dems the rules. [trigger #275]

With magic, as with all other things, there are rules. And those rules, like most other rules, are unclear, mysterious, and bendable. The rules are not our rules, they are not solid where we think they should be solid or porous where we think they should be porous. They are not intuitive to us. If we guess at them, we will guess incorrectly. If we obsess over discovering and heeding them we will never perform even the simplest magic, yet we will only completely ignore them at our own peril.

If the rules were along the lines we anticipated, one might expect that there were firm and dangerous rules pertaining to taking the life of another or returning one from among the dead to the mortal plane. In reality, this is the place where the rules and veils are the thinnest. Our instincts are so far off on this because we as a species aren’t very good at seeing the true nature of things. It’s a bit of willful ignorance I suspect, humans are always uncomfortable with how close they are to death in every moment they draw breath.

The most rules with the most dangerous consequences when broken seem almost entirely arbitrary to our unrefined sensibilities. Some of the worst magical disasters in history have been the result of casting cleaning spells on a Saturday, performing three flirtation charms in a row without breaking it up with an unrelated spell in between, or summoning a pet through a portal while wearing brown shoes.

It’s not that there is no sense or logic to these rules. The sense and logic is just very old, and from very far away (far away, not in terms of physical distance, but in terms of metaphorical distance along the astral plane). It is a sense and logic that would be impossible to translate without us being changed so much in the process that we would no longer have any resemblance to our former selves, or even to what today passes as human. Perhaps that isn’t such a bad fate, but it would defeat our purposes in actually trying to accomplish anything specific because we would lose all connection to our original aims by the time the translation process was completed. The best way to describe it is to say that in an attempt to translate between us and the ancient laws and nature of magic, it is us who is translated. One of my greatest pupils attempted just such an endeavor. For all I know he succeeded, but I can’t know for sure because he hasn’t been seen in this dimension in over 40 years.

Suffice it to say that an attempt to fully know the rules surrounding magic is just as costly and dangerous as attempting magic without fully knowing the rules governing it. The cost is the cost, and we won’t fully know what that cost was until long after the magic has been accomplished. So it is with magic. So it is with life.

devil’s advocate. [trigger #274]

As he stares down the hallway, the man uses his left thumb to crack the rest of the knuckles on his left hand. It is a habit he’s had for so long there isn’t even a small amount of him conscious of it anymore.

He is the Devil.

Not in some figurative way, insinuating he is particularly evil or diabolical. The man is actually the entity on which all the stories about the Devil were based, although most get so far away from the truth of things that they seem to be about another character altogether.

He is Lucifer, Satan, the Accuser, the Morning Star, Beelzebub, etc.

He isn’t a bad guy.

His friends call him Lucy.

You see, Lucy has never been a guy with a pitch fork or horns. He’s never been, and forgive the pun here, hellbent on world domination. He doesn’t revel in human suffering or misery. On the contrary, he hates seeing people under the burden of avoidable pain and restriction.

He’s more of a trickster than anything.

He’s just the guy who is always going to stand up and ask, “But, what if…?”

The closest phrase that gets at his true essence is devil’s advocate, but of course, in reality that means he is is own advocate.

Whenever someone boldly claims, “This is the way things are!” He is the voice that whisper, “Is it, though?”

When someone proclaims, “It must be done this way for all time!” He is the one offers, “But what if we tried it this way instead?”

He can’t help himself really. It’s just his lot in life. And it can be beautiful as often as it can be terrible.

Of course, his view on things can lead to all sorts of destruction and mayhem, but sometimes an alternative voice is exactly what we need. His ideas are pretty helpful in the face of intractable hatred, and slavery, and evil. His voice can be the thing that cracks the window just a bit, to let some fresh air into an otherwise stuffy and airless room.

However, when a system is running particularly well, benefitting a great many, you can be sure he will show up there too. He questions good things with the same voracity and cunning that he questions the horrible.

Today, he stares down a hallway, waiting for Sara Perkins to come out of her admissions interview.

Sara can see the rest of her life set before her. She will be accepted, there is no doubt there. After which she will apply her will to this PhD program the way she has to everything else, and before long she will be on the fast track to an important fellowship with any of a number of prestigious research projects. She knows that someday she will be famous, because someday she will cure cancer once and for all. She is certain of it.

She will do this mighty and important thing.

What Lucy wants to ask her is, “But what if she didn’t?”