Elder Race

How much worse to think yourself wise, and still be as ignorant as one who knew themselves a fool?

I am only now, at the wrong end of three centuries after loss of contact, beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care.

And I am absolutely intellectually able to agree, yes, all of this great crashing wave of negative feeling is not actually being caused by the things I am pinning it to. This is something generated by my biochemistry, grown in my basal brain and my liver and my gut and let loose to roam like a faceless beast about my body until it reaches my cognitive centres, which look around for the worry du jour and pin that mask on it. I know that, while I have real problems in the world, they are not causing the way I feel within myself, this crushing weight, these sudden attacks of clenching fear, the shakes, the wrenching vertiginous horror that doubles me over. These feelings are just recruiting allies of convenience from my rational mind, like a mob lifting up a momentary demagogue who may be discarded a moment later in favour of a better. Even in the grip of my feelings I can still acknowledge all this, and it doesn’t help. Know thyself, the wise man wrote, and yet I know myself, none better, and the knowledge gives me no power.

Is that not what magic is? Every wise man, every scholar I have met who pretended to the title of magician, that was their study. They sought to learn how the world worked, so that they could control and master it. That is magic.

It’s a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.

Want and need are distant cousins,

Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only "What we wish we'd done," rather than "How we actually did it.

I’ve never cared about religion, aside from as a subject of study in others, but in my blackest pits of despair I always find God and call out for help, because only an omnipotent outside force could possibly move the stone that is pressing me down. And God walks away, single footsteps off into the collective unconscious. He doesn’t care. Why should he? I wouldn’t.

that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.

I say, “scientist,” “scholar,” but when I speak to them, in their language, these are both cognates for “wizard.” I imagine myself standing there speaking to Lyn and saying, “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard.” It’s not funny.

They think I’m a wizard. They think I’m a fucking wizard. That’s what I am to them, some weird goblin man from another time with magic powers. And I literally do not have the language to tell them otherwise. I say, “scientist,” “scholar,” but when I speak to them, in their language, these are both cognates for “wizard.” I imagine myself standing there speaking to Lyn and saying, “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard.” It’s not funny. I have lived a long, long life and it has meant nothing, and now I’m on a fucking quest with a couple of women who don’t understand things like germs or fusion power or anthropological theories of value.

Nyrgoth Elder,” Esha said slowly. “Is that not what magic is? Every wise man, every scholar I have met who pretended to the title of magician, that was their study. They sought to learn how the world worked, so that they could control and master it. That is magic.

It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight.

I am overwhelmed by a terrible sadness, but it’s a good sadness in a way. It isn’t the leaden weight of my own self-pity and misery, the biochemical fallout of malfunctioning metabolism and cognition that just casts a dour filter over everything, whether there’s cause or not. I am sad for Lynesse Fourth Daughter, trying to be something that never existed in the world, and failing because it’s impossible, and trying again.

I feel my heart break, in a way that I would never be able to fix, not even if I took it out right now and tinkered with it. Staring at Lynesse Fourth Daughter, dressed in her finest, sword at her hip, off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it.

dressed in her finest, sword at her hip, off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it.

It should be as you say, some similar manipulation of the way the world is, but . . . I can’t account for it.” And he was more discomforted by that, she could see, than she was. How much worse to think yourself wise, and still be as ignorant as one who knew themselves a fool?

He is a man who has made bad choices and suffered for them, and had written his own life off as lost. Now he has the chance to remake himself and, having cut away all that bad history, we find a strength of character underneath that even he would not have guessed at.

Nyrgoth Elder did not age, for all that he had seen out his centuries. Instead, what came on him at night was what she could only assume to be a lifetime’s dread and fear and anguish, all the little emotions that little people had to battle, but which a sorcerer, it seemed, could just put aside for later. She felt horribly guilty for violating his trust, bitterly envious of this new demonstration of his power. It was not a magic spoken of in stories, and yet right then it seemed more useful than any casting of the lightning or commanding of monsters.

El aire apestaba a estaño podrido y a oro agrio.

What’s counterintuitive is, because I’m such a fuck-up, when I’m in the pits, some part of me doesn’t want to climb out. Yes, it’s bloody awful down here, but at the same time nobody’s making demands of me, not even myself.

And intellectually I know that I was still dealing with these problems when I was with her, but in the treacherous light of hindsight she was glorious like the sun, but a sun whom my memory honours only by noting how bloody dark it's got now she's gone.

themselves and their environment, melding Earth and native stock to insert themselves into the planetary ecosystem, so that what you have now, your crops, your beasts, some are natives and some are tweaked Earth creatures and others are hybrids of the two, so that there is precious little left that resembles the original alien ecosystem.

The engineers of those people changed

they were the ancients and with their magic they set about teaching the beasts and plants their place, naming them and giving them their roles.

No!” he insisted. “A spade is not magic, just because it turns the earth better than your fingers! Iron is not magic, just because it needs a smith’s skill to forge. It is just knowledge.

Then the rage was back without warning, and he slammed his fists into the wall hard enough that he left bloody smears where the skin over his knuckles had broken. Lyn flinched and heard her own whimper in the silence that followed, but Esha just pointed at Nyrgoth’s hands, where the skin was visibly knitting, torn edges crawling together and leaving no sign nor scar. “It’s not magic,” he insisted, against all reason. “I am just made this way. I am just of a people who understand how the world works.

There is no such thing as magic, you stupid girl. There are no such things as demons. There is only the way the world works. I come from a people who understand the world, and so there are things we can accomplish with it that you cannot. I know of the ancient words to command the servants and workers of elder days, like that wise fool Ulmoth unearthed. I have items of power which can chastise my enemies and protect me. There is no magic. I am not a magician, but a wizard.” He grimaced. “Not a wizard but a sorcerer, a magus. A . . .” And he said a word she had never heard, sharp and alien sounding, unsettling as metal on a tooth. And then a tirade, a whole sentence of the same words cast upwards, past the ceiling to the uncaring sky. A wizard’s curse.