About a hundred million years ago people started to think. You may have heard something to the contrary, but it's the stance of the college that these are lies perpetuated by THE TERRIBLE ONES to help crooks sell sliced ham. So forget what you believe you know.
As soon as the first thinkers emerged from the volcanic ash left by THE GREAT UNDOING they noticed that they were noticing things happening in accordance to their noticing. This proved difficult to confirm, as the ability to see that which you are not noticing wouldn't be discovered for several million years. But in their inexperience they elected to form a belief without an experimental control group that's carried on quite well for us ever since.
The principle is this: OUR REASONING OF THE UNIVERSE IS THAT WHICH GUIDES IT INTO SHAPE.
You're perhaps familiar with the old riddle: "if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did
it make a sound?". To a wizard this is a ridiculous question. The appropriate question would be to ask:
"if you discover a tree has fallen, do you owe it to the tree to reverse time and prevent its having died?" for
which the answer would probably be yes depending on your political affiliations.
The reason for this is that without our reasoning through the causality, if we were to
look at a fallen tree and not attempt to work out the order of events that led it to that situation,
we have every reason to believe that tree has never actually fallen at all. And has been lying on the ground
since the beginning of linear time. Wizards have been known to enter meditative
states that allow them to perceive but not reason so as to acquire this "infinitely aged wood".
It's really quite good kindling, as it's never been alive and therefore is quite dry.
;
Magic may now be defined to be using the powers of reason to come to erronious conclusions that confound and perplex the universe around us until it freaks out and burps out a fireball or something similarly sick or hella cool. We can accomplish this through complex mathematics utilizing truths about reality and combining them with falsehoods about reality that are also known to be true at the same time (such as the english spelling rule "i before e except after c", or the understanding that the youth of today [or the future] are using autonomy they don't have to ruin the world they can barely participate in, or that hot dogs exist, or something else along those lines).
However some magic spells may be accomplished with rudamentary logic, and thusly I will leave you with your first spell!
