Spellcasting, at its most basic definition, was the result of two factors: a particular amount of energy that was put to use, and the manner in which it was utilized.
By that description, casting a spell was no different than any other form of work. Applying the proper amount of kinetic energy to a specific object at the correct angle, for instance, was what allowed a nail to be hammered into a board. Likewise, directing the correct amount of magical energy in a specific arrangement as it was released could do the same thing. Though the particulars were different, the overall process was the same.
Another area where magical and non-magical work were the same was in how little understanding their practitioners needed in order to put them to use. A carpenter didn’t need to consciously calculate the units of force necessary to pound a nail into a surface; they simply intuited how hard they needed to hit it. Similarly, spellcasting – or at least, Equestrian spellcasting – didn’t require conscious understanding of the forces involved. It simply required a unicorn to flex the muscles in their horn, shaping the energy they pushed through it in a way that properly configure it to produce the desired effect.
For most unicorns, figuring out a small array of such effects was enough. They’d learn how to move objects telekinetically, conjure a light, and perhaps a few other tricks related to their special talent – something which would come easier than other spells, thanks to the assistive magic of their cutie mark – and that would be it. Wizards, by contrast, were those unicorns who strove to figure out how to flex the muscles of the horn in complex patterns, utilizing the energy they put into it in intricate arrangements. Like learning the steps to a complicated dance, the process was entirely physical in nature, and mastery of a spell was commonly thought of as being when a unicorn could flex their horn muscles in the proper arrangement without having to consciously think about it any more than an expert dancer would need to stop and think about their steps.
Even before he’d hit upon the realization that the constraints of how much energy the physical body could gather and make use of was a fundamental limitation that needed to be bypassed in its entirety, Lex had disdained the standard approach to Equestrian spellcasting. Unicorns were taught sequences of tensing and relaxing their horn’s muscles, with no effort being made to understand why each sequence resulted in the energy manifesting as a different effect. As far as he was concerned, any school of thought that actively discouraged understanding why something worked the way it did in favor of simply being able to do it was fundamentally flawed.
But then, that was entirely characteristic of the Royal Sisters' style of leadership. It had surprised Lex not at all, once he’d returned from his thousand-year imprisonment in the Crystal Empire, that Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns had remained the only school of magic in Equestria, and that its curriculum had remained virtually unchanged from his brief enrollment there. “Good enough” was their government’s watchword.
Lex’s own approach to magic took the opposite approach, storing energy within discontinuous thought-forms. In fact, “forms” was a misnomer, as it implied physical framework; thoughts, being immaterial in nature, had no structural arrangement per se. Rather, their “shape” was in how they were each maintained as a discrete mental model of the series of processes and reactions, held apart from the rest of his aggregate consciousness. Only by sustaining each one at an exacting level of holistic understanding could they remain coherent enough to hold the energy that was forced into each of them. Essentially, it was the process of keeping an elaborately-detailed thought in your mind at all times, while still being able to direct your attention elsewhere.
And then doing it again for each and every spell you wanted to have prepared.
But although Lex had spent years teaching himself to do just that, the issue of forcing the requisite amount of energy into his thoughts still remained a daunting obstacle. Shoving the necessary amount of energy into them was like folding a sheet of paper over and over, trying to compress it down to where it was small enough that it could fit inside such an ephemeral container. And since stronger spells required mental models of even greater complexity, they required larger amounts of energy to actuate, which essentially necessitated a larger piece of paper that was folded even more times. It was something that, to Lex’s enduring frustration, he still needed outside assistance with.
But even with what limited success he’d had, healing spells had been utterly impossible for Lex to create.
That hadn’t been a surprise, of course. Spells to repair physical damage had long since been written off by Equestria’s magical establishment as being impossible, and when Lex had examined that determination through the lens of his alternative spellcasting, he’d quickly come to realize why that was. Namely, that the specificity such spells would require was staggering in scope.
While storybooks and stage plays were filled with tales of magic that could be used to mend injuries, the reality was far more complex. Spells could only do what their formulaic structure – their data, in other words – was arranged to make the attendant energy do. But the extremely complicated nature of physical bodies, when combined with how injuries were all unique in location, severity, and a host of other factors, meant that it was virtually impossible to make useful healing spells. A spell designed to repair a rupture of the bilateral quadriceps tendon was completely different from a spell that had to repair a lacerated aortic valve. Both of which were radically different from a spell that was needed to repair a fracture of the fifth vertebrae while simultaneously fixing any underlying nerve damage. And none of those spells would handle any related injuries, such as severed blood vessels or damaged skin; those would require separate spells of their own, as specific as the others.
While a rare unicorn doctor might learn one or two spells like that, most never bothered. Why go through the effort to learn to cast a spell that only healed ruptured (instead of lacerated or burned) fenestrated capillaries when there were so many other ways that a patient might be injured? Any moderately-severe injury would have required dozens of highly-specific medical spells, at the very least, from what were likely millions of potential combinations of body parts and injury types. The degree of impracticality was simply too daunting to overcome.
Of course, the obvious alternative to that was to create a healing spell that was able to perform any and all reparative functions to a damaged body. But that was beyond what Equestrian magic was capable of. The overly simplistic “instructions” that could be used on a given amount of energy via flexing the muscles of the horn were simply not capable of imparting such a daunting amount of data. In theory, Lex knew that he could have created such a spell with his thought-based spellcasting, but even without having studied medical science he knew that maintaining a thought-form with that much information in it would have taxed even his limits.
As such, his surprise had been complete when he’d witnessed mere adepts on Everglow using healing spells with exactly that kind of universal functionality.
