Circle magic

Circle magic, which its keepers also call circle casting, is worked from iconography. Symbols are set out so that they stand in a ring, and in that arrangement they come together to make one effect. The plainest use of it is to trap: a circle can take a creature and lock it into a place.

Living icons

Where symbols can be drawn, they can also be stood. People take the positions the icons would have held and become the iconography themselves, and a caster working inside that ring is no longer casting alone. Those standing in it can enhance his power, reflect it back at him, or let him channel his own working through them.

Asked how long such a thing holds and how far it carries, a red-haired traveler of the nameless road-folk, explaining it over a beer in a Loshev tavern, gave three answers and no number: it depends on the skill, it depends on who is involved, and it depends on so many factors besides. He was careful to add that the art was not his own mastery. He understood it to a degree and no further, being no magical man himself.

The heart and the book

None of this is what the Arcane Congress teaches, and the road-folk are not gracious about the difference. The traveler had no patience for the schools, and put the whole distinction in a line: real magic is done from the heart, as opposed to out of a book.

What his own tradition insists on is a mentor. Without one, without elders to teach, a caster can still get good. That much he granted freely and did not sneer at. What such a caster cannot get is broad. His knowledge stays finite, and he will learn to be good at one thing, perhaps two, and stop there.

He drew the moral with Orsugo in front of him, self-taught, untrained, and settled on fire. However good the man gets, by that reckoning, he is one flame. One roaring flame, one bright hot flame, but one fire, and a fire can be smothered, doused or starved.

Nothing has proved that Orsugo’s raids run on circle magic. The Valiant Few described what they had seen in the mountains: a great ritual of flame with many participants about it, the fire growing and shrinking, and gnolls coming out of it with the power to burn. The traveler heard the account through and said it still sounded like circle casting.

Circles of another kind

The Congress knows circles of its own, and does not mean the same thing by them.

In a sealed chamber under the Mól ruins beneath Haudh-Gwenn, an ornate twelve-foot well of green ooze was found ringed with runes cut into its rim, written in tall Mól script layered with the dialect the Mól reserved for writing magic directly into an object. Read through a Congress schooling it is a magic circle of the sort the schools teach, scaled far past a spell: keyed to an elemental force rather than to an alignment, and turned inside out, so that it holds the thing in rather than warding it out. Circles of that kind need physical runes carved into stone or metal to hold at all, and breaking the runes breaks the circle. The same principle at a grander scale is what Mól sacred geometry does, condensing the thin boundary between planes onto a single point and amplifying whatever gathers there.

The two are cousins and not one craft. The Congress’s version is written, carved and still; the road-folk’s is inherited, taught mouth to mouth, and can be made of people.

Which of them the traveler had in mind was never asked. Mikhail admitted, in the middle of the conversation, that he had learned his magic from books, and the man set his beer down. His people are wary of Congress-trained mages as a rule. “You’re one of them Congress people,” he said, and stood, and said it was a good thing he knew nobody who knew magic. On his way out he added that he had already met others.