Stone's Not Real

Stone's Not Real is set four years before Mage Errant, and most of a year after Sand's Not Real.
Also, quick PSA: The short stories due to be included in The Gorgon Incident, the first Mage Errant anthology, will be removed from the Patreon in early February. You can find the list of stories due for removal here.

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“You’ve made a lot of absurd arguments over the years,” Hepthet Dras said, “but stone not being real? That’s a new height of ridiculousness.”

The dragon Verrifax smirked at the hive mind of mites on their house-sized beetle host from where he lurked atop a pillar-like sandstone yardang. “Doesn’t make it less valid.”

“Is this like your argument about sand not being real?” Peryn the Fourth said. The communications mage sounded bored— which, in fairness, most of them were at the moment. Surveillance missions like this one were hardly the peak of excitement.

“You’re making a claim that stone affinities are process affinities, like sand affinities?” Yohann of Yldive said. The philosopher wasn’t a proper member of the Tomb Guard, but he’d settled in with them after they rescued him from pirates, said he wanted to write a book about the Tomb Guard— including a record of some of their long, rambling philosophical arguments.

Though Verrifax was fairly sure Yohann of Yldive’s ongoing affair with Querulous Yohanna weighed heavily in his decision.

“Not in the slightest!” Verrifax replied. “I’m saying that stone, the physical, material substance, isn’t actually a substance!” 

Stagys Wress, the newest member of the Tomb Guards, hissed irritably. “Tell that to my stone spells.”

The gorgon was small for her kind, but even other gorgons feared her. Not just for her powerful stone magic, but also for the fact that she’d used her healing magic to somehow successfully implant giant centipedes into her scalp instead of snakes. 

“It does seem like a bit of a stretch,” Querulous Yohanna said.

“Have any of you ever heard of laterite?” Verrifax asked. “Also known as beehive rock?”

“I have,” said Stagys, sounding less than interested.

“Enlighten the rest of us,” Hepthet Dras offered.

Since Stagys seemed unlikely to explain, Verrifax proceeded— after a quick scan of the horizon for oddities. “Laterite is a type of stone frequently used for construction in the jungles west of Sica. It’s called beehive rock because it’s full of holes, and it’s bright red from its high iron content.”

“You’re claiming that rocks aren’t real, and proving it by giving us examples of rocks?” Peryn the Fourth asked.

“There’s something strange about this laterite, isn’t there?” Yohann said.

Verrifax smiled. “Quite a few things, but most notably? Soil mages can manipulate it freely. Often more powerfully than stone mages.”

“A bit odd, but there’s an understandably fuzzy border between stone and soil,” Hepthat Dras said.

“It’s because laterite is soil,” Verrifax said. “It’s been baked to the hardness of stone, usually by the sun. But it gets weirder: many but not all laterites can be manipulated by ceramic mages.”

“It’s just the laterites with a high clay content,” Stagys said. “There’s lots of rocks that can be manipulated by other affinities.”

“Exactly!” Verrifax said. “Sandstone can be manipulated by sand mages like myself. Obsidian can be manipulated by glass mages. Coquina can be manipulated by shell mages.”

“Coquina?” Hepthet Dras asked.

“Rock made almost entirely of seashells cemented together by other minerals,” Stays said.

“So you’re saying that because rocks have a range of different compositions, they’re not really… a thing?” Peryn asked.

“This seems like much more of a stretch than your usual arguments,” Yohanna added.

“It’s not just composition, though!” Verrifax said. “There’s wildly different means of formation, too. The formation of sandstone and granite have basically nothing to do with one another, for instance. They…”

“Hold,” Stagys said, gesturing at the horizon.

They all tensed for a long moment, staring at the motion.

“It’s just a smuggler ship,” Peryn finally said, and they all relaxed.

“Anyhow, what exactly are you trying to say, Verrifax?” Hepthet Dras asked. 

“I think he’s trying to claim that stone is an incoherent category,” Yohann offered.

“Exactly!” Verrifax replied. “There aren’t any common threads between all rocks, beside them being hard objects in the ground, and even that’s negotiable. You can firm things up a bit by excluding some stones— say, anything made of glass rather than crystalline minerals— but it inevitably ends up in a place where you have to explain to random people why things that are clearly rocks really aren’t.”

