“No,” Marci said. “At the time, I was hoping I’d discovered a new classification, but Ghost has never acted like a death spirit, so now I’m not sure what he is. I was actually about to start experimenting when this Vann Jeger nonsense blew up.” She smiled at the dragon, crossing her fingers in secret where she held her bag. “Do you know what he is?”
She’d just meant to fish for clues, but to her amazement, Amelia actually seemed to be giving her question serious consideration. “There’s a lot of answers to that,” she said at last. “You claimed you weren’t an expert on spirits. What does that mean?”
“Well,” Marci said. “I mean, obviously I know the basics. Every licensed mage in the U.S. has to learn how to bind and banish and so forth for their own protection. But the study of spirits is part of the Shamanic branch of magic, and I’m a Thaumaturge. We deal with the more rigorous, scientific aspects of magical theory.”
“I’ve been gone for fifty years, so I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Amelia said with a shrug. “But I’m guessing all of that was a fancy way of saying spirits aren’t your area?”
Marci sighed. “More or less.”
“Don’t worry,” Amelia said. “If spirit studies are like the rest of modern magical theory, they’re all wrong anyway. It’s actually easier if you don’t know anything, because that means I can start with the basics. Here.”
She took another quick drink off her rum bottle and set it back in the ice bucket. With her hands free, she turned her chair around and started digging a hole in the wet sand behind her.
“Think of magic in this plane like this water,” she said, moving her hands to show Marci the seawater that was seeping up through the bottom of the sandy hole she’d dug. “It wells up constantly from the Earth at a more or less even rate. Like water, magic’s not picky. It’ll fill anything that’ll hold it.” She expanded the simple hole into a cross shape as she said this, and sure enough, the water followed, filling the canals with foamy salt water.
“On the beach, of course, we’re uphill, so the water only goes part way. But if this beach were perfectly flat, the water would fill each of these depressions to overflowing before moving to the next one. Magic is the same.”
She turned her chair back around to face Marci again, grabbing her rum for another swig before continuing. “It’s like water welling up in a flat field. If there are any depressions—ditches, holes, low areas, etc.—it will fill those first before flowing on. Once filled, these puddles of magic take on the characteristics of the land that contains them. This is why magic feels different in different places. It’s literally taking on a different shape depending on what it’s filling.But, if the vessel in question is large and deep enough, eventually the enormous amount of magic filling it will reach critical mass. When this happens, the magic itself can develop sentience and become what we know as a spirit.”
She paused there, shooting Marci anAre you following all this?look, but Marci could only stare back in awe. She’d never heard anything like this. Everyone knew that magic rose from the ground, but no one yet understood why that was, or why certain locations had different magic than others. There were dozens of competing theories as to why some places—like the Great Lakes—had spirits while others did not, but nothing had ever been proven. This, though, this madesense.
“Spirits are sentient magic,” she said, her voice shaking. “I always thought a domain was just the specific place a spirit had control over, like Algonquin and her lakes, but it’s the other way around! The domain is what contains the magic that becomes the spirit, because spiritsaremagic!”
Amelia smiled. “Like that, huh?”
“Likeit?” Marci plunged her hands into her bag, pulling out her notebook so fast, she tugged them right through Ghost. “I have to write this down!”
The more she thought about Amelia’s explanation, the more things clicked together. Her whole life, all of her teachers had talked about spirits like they were just a different, more powerful type of magical animal, but that had never really made sense. A tank badger had magic, sure, but it was nothing like a spirit. It couldn’t vanish and reappear like Ghost could, and no magical animal had ever talked to her in her head. But if she accepted the idea that spirits weren’t physical at all, butsentient magicthat thought and acted for itself, that explained so much! That was why she’d been able to bind Ghost in the first place, because he was just more magic, the same stuff she touched and moved around all the time.
And the drought! She’d always thought the name for the thousand-year span when there’d been no magic was just poetic, but what if it wasliteral?What if the magic really had dried up like a river in a drought? That would explain why the spirits had all been forced into sleep, and why they’d all come roaring back the moment the meteor got the magical flow going again. Unlike magical animals—including human mages—who’d merely been altered by the sudden influx of magic, spirits had been practically reborn on the spot, because theyweremagic. Unified, self-aware, sentientmagic.