His investigation of how they were able to do such a thing had quickly run aground, thanks to his unpalatable demeanor, but not before Lex had uncovered one salient detail: the only form of magic (or at least the only one that he’d been able to verify) that was able to use those spells was sacerdotal thaumaturgy, better known as the gods-given “divine magic.” While a few other spellcasting traditions were able to utilize some limited types of panacean remedies, a quick review had found them all to be inefficient and restricted in scope…much like the single, weak healing spell that the Night Mare had given him. That pathetic excuse for reparative magic simply affected a physio-numinous change in the body, briefly causing it to simulate accelerated cellular repair, which was why it left scars. It wasn’t nearly as extensive, nor as thorough, as what he’d seen on Everglow, despite the fact that the acolytes using such a complex spell should never have been able to do so.
But now Lex knew why they had been…
Sacerdotal thaumaturgy was essentially a process of mental self-conditioning – what its practitioners tritely referred to as “faith” – so as to better make their minds receptive to receiving magical energy in the form of spells sent from their deity. Doing so was, at least in theory, dangerous, since allowing a higher power to reach down and stuff you full of energy ran the risk of that energy running out of control and damaging your body if you weren’t capable of containing it within your mind. That was the reason why so many oracles of the gods were maimed in some way, since most of them had been chosen to be receptacles of divine power without asking for it. Likewise, he was able to receive divine spells (albeit only a modest amount) from the Night Mare because his manner of approaching the world was so similar to hers, allowing him to receive power from her without being deleteriously affected.
Lex had known all of that for a while.
What he hadn’t known was that the gods – or whatever divine agents sent spells to their worshipers on their behalf – were, as far as healing spells went, simply bypassing the issue of encoding the thought-form spells they gave their servants with comprehensive data.
Or at least, that was the case with the resurrection spell in the gem that the Night Mare had given him.
There was still a great deal of information embedded within the spell’s conceptual structure, of course. More than Lex himself was capable of containing within even his most complex spells, though he was still working to expand what his mind was capable of. But he’d spent days mentally dissecting each layer of instructions so as to work his way down to a more specific description of the various processes the spell called for…only to find that at a certain level, the information encoded in the gem simply didn’t become more elementary.
This resurrection spell, he’d learned, was essentially healing magic taken to its ultimate conclusion. Far more than what Garden Gate had described Cadance as being able to do, this spell could recreate a body from nothing while simultaneously calling (but not forcing; that had been another thing that he’d learned, that a soul could not be brought back to life involuntarily) the soul of the individual back into it. It was essentially “repairing” death.
The process was unbelievably complex…but not as complex as it should have been. Insofar as Lex had been able to determine, the spell was performing over five hundred different operations. But to recreate a specific body entirely from scratch, perfectly copying everything about it down to the sub-cellular level…even without taking into account the issue of sending a tether out into the afterlife to find the correct soul and guide it back, there should have been far, FAR more. A rough estimate suggested that well over one hundred thousand individual points of data would have been needed, and that was a conservative number.
It had taken time, but eventually Lex had puzzled out why that was. In fact, he’d been startled to realize, he’d seen something like it before.
On the scroll that he’d liberated from Xiriel.
One of the spells on that scroll had been an open-ended magical effect, essentially allowing whoever cast it to – within a limited degree – alter reality in their local area. Lex hadn’t been able to study it in more detail at the time, using it to restore enough of his magical potential to augment the floating gems that he’d given to Garden Gate in order to help her fight the ghoul army. Once he’d cast it, the writing on the scroll had disappeared, preventing further examination.
But from the little bit that he’d been able to examine before he’d used it, it was similar to what was happening here. At a certain level, the instructions in the resurrection spell didn’t grow more specific because they essentially used micro-alterations to reality itself to establish the baseline they needed, and then worked upward from there. Data such as “recreate the heart” had no further instructions for how the energy of the spell should do it; it simply allocated that it rewrite the matter of its immediate locality so that the organ in question would be there, and then let the rest of the spell go to work on it. Healing magic, he’d been able to deduce, was much the same, save for operating on a smaller scale.
It was an incredible piece of spell-work…but Lex found himself unable to appreciate it. Not when it was something only an entity of incredible power, such as a god, could have pulled off. Rewriting the fabric of the universe so as to bypass cause-and-effect wasn’t beyond what his spellcasting could theoretically accomplish – the spell on Xiriel’s scroll had shown that to be true – but being able to utilize so many reality alterations so precisely was a level of efficiency that bordered on incomprehensible. Making just one or two changes of moderate scope would have required immense power, even using external support mechanisms.
Which meant that his only hope for being able to cast resurrection spells on his own, without being able to utilize this divine-level shortcut, was to work out the hundreds of thousands of instructions step-by-step, and provide suitable energy for each and every one of them all at once, something which Lex could already tell would have required far more power than he could have hoped to supply. He could have crammed his thoughts to the metaphorical brim with power, and channeled energy through his body twenty times over, and never even come close to the level of energy necessary to make all of those operations happen.
And that was just to resurrect one person!
Maybe, maybe if he wanted to recreate what Cadance had done, restoring life to an intact body which hadn’t been dead very long, he could find a way to do so…but even that would require outside assistance in terms of gathering and directing the necessary amounts of power. And that was after coming up with the proper spell formula…
Which meant that right now, for all intents and purposes, once he used the spell in this gem, that would be it. Nopony else would be brought back.
There wouldn’t be any great wave of resurrections. The thousands of ponies who’d died in Vanhoover were gone forever.
Save, of course, for the one he chose now…