“I end up in that place already,” Stagys muttered. “You know how often I have to explain why coral isn’t rock?”

“Except there are stone mages who can manipulate coral,” Yohanna said. “And just about all stone mages can manipulate fossilized coral.”

“Or look at your own fulgurites,” Peryn said. “What, something like half of stone mages can’t manipulate them?” 

“More like a fifth, but yes,” Yohanna said.

“This problem would be hypothetically alleviated by simply accepting fuzzy boundaries for the category labeled ‘rock’,” Yohann said. “By accepting stone as a mere cultural construction for common convenience.”

Verrifax nodded, though he was too far away from most of the others for them to see that. “That meshes perfectly well with my argument, and amazing alliteration… though, that said, your heart doesn’t seem entirely behind it.”

“He’s right,” Hepthet Dras said. “You’re considering some other argument entirely.”

“Well, yes, but I’m not sure the ideas are ready to face up to scrutiny,” Yohann said. “I think they need more work first.”

Stagys snorted. “Not like we’re doing much else at the moment, and I think we could all use the distraction.”

Verrifax smiled. It seemed the newest member of the Tomb Guard was finally getting into the spirit of the long, rambling discussions they liked to have.

Yohann sighed. “Very well, though keep in mind that this is spur of the moment speculation, not well-reasoned or researched argumentation on my part. I…”

“Yes, yes, on with it,” Yohanna interrupted.

Yohann sighed again. “Very well. This discussion is leading me to believe the opposite of Verrifax’s argument.”

“You’re saying he’s wrong, that stone is real?” Peryn asked.

“No, I’m saying… well, yes, I’m saying that stone is real, but not as a rejection of Verrifax’s claim. Rather, I’m saying that while stone is real, the distinction between different types of stone is false.”

There was a long silence at that. Verrifax kept his eyes on the smuggler ship, but his mind was on what Yohann had just said, not on the possible contents of the smuggler ship.

Smuggler ships were a common as drakes in the territory of the Tomb Guard— they didn’t pose a risk of waking the Sleeper, so the Guard let them pass freely. They were watching for a far more dangerous passage today.

Stagys was the one to finally break the silence. “Alright, what sort of nonsense is this? Are you trying to say that there’s no difference between, say, granite and mudstone?”

“Not in the least!” Yohann said. “I’m saying that rather than being distinct entities, they’re just different spots on the same spectrum. It’s similar to colors— it makes sense for us to divide light into different categories, but there’s no pressing reason for us to divide light into the specific colors that we do! We could easily combine orange and yellow into a single color called yernge or ollo! There is nothing essential about the way we divide the colors, and there’s tons of empirical evidence of that— light mages who only control parts of the rainbow, for instance, vary in their exact range of control based off the language they speak, indicating subtle differences in the borders of colors as defined by different cultures! I’m coming to believe that rock might work the same.”

“Yernge and Ollo are terrible names,” Verrifax said. “Some of the worst names for anything I’ve ever heard. Still, I think I see your point? But… hmm. I was going to say light all has common origin, unlike stone, but it definitely doesn’t.”

Hepthet Dras chittered quietly, as the hive mind did when thinking hard, and they all waited for the mites to speak. “There does seem to be a commonality to different origins of light that is lacking among origins of stone. The origins of light do range wildly, but it feels qualitatively different than stone in some hard-to-verbalize manner. But light, according to light mages and philosophers, has the same composition, while stone from different origins often has wildly different compositions.”

“You’re our resident stone mage, Stagys, what do you think of that?” Peryn asked.

The gorgon made a thoughtful noise in the back of her throat. “It’s… actually not a bad argument? I find the idea of types of stone not being real less objectionable than the idea of stone itself being not real. The light comparison is especially good, because so many types of stone are just statistical ranges. There is no good reason to distinguish sandstone from mudstone at the line we do— the only thing differentiating them is grain size, and we could have set that line anywhere, or done away with it entirely. But Yohann’s argument also seems weaker than Verrifax’s original argument, because in order for it to work, you actually need some definition for stone beyond common usage. And the whole source of this argument is our lack of any such definition for stone, other than…”

Stagys trailed off.

“Other than what?” Verrifax asked.

