Raistlin Upadesa casting magic in the style of Caravaggio, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Raistlin had been trained as a Conjurer after an aptitude scan in childhood showed that the field of Conjuration was where his talents lay.

  Everybody was scanned in this way and then trained in the specific field of magic that they had an aptitude for – and it was always just one field. Never more than one.

  Indeed, everybody in the whole world knew that a person could engage with just one specific field of magic. Conjurers like Raistlin could create energy and matter, while Transmuters could manipulate and transform energy and matter.

  Conveyers could transport themselves and other people and things around, while Disseminators established lines of communication.

  Evokers – everybody called them evoks after the race of cute characters in the old fairy tale – had the ability to affect people’s physical bodies, while Invokers (occasionally invoks) could affect people psychologically. (Enhancement magic was traditionally believed to involve seeking help from spirits or divinities, which would be ‘invoked’ in the sense that they were called to express themselves via the caster, which explained the name of the field.)

  Diviners gathered knowledge, Conjoiners facilitated cooperation between mages from different fields of magic, or just for large-scale projects in general, and Abjurers were the party poopers who cancelled and nullified other people’s magics.

  That was that. Everybody had an affinity for exactly one field of magic, and that was their lot in life.

  If you were a Conjurer or a Transmuter, which most people were, you would generally work in some kind of industry – Raistlin had been working in energy generation.

  Conveyers and Disseminators served obvious societal tasks, Evokers were medics and rejuvenators, and Invokers were typically counselors and psychologists.

  Diviners were administrators, scholars, and investigators, Conjoiners were often managers and leaders, and Abjurers were Protectors. Trying to teach a person engrams from other fields of magic invariably leads to madness, dangerous energy flows and, in the end, disaster.

  Everybody knew that was how things worked, except Raistlin and Ykka and their old group of independent researchers. What they had discovered was that anyone could learn any field of magic, and they could do it well and there would be no problems.

  The whole affinity thing was bullshit.

  Well, not exactly. Organizing magic into different fields made sense in some ways, because there were different types of skill involved. A person skilled in Conjuration might not find it easy to do Invocation magic, much in the same way that a person who had a talent for playing the piano would not necessarily also have a talent for playing football.

  What Raistlin had found, back with Ykka and the group, was that learning other fields of magic was really hard. He was like a person who had been playing football his whole life but who had never even seen a piano, but then had to sit down as an adult and figure out how to make it produce music. He struggled with the most basic things, constantly feeling out of his depth.

  Today Raistlin was a renegade mage, and he never cast magic the way he had been taught in Conjurer school. Not even when he was playing around with magics relating to the field of Conjuration. His work was entirely different.

  What he and everybody were taught in school was that successful magic use – the manifestation of a magical engram – depended on three personal skills: energy, flow, and schema.

  Energy is what you need to get going with any project, magical or otherwise, and flow is the ability to channel your energy where you need it.

  Schema is the structure of it all, assembled from various sub-schemas known as sigils in much the same way that a written word is assembled from individual letters. The schema is the plan that gives the project stability, and it is also the secret ingredient that they will very slowly reveal to you during your education, along with strict admonishments not to pass the knowledge on to anyone else.

  Each magical engram has its own schema that you need to learn, and the knowledge of such a schema allows you to manifest the specific engram within the constraints of your energy and flow skills.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  In sum, a magical engram is the result of energy properly channeled according to a valid schema. People who specialize in magical theory learn to simplify, refine, and combine elements from two or more schemas, thereby inventing new engrams. Such work has very high status and is reserved for the best of the best.

  Much of this was actually quite useful knowledge. Energy and flow are indeed fundamental to magic. Schemas, however, were not. It is true that you need something for stability, but it does not have to be a mental schema.

  The way people were taught magic was as if they were architects who had to memorize readymade plans for any building they wanted to construct. Your magic was limited to whatever schemas someone had decided to share with you.

  It was an extremely cumbersome way of doing things, and it practically ruled out personal invention except for highly skilled specialists in magical theory.

  Ykka and the old group had found that there were other ways to stabilize a magical project – Raistlin never used the word engram for this, because to him that term represented the traditional way of doing magic.

