Chapter 2

Now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve opened opened Pandora’s Box and a world full of trouble.”, Medes quipped.

“Never mind the jokes. Let’s get down to business. How do I do the magic?”

“I wasn’t really joking.”

“But to answer your question, you can’t, at least not yet. You have to prepare your soul first. And that is going to take time and effort, a lot of time and a lot of effort.”

“OK, how do I do that then?”

“You start with me dumping a whole lot of theory on you.”

I just stared at him silently and after a few seconds he got the message. We then began on a long and detailed conversation, which I’ll summarize for you.

Magic is powered by mana, which everyone already knows. What everybody doesn’t know is that souls need to absorb mana to be strong and healthy. But most people’s souls are asleep so they aren’t getting the mana they need to grow. They only get to absorb the mana that drifts into their very small sphere of influence. It’s similar to going on a starvation diet. It will keep you alive for a time but slowly your body will wither and die. It’s the same with mana. Your soul doesn’t absorb enough mana to keep itself or your body healthy and strong. That’s why people age and die. They simply don’t have enough mana to keep it going.”

And that’s where I would start. I would need to learn how to feed and care for my soul to let it grow to maturity. But first, I would have to find my soul, spirit, astral body, or whatever other word you want to use for it, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll use the word, “soul”, since that’s what Medes called it.

But before I did any of that I would need to get control of my self. To do magic you need to have total control over your mind and your emotions. You needed to concentrate, to focus on what you are doing to the exclusion of everything else. The best away to start to learn how to do that is to learn meditation and breathing.

Unfortunately for me, magic is a very dangerous, capricious and unforgiving thing. The slightest mistake can have devastating consequences, so I would have to learn it in baby steps. I would need to master and understand perfectly every technique, every detail, and every nuance before moving on to the next. If you try to do too much too soon you can fail catastrophically and become a wandering spirit.

Wandering spirits are at the bottom of the food chain in the spiritual world. They are bullied and preyed upon by the other, more powerful spirits. They are basically everyone’s bitch. There is no end of things that could become wandering spirits. They could be non-human entities that had lost battles and had their power drained, or they could be fledgling magicians like me, whose spirits had somehow been wrenched from their bodies. They could be less powerful Elementals who had angered more powerful Elementals. They could be anything.

There are a number of ways for a magician to become a wandering spirit, all of them sound very unpleasant. The most common one is that the magician becomes too full of themselves and tries to do too, much too soon, causing the body and soul to separate. Another way is to fail to open the gate, which again causes the body and soul to separate. A third way is for the novice magician’s soul to try wandering around the the spirit world and getting lost. The body needs to maintain a connection with the soul at all times or the body eventually dies and the soul wanders. And the fourth, and least common way, is for another, more powerful wizard to find you and rip your soul out of you body and steal your mana.