Sylvia blinked in the first light of day. Reaching up, she yanked the curtain away, letting the lazy orange light flood her small room. Sometimes, she complained about how crammed it was. There was no space for a chest or a crate. She had to store all her belongings under the bed, or in convenient corners around the house and barn. But truth be told, she was just glad to have her own room. Since the roof was low, she was the only one who could stand comfortably in the loft. Alice could too, of course, but their mother had to be able to go and wake Alice without hitting her head.

Making her bed and slipping out the door, Sylvia edged past the extra chairs and the winter coats, rounded the extra plank for the kitchen table, and climbed down the ladder into the hallway. She sneaked down the stairs, walked though the kitchen, and exited the back of the house.

In the shade of the awning, she leaned over the water basin and washed her face and hands. She picked her trousers and a smooth cotton tunic from the clothing line, put them on, and tied her father’s broad belt around her waist to keep everything in place. Taking another look in the basin, Sylvia inspected her reflection in the still water and sighed. Grabbing a comb, she hurriedly pulled it through her hair. Then, she made a messy braid. The first thing she was going to do when she left Nyberg was cutting her hair short. It was always in the way. After lacing the newly repaired boots, she finally made for the barn.

Climbing up to the haymow, she pulled her backpack out from behind a stack of bales. Making sure The Basis of Magic rested safely within, she nodded to herself and shouldered the pack. Before she could turn, a faint screech gave her pause. Leaning forward, she peered through the haydoor. Her father was walking to the pigsty with poleaxe, knife, and rope in hand.

It was much too early in the year, but after recent news, they had to tighten their belts. They would be better off freeing up some feed right away. Perhaps they could even salt the meat and hide it among cloth and wood in the attic. What they could not afford was to wait for someone to come by and exchange the animals for money. No one could digest coin, no matter how much of it their purse held. At least they had gotten the winter wheat processed before news of the letter reached the millers. Surely their percentage was going to rise.

Sylvia weighed her options. If she had to help with the slaughter, she would not make it to the stables in time. After pulling the blue book out, she stashed the backpack into its corner. Tucking the slender tome under her tunic, she shifted her belt and sat down. Dangling her feet from the haydoor, she took a firm hold of the edge and lowered herself as far as she could, before letting go. She rolled off her feet as soon as they hit the ground. Standing up, she spotted her sister and sighed.

“And where do you think you are going?”, Maja asked.

“Nowhere.”

Maja crossed her arms. “Nowhere is right. You saw father. We have to help him.”

“No chance of you stepping in for me?”, Sylvia asked sweetly.

“I am not going to do it all on my own. We have to preserve several pigs. Do you realise what kind of time that will take if only me and father are working?”, Maja protested. “Tsk. Seriously. At least pretend like you are pulling your weight, little of it as there is.”

Sylvia forced herself not to roll her eyes. Maja was getting more like their mother every year. It was so annoying. Biting back the scathing comment, she tired a different approach.

“I will be back before midday. Promise. Just clean the bristles off with him and I will be back for the separating and salting.”

“That is a lot of water to carry all by myself”, Maja said, raising her eyebrows.

Relieved, Sylvia smiled. “What do you want?”

“You clean the pigsty on your own for two days”, Maja bartered.

“Deal.”

“Where are you going anyway?”

“Nowhere”, Sylvia repeated.

Maja shook her head. “Do not leave Klara waiting in nowhere then.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Mhm.”

Sylvia took off in a sprint. Hurrying across the meadow, she slipped into the shadow of the trees before her parents had a chance to notice the escape.

The morning light shimmered through the canopy, casting eerie shadows across the forest, each dot dancing to the rhythm of the wind. Away from the farm, nature had not been re-arranged by human hands, and not for a lack of trying. The large blackstones embedded in the ground made it hard to claim more farmland. Even in the fields, you could find the occasional patch of unused land, indicating a stone beneath the surface, which broke any tool put to it. Not even light could affect the stones. They appeared dark as night even under a bright summer’s sun.

The ground moved under Sylvia’s feet, sighing under her boots until she removed her weight again, and stepped onto the next puffy patch of dry moss. Sylvia observed her surroundings while she made her way further into the thicket. The light seemed as alive as the forest itself. It had a surreal, lurid touch. All colours seemed more intense, like she was walking through a painting. Even sound behaved differently. Voices travelled only short distances. When walking with company, you always thought them further away than they were. The rushing of leaves and the trickling of the river, however, echoed through the entire forest unhindered. They had been here for so long, they knew their way around.

Sylvia liked to imagine these woods were enchanted. The mysterious black stones and birds acted as charms to ensure no one disturbed the silence. Or maybe she just read too much. She shook her head. No. Impossible.

Emerging from the calm of the woods a good hour later, Sylvia spotted a young fox lying low in a nearby bush. More alarmed by her sudden appearance than by the dogs barking from afar, it sprung to its feet and hurried out of sight. As soon as the red tail had disappeared between the trees, not a rustle betrayed the hunter’s location.

Climbing the fence and striding across the paddock, Sylvia entered the stables. She often admired the construction, which lay nestled in a slender clearing. Each crooked beam was once a tree standing proudly among the rest in this very place. A few blackstones peeked up from the ground around the rustic stables. You could not fight nature on these things. The clearing was what it was. There was only one road, leading out of the forest to where Nyberg licked up the foot of the mountain.

