A Brief Introduction to Magik

The following is an excerpt from the unpublished work, A Brief and Comprehensive History on Magik as Discovered through Laboriovs Meditations by Cecil Guudhart. Cecil promises it will be completed before long, precedent says otherwise.

Magik is a funny term. It's used to describe the indescribable, the unknown and often the frightening. Any adventurer who has wandered north of the Blue Horn River will tell you of the powerful force in nature, the great mysteries that only aulde forests far from humans still hold. Enormous beasts, pathways that lead back to where they started or wild folk who can change faces at will. That's all well and good, however, the contents of this humble tome shall explore the practice of magik within the civilized world, sparse as it may be. For it is this practice that truly alludes to a mystic force susceptible to control. Away from nature, away from the dark, and into the light. The very first recorded practitioner of magik lived even before the Great Migration. A royal scholar by the name of Connor Pinnock was awake until the early hours, vexed as he was by a spell of his frequent insomnia, when he sneezed. The resulting sound of Connor's expulsion, as noted by his apprentice Rachel Fernsby, was not a common 'Ah-choo' but something most unusual. With his hand outstretched for a quill, Connor exclaimed 'A-hal-a-kah-blu-sin'. Both Connor and Rachel then report that a block of solid onyx lifted from his desk and suspended itself for almost 5 seconds before crashing back down into a cup of tea. Connor would remain fixated on this sneeze for the remainder of his life. By day and night, he would shout the jumbled word towards stone and squirrel alike hoping for 5 more seconds beyond the veil of reality. Alas, his obsession led to neglect of basic nutrition and eventual dry-land scurvy, i.e. he died. Rachel was not so daft. Sensing the limits of Connor's imagination and sanity, she departed his service and instead travelled in pursuit of answers to that fateful night. Exactly where she went is unclear thanks to the Greenwich librarian Sam who got drunk, became angered by a brown mouse, threw a candle at it and subsequently caused the Great Greenwich Fire which destroyed a thousand years of recorded knowledge including Rachel Fernsby's travelling journals. They say to never speak ill of the dead and so I shall subdue myself in saying, get stuffed Sam. What we still do have, however, are Rachel's findings. The Fernsby Pages hypothesize three practices of magik, that of utterance, crystal vessel, and imaginative conjuration.

To those of arcane studies, this is an oversimplification, but for the uninitiated a vital starting point…