices.
Sidereal Metaphysics
Sidereal metaphysics is the study of magic in space. Sidereal metaphysicians examine the flow of magic through the cosmos and non-earth environments. They also study the ways that humans can use magic to safely navigate the stellar environment.
Practitioners of sidereal metaphysics lovingly call it one of the “wet” fields of metaphysics because it builds on both traditional and theoretical frameworks to create new forms of magic.
Mnemonics
Mnemonic metaphysics (or simply mnemonics) examines the Memory of the World, a theoretical skin of existence that is thought to remember everything that has ever occurred in the known universe. A young field built on an ancient idea, the birth of magic has allowed certain mages to image echoes of the past that once lived only in metaphor or oral tradition.
Metapsychics
Metapsychics seeks to understand the relationship between the human mind, memories, and magic. It is built on the work of the ancestral Sarikote, who contrived pseudo-magical tools to alter the human mind, thousands of years before the birth of magic. Metapsychics pairs these tools with modern magic to achieve mind-altering effects that are impossible under normal circumstances. Dangerous, controversial, and poorly-understood, metapsychics is arguably one man’s deranged fringe theory, not a formal practice.
Canting
One of the oldest forms of metaphysics, canting is a linguist’s approach to magic. It uses language to create cants, rituals, and glyphs that are easily taught to other mages. By creating a standardized language of magic, the world’s first mages could safely practice their craft in a time when magic was volatile and poorly-understood.
Because canting is a language, it also has several written forms. These forms are used to write constant or long-lasting effects into existence. Examples include sigils, mnemonic tattoos, and metaphysical circuitry, which in turn are used for lights, machinery, street art, personal protective equipment, thermoregulation— almost anything one can imagine.
Ne Piriori Laws
Though there are few absolute truths in metaphysics, there are certain “agreements” that mages make with one another. These laws are our way of describing a boundary that may or may not actually be there. Remember that forms of metaphysics—like forms of martial arts—are diverse, contextual, and designed for specific purposes. They make certain assumptions about the world that influence how hard or soft a boundary is. These laws are creatures of the same assumptions.
Magic is infinite.
Until death, the metaphysical body is self-perpetuating. It can be damaged, fragmented, and exhausted. It can even “abandon” the body, for a time. However, it will always regenerate as long as the physical body still lives. In this way, magic alone typically cannot be used to kill someone. Magic can create conditions where a body would die, by manipulating the world around that body, but tampering directly with a metaphysical body never results in its permanent destruction.
On death, the metaphysical body decays. Like physical death, this is a gradual process. We do not know where the metaphysical body goes after it decays.
The metaphysical body does not appear to abide by the second law of thermodynamics. This has a number of implications for the future of the universe.
Magic is memory.
All magic leaves a lingering “trace” on the world that is perceptible to those with trained eyes. This trace fades after a time, like a scar, but it never truly goes away.
Space-time is immutable.
History cannot be changed. The forward flow of time can be altered by the creation of objects that are so large they dilate space and time, such as black holes, but this is a physical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one.
Space cannot be changed, either. It is impossible to teleport an object from one location to another, or to collapse space-time so that two separate locations are bridged together.
Black holes are metaphysically anomalous. Through them, it is possible to travel vast distances in space and time without manipulating either of them (though one can never travel backwards in time.) The nature of this is not well-understood.
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