Benedict Jacka

The first type of magic this Encyclopaedia will look at is divination, a type of universal magic.  A mage who can use divination magic is called a diviner, a seer, a probability mage, or (if you want to annoy them) a fortune teller.

Divination is one of the most limited of all magics.  It does one thing and one thing only:  it allows its user to see the probability of future events.  It can’t change those probabilities, it can’t change those events, and it can’t affect the material world in any way.  All it can do is provide information.

How Divination Works

A regular person introduced to a new situation doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  When you’re faced with a machine you don’t know how to use, you don’t know what pressing any of the buttons does.  Over time, you start to learn how the thing works.  Eventually, you might even learn why it works.  And once you know the how and the why, you can figure out what’s going to happen whenever you mess with the thing, subject to the vagaries of chance and a certain amount of legwork.

A diviner gets to shortcut that.  When he looks at a situation, he sees possible outcomes:  he knows the what without understanding the how or the why.  Every diviner develops his own sensory code for this, but most do it visually, ‘seeing’ the potential futures unfold.  In general a diviner’s visions are limited to his own senses:  he can only see the outcomes that he would be able to perceive were he to actually live through them.

Learning Curves

For a novice diviner still unfamiliar with his powers, divination is strange and terrifying.  His visions come in random unpredictable flashes, sometimes showing him nothing at all and sometimes overwhelming him with an insane rush of information as he experiences dozens of futures at once.  All apprentice diviners have at least a few episodes where they quite simply go batshit crazy.  Over time they learn to master and control their visions, ordering them to their will, and as a result nearly all experienced diviners develop a high level of mental discipline.  The ones who can’t manage that give up their power or go insane.

Once they’ve learned the basics of control, novice diviners start learning to direct their visions, exploring the consequences of simple actions:  what happens if I press this button?  How about if I turn this card?  What if I jump off this bridge?  (They quickly learn not to look too closely at the last one.)  Over time they learn to explore more complicated futures, comparing multiple courses of action against each other and picking a single future out of many.

The Two Limits

Divination magic can predict anything that can be predicted.  The two things it can’t fully predict are chance and free will.

Chance is the simpler of the two – some things are just random, although at a human scale truly random events are actually much rarer than most people think.  More common is a sort of emergent unpredictability, where the cumulative effect of millions of tiny events adds up to something that isn’t completely random but is chaotic enough that long-term prediction is impossible.  Diviners can’t predict pure chance but they can analyse it in terms of probability, interpreting it in an ordered framework.

Free will is more complex.  Philosophers argue over whether free will exists but diviners know it does, even if they don’t understand exactly what it is.  If someone genuinely hasn’t made a choice, diviners can’t see beyond it.  The most they can do is see the most likely choices, and the consequences.

Aside from those two limitations divination magic can predict just about anything, subject to the skill of the diviner.  Part 2 of this entry will explore what that means.

Dark mages are the counterpart to Light mages.  At various points the two factions have fought against each other, most recently in the Gate Rune War of the twentieth century, but at present Light and Dark mages share an uneasy peace.

Dark mages don’t have a centralised organisation as Light mages do.  There’s no Dark Council and there’s no Dark administration.  In fact, it can be difficult to know whether someone even is a Dark mage – it’s not like you can apply for a membership card (and other Dark mages wouldn’t pay attention if you did).  If being a Light mage is like being a citizen of a country, being a Dark mage is more like being a follower of a cause or a religion.  What makes you a Dark mage is the way you act and the ideals you believe.

Dark Is Not Evil . . . Maybe

Dark mages follow a philosophy called the True Path, the True Way, or simply the Path or the Way.  The True Path holds that someone’s reality is defined by their personal power and the only goal that has any long-term value is increasing that power.  Traditional morality is seen as an artificial construct:  while it can be beneficial in certain situations, it places limitations on the user’s ability to pursue power and therefore has to be discarded.

If power is a virtue, the corresponding vice is weakness.  Dark mages consider voluntary weakness to be the one really unforgivable sin.  Anyone who turns away from power is giving control of their life to whoever is willing to pursue that power, and by doing so they prove themselves unworthy to wield it.

What that means in plain English is that if a Dark mage wants something from you they’ll take it, and if you can’t stop them it’s your fault.  You aren’t owed anything and you don’t deserve anything.  If you don’t like it, learn to take care of yourself.

Dark Society

Dark ‘society’ is a bit of a misnomer.  Dark mages don’t like each other, don’t help each other, and don’t trust each other.  For this reason Dark mages are notoriously bad at getting along.  The more Dark mages there are in a group, the faster they’ll fall out unless they have some immediate reason to stay together.

The unit of Dark society is the household or cabal.  A household is made up of one Dark mage plus his apprentices, servants, slaves, and other hangers-on.  A cabal is a group of Dark mages who have decided to band together in a pack – their numbers vary but 2 to 5 is the most common size, as once the group gets much larger than that internal divisions start appearing.  Larger groups aren’t unknown but typically require a strong leader to keep them in line.

That said, Dark mages aren’t hermits and they do socialise.  It’s common for Dark mages to hold gatherings, competitions, and parties where they can meet each other, watch their apprentices compete, and share information under a temporary truce.  However, these events are much smaller than the grand balls sponsored by the Light Council.  A typical Dark mage knows far fewer of his colleagues than a Light mage does.

