Fossils Aren't Real

This story is set on Anastis, three years before the start of Mage Errant. It was definitely fun revisiting the Tomb Guard again, I love writing their weird little arguments! This one catches me up for last month- so you'll get one more short story this month! (I intend to have the voting buffer built back up before next month. Thanks for your patience, all!)

Honestly, I was expecting the US election news to knock me out of writing mode for a while- you may have guessed that I am very firmly on the left (I feel like I've offered one or two clues hah), and I'm less than pleased about the results- but after taking the last couple days off to cope and binge Outer Wilds, I'm feeling... weirdly energized to write more? Spite and anger have always been strong artistic motivators for me, I guess. Still, next few years definitely aren't gonna be fun. Take care of yourselves and each other, y'all.

Anyhow, story time!

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“You’re just making silly arguments because you’re bored,” Hepthet Dras accused Verrifax.

Verrifax stretched out in the sand, sheltered from the sun by the nearby mesa. “Of course I’m bored, the Sleeper hasn’t stirred in months, and it’s been even longer since anyone’s attacked.”

“Not seeing the problem here,” Hepthat Dras said. The sentient hive mind of mites forced their giant beetle mount to burrow deeper into the sand nearby. “I’m happy with bored.”

Peryn the Fourth looked up from his hammock hung between two enchanted inertial anchors floating in mid-air, where he’d been reading. It was always a bit odd seeing the mage outside their lair, he spent the vast majority of his time scrying for threats from his cave. “Sorry, didn’t catch what Verrifax is arguing now?”

“He’s claiming fossils aren’t real,” Stagys grumbled, from where she lay half-buried in the desert sands. The centipedes she had for hair were busy burrowing about in the ground by her head, while she lay there with her eyes closed.

Peryn eyed the dragon, then the gorgon.

Then he shook his head and went back to his book.

Without opening her eyes, Stagys reached over and shook Yohann of Yldive, where he was lying next to her.

“They’re talking about silly nonsense again,” she said.

Yohann, a philosopher who’d been living with the Tomb Guard for a couple years now, woke up with a start, then carefully maneuvered himself to sit up without disturbing Querulous Yohanna, who lay on his other side. The two great powers and the philosopher had been in a three-way relationship for a few months now, which none of the non-humanoid members of the Tomb Guard would have ever predicted.

“What’s this?” Yohann asked.

“Fossils,” Verrifax repeated, “aren’t real.”

Stagys grunted, then used stone magic to bury herself deeper in the sand.

“Alright, let’s hear your argument,” Hepthet Dras said.

The draconic sand mage exhaled happily, sending a small cloud of sand puffing away.

“Fossils are a completely incoherent category,” Verrifax said. “Not only does it include animals and plants, but even includes things that were never even alive— fossilized burrows, animal tracks, even feces!”

“Feces is considered a living thing by many philosophers and fecal mages, but that’s a fairly niche argument,” Yohann commented. “I do take your point, that is a bit strange.”

Yohanna let out a snore beside him, but no one worried about waking her— she was notorious for sleeping even heavier than a dragon.

“It gets even weirder!” Verrifax continued, starting to warm up to his subject. “There’s not even a single consistent method of fossilization!”

“Pretend I somehow never had a stage in my life where I was particularly fascinated by fossil formation and elaborate,” Hepthat Dras said.

“There are, in fact, at least a half-dozen different methods, if not more! The classic fossils are bones that got buried in sediment, and then had minerals precipitate and crystallize in their form out of water trickling through them over time. There are creatures that are buried in especially thick, lifeless muds who fail to rot at all, and have even their soft tissues preserved as stone. There are multiple variations of the above consisting of different chemistries too, resulting in wildly different fossil composition. Did you know there are fossils entirely made of opal?”

“Sounds expensive,” Stagys muttered.

“Bugs preserved in tree sap that became amber? Fossils,” Verrifax continued. “Creatures that get burnt to a cinder and then preserved as welded ash inside the resulting ash deposits? Fossils. Creatures that get buried in mud, then rot away leaving a mold that later gets filled in with other minerals like a cast? Fossils. Chalk? Just compressed microscopic seashells, absolutely a kind of fossil.”

“So what’s the real difference between fossils and any other kinds of rock?” Hepthat Dras asked. “They’re wildly inconsistent in formation and composition as well.”

