• Published 28th Aug 2016
  • 5,730 Views, 925 Comments

In the Company of Night - Mitch H



The Black Company claims to not remember Nightmare Moon, but they fly her banner under alien skies far from Equestria. And the stars are moving slowly towards their prophesied alignment...

  • ...
13
 925
 5,730

PreviousChapters Next
Life Is Magic, Death Is Power

SBMS045

I found Gibblets testing his apprentice on her glamours. Or, I should say, his apprentice-class on their glamours. We had discovered that Bad Apple wasn't the only apprentice with enough magic to warrant proper training. A week or so after the Hearthswarming pageants, Octavius caught Feufollet with a sharpened nail, a bloodied fetlock, and a half-constructed windigo illusion floating above a water-bucket she was supposed to be fetching. We had accidentally apprenticed a potential blood-mage to one of the weakest unicorns in the Company. Octavius kept her training for day-to-day matters and so forth, but she was sent to Gibblets to get enough control over her blood-casting that she didn't end up zombifiying herself or others.

They were taking turns casting glamours on each other, and it looked for all the Chain like Feufollet was glaring at an inoffensive-looking shrub growing out of Gibblets' bedroom floor when I walked in.

"Good, good. Let's see you unravel that and retrieve the energy without wasting any of it, now." The shrub began warping and splitting like a peeling orange, turning to green sparkles and flowing back to the donkey, whose blooded right fore-hoof was pointed accusingly at the dispelling phantasm.

"Gibblets."

"OK, next, Bad Apple. Let's see a hound."

"Gibblets."

"What!? Can't you see we're busy?"

"They're busy, you're hovering. I've been reading, I have questions."

"You're always reading, it's your job. Wait, reading what?"

"Briefings and evaluations of the situation in the Riverlands. Things don't add up for me. It's too much. They bear no resemblance to what we've seen here in Rennet. How can it be that bad down there, and was so easy up here? Best I can tell, the answers amount to somepony chirping 'magic!' and going 'ooooooh' and waving their hooves at me. I figured since you don't have hooves, we could at least skip that step."

"But how can you zay Rennet is zo eazy, Monseiur le Stripes?" asked a shaggy, rather muttish 'hound', whose hide immediately rippled as Bad Apple lost control of her glamour.

"Hush, you. Distracting the caster is tomorrow's lesson. Let her finish in silence. But the jenny is right, Sawbones. Weren't too easy, even with us avoiding every 'caster in the province, and the province being damn light in magical heavy-hitters. The Riverlands is a drainage sump for power - everyone on the continent with any sort of respectable strength or power has been drawn into the furball. It's how you prove your worth, where you find your power."

"I've been through most of the Annals, or at least, all of the summaries. Other worlds' mage-wars haven't been this sort of all-consuming. When they get that bad, the fighting chokes on its own waste products. You can't get enough troops active in the theatre for lack of supplies, for lack of troops, for sheer over-fortification of all the lines of advance. There are… limits."

"Well, few worlds are quite like Tambelon when it comes to magic."

"And here you start making spook noises and waving your limbs around. I've heard this song."

"Seriously? Let the goblin tell you what you want to know, you ignorant zebra. Finished? OK."

He got a ponderous, wizardly look on his frog-face, and I settled in for the story. The two wizardlings, ignored by their instructor, settled in, outside of Gibblets' peripheral vision, to do their best illusions of little pitchers with big ears.

"Life is magic, death is power. This is one of the core mantras of magical instruction, although it's such a truism that most ponies don't really emphasize it beyond the basic level of instruction. Life is magic, it is the expression of mana through growth, complexity, the commitment of energy on a fine and fractal level throughout the chain of living, from the invisible little critters that make dirt soil, to the great wyrms that wrap around the circumference of great Yggdrasil. The bonds of magic and life are strong, reinforcing, and produce on a secondary level the various effects we know on most worlds as 'magic'. Almost all magic as we use it are the side-effects of life simply living, of the Chain of Creation turning, of primary processes leaking secondary energy as a matter of course. Death, however briefly, sunders those primary bonds, frees the true magic from the labyrinth of living which normally contains it, channels it, keeps it from burning everything and everypony around it. Death is pure, naked power."