“Stones,” Stagys muttered.

“The definition of stone is stones?” Yohann asked in puzzlement.

“No, I was using stones as a curse-word there,” Stagys said with exasperation. “Ignore that. I was just remembering one of the earliest lessons in stone magic I ever received.”

“What’s that?” Yohanna asked.

“Stone is memory,” Stagys said. 

“Stone is memory?” Hepthat Dras repeated.

“Stone is the world’s memory,” Stagys said. “It’s one of the oldest, most worn-out truisms of stone magic. Stone is the memory of past processes of our world, the congealed remnants of climate, volcanism, erosion, life, and every other process our world has ever undergone. It’s a saying that gets repeated from one generation to the next, but no one ever really pays that much attention to it, because it lacks any real practical use. It’s usually just something that gets put in front of your first lithification lesson, to drill in the importance of practicing forming rock out of non-rock ingredients.”

“But it works as a unifying definition of stone where nothing else does,” Yohann said.

“It works,” Stagys said. “On so many levels. But it doesn’t just reinforce your argument, but Verrifax’s argument as well.”

“How can it do both?” Yohanna asked.

Verrifax chuckled. “Because either way, stone is just a taxonomy of hard stuff that usually comes from the ground, and all taxonomies are fundamentally artificial.”

“What? No. I mean, sure, that’s not wrong, but it’s not what I was going to say,” Stagys said. “It’s because stone only records some memories of the world, those predisposed to making hard substances in the ground. And it means that, through weathering and erosion, the world is subject to forgetfulness. Stone is the true memory of the world, but it’s a non-representative memory. It’s both real and unreal in that sense.”

“So sand eroded from stone is physical amnesia, then?” Hepthat Dras asked jokingly.

Stagys sighed. 

Before they could dive back into the argument, Peryn cut them all off. “It’s happening,” he said. “They’re here.”

Every member of the Tomb Guard, some of the deadliest great powers in the Endless Erg, went silent at once, gazing in fear at the horizon.

And, as they watched, sunlings began flowing over the dunes like the sea. First a few dozen scouts, then a vanguard of hundreds, and then their numbers shifted into the thousands, and then millions.

Sunmaws flew high overhead, diving at the edges of the swarm to prey on their lesser kin. Dozens of drakes followed each sunmaw, waiting to pick up their feeding scraps. 

Within minutes, a third of the horizon had been covered in the hovering, leaf shaped forms.

Verrifax took off into the air, seeking as clear a view of the sunling swarm as possible, as did the other flight-capable members of the Guard.

They watched silently as the swarm passed deeper and deeper into the tomb, their hearts beating faster as the sunlings passed ever-closer to an invisible line in the sand.

And then they crossed it. Crossed over the exact burial site of the Sleeper Beneath the Sands, flowed over the wings of the great carnivorous terminarch.

Like their much-smaller predatory cousins the sunmaws, the Sleeper possessed a natural defense against magic— even in the depths of its sleep, it had an aether-warping field surrounding it that distorted and shredded spells. The deeper it slept, the smaller the field grew— but when its prison weakened, when that aether-warping field began chipping at the sleep spells containing it once more, the field began to grow and escape. It began calling to its lesser kin.

Most of the time, it wasn’t a cause for concern. Most of the time, the prison would adapt, and force the being deeper into sleep once more.

But when the prison began to weaken too much, the swarms would grow larger and larger, until they reached unnaturally vast size, like the currently approaching swarm.

And, if the field reached high enough up, the sunlings and sunmaws would begin to follow the lines and currents contained within that field, would flow across the sand in strange loops and curves.

The Tomb Guard waited in terror for those patterns to begin emerging, for the vast swarm of native Anastan life to indicate a potential breakout of the Sleeper.

Long minutes passed and turned to hours, and the Tomb Guard relaxed as the vast swarm passed over the Sleeper without any new patterns emerging. 

They would still watch with special caution the next few weeks, but if past cycles held true, the Sleeper’s aether field would begin retracting soon, would stop summoning its lesser kin.

The Tomb Guard slowly drew their attention back to their silly philosophical game, to their endless debates.

And deep below them, the Sleeper dreamed.

Stronger than any stone.

More eternal than any bedrock.

Hungrier than any memory.