I’ve not been very reliable about writing stories for the monthly Elegant Literature prompts recently; indeed, I haven’t been reliable about writing any kind of story recently, as I mentioned when I discussed my (lack of) progress on Golems and Kings in a recent post about motivational momentum. Unlike my progress on longer works, which won’t appear on the site for awhile no matter how fast I finish them, the lack of new short stories directly causes a dearth of new stories for you to read here on the site. Of course, according to the data WordPress gives me, few people actually read my stories – it’s my blog posts and books reviews that garner traffic, so perhaps it’s silly of me to be concerned that you’ll be disappointed by the lack of new stories.
Because I treat my short story writing as a means of conducting writing experiments, trying out different ideas or techniques in small form before they’re ready to deploy in a larger context, they can be difficult to place in other publications. This doesn’t mean they’re weak stories, but, in a few cases, it means I’ve submitted a given story to a handful of places for publication, received an equal handful of rejections, and don’t know more suitable forums to which to submit. For all these reasons, I’ve chosen to publish a story I wrote last year here on the site: Against the Warlock.
A few months before I wrote Against the Warlock, I had an idea for a magic system based on the placebo effect. Named for people paid to attend funerals, the placebo effect mostly appears in medical science, referring to the way people will show improvement in their illnesses from being given an inert substance they think is a medicine. Around the same time, I read a paper purporting to work towards isolating the neuroscience behind the body’s ability to change its behavior in response to a belief. To put it another way, it’s the power of suggestion. Psychosomatics. My idea is to write a magic system based on this notion of suggestion’s power.
Flashy, physical magic systems are fun to write and fun to read, but I sometimes think that’s not what magic should be. It stops being magical when every magic system is centered on physical effects. As excellent as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies are, one of the most disappointing scenes is the wizard battle between Gandalf and Saruman, in which they telekinetically beat each other up with sticks. It makes for easy special effects, but wizards used to be the cerebral characters engaged in complex, arcane, intellectual pursuits. My math magic concept is one attempt to bring the braininess back to magic. This notion of psychosomatic magic is another, but where the math magic idea is an intellectual approach to classic magic effects, psychosomatic magic also helps bring wonder and mystery back to magic.
At least, that’s the idea. I’m still developing exactly what it should look like and how it should work in the context of a story, but my first attempt is captured in Against the Warlock. The core concept is a magic system that allows the wielder, by some mechanism, to use the power of suggestion to produce physical effects in other people. It doesn’t work on the wielder, because the wielder knows it’s not real, per se, just like a placebo won’t produce an effect if you know it’s a placebo. And it won’t work on the material world, or on nonhumans, although in some versions I suppose other forms of life with a compatible psychology could be affected, perhaps in unpredictable ways (another aspect to explore). For Against the Warlock, the effect is delivered through the vehicle of a “first language,” a kind of protolanguage that speaks to a more primitive region of the brain. It’s not enough to simply say something in this language, however – you must tell a story to convince the other of your suggestion’s “reality.” Thus, the best wielders of this kind of magic are those who can compellingly spin words into a believable tale, and the more skilled, the wilder a tale you can suggest successfully.
A magic system does not a story make, so I came up with characters and a plot with which to play. My original vision was for this arrogant magus and an unstable master assassin to be forced together to free a would-be conqueror from a prison, during which event they would learn to work together, leave the conqueror’s employment, and go off as a mercenary team to have different adventures. At some point, I realized so much backstory was baggage, especially for a piece I wanted to keep below 2000 words, so I shoved the context into the background and chose a smaller story to tell about the same two characters after they’ve started working together.
Against the Warlock is not the final word on this magic system. At some point in the future, I intend to explore it further, maybe conduct a few more experiments, and eventually incorporate a more mature version of psychosomatic magic into a longer piece. That does not detract from Against the Warlock as a stand-alone story with a concise adventure and an intriguing magic system. I hope you enjoy Against the Warlock.
It wasn’t dark; neither was it light. A perpetual half-light afflicted this patch of jungle. The trees were more gnarled, the paths more treacherous, and the animals too quiet, those that had not fled. Animals weren’t affected by the First Language like humans, but they could still sense when something about their environment was wrong.
Even knowing these changes were only perceived, Lun-Go shivered. Her grey-white wrappings over leather armor seemed scant protection against the looming, threatening sense. No matter how she told herself it was imaginary, a magus’ story spoken into her hindbrain, the trees remained stubbornly twisted and the path remained determinedly perilous.
Nor was Nebah handling the effects much better than Lun-Go. His dark brow was twisted, he clutched the golden button that was supposed to help keep him from responding to Suggestion so its design imprinted on his palm, and he muttered a counter-story in the First Language, but affecting oneself with Suggestion was far harder than affecting others. No magus he knew was as powerful as the one lurking at the center of this perceived distortion.
Spoken into their imaginations, the nightmare appeared from nowhere. A monstrous, orange-flecked creature with too many limbs and unnatural proportions, it scuttled at the mercenary pair with exaggerated claws and fangs extended.
“It’s not real,” Nebah declared. The way he eyed the monster suggested he had not convinced himself. “Awareness should break the Suggestion. Hold your ground. It’s. Not. Real.”
Click here to read the rest of Against the Warlock.
IGC Publishing 