Time for another look at one of the factions of my urban fantasy serial fiction project. This time we look at the magic wielders.
Witches. Warlocks. Sorcerers. Wielders of strange and arcane power.
I tend to view magic and its use as a tricky (pardon the pun) prospect at best, downright deadly at worst. There are reasons that magic isn’t widely seen in our society. Dealing with power on that level has a price, and sometimes that price is quite high.
Another problem with magic is that if you can do anything through magic, that removes the conflict from the story. When I was young there was a cartoon, Shazzan about two young adventurers who have access to a genie, Shazzan. Whenever they get into trouble, they call Shazzan, who gets in a battle of one upmanship to see who can top the other using magic. Of course, Shazzan always wins, I guess because he knows more tricks than his opponent and can go one more step than they can.
Many people think of magic as being like a stage magician like David Copperfield or David Blaine, performing tricks to amaze and amuse, vanishing tigers and turning them into attractive assistants. Or they think of shows like Bewitched, or movies like Doctor Strange, where spells are cast with no cost, or using flashy special effects.
No, the kind I’m thinking about is magic of the old fairy tales and Shakespeare. Witches in the middle of the forest, chanting under a full moon, stirring the cauldron, summoning demonic forces for nefarious purposes. Magic can get you out of trouble but more than likely it is going to get you into more trouble. This is something they got right in Bewitched. Samantha Stevens could cast spells to fix a broken vase, for example, but it was usually magic spells cast by her large extended family that caused the problems in the show.
I haven’t quite finished working out how magic is going to work in my stories. Most likely it will be based on rituals. Things that take time, preparation and research to pull off successfully. The mages in my stories could probably toss fireball and lightening bolt spells around but that type of thing draws attention to you. People start asking quesions. Or they start demanding you use your power for them. Or they burn you at the stake because ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’ There isn’t likely to be any wizard duels in the middle of Main Street at High Noon. That doesn’t preclude wizard duels in an abandoned warehouse, I suppose.
I’m not entirely sure what the cost will be either. Does wielding magic suck the soul out of the user over time? Either slowly or quickly? Does it prematurely age them? Transform their body into something other than human?
These are things I’ll need to work out, preferably before I get too far into the stories. Or maybe I’ll just use the stories as a way of figuring out how it all works. Most likely the former though.
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