Grinning like a maniac, Marci paused scribbling her notes and jumped back to the top of the page, writing the wordsSENTIENT MAGIC THEORYacross the head of her notebook in bold stokes. Forget earning her doctorate,thiswas the sort of magical breakthrough that got your name in the history books! All she needed now was proof—some kind of experiment that would show definitively that spirits weren’t a separate class of magical animal or gods or whatever the current popular theories claimed, but thinking, moving blobs of self-aware magic—and she’d be famousforeverasthe mage who finally cracked spirit theory. They’d awarded the Nobel Prize in Magic for less. And here she’d thought her academic career was over!
That thought snapped her back to the present, and Marci looked up to see Amelia watching her with a bored expression and a nearly empty bottle of booze. That wouldn’t do at all. She’d finally found an immortal willing to talk to her about magic, and the results had already gone beyond her wildest expectations. She couldn’t let Amelia get bored with her now. Who knew what other secrets she had to offer?
“Sorry,” Marci said, scanning her page one last time to be sure she had all the key points down before closing her notebook. “Got carried away.” She paused, suddenly worried. “You don’t mind if I tell other people about this, do you?”
“Knock yourself out,” Amelia said, downing the last inch of rum and tossing the empty bottle into the sand at her feet before digging into the ice bucket for a fresh one. “Believe it or not, this stuff used to be common knowledge. If I’d known human magic was this far behind on the fundamentals, I’d have come back decades ago just to save myself the pain of watching you all make the same mistakes all over again.”
“That’s not our fault,” Marci said hotly. “There was no one teach us! All the old books and resources on magic were either destroyed by time or burned by the ignorant as heretical. By the time magic actually came back, most people believed it had never existed in the first place. That’s not even starting at zero. The first mages had to work their way up from negative knowledge, and the whole time, the spirits and dragons were just watching and not telling us anything!”
“Why should they?” Amelia said, popping the cork on her new bottle. “Human mages used to be at the top of the food chain, killing dragons and banishing spirits. The only thing that kept you in check was the fact that most of you died of preventable causes before you could become really dangerous. With the modern explosion in the human population, though, there are more mages alive right now than have ever existed in all the previous history of mankind combined. Your astounding ignorance is the only thing that keeps you from ruling the world on all levels. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were hidden dragons embedded in academic magic circles purely for the purpose of feeding you false information to keep it that way.”
Considering how long a few incredibly stupid theories had stuck around in otherwise respectable circles of magical thought, Marci didn’t actually find that idea too far-fetched. “So why areyoutelling me now?”
“Because I don’t have to stick around for the aftermath,” Amelia said with a wink. “I can leave this plane anytime I want. Also, I’d love to see certain individuals taken down a peg or two. Watching a new generation of dragon slayers rise up to take down the old guard would beverysatisfying.” She paused for an evil grin before taking another slug off her bottle. “Shall we continue? I still haven’t actually answered your question, and I’d like to get this over with before the sun goes down and the mosquitoes come out.”
“Of course,” Marci said, flipping her notebook open again. “Please go on.”
“You asked me when we started if I knew what kind of spirit your kitten there was,” Amelia said, settling back into her chair. “The short answer to that is yes, but the long answer is a bit more complicated, and has to do with you.”
Marci blinked. “Me?”
Amelia nodded. “As you might have guessed from what I said earlier, spirit classification is a tricky business. Traditionally, spirits are organized into four types according to their vessels. The most common type of spirit are those whose power gathers in physical landmasses, like, say, the Great Lakes. We call these spirits Spirits of the Land, and they tend to be the heavy hitters of the spirit world since they’re the magical embodiment of freaking giant mountains and whatever. Really, though, anywhere magic pools for long enough can become a spirit. Animals, for example. If enough animals get together in a population, their collective magic pools to form an Animal Spirit.”
“I’ve seen plenty of those,” Marci said, thinking of the tank badger spirit she’d banished yesterday evening. “They don’t seem to be as powerful, though.”
“They’re not,” Amelia said, nodding. “But that’s a volume issue. Even if a critter is super magical, it takes alotof them all living together to create a magical depression as big as the Great Lakes. Most animal populations simply never reach that size, and so Animal Spirits tend to be weaker, smaller, and stupider than their geological counterparts.”