"If that was the sum and whole of the matter, then all the worlds upon the Chain of Creation would be as sere and blasted and lifeless as any stretch of Tartarus. But on most living worlds, there is a balance between life and death, and it favors life heavily. Death is a brief spark of power, devoured by life returning to life, and death merely returns to life without much of a hiccup in the scheme of things. Some necromancers can wall off the burst of power, make dark magic out of the killing of things, but the efficiency of this kind of magecraft is even worse than normal life-based magecraft. You can't seriously power any sustaining enchantment outside of a vacuum on most worlds with death, for instance - it would be cannibalized by anything physical, even motes of dust or pockets of air would spontaneously grow life from their proximity to the death-magic. The only reason there are necromancers anywhere outside of Tartarus is because the initial bursts of magic are so pure and intense that you can do a number of impressive and interesting things that don't require long casting times or any sort of duration."

"I would have gotten some coffee, if I knew it was going to take this long."

"Shut up, I'm going somewhere with this. Tambelon is different from the normal run of world. The balance is out of whack, out of true. It's not a Tartarus-world, or else we'd all be dead by now, but it is about as close as you can get and still have what we'd recognize as life. You've noticed that there are no monsters on Tambelon?"

"Streets and lanes seem to be full of them. Most of the higher-ups in the Imperium are liches and other undead."

"No, you damn fool, I said monsters. Monsters are not dead things, they're living things. They're the result of too much life, too much life-magic. Life broods on life, life bloats with life-magic, and suddenly you have minotaurs and griffins, you have bird-ponies, you have unicorns with spikes of magic bursting out of their skulls with the inescapable urge to return magic to magic, life to life. That's on the simple, equine level. On the macro level, you have chimera, you have cockatrices, manticores, sea-serpents, great hydra lumbering about. You have great continental-spanning dragons sleeping until they grow mountain-ranges upon their spines and coastal peninsulae around their claws cutting furrows into the sea-beds."

"Tambelon doesn't have any of that, not that I've been able to detect. The most magical living things on this world seem to be the earth-ponies. Even they don't ever seem to birth any sports, nopony has unicorn foals or pegasi. Even on the most pure-blooded worlds elsewhere on the Chain, the Three Tribes regularly birth each other, unicorns with earth pony foals, pegasi with unicorn foals, earth ponies with both. The simple statistics of heredity should produce at least a few pegasi wherever there are earth ponies. The world itself conspires against it."

"So how does that tie into all these donkey bloodmages and caribou rune-casters and the Riverlands over-run with the hungry undead?"

"As I said, the balance is out of true on Tambelon. The bonds of life with magic are weaker, the power from death is more pronounced and has actual duration. You can make a ghoul or a wight and it will keep going until it is put down. The simple friction of life against death doesn't hold the same sway as it would on a normal world. It's not completely gone, of course - necromancy isn't a perpetual motion device - but the change in balance makes for a completely different environment when it comes to sustained engagement with the subject of death. The rituals of burial are substantial in this country, because if the dead aren't bound to their graves, they sometime rise as revenants. And nothing spawns evils like an untended battlefield. And the Riverlands are dotted with battlefields, decades worth of unquiet dead. That's a lot of power. It draws the witchy like moths to a strong flame."

"Life is magic, death is power. And power holds the balance against magic in this world." And the goblin turned away from me and my stupid questions, and returned to his training of that little donkey whose blood birthed wonders, and the little earth pony who should have been born a unicorn, in another life, on another world.

Author's Note:

The lengths I go to, to avoid as-you-know-Bob. Although I don't think I escaped it entirely here.

PreviousChapters Next