Ask Me Anything 1 -- The Spellthing

Do you have a name?

Do I have a name? In my experience, my deer, names are most often held by humans, who breed and cultivate them and then tag them onto everything they see until the skies and the seas and the mountains are positively drowning in mundane labels. I’ve never been one to wield them myself. Some spells do – Destiny cannot seem to resist bludgeoning everything it prophesies about into the shape of a name – but the only name I have with any regularity is the one I am currently applying to you, my deer.

What are your pronouns?

The pronouns I use the most are “me” for myself, and “you” for yourself.

Do you have tastebuds, and if so, what does the magic you suck in taste like?

Do I have tastebuds? My deer, I… I’m not made of cells.

Have you ever met someone else in the initiation?

Oh, there are always new humans to meet in the Initiation. So young and scared and delightfully, entertainingly clever.

Are you more or less likely to attack someone if they’ve escaped you before? I’m thinking you don’t care, but I’m curious.

I never attack someone. I speak to a dreaming space, a human mind as you might so arrogantly simplify it, and it is influenced. Whether it lives or dies is its own affair and, in the scheme of things, rather meaningless.

I almost never meet the same human mind twice, so it would be difficult to extrapolate any pattern in my behaviour based on previous encounters.

How old are you, by this I mean, when long has it been since you guys started to bond together?

It is my nature to see the future. If you have questions about the past, it is perhaps worth your time to ask somebody whose nature is to see the past. A human, perhaps.

Thoughts on insects?

There are no thoughts on insects. Or I suppose it is more accurate to say that there are no dreams on insects, at least none that are visible to my kind, and others have no relevance. Humans may build dreams in the shape of insects, but I am not what you want to speak to about that.

Do you choose your appearance or do you have no control over it? If you chose, why do you choose to be so alike a human but so odd at the same time? If you don’t choose, why do you look human-like, are bonded spells prone to look like humans? Or is it all coincidence and both humans and spell things tend to look eerily alike?

I do not know what my appearance is from your perspective. I cannot see, at least not in the way that you see.

It is my nature to give information to humans. This is what I am. I would imagine that I appear to you as your mind would characterise me.

Would sunlight hurt you?

… No? Why would it?

What exactly makes you, as a spell-creature, any different from a human-creature (aside from all the magic)?

“Creature” is an arbitrary distinction. Do you believe that you are an individual thing, my deer?

The mere existence of this question betrays an understanding of the world so flawed that it has no answer. You may as well ask what a sunrise tastes like.

Do spells tend to bond like this or are you an odd case?

I am a product of my environment. It is not normal for unbound spells to encounter each other. If you put a whole lot of them in a very confined space for centuries, odd things are guaranteed to happen.

Are bond up spells more or less likely to be bond to a human?

Are you more likely to be infected by a bacterium from the mouth of your lover, or the pen you absentmindedly chew? The origin is irrelevant. It takes a great deal of shackling or long-ingrained training to keep a spell from a compatible host.

Why only enter humans and not other animals? In case it enters an animal would it be able to use the spell? Would the spell be ‘trained’ to enter other animals only?

We bond to the dreamers from which we are born, the dreams that we perceive. The only source of such things that I can see are the animals you call humans. But the flesh is not particularly relevant, and the question of why dreams are born only of human meat is uninteresting.

Since when can you talk like this?

I am a being of prophecies. To perceive information and communicate it to humans is the entirety of my nature. I have been able to ‘talk’ for as long as I have existed, or I would not, by definition, exist.

Is it possible to enchant living beings?

How would I know this?

Any prophecy spell is able to become part of you or they must be 'compatible' somehow? If it needs to be compatible, what is this compatibilidade based on? Is it strength (and would be ‘strength’ in this sense?)? Maybe the more specific the spell, the harder it is to bond with other spells. Maybe it’s linked to the kind of prophecy spell (if it’s the kind that only sees the future or the type that profetices things to existence).

My perception is vast, and somehow you keep insisting on asking me questions outside it. Do you know how all of your cells interrelate and operate? This is a question for a scientist.

Do you need to be near a human to prophecy?

I am always near a human. I am trapped under a society of mages.

Do you choose when to prophecy? If not, do the prophecies come in predictable bases or at random? Does taking on a single spell from you change it?

Do you choose when to breathe?

When you see the future, or something alike, do you ‘want’ to tell it? Is it your nature to tell it to a human? or is it your nature to just say it? In truth what do you ‘instinct’ after profeticing?

‘Want’ is the purview of beasts. I see and I communicate because this is what I am. The most that a spell could be said to ‘want’ something is to follow its nature and find a compatible host, but even this is like saying that the rain ‘wants’ to fall and the wind ‘wants’ to blow. I don’t understand the rest of your question.

Do spells do things when they are not bond to humans or they just… do nothing but exist? If there were no more humans in the world, would all the spells disappear? Would they try to enter other living beings or objects?

Imagine a shack in the middle of the woods. It has a heavy oak front door, bolted shut. It is abandoned; nobody is out here, nobody will ever go through that doorway. Is the door still a door?

Imagine a shack in the middle of the woods. It has a heavy oak front door that is bolted shut, but weather has broken the windows and torn off parts of the roof. Animals freely enter and exit these new doorways, but the panel of oak remains bolted in place, effectively acting as a wooden piece of wall. Is the door still a door?

Imagine a ruin in the middle of the woods. There are no walls, no roof, only the oddly smooth stones beneath the colonising grass shows any hint of there ever having been a cabin there at all – that, and the doorframe, which through some act of fortune has remained standing, housing a heavy oak door. The door is bolted shut, but there is nothing for it to shut in or out – it is not part of a wall, and instead of being any kind of passage, is now a standalone obstruction. There’s nowhere for it to lead to.

Is the door still a door?

Imagine a ruin in the middle of the woods. There is nothing left now, but the oddly smooth stones beneath grasses and small bushes. An old oak panel lies on the ground, roots just starting to burrow their way into the soft tracks left by fungus. Rusty hinges are still attacked to one side. Is the door still a door?

Imagine the middle of the woods.

There are worked stones and rusty nails here. Signs of previous human habitation. Under the grass and mushrooms growing in one particular patch is the spongy remains of a long-dead panel of oak.

Is the door still a door?

A thing is defined not just by its form and history but by its function. If there are no dreams left, can there be magic? Is a spell that cannot act still a spell?

Of course, none of this particularly matters for your question, because I don’t know what we will be after the humans are gone. I cannot see that. You cannot move into a lack of space, you cannot exist into a lack of time, I cannot see into a lack of dreams.