  In the same way that architects might visualize a physical structure in their mind, one could visualize the structure of the project one wanted to manifest. Raistlin could see or feel or intuit where the energy needed to flow in order to manifest what he wanted to. Which meant he could do things much faster than others, and that he could operate in full independence from the hierarchy of the various magical fields. Their closely guarded schemas were nothing to him. Raistlin could invent new magics as he wanted.

  This way of doing magic also allowed Raistlin to combine different fields of magic seamlessly. The detection magics he was running to warn him about scans, for instance, were surrounded by obfuscation magics, but the two fields of magic (Divination and Abjuration) were not separately manifested.

  If that were necessary, Raistlin would have had to run dozens of separate magical projects at the same time, which would obviously be impossible.

  Instead, he had learnt to combine the two into one single project. His detection magics wore a cape of invisibility because invisibility was an intrinsic aspect of their nature, not because he had dressed them up in such a cape afterwards. They were invisibility and detection at the same time.

  Other projects were even more complex, but one thing all his work had in common was that it was hidden behind several layers of obfuscation. His most important specialization – the one that really kept him alive – was invisibility.

  Of course, Raistlin would not think these thoughts. Thinking about unregulated – or renegade – ways of doing magic was precisely what would make the scans explode in outrage and alarm. He would not have lasted five seconds into such an exposition of renegade ideas.

  But without thinking these forbidden thoughts, he could know them. In the silence of his mind, he knew these things, even if he never, as it were, talked about them. It was a silent knowledge that scans could not identify. His silence made him invisible.

  Realizing that there was an entirely different, and much more powerful, way of doing magic had opened a whole new world to him. But it had also closed an old world to him, and he had barely escaped with his life.

  ---

  After Ykka was arrested Raistlin is in a state of constant dread. But he knows that they – whoever they are – will be looking for people behaving abnormally, so he does his best to pretend that everything is normal.

  Nobody from the group gets in touch with him and he does not reach out to anybody – indeed, he does not know how to reach them. This was their way of protecting themselves, but it also means he has no one to share his anxiety and grief with.

  Somehow, he knows in his heart that he will never see Ykka or anyone from the group again. And he knows that he is in the greatest danger of his life.

  Raistlin is aware that Diviners can read minds. They have talked about this in the group, and they have practiced silencing the mind, which is hard, and filling the mind with innocent babble, which is easier.

  Raistlin knows that if there is trouble, he must not think about the others in the group. He tries his best to keep his mind filled with everyday stuff.

  He rests in his bed after work when he feels something he has never felt before. It is just a very slight change of pressure in his head that he would probably not have noticed at all if he was not in such a sensitive state, and so alert for anything out of the ordinary. It is like something floats into his mind, and somehow he understands that he is being observed.

  He knows he has to control his fear, or they will register it as something suspicious. But it’s impossible. Instead, knowing that the fear will be his downfall increases the fear.

  As he loses himself to a feedback loop of panic, his heart beating relentlessly, he sees a little spider crawling on the wall, and, somehow, he allows this spider to fill his mind, so that his awareness is limited to just the spider and the overwhelming fear.

  He lies like this for what feels like a long time, then eventually the tingling ends, and his panic gradually loosens its hold. It is the most intense fear he has ever experienced, and it is the first time he is aware of being scanned.

  They scan him many times over the next weeks, but having gotten through it once he is determined to get through the other attempts as well. When he feels a scan entering his mind, he very carefully and deliberately thinks about work or sports or celebrities. Or spiders.

  One day several people are arrested, and their faces are shown on ether news. Raistlin sees them for the first time – they had kept their identities secret so that it would be difficult for one person to expose the others.

  There are five photos, so it seems everybody from the group is gone. The scans remain intensive for a few weeks after that, and then they settle down to a twice-daily rhythm that he has later come to assume is normal for everyone.

  One good thing about the scans being so frequent is that the fear of them soon evaporates. Raistlin has an unsettled relationship with spiders for a while, though.

  Takashi Satoh, Conjurer, casting magic in the style of Caravaggio, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.