A Cliché in Many Mystery Stories is to Disguise them in Pieces of Art

For tonight's hoofnote, we're taking another deep dive into the mechanics of magic, this time with sigils.

In a different blog post, I mentioned the fact that magic operates on a wavelength. All magic (on the Gaia side of reality) can be casted on the same basic wavelength, with the only variance being in frequency. This is different from Tartarus magic, for which there are multiple possible wavelengths. Imagine Gaia magic as being like visible light, the same thing but with different colors, while Tartarus magic can be divided into all the other types of totally distinct rays.

In Gaia magic, there are fourteen frequencies, each with its different strengths. Pretty much any spell can be cast from any frequency, if the magician has enough power or time, but aligning the spell to its best frequency makes the process easier and more efficient. In classical magic study, magic is divided into fourteen base "types" to go with their most effective frequencies, and they are as follows.

(1) Forces, impulses, exertions. Magic to push or pull an object, or to blow something up (Octavia uses magic on the first frequency a good deal).
(2) Growth, healing, invigoration, purification. Magic to undo damage or promote vitality in living beings (Fluttershy works best on the second frequency).
(3) Containment, protection, slowing progress. Magic to keep objects out of a certain area (Rarity uses this frequency a lot).
(4) Storage, memory, record-keeping. Magic to enhance memory clarity or make certain objects stand out more to the senses.
(5) Influence, persuasion, exercise of willpower. Magic to make another mind obey one's command, or to enhance one's charisma.
(6) Physicality, strength, endurance. Magic to toughen and optimize organic material, different from the second frequency in that it deals with enhancing what is already there, and not simply healing it or making it feel better. This frequency is one of Princess Celestia's particular strengths.
(7) Thought, reflex, knowledge, flow of information. Magic to alter the way one thinks, or to change the way information is processed in the mind, or, at extremely high levels, intrinsically. Princess Luna specializes in the seventh frequency of magic.
(8) Perception, sensation. Magic to alter sensations and create or dispel illusions.
(9) Thermodynamics, physics. Magic to give one control over the elements, essentially. Different from the first frequency in its scale. Frequency one is just a shove, where frequency nine is digging into the fundamental forces behind it all. Spells concerning this frequency are the most common that are illegal, on account of how dangerous they can quickly become.
(10) Propagation, orders of magnitude, exponential increase. Magic to enhance magic, or to intensify effects.
(11) Emotions, sexuality, creativity. Magic to excite passion and inspire more emotion or instinct-driven thinking. Princess Cadance specializes in this magic.
(12) Causality, chronology. Magic to move independent of time, or to artificially see into the future or past. This is one of the most difficult frequencies to use.
(13) Orientation, distance management, dimensionality. Magic to move things through space, or to allow one to occupy multiple places at the same time. Teleportation is a low-level spell on the thirteenth frequency.
(14) Communication, spirituality, transit between life and death. Magic to see beyond the body's death, or to communicate across long distances or disparate states of being.

A sigil is the use of line work and symbolism to emulate magic when activated by a magician, and they generally follow a very simple formula. There are only a few elements to every sigil, and the only one that is absolutely necessary is the core, or the central design. This is the spell that governs the rest of the sigil, the design's primary focus. From there, you can have one or more mezzanines, which are secondary rings around the core, and whose designs act as parameters or methods of expression; borders, which act merely as limits for the spell's area of effect, and must surround an empty ring; and satellites, which are secondary sigils that add additional or conditional spells to the primary. Satellites can have their own satellites.

Each of the frequencies has its own design specificity when drawing. For instance, a sigil to create and maintain an area where one cannot enter from outside would contain a sequence of branching lines with dots arranged and organized around and among them. A sigil that causes one to forget where they were going when entering it would be filled with a single, unbroken line that intersects itself.

Memorizing the different geometries and the ways they change in accordance with a spell's intensity and intent is difficult enough, but single-form sigils can only do so much. To get a sigil that is useful for complicated, more real-life situations, you need to combine designs, creating mixtures of frequencies to give off more complex magic. The area containment sigil above, for example, has in its core a mixture of the third and thirteenth frequencies.

A great example of how complex sigils can get is in the character of Thunderhead. She is created from one main sigil and two satellites. The main sigil has three mezzanines (from core to outside, the represented frequencies are ten and two, two, fourteen and six, and eight), and is the pony herself, giving the spell the ability to take physical form and re-cast and maintain itself. One satellite represents her ship (fourteen and six, two, and eight), which takes physical form and can heal itself, and the other represents her connection to a pre-made bank of independent spells that Discord laid out (fourteen and seven, twelve and seven, and five). A band lies between the two satellites to connect them, meaning that the ship is capable of casting magic from Discord's bank without Thunderhead necessarily willing it. There are no borders on any of the sigils.

At a higher level of education, you'll run into things like non-circular sigils, which are good for circumventing issues with conflicting orientations or conditions of activation; blurring or crossing the mezzanine lines, which can allow for multiple sigils contained within the same space (advanced as hell); or sigils used as vertices around an empty space, which can allow for things like self-sustaining magical landscapes or dreamscapes.

Many unicorns don't touch simple sigils, because they can cast the spells without help. As the magic gets more advanced, though, a sigil is useful for condensing the power into a manageable form, where the only magic required is the magic to activate the drawing. Something like Thunderhead, for instance, would require someone of Celestia or Luna's caliber to create without use of a sigil, but, if it were readymade, someone like Twilight or Rarity could activate it.