Greeting the horses, Sylvia offered each a small treat of dried apple from the fruit box. Once the animals accepted her presence, she walked around to the front of the building. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she took a deep breath and called out. “Hii-ha-hiiho-ha!” Her shrill voice travelled along the road, all the way into town. She tilted her head down, listening to the echo fading into the woods. She waited, closing her eyes. Nothing. Cupping her hands around her mouth anew, she called into town again. “Hii-ha-hiiho-hao!” Closing her eyes once more, she waited and listened. As the echo of her voice died, a new voice rang through the air, high pitched and sweet. “Hii-ha-hiiho-ha.”

Satisfied, Sylvia retreated into the shelter of the stables. The horses looked at her expectantly.

“I was not talking to you. Do not mind me”, Sylvia told them.

She ruffled the mane of the nearest steed and then made herself comfortable in the empty stall by the door. Producing the blue book from under her tunic, she thumbed through until she found her page.

The subject of magic naturally invited wild dreams. It was encouraging that someone had bothered analysing it, and writing about it in such basic terms. The book defined its nature and use, but despite the careful precision of the text, there was one big mystery the book did not offer any answers to. What made a mage? Or any caster? How did one learn magic? It caught Sylvia’s imagination. The question burned in her, had kept her up long into the night.

Despite her interest in the subject, the slender tome proved more frustrating than rewarding. She had read and re-read the entire book, cover to cover. Yet, after two readings, trying her very best to find what lay beneath the ink, she had nothing to show for the effort. Contrary to what Priest Ryther had insinuated, the book barely spoke at all. The words were stale, not a single underlying meaning hiding in any sentence. There was not a drop of feeling left behind by the writer. The plain, matter-of-fact writing in perfect, easy to read, scholar level calligraphy, was worse than the pretentious ramblings of The Origin of Fri. It was downright boring! How anyone managed to make a subject like magic boring was beyond her. What was Ryther feeling when he copied this work? Nothing at all? She wondered if the original was as bad as the copy.

She ran her fingers over the text, lying dead as stone beneath her touch. Taking a measured breath, she forced herself to focus. It would take more than a bit of boredom and frustration to keep her from such an exciting topic. Because it was interesting. It really was. Huffing, she clenched her jaw and flipped back to the very first page.

“First we must ask ourselves what magic is. This can be a hard question to answer, since magic is both object and action, and both go by many names. We speak of favour, prayer, spirit, soul, aura, bending, occult qualities, witchcraft, and much more in other languages. The practitioners of magic are also known by many names, such as witch, wizard, mage, caster, priest, shaman, half-god, awoken, favoured, gifted, and many more. This creates a natural language barrier, which complicates the gathering and compiling of data on the subject. With a strong linguistic basis, however, one can discern what their conversation partner means when they speak of magic in a certain way.

Another complication in the study of magic is the human mind itself, and the limitations of the models it uses to operate. Humans are notoriously bad at observing nature in its true complexity. They categorize everything and then venture to define relationships between those arbitrary categories. Fluids drench cloth. Fire burns flammables. Grass grows on dirt. This is faulty logic. Fluid can be contained even in cloth and flame can burn without material. Even grass can grow without soil. Much the same way, magic has been broken into concepts and models in order to enable any conversation at all.

A shaman from the mountains will tell you about the two worlds, physical and magical, and the thin veil which separates them. The priests will tell you how the prayer of humans shapes Gaia into observable forms, such as gods. Both of these models have their appeal, but we shall focus on the triality model, which most casters of academic background favour. By the triality model, magic exists in three parts, namely in deity, soul, and intent.

Deity, or Gaia, also known as magical energy, is the natural magic that forms the basis of our world. Deity is everywhere and everything.

Soul is the magical energy which constitutes each individual ego within Gaia. Every live human and animal has a soul resting within their body. The presence of the soul within a body is in fact the most common definition of the term ‘alive’.

Deity can be manipulated by a soul via the application of intent, meaning that any being with a soul can in theory cast. Shamans explain the often supernatural abilities of animals in a similar fashion. A shaman may argue that birds fly by manipulating the magical world with their wings, which we perceive as flapping in the physical world.

Intent can be applied in many different ways. Intent can be applied by prayer, which channels deity in the air, by spellcasting, which channels deity through a soul, or by employing charms and enchantments, which follow predefined recipes and require very little magical affinity. The most common of these enchantments are soulbonds, such as oaths and pacts. While powerful, oaths are unique and mutually exclusive within their respective category. Spellcasting is far more potent. It allows the caster to learn many different forms of manipulation, and even enables the imbuing of magic, or occult properties, into otherwise ordinary materials. In fact, this is how whisperwood is made.

Someone who can cast is said to have magical affinity. This property is one only humans have ever been observed to possess.”

Barely a quarter of an hour had gone by when the familiar rhythmic sound of trotting hooves brought Sylvia back to reality. Smiling to herself, she kept her head down and her eyes on the pages, but she was not focused on the written word any more. The anticipation was much too great. It had been a while.