In chapter 224, Damien’s research revealed that aberrant formation is speeding up. One of his theories is that each aberrant formed makes the next one more likely. It is my theory that each spell made makes aberrant formation more likely.
When someone forms a spell, they are carving channels into magic for their will to guide energy through to perform the spell. When someone casts a spell, they reinforce those channels. I think that sometimes the channels in spells can intersect.
Normally thaumaturges would use their will to keep within the bounds of the spell they intend to cast. If their will slips within one of these intersection points, they could be pulled by momentum or capillary action into other spells. Their will would not be enough for all those spells at once, so their mind and body would also be drawn in and be forced to conform with the magic channels. Then they would be rejected and spat out as aberrants. That is what I imagine happens during a break event.
The intersecting spells would explain why Newton had multiple effects. He had the calming effect of the spell he was casting, but also the thread unraveling and sensitivity to sound. He was embodying a cluster of spells all at once.
I think it would still be possible for an ill prepared and unlucky thaumaturge to aberrantize on a single unconnected spell if they slipped badly enough. However, the intersection point of two spells leading to another easy to follow path in magic would be an easy and common place to mess up.
This might be a contributing factor to why blood magic is banned. Maybe in addition to wanting to monopolize the power, people assumed that because blood magic often uses the body and mind in a specific set of ways there would be more intersecting spell channels. As shown with Newton though, it is probably unpredictable how many spells intersect a specific spell. Maybe you can actually check it by having very good will control and slowly feeling out the casting of the spell for weak spots. However there are incentives to ban that whole branch of magic with a shaky rationalization.
I wonder what would happen if a chunk of magic was completely severed from the rest by the channels of various spells. It might not be a common problem depending on how many dimensions magic has and the shape of spell channels. It might not be a problem at all if spells are something like a trench carved into the surface of a three dimensional object. It might be a way to create independent objects that react to will like Myrrdins transformation amulet though.
I feel like you might be on the right track with a lot of this, but I’m also not quite sure about the part about intersections.
If it was intersections with other spells that is the problem, then wouldn’t the most dangerous spells be the ones with the most usage of similar spells and subtle variations? I would expect that, in that case, the most dangerous spells would be ones that convert heat or light into kinetic energy, since those are the spells for which there would likely be the most useful overlap, and are also ones where someone is likely to dump a bunch of energy into in order to accomplish something difficult… But, instead, this type of spells is one that Lacer readily assigns to his first-years because the frequent use of many variations actually seems to make them safer.
Rather than similarities with other spells posing more risks, it seems like spells being new, and spells involving higher-order associations are a large part of the increased risk. But because spells are more dangerous the fewer people cast them, and because, thanks to thaumaturgical research, the number and types of spells is ever-increasing, it’s entirely possible that the process of magical research itself is the source of the danger. Every time a new path is formed, that is just one more fragile source of risk that must me maintained, and as knowledge grows there simply aren’t going to be enough people casting to maintain all of them.
Like, I feel like a decent metaphor might be that each spell is a path through a monster-filled jungle, and those paths are maintained by the feat that tread upon them. You could potentially wander off any of the paths, or get forced off of them by a hostile competitor, but you’re at much more risk the longer and more overgrown that the paths are, and probably also at higher risk the more people who have gotten lost and attacked in the nearby jungle. As the total number of paths through the forest increases, every one of those paths becomes riskier, because there are fewer people, on average, walking on every one of them.
I think that if a spell has a similar structure/functionality as another spell, it won’t necessarily occupy the same space. When Siobhan was making her sleep spell, there were some parts harder than others, but I don’t think the easier parts were correlated to the more common parts. The spell’s location in magic could be completely random or it could be correlated to the location where the spell was made in the real world, or spells made by one person are close to each other in magic.
Part of this theory is the opposite of what Grandfather taught Siobhan. He taught her that spells with established patterns are easier to cast because they have been cast before, and therefore less likely to fail and cause a break. It’s literally in the first chapter.
But this chapter opens a reexamination of a question S. has avoided: why did an Newton’s esoteric spell, perhaps hundreds of years old, break so easily? The Shadow Familiar surprised him, but does it make sense that he lost control so dramatically of a relatively harmless and simple spell?
Maybe I just wouldn’t call it groves and intersections causing this instability, maybe I’d just call it weakened reality.
I posit that nearly all human magic in this story is a matter of control over reality. Each spell changes reality by introducing a crack in it, allowing the sorcerer to manipulate unreality with their will and impose a new reality that would generally be safe. With time, any unresolved reality cracks heal. Either as the spell is cast, or right after.
However, aberrants are deep gouges in reality. They do not heal. They persist.
My perception of aberrants is that when a sorcerer tries to bend reality too far, the spell “breaks” and creates a new local reality using the sorcerer as its focus. These new pieces of unreality are now a part of the fabric of reality. So, trapped pieces of unreality are destabilizing what the real means for the people living in it.
I also suspect this has already been partly discovered. I think the Red Guard is trying to shore up belief in the functional reality to keep more of these breaks from happening by reducing the information people know about aberrants. The more people think about aberrants, the less fixed reality becomes.
I also suspect Lacer disagrees that this method will work, and he’s researching the ancient period to try to understand what reality looked like before. He’s interested in reverting reality or controlling the change better. Why are humans magical creatures? When did we get the ability to change reality? And, why are more the more magical races gone? Is it really that humans destroyed them, or that they destroyed themselves?
The chapter puts two ideas close together: the wastes, and aberrants. It seems the hint is that someone must prevent the world becoming like the Wastes, where the Brillig cast so much magic that reality became unstable and now your thoughts effect it.
I’m just dropping in to say that you’re all brilliant, and this is a great discussion. When I have the mental bandwidth I’m going to jump in.
I don’t know that the model of magic that RedeyeA puts forth implies that spells like spinning marbles and other common spells would be more dangerous. Sure one way of looking at it tells us that the spark shooter spell is more dangerous because it has all sorts of variations, but that is balanced out by the fact that practically every thaumaturge learns that spell and carves the pattern of the spark shooter spell into reality more deeply than any one variation. Less spells would be more like shallow divots. Spilling your will into a new spell would be like pouring water onto a dinner plate. As for Newton’s spell, I think his grandmother passed it to him. Is one thaumaturge every other generation for a couple hundred years really going to make a spell more stable than say, even a single semester’s worth of students at university learning a kinematic spell?
I feel like this model gets weird when it comes to the distinction between transfiguration and transmogrification. When Siobhan was distancing herself from the collective consciousness I believe only her transmogrification was suffering. Does this mean she and everyone else has their own groovy magic structure by which transfigurative spells are worked? Maybe because transfiguration plays more by the rules of reality this gets worked around. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Also Newton’s spell got easier after he broke via it, does this have a clean explanation under the magic is groovy model?
Lol what do you think the poor aberrant made from someone casting the spark shooting spell would look/behave like?
A humming glowing orb that touches people they pop in a spray of sparks?
A firework jellyfish that makes others into firework jellyfish?
An unextinguishable living fire that crawls on the ground, and when it consumes people it grows in size and brightness?
Maybe a completely invisible aberrant that sucks heat from those that it touches and the dead rise to become like it?
A spark that jumps into the minds of anyone that sees it; visible as a multicolored firework in their eyes, jumping from body to body, spreading to anyone that looks in their eyes, and victims grow hotter and hotter until they burn from the inside out.
Yeah. I dunno why, but I feel like firework themed. Fireworks aren’t super scary to me, so I’m having trouble coming up with evil ideas.