“It’s not fair,” said Noel as she made a rock roll on the ground.

“Yes it is,” I said as I smiled, smugly.

“You can’t even see your magic,” she said as she made the rock roll around some more.

“But it works,” I said.

“Who cares about air, anyway?” she said.

“You do, you’re breathing it in right now,” I said.

We were bickering because I’d ‘won’ our little race. Noel finished her earth elemental magic before I finished my motion detection magic, but she hadn’t finished her air elemental magic yet. I wasn’t actually expecting to win, since her elemental magic was basically the water elemental magic we had already developed but for earth and air instead. However, apparently I had underestimated the complication of the elemental system.

The elemental system was based on the ancient idea that everything in existence was composed of some combination of the basic elements. These elements, as we had defined them for our own system of magic were: fire, water, earth, air, and void or aether. As such, they were borrowed from the Greek system adopted by people like Plato and Aristotle. Each element could be a combination of properties like hot and cold or wet and dry. I had explained this definition to Noel before, but since ‘Earth’ was supposed to be ‘cold’ like water but ‘dry’ like fire, it required a different type of ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ to turn the idea into a magic spell.

The water elemental magic we had invented attempted to use the water that ‘made up’ other things in our spell. Of course, the real world was not actually all composed of these four or five elements, so the system required a bunch of assumptions about existence and the material world. The problem with earth elemental magic was that earth was solid, unlike water.

While you could easily imagine water being a ‘part’ of other things since water can seep into and be absorbed by porous things, like certain trees or dirt, earth was harder to visualize as being a part of other things. If earth fell on wood, it wouldn’t seep inside and appear like it had become a part of the substance. Earth could hold up a tree, it could be mixed into water to form mud, and so on, but in all of those states, it would appear to be separate.

And so Noel had to directly use the attributes of ‘cold’ and ‘dry’ to think about the way the element of ‘earth’ made up other parts of existence. It was thanks to that sort of thinking that she was able to create earth out of wood or stone. She had to completely define ‘earth’ instead of assuming it meant something like dirt or ground. It was a fun, useful exercise in pure reason and its applications in our magical but material world, but definitely took a lot longer than I had expected.

“My magic, on the other hand,” I said aloud.

“Why are you explaining everything that I already came up with for my magic,” said Noel, dryly.

“Because it’ll help you get your thoughts in order,” I said.

“My thoughts are in order,” she said. She made some dirt fall out of her hand. “See? I can use earth elemental magic.”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s so I can get my own thoughts in order.” I put my own hand above hers and dropped dirt on top of it.

Noel’s eyes widened. “You can use it already?”

I shrugged. “What can I say? You’re a great teacher.”

Noel frowned. “But I didn’t… you know what, never mind. Thank you. You’re a great student, too.”

Darn. I was hoping to get a better reaction than that. It was boring trudging along the open wasteland with nothing to do. Thankfully, it was almost sundown and we could start setting up camp for the night. But first, we went around a few promising locations and set up some traps.

“How did you come up with motion detection magic so quickly, anyway?” asked Noel as we dug out a hole with motion magic. Elemental earth magic used a lot more energy to dig or move earth than simple motion magic did. Not surprising, since it didn’t rely on understanding the chemical composition of earth or its physical properties.

“Well, our system for motion magic was based on really old understandings of motion, which means it’s not as efficient as real motion magic will be once I have some time to actually work on it. Give me a dozen years or so and I’ll be moving mountains, I’m sure of it!” I said.

“You can be smug later,” she said. “Explain your magic already.”

“Right,” I said. “See, Aristotle had a weird and contradictory explanation of motion. Some people thought that by motion Aristotle meant ‘change’ while others said his definition of motion would include things like life itself!”

“Life itself?” said Noel.

“It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? To be alive is like being in motion. You start from rest and end at rest with a bunch of potentialities in the middle. For Aristotle, motion was kind of like a mix between actuality and potentiality. Or at least, people like Saint Thomas Aquinas thought so. Aquinas was this other guy who commented a lot on older thinkers like Aristotle. He figured that Aristotle thought of motion as a state of being both what something is already and as that something being something that it is not.”

Noel sighed. “I really, really hoped this translation magic would make it easier to understand your horrible explanations.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’ll try to explain it in a different way. If we’re in motion, according to Aquinas, Aristotle would think we are both in the place we started and at the place we ended. We’re not sure if that means that, if we went from our camp to this trap, we would be to some degree in a state of being in both places while traveling, or if this only applies to the moment of motion, so like, when I have my foot in the air or something. Motion itself is confusing, but trying to understand it the way people like Aristotle understood it, makes it even more confusing.”

“Then why did you use that understanding for your magic?” I asked.

I snapped my fingers. “That’s because, I didn’t!”

“You didn’t?” said Noel.

“I didn’t,” I repeated.

Noel shook her head and glared at me. “I think I need to beat you up a little to teach you not to waste my time!”

I laughed. “Okay, fine, I used it a little bit. See, Aristotle had an effect on other thinkers, and I ended up using one of those other thinkers’ ideas for this magic. See, there was this guy called Avicenna, and he figured that motion was kind of like being in a state between two other states or ‘termini’. He at first tried to keep the Aristotelian idea that motion required the object to be in the beginning and at the end in a sort of continual, connected state, but eventually figured out that motion was not the connection that included the beginning and the end, but merely the space between the beginning and the end.”

“Okay,” said Noel, “that makes more sense. So motion was not us moving from one place to another but only the movement between those places itself.” Noel frowned again. “Wait, how is that different from how I think about motion anyway?”

“It isn’t,” I said.

“Then what was the point of this whole thing?” said Noel.

“Arguably, none!” I said. Before Noel could get angry, I continued: “Well, actually, it gave me a system of thinking that could be easily applied to this magic. See, for Avicenna, the state of being at either terminus or end, was different from being in the state of motion between those termini. This means my magic has a way of differentiating between things that are not moving and things that are moving, by assuming two fixed spaces are termini.”

“Two fixed spaces?” she said. “Doesn’t that limit your magic a little too much?”

I shrugged. “This magic isn’t perfect. Since I don’t know what the object of movement will be, I need to set up another object first and my magic will only detect when this other object is moved.”

“In other words, it works best with ropes,” said Noel. “And us not having any rope was the entire reason you wanted to come up with this magic, wasn’t it?”

“You’re right, it works best with rope, but it also works with sticks, rocks, leaves and stuff like that,” I said.

“Alright,” Noel said. “At least it isn’t completely useless.”

“I know right?” I said as I put a large but light rock on top of the hole we were digging.

“Hey,” said Noel. “That’s too big! If we put the bait on top, the monster might not fall in.”

I crouched near the bottom of the rock. A small pebble had been lodged into the corner of the rock. “Actually, the only thing stopping this rock from falling inside the hole is this little pebble. If I connect this pebble as one terminus of my motion detection magic, anything that moves the bait we leave on top of this large rock will cause this pebble to move and the whole trap will trigger!”

Noel looked at the pebble and saw me cast my magic. On the way back to camp, I helped her understand my motion detection magic.

“Hey Cas,” said Noel as I explained Avicenna’s concept of termini to her.

“Yes Noel?” I said.

“Do you like making things more complicated than they need to be?” she said.

I smiled and said, with great confidence: “Yes, I do!”

She made me help her with elemental air magic that night.