• 09:52 Mmmm. BPAL "The Antikythera Mechanism" is worth re-visiting soon. It's a curiously cool bathhouse steam that goes straight through the nose. #
• 14:55 @asloudasmyheart Could have been worse: huntsman. #
• 21:19 Sometimes fantasy has very good reality-mapping. WTF beguilement. mood: cryptic #

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The problem with pretty much any book of philosophy is that unless it was extremely well-researched, and had a team of people looking at it from all sides, there are blind spots. It's the sort of blind spot that leads to dangerous untruths, mistaken assumptions, and things that the author thought were of-course that got glossed over. [Edit for clarification: this is only a hazard to people basing actual real-life magical training off the books, in the same way that one can learn to ground & center along with Talia the Herald.]

The dangerous thing I realized from the Young Wizards books was this: "Wizardry does not live in an unwilling heart."

It makes it sound as if wizardry simply evaporated when the heart or mind was no longer willing to bear the concept of wizardry, leaving, at worst, a nameless sorrow at the bottom of the soul, of the sort that Nita would have had if she'd ditched out her obligation to the Song of the Twelve in Deep Wizardry.

And that's how it may be in the Young Wizards universe. It's an author's privilege to write things as they should be in the universe, not as they are.

The books do cover what happens when a wizard is touched by the Lone Power and goes bad or mad. And that's as so. But in the real world where things aren't so tidy, there's a vast area between believing in the wizardry enough to do things with it and disbelieving in it enough and painlessly enough that it simply disappears as if it had almost never been there. Times it happens that the power, and the potential, are there, but the heart is so vastly unwilling or twisted that actual proper wizardry is nigh unto impossible. When inadvertent wizardry slips out around the cracks, the heart grows less willing to see it, for wizardry is impossible, after all. If an active wizard on errantry comes by and attempts to shake things loose, the results can be worse than Nita facing her Seniors telling her it was all RP, ah, wasn't it fun, little girl? Now go grow up... Much worse. Much, much worse.

And make no mistake, the wizardry will attempt to out. And it doesn't just come as bidden after taking the Oath. Sometimes it's born in. Sometimes it's woken far before any Oath. Sometimes it takes even a half-joking Oath as true and comes on full after the Oath is forgotten in childhood. Who could dream that the fantasy tales you played with your sister as a child could have repercussions in the Real World after you supposedly grew out of them? But no matter how it decided to arrive, it's there, and it's leaking around the blocks and baffles set up in the unwilling heart to prevent accidental magic. And every now and then, accidental magic happens, sometimes with personally or psychologically disasterous results.

In a makinglight thread a good long time ago, a thread started with two dreadfully clue-negative would-be Darwin competitors horsing around with makeshift lightsabres composed of flaming gasoline in fragile glass tubes, someone gave a well-thought "proof" that magic does not exist: namely, if magic did exist, there would be all sorts of people trying really damn stupid spells, and the results could not be disguised as any sort of mundane injury.

I had to laugh. I'm the sort of practitioner of magic who makes it my sworn duty to help mop up after and prevent beforehand just that sort of problem. Mercedes Lackey makes it very clear that Guardians-as-she-writes-them are a fictional entity, made up out of equal parts chivalry, fiction, and decent pagan-grouping research. On the other hand, it's a very useful and tidy way of phrasing something that's equal parts job description and Calling. On the gripping hand, even if she hadn't written about them, something of the like still would have invented themselves. Organization? One might as well herd cats, or computer geeks, or pagans. Call it coalition. Like attracts like, and can be persuaded to stay in loose contact every now and then. Hierarchy? 1337-spiffy magic-users? Competent and self-selecting in networking purposes, rather. And people who get dangerously riled up at the thought of being ZOMG EXCLUDED from any sort of group that may or may not exist that they want to be in are the sort of people who anything calling itself Guardian ought to be guarding against.

Magic as it exists is far more psychological and intangible than fantasy-based magic. Gods and demons work through the physical world, in the little corners left to them by chaos and psychology. That accident-prone drama magnet may well be victim of a self-inflicted Stupid Magic User moment, much like those Darwin competitors were left with nasty burns. It's a lot harder for the competent mage to hand out violation tickets on the highway of Darwin-Potential Magic when the Darwin-Potential Mage firmly believes that magic does not exist. At least you can whap would-be flaming gasoline-in-glass lightsabre duelists over the head with a goddamn physics textbook and arrest them for Doing Really Stupid Shit. It's a lot harder to call an end to the insanity when the person who just magically caused all manner of panic and disorder with a nasty emotional vortex and a 5-point blow to the love lives of all the people within a shout's range is flatly denying that they just did this and that the magic to do it at all, much less sense it, exists.

Once upon a time, there was a Princess who lived in a palace in a very solitary kingdom very far from the rest of the world. She was betrothed to another Princess in a land far, far away. And then a Bardling came into the life of the Princess, and the Bardling told the Princess tales both wonderful and terrible.

The Princess fell madly in love with the Bardling. And he stayed for three seasons: the fall, the winter, and the spring, and appeared to be courting her.

But as spring came, the Bardling grew nervous, and told the Princess that he must leave her then: he was being summoned to the far-away land of his birth. And he whispered her a deadly secret: he was not truly a Bardling, but in fact a Prince in disguise, and he had been created to be a perfect warrior by an evil magician. And he gave the Princess a token of his love, and she gave him a token of hers, and then he was whisked away to join the Evil Magician in the land far away.

The Princess was no poor enchantress herself( ... )

My HP doesn't really dig why I consider chaos to be such a large part of my life. One of my specialties is imposing order upon disorder, and finding patterns in nonorder.

Guess I can't really explain it here either. Chaos makes such pretty pictures, though, and I'm so much of a drama queen that I have to like chaos, 'cause you wouldn't have any drama worth speaking of without chaos.

One of my old friends from high school told me that my worst problem was trying to find the pattern, the plot, to my life. He said that it's just a great big jumble of fairly random events, and to try to fit them into a neat plot like a book is a way that madness lurks. He'd had that difficulty too.

Still, I search through my life for evidences of past lives, predestination, possible plotlines and congruences with my past. In one reality, I'm already married to Godai and we have seven kids. One single birth and two sets of triplets.

Again with the resonances. I know I'm jumping at the drop of a pin, but when he said that to me, I started giggling 'cause of the guy (also named David, for some odd reason) who I was going to marry once upon a time, and have triplets with. At that exact moment, David who I was once planning to marry said hello via AIM...

Synchronicity's a witch.

...and as I say that, the back falls off of my chair. Signs and portents all over the frickin' place. And I reach out and grasp the candle rather than my plastic cup of Mountain Dew, just because it's closer, and contemplate taking a drink until I realize that not only is it pink, unlike Mountain Dew, it's also on fire.