Etudie Perpetuity

“Plato was really good at making the rest of us feel dumb,” I said, “but him and his student, Aristotle, said a couple things that might be really useful for the two of us right now.”

“They have funny names,” said Noel.

“Yeah, they have funny names in my language too,” I said. “The important thing is, these guys began asking questions about all sorts of things. Questions about nature, reality, the nature of reality, and importantly for our magic, they asked questions about knowledge too.”

“Knowledge the way the birds described it? An understanding of reality or an aspect of reality,” said Noel.

“Yeah. See, they wanted to know about knowledge itself. What is knowledge? How do we get it? What do we know and what can we know?”

“The birds already told us knowledge was an understanding of reality. Which means we know things after we understand them and we can only know things that we understand,” said Noel.

“That does make sense,” I said, “but did we really see a bunch of birds inside the tree?”

Noel furrowed her brows. “Maybe? It might not have been the real form of whatever the God of Madness had fallen in love with, but it did look like a bunch of birds.”

“Right, because birds don’t talk,” I said, “and birds don’t give people magical secrets. And if the birds weren’t actually birds, that means they can change forms. And that fits pretty nicely into what Plato thought about knowledge!”

“What do you mean?” asked Noel.

“We saw, no, we experienced, the birds talking to us there, but we can apply reason to conclude what we saw wasn’t real. Plato would say that’s true for everything. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, all of the things we can sense, things we can experience, all of those are like shadows dancing on the walls of a cave.” I pointed my stick into the darkness around the camp. “We can only know things after applying reason to our experiences, transcending the shadows and walking out of the shadows and into the light of reality.” I cast a small flame on the tip of the stick.

Noel stared at the flame. “I think I understand what you’re saying, even though one of the words you’re using isn’t being translated properly.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know, I can’t say it.”

“Is it reason?”

“Yes,” said Noel, “that one.”

“It’s a complicated word, but you can think of it like consciously, or purposely making sense of things, usually making judgments based on facts. For example, we know ordinary birds can’t talk or give magical secrets, so we can reason that the birds we saw were not ordinary birds, or maybe they weren’t birds at all.”

“Got it,” said Noel, “but how does that help us with magic?”

“Well,” I said, “if we follow Plato’s ideas, and apply them to this fire I made, maybe it’ll help you cast magic too.”

“So it’ll help me understand fire?” asked Noel.

I nodded. “You’ve seen fire, but you haven’t transcended what you’ve seen. You have to apply reason, logic, step out of the shadows, in order to light a flame.”

Noel frowned. She put out my small flame with her fingers and stared at the end of the stick. “Then I should start with what I know about fire.”

I nodded. “I’ll add some things too, to help you along.”

“Thanks,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Fire is bright and hot. I used to think it could only come from the cave of The Terrible, but now I know you can make it the way you did too. So it can be made with wood.”

“Actually, the wood isn’t the important part. The motion was,” I said.

“Going back and forth?” said Noel.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ever gotten a bad scrape after rubbing against a tree? Your skin doesn’t get pierced like it does with a thorn or bruised like with a stone. The texture rubs a wound into your skin.”

“So you made fire by rubbing rough wood back and forth?” said Noel.

“Sort of, yeah. The important point is that rubbing those things creates heat.”

“And fire is hot!” exclaimed Noel. “No wait, maybe fire isn’t hot, but heat creates fire?”

“Maybe. But if you see a lot of leaves and a lot of of double berries on the ground, does that mean that double berries fall because leaves fall, or that leaves fall because double berries do?”

“No,” said Noel, “it means there’s a double berry bush that’s about to lose all its leaves and berries for the season.” Noel’s eyes widened. “Wait, you’re saying there’s something else? That something else makes both heat and fire?”

I nodded. “It makes sense doesn’t it? If you only needed heat for a fire, wouldn’t the sun have burnt us all to ash by now.”

“But how do I understand the thing that makes both fire and heat?”

I raised a finger. “That’s the thing. I’m betting you don’t need to do that.”

“I don’t have to understand the thing that makes both fire and heat?” she asked.

I nodded. “Plato’s student, Aristotle, used something called syllogisms to make certain arguments. In a syllogism, you have two premises, or claims, and from there you can make a conclusion. Aristotle also believed that if you learn something, or gain actual knowledge, you acquire something about the object itself, which sounds really similar to the way knowledge leads to magic!”

Noel didn’t get some of the words I used so I explained the ones that were important. She didn’t have to remember what a syllogism was, only that she could start from two claims and come to a conclusion based off of those claims. She also didn’t have to remember any of the names I was using, because who cared about Plato and Aristotle in this world?

“But that still doesn’t explain why I don’t need to know about the thing that makes fire and heat,” said Noel.

I could have just told her about combustion. In fact, it would’ve been easier than giving her an introduction to history and philosophy, but then we’d be back to climbing the tree instead of finding the roots of magic. I had to dive deeper into the fundamentals of magic in this world, rather than trying to build on top of what I currently knew!

“I think, that if you try to make an argument about fire based on what we’ve talked about so far, you’ll be able to cast magic. Just try to find a couple of claims you made and see if there’s something you can learn about fire magic from those claims alone,” I said.

“So you want me to come to a conclusion based only off what I already know about fire?” asked Noel.

“Yeah. I think magic might be partially tied to that process of reason and argumentation, because otherwise anyone who experienced a fire might be able to use at least a little bit of fire magic, right?” I said. “Although I think experience is important too. Elder Starry was able to use fire magic despite not knowing how to make fire, after all. He probably spent a lot of time with fire and reflected on it himself.”

“Okay, I’ll try to come up with something,” said Noel. “I know there is ‘something’ which creates fire, heat and light. I also know that fire itself gives off heat and light, and that it makes more fire if you give it more wood. So if both ‘something’ and ‘fire’ make fire, light and heat, then ‘something’ and ‘fire’ must be either the same thing or very directly related to each other.”

I was surprised. She didn’t have a word for ‘flame,’ but still realized that what she saw as ‘fire’ was different from the specific parts of fire: flame, heat and light. She also realized that combustion, which she called ‘something,’ continued inside of fire rather than only happening when a fire was first started. “Now you have to figure out the ‘wisdom’ part, which means you need to figure out how to use what you learned to cast magic,” I said.

“It feels like cheating,” said Noel, “but if fire can make more fire, basically replacing ‘something’ after fire has already been made, then I should be able to cast fire magic by skipping ‘something’ and going straight to ‘fire,’ right?”

Noel pointed a finger at the still-smoky stick in my hand. “All I need to do, is imagine fire being made from more fire, since that represents the ‘knowledge’ of fire that I’ve gathered from experience and reason, as well as the ‘wisdom’ of creating fire in a magical way.”

A bright orange flame burst out of the tip of her finger. It singed the top of the stick but kept flying forward. A dark shape appeared at the tip of the flame, and a quiet yelp broke the relative silence of the night as the dark shape flapped its wings and ran away from the now fading line of fire coming out of Noel’s fingertip.