Magic spells @ Things Of Interest

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2024-09-01 10:30:02

This is background information about how magic spells work in Ra. This is information that I've been keeping up to date since the story began, but now it can be released publically.

This article contains one serious spoiler for anybody who hasn't finished reading chapter 18, Deeper Magic, and mild spoilers beyond that point. In fact, you should probably read the whole of Ra to date before reading this. This is reference information; Ra is the real story.

The (spoken) language of magic is called "" (the empty string). Or rather, it calls itself this. This has been demonstrated experimentally:

Like many languages, magic has an alphabet, a vocabulary, a grammar and an accent. The language is convoluted, ugly to look at and difficult to speak correctly. Like natural languages, it has very good expressive power and numerous inconsistencies/edge cases. Like programming languages, it demands rigid correctness from its speaker. The study of this language is called thaumolinguistics.

The spoken words of a spell rarely completely describe it. Much complexity is offloaded to the mind of the casting mage and to the physical equipment being used to perform it. More advanced equipment can be used to reduce the mental load for casting a spell. Equally, a spell can usually be made much shorter by increasing the mental load. A spell with zero or close to zero mental load is called a "fullspell".