Strength and Weakness

The previous few paragraphs probably makes it sound as though Dark mages really aren’t much of a threat to Light mages.  If they can’t work together, what’s the problem?

The short answer is that Dark mages are dangerous because they don’t work together.  Most Light mages aren’t battle-mages – there are vast numbers of Light mages who’ve never seen real combat.  But every single Dark mage who graduates from apprentice status knows how to fight and how to defend themselves.  They have to, or they don’t survive.  Dark mages aren’t invincible but they’re tough, nasty, and above all experienced, and one for one Dark mages are probably the most dangerous men and women in the world.

Most Light apprentices and younger Light mages are afraid of Dark mages and avoid them whenever they can.  Even the ones who aren’t scared usually keep their distance, believing (correctly) that the more closely involved they get with Dark mages the more danger they’ll be in.  All the same, there are a fair number of Light mages who associate with the Dark.  Sometimes it’s from necessity – Keepers and the other enforcement branches of the Council have to deal with outsiders as part of their job – but just as often it’s for personal profit.  The lifestyles of Dark mages often bring them into contact with hidden secrets or unusual techniques and bits of knowledge, and they’re sometimes willing to share them.  Such help can be valuable to a Light mage, but it’s never free and the price is always high.  Many unwary Light mages who entangle themselves too closely in Dark politics end up incurring debts they can’t repay, losing friends and possessions, and in some cases vanishing without trace.

There are two main power blocs within mage society – Light mages and Dark mages.  Mages who don’t side with either are called independent or unaligned.  Of the two factions, the Light mages are by far the more organised.

Dark Is Not Evil, Light Is Not Good

This is probably the most common misconception amongst newcomers to the magical world, so it’s worth getting it out of the way first.  Light mages are not necessarily good people, for reasons that should be obvious.  Calling yourself a ‘Light mage’ doesn’t make you a servant of light any more than calling yourself a ‘good person’ makes you good.  Even if they were originally set up as a bastion of goodness to stand against evil (which mage historians argue about), the Light faction is an organisation, not a status.  Old members leave, new members join.  Light mages have existed for thousands of years and their society has had time to evolve a very long way.

Asking whether modern Light mages are good is a lot like asking whether your country’s government is good – it’s a very simple question with a very complicated answer.  Some people will say yes, a lot will say no, and in most cases the answer you get will tell you more about the person you’re talking to than about the Light Council.  The Council is very large and very powerful and like all large powerful organisations it has a lot of enemies, many of whom hate it for completely unjustified reasons.  Others hate it for completely justified reasons.  It depends on the history.

In terms of alignment, a better way to think of the Light mages as opposed to their Dark counterparts is as order vs chaos.  The Council and Light mages as a whole stand for order.  They effectively run the magical world – there’s no other body with anywhere near the combined power and influence of the Council, meaning that any kind of governmental functions fall to the Council by default.  The Light Council are the primary enforcers of the Concord.

The flip side of this is that since the Light Council run the magical world, mages often join the Light faction not because they believe in any of its ideals but for the benefits it can bring.  In a one-party state, you have to work with the party to get anything done.  Over time this has increased to the point where it’s by far the most common reason for mages to join the Council.

The Council

The phrases ‘Light mages’, ‘the Council’, and ‘the Light Council’ get thrown around a lot, often referring to the same thing.

The Light Council is the collective decision-making body of the Light mages of Britain, made up out of (currently) thirteen mages.  Six are non-voting members, known as the Junior Council, and seven are voting members, known as the Senior Council.  The Senior Council have (at least theoretically) total authority over all mages in the country.

Beneath the Senior and Junior Council are layers of administration and bureaucracy that take orders from the Council and carry those orders out.  These administrative arms and lower-ranking members are the face of the Council, and the ones that other people actually meet.  Confusingly, these people are also called the ‘Council’.  In practice when mages say ‘the Council’ they tend to mean both the Light Council and everyone who works under it, in the same way that when people say the ‘British Government’ they can mean the Cabinet, the Civil Service, the people in between, or all of them at once.

Other mages tend to see the Council as monolithic, but it really isn’t.  There are dozens of factions within the Council and they spend far more time arguing amongst themselves than they do enforcing their will on other mages.  It takes a significant external threat to get the Council to unite, and even then the factions are almost guaranteed to disagree on whether it counts as a threat or not.

Life as a Light Mage

Life as a Light mage is generally comfortable.  Being a Light mage doesn’t automatically give you wealth and luxury and safety, but it gives you access to the contacts that you can use to get all those things.  Light mages rarely have to take risks or work a day job.  They tend to live affluent lives, free to spend their time socialising, researching, romancing, making money, training apprentices, or whatever else they feel like doing.

This does however come with a price:  as a Light mage you have to play politics.  Getting what you want as a Light mage usually involves dealing with another Light mage, and that mage will want something back.  Light mages have to network and make contacts, which means spending a lot of time kissing ass.  It also means accepting the authority of the Council and fitting in with other Light mages’ social norms.  Light mages who rock the boat quickly find themselves left out in the cold.

Some Light mages try to deal with this by accumulating political power, associating themselves with a Council faction or otherwise making themselves important enough to have a say over their destiny.  This gives them more leverage, but comes with its own risks:  while rank-and-file Light mages live fairly safe lives, Light mages who involve themselves in the Council’s political games do not.  Conflicts over power among Light mages are more subtle than among Dark ones, but the cost of losing can be just as high.