Subject: ... There was an attempt: General Theories, Ch. 1
Author:
Posted on: 2018-04-11 14:23:00 UTC
Well, hS is gonna do it, I might as well have a crack at it. =]
---
It should have been raining.
Warm summer sunlight drifted through the bedroom window instead. It landed on a figure, slumped face down on a blanket the colour of verdigris, lying on a broken bed. The figure shook, ever so slightly, constantly in motion. A stuffed wombat muffled the noises that the figure made almost completely, but not quite.
The figure rolled over onto its back, staring up at the ceiling and the pea-green walls, at the bare bulb through tears in the shade. It was an odd-looking boy: rail-thin and long-limbed in that way only teenagers are; mass of thick brown curls splayed out on the pillow like tree roots; skin pale despite the summer sun and cratered with nervously-plucked acne scars across the figure's arms and forehead; and green eyes with a ring of hazel at the pupil, when they weren't squeezed tight to keep the world out. It was definitely an odd-looking sort of boy.
Her name was Siobhan.
Siobhan rolled back onto her stomach and blinked away a few more tears. She couldn't concentrate any more, couldn't focus on anything that wasn't what she was. Her insides felt like dead weight. Her arms were heavy. She wanted her laptop back, but that was gone, hurled out of the window by her mother for ballsing up her exams once too often. She needed something to take her brain out of the mindset of failure and let it just... whir away in the background. The fan on a computer that didn't do anything but was kept around because people liked the noise.
It should have been raining.
A book would do. Siobhan rolled off the side of her bed, clutching her wombat briefly, and listened for where her mother was. Downstairs, still furious. A book would hdefinitely do. She crept out of her bedroom and glanced around at the landing, all mid-brown rough carpet and watercolours of flowers. And a shelf of books, mostly academic works that her mother was using for her doctoral thesis. One of them caught her eye, though.
It was a rather wizened looking thing, a battered old paperback with dog ears and a faint smell of mildew and old libraries. The cover, which was black and covered in green stars, said it was A General Theory of Wizardry by Marcel Mauss, translated from the original by Brian Roberts. It was exactly the kind of book Siobhan wanted to read. It was also all wrong.
She held the book timidly in her hand and went back into her bedroom like a shot bolt, locking the door behind her and smacking the knob with her palm. A small thunk from the other side let her know that the other knob had now fallen off, and she took the rest of the handle out of the mechanism. Once her privacy was assured, she popped the book down on her pillow (her wombat seemed to be looking at it askance) and began rooting around in the bookcases. That was the one thing she liked about her room: it was full to bursting with books. They were everywhere, a small minefield of information. Sure, she spent a lot of her time on the Internet reading underwhelming webcomics, but just having books around - especially old ones, like her grandfather had collected - made her feel safer, more grounded, more real.
A small, triumphant noise escaped Siobhan as she finally found the book she wanted. At least, it sounded triumphant. It might have been a burp. She wasn't sure. She placed the battered paperback copy next to the book she'd found on the landing and began a compare and contrast.
Mauss's work, a famous work, was A General Theory of Magic. The translation she had, by Robert Brain, was a slim paperback whose black cover was decorated with an array of blue stars. She'd dipped into it briefly for pleasure a few months ago, when her mother had been more amenable to letting her do things like that. But they only had one copy.
So, in short, what the blue hell was this book doing here?
Siobhan picked the book up and began to read, and it was a strange sort of book. She noticed that the dedication was wrong, too - it simply read "For You" - and her jaw set. She turned the pages, teeth gritted, tears drying on her cheeks, trying to find more inaccuracies in the... copy? Knockoff? What was this bloody thing?
At least the style was right. Mauss's prose really wasn't a strong point. However, it differed in that as it explored the history of the use of magic across ancient and so-called "primitive" cultures, it leaned heavily on narrative examples and allegory rather than evidence or history. Because they had to be narrative examples, right? Stories about teenage shamans in the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo waging war on death itself were ridiculous. So was the story about how the murals of dolphins excavated at the palace of King Cogidubnus at Fishbourne were due to the king's long-standing alliance with dolphin wizards - which had to be fake, because the palace was first discovered in 1960 and Mauss's book (the real one) was published in 1902.
There was an entire chapter dedicated to Cogidubnus, and the essential tragedy of his reign; how he had thwarted something called the Lonely Power in his youth, and lingered on too far past his time, wandering amidst the seas, giving up his kingdom to a foreign empire just to keep his people safe, and then being cut off when the Romans retreated from the island, leaving behind only stone and blood. The Lone One had won that day, and plunged the Britain of the Late Antiquity into something that truly merited the term Dark Age, and only with the coming of the young wizard Aelfred hundreds of years later was It finally beaten back. Mauss - or whoever had taken his name - had thoughtfully included diagrams of the murals at Fishbourne and Celtic and Saxon works of art, but the designs were wrong there as well. Rather than traditional tiled murals or knotwork, they were lines and circles that merged and flowed into... something. Siobhan couldn't read them, but she knew what they meant; they were guides to the magic used in those ancient days, in the battles against It that were won... or lost.
Siobhan knew it was wrong. It had to be. It was completely unbelievable. She kept reading.
The chapter ended with a promise and a poem. The promise came first: that by reciting an Oath, the reader could truly use the magic of the ancients that was the birthright of everything that could give birth. The poem was the Oath itself, apparently. It warned Siobhan that an Ordeal would come her way, that she would be called upon to fight against Its influence upon the universe, but that she would not fight alone; all across space and time, there were those who would call her cousin, and call her by her own name. She wouldn't be Harry any more, the skinny, smartarse, good-for-nothing boy; she would be Siobhan Jones, a wizard of Earth, and she wouldn't be alone again.
Siobhan looked around at her bedroom. The floor was covered in a thick layer of books and junk. Doodles were everywhere. Dust was everywhere else. She hadn't gone out with her friends since school had broken up for the summer, and she hadn't gone out at all for a week. The book full of lies promised her the moon on a stick, and all she had to do was speak some words aloud. It was insane. Clearly, demonstrably insane.
She looked down at her skinny, pigeon chest, at the scar on it, at the word on it. What did she really have to lose by trying?
"In Life's name, for Life's sake..."
---
I realized upon further reflection that my Manual would actually be one of the scholarly works on magic that my mum had loads of around the house while she was working on her Ph.D. So, this is a brief and probably quite ropey illustration of that. Concrit from people more familiar with the Young Wizards series is always welcome. =]
