The Absence of Direction ( 8 )

Everything has a beginning, and that first success is hardest to achieve.

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Any young novitiate is required to have a basic competence in the foundational matters of magic. Usually, this is the responsibility of whichever parent is a qualified mage.

For my brother and I, Mother was the teacher, and Father the examiner.

All workings require a melding of imagination and will. The mage must conjure images to his mind and focus those images to do her bidding. The student lacking in either will never see the Black Isle. 

Farsending is one of a class of workings requiring an extra dimension. Mathematicians might call it a vector, while most mages would call it "fastidiousness".

I think of it as "direction".

The most rudimentary farsendings cover only a small distance, maybe across the room, to a destination that can be seen clearly, and one that is perhaps in physical reach. 

The mind imagines the distance, the position, the "direction", and wills the subject directly to the new location. 

Farsending is impossible in the absence of direction.

My first farsending success was with a pebble from the garden at Azillan. I was so pleased with myself that I've kept it all these years. It serves as a reminder that everything has a beginning, and that the first success is hardest to achieve.

If direction cannot be assessed by sight, it must be achieved by meticulous imagination. We are taught that the only way to farsend accurately is to choose a familiar destination. In other words, you can farsend to a place only if you have already been there. It's quite a limitation. The result? Young mages regularly traipse around the world, along the Boundary roads, solely to expand their farsending range.

I should know — I did it myself.

This sense of direction must be wholly on land, avoiding water. 

It is commonly held to be impossible to farsend across a body of water, and any success is believed to be, in reality, a farsending around the body of water. Water is itself a problem, I grant you, but here the issue is about its motion as a fluid, or rather, its impermanence.

Every step we take leaves a trace. We are bundles of energies and emanations. The stones we walk upon remember our presence. It is this echo that a mage follows in a farsending, the last vestige of their own former presence. This knowledge is so fundamental that it is considered to be a law.

Of course, if you can see the other side of the river, and accurately judge the direction of your destination by sight, there is no good reason you couldn't farsend to it, except for a lack of imagination or will. Most mages simply don't pursue such things, eagerly forgetting their first farsending success.

There are two accepted exceptions to the rule of familiarity. 

First, a Lanstone is connected at all times to each and every member of the lan.

While a mage usually follows his own Trace, he can also follow the Trace the Lanstone has on any lan member. In times of dire need, the Lanstone itself can provide the direction needed, allowing a mage to farsend to an unvisited destination that is nevertheless known to the Lanstone. 

Azillan's Lanstone would help me farsend to Father's location.

Second, wherever a mage is in the world, they can use that tenuous and subconscious connection to their Lanstone to farsend directly home, subject to the same limitations of will and imagination faced by anyone with only a formal education.

There is a third exception. Most never even think of it. When Mother let me place a Trace upon her, she gave me a sense of where she is, an echo of her presence in the world. I knew, in any moment, that I could farsend to her. Why hadn't I? Father would have found out about it, and I didn't need to earn any more of his displeasure. It was as simple as that.

I ascended the central tower of Azillan, my mind swirling with the possibilities that now lay before me. I had my audience with the Lanstone. It spoke through the ghost of my father, telling me all I needed to know. Seeing Father was a sobering reminder of what was at stake. 

I learned why Father had gone to Agali, and a great deal more.

And then, when the Lanstone shared Father's Trace with me, and I took measure of the direction of his body, I endured one more revelation: Mother was there.

Continue reading with Part 9 - The Shape of Dark Magicks.