“Simple!” Verrifax said. “First, there’s the sheer diversity of affinities that can affect fossils dwarfs the number that can affect normal rocks. Bone mages can affect bone fossils, wood mages can affect petrified wood. Stone mages can affect most fossils, glass mages can affect those opal fossils I mentioned before…”

“Hold on, opals are glass?” Stagys interrupted. “They don’t feel like glass to my stone affinity.”

“They have an amorphous physical structure like most glass,” Hepthet Dras said, “though they do have a few quirks, like being more stable when wet.”

“Anyhow, the sheer diversity of fossil types means that they can be affected by a ridiculous number of different mages,” Verrifax said. “And, more importantly, fossil mages can affect all of them as well. Well, usually. Some fossil mages can control sand eroded from fossils, others can only control whole fossils. Some fossil mages can affect amber without animal or plant bits inside, counting the tree sap itself as a fossil, while other fossil mages can only affect amber with those animal or plant bits inside.”

“They wouldn’t be fossil mages if they couldn’t,” Hepthet Dras pointed out.

“Here’s where we get to my second point, and where it gets weird,” Verrifax said. “Fossil mages have a truly torturous relationship with the law of magical specificity.”

Everyone paused at that.

“Fossil’s a more specific category that rock, right?” Stagys ventured. “So they should be able to overpower rock mages?”

“Sometimes, yes!” Verrifax said. “For other fossil mages, not so much. There was one especially well-known fossil mage who had to spend something like six times as much mana to combat the control of stone mages over limestone— but when opposing limestone mages, his magic was suddenly three times more efficient.”

“How does that even make sense?” Stagys demanded. “Isn’t your mana efficiency supposed to stay set for any given material?”

“Usually, but it can warp a bit when directly contesting other mages,” Hepthet Dras said. “It’s a fairly obscure phenomenon, though, and it’s usually a trivial variance.”

“Fossil mages have huge variances all the time, though!” Verrifax said. “Their control of individual fossils of the same type will change wildly depending on preservation method, fossil condition, even whether it’s still embedded in rock or not!”

“Why is that?” Stagys asked.

Verrifax paused, then deflated a bit.

“I haven’t the slightest clue.”

Then he paused, and turned to look at Yohann. “You’ve been awful quiet, philosopher. You know something, don’t you?”

Yohann coughed awkwardly. “I’m, ah, actually quite familiar with this specific topic. I wanted to let you explain your argument a bit before I intruded.”

Verrifax rolled his eyes a bit. “I’m hardly going to take offense at expertise, Yohann.”

“I know that logically, but that sort of humility is rather a change from most powerful folks,” Yohann said. “Call it philosopher survival instincts.”

“Fair enough,” Verrifax said. “You were saying, though?”

“Ah, right!” Yohann said. “I don’t know nearly as much about the physical nature of fossils as you do— rather, my knowledge of the debate rested around the linguistic aspects of things. Namely, that the fossil affinity variance problem you’re describing is only an issue in Ithonian and a few other languages. In languages that divide the category of fossil more, the behavior of the affinity is much more coherent. Many languages, for instance, divide fossils and trace fossils into two entirely different groups, which results in much more coherent, if usually less useful, affinity types.”

Verrifax tilted his head, absolutely fascinated by the revelation, but before he could inquire further, Querelous Yohanna jerked awake with a snort.

“Do you think a fossil mage could affect the Sleeper?” she asked blearily.

Then her head slowly lowered back to the blanket she was lying on, and she was snoring again a few seconds later.

“Was she… just sleep debating?” Hepthat Dras asked.

“Seems like it,” Stagys said, giving the sleeping great power a fond look.

“That was a good question, though,” Yohann said. “The sleeper is older than many fossils, is the last of its kind, and is buried deep in the ground. Does it count as a fossil? Could a fossil affinity affect it?”

They all stared silently down at the sand, their own affinity senses reaching as far down as they dared, to where the Sleeper in the Sands was buried, kept locked away from the world by a vast network of enchantments, wards, and spells, not to mention the Tomb Guard themselves.

It was so deep even the affinity senses of great powers struggled to reach it— to Verrifax’s sand sense, it was just a vast, city-scale void in the sand, where Anastis’ oldest and largest predator lay buried, a carnivore that would never, could never die so long as the sun still burned.

“Let’s never, ever find out,” Verrifax said nervously.

The rest agreed immediately.