Chapter 10 The Magi-Scientist #2
The Magical version had been used similarly, as a justification to enslave humans, or even to wipe them out as a kind of genetic cancer.
This was what Luc was studying?
Why would he use his enormous brain for something like this? Whatever Luc’s intentions with magiancestry, there’s no possible way any research he did on Magical abilities based on genetics wouldn’t be abused if the wrong people got their hands on it.
He’d end up Dark Cathedral’s favorite magi-scientist.
Hear him out, Bones murmured in my mind.
I bit my lip, not answering him.
“I have a theory about the current crisis in Magical abilities,” Luc said, glancing at me, then more warily at Bones.
“I think it’s not just about the corruption of human Earth, meaning the planet.
That’s been the primary theoretical explanation for Magical degeneration since I started school, but now that I’m digging into the data, I’m just not seeing the causation––”
“You need to start earlier than this,” Bones cut in.
Luc looked up, startled, then seemed to understand what Bones meant.
“Right,” he said, rubbing his face with a hand. “Right. Hang on a second. I can show you some of where this comes from.”
Turning away from the work table, he walked over to a cabinet I’d missed. Unlike the others, it had green tile doors so that it blended perfectly with the wall. He pushed a button and something popped out on a sliding tray that looked like an old-fashioned film projector.
Luc pulled another box out of a drawer beneath the work counter and tugged off the lid, exposing three rows of glass spheres, like small crystal balls.
He gestured over them with intricate finger and palm movements that expelled purple threads of magic.
I saw the spheres glow, one by one, as he finished.
I frowned, and began walking closer, but Luc held up a hand.
“It’s fine, Leda, stay where you are,” he said, voice distracted. “I’m going to project it on the wall so you don’t all have to hover over my documentation.”
A rectangle of orange light appeared on the wall.
I glanced at the projector and saw a new light flickering from the bowels of it, the same color as the square on the wall. Luc picked up the first crystal sphere from the top of the stack, and placed it in a round hole inside the projector.
Instantly, an image appeared on the wall, of what looked like a series of X-rays, or some similar type of body imaging.
They weren’t static.
Ten forms stood there, roughly the shape of a person, their sexes indeterminate, with a magical aura around them that writhed and burned and sparked with different colors and quantities of light.
The light ran through their bodies like veins filled with liquid fire, similar to what I’d seen on Alaric when I’d been looking at his magic the night before.
The bodies rotated as I watched, until they were all standing in profile. They turned again so they had their backs to us. The writhing, multi-colored flames around each particular form never really changed in terms of the quantity or the quality of light.
“The spell I just did transmits some of my research to the light globes I’m using for projection,” Luc explained.
“I thought it might be helpful to have visuals of a few of these things, so you can actually see what I’m talking about.
” He pointed at the image on the wall. “This is a composite, generational image of what are called auric scans. They really look like that… with living auras, I mean. There are millions of these that have been done over the years. Billions in just the last ten or so years alone. It’s basically a spell that takes an impression of a particular mage or witch’s magic.
Or really, their capacity for magic. Their magical potential, if you will.
It’s generally done now when a Magical is first born. ”
Luc gave a vague hand-wave towards the image, then slid that same hand through his long, red hair, combing the wavy strands out of his face.
“I don’t want to get too technical,” he said, somewhat apologetically.
“But essentially, they’ve been conducting these auric scans on Magicals for centuries.
They’ve got some that are over two thousand years old.
Initially, it was only wealthy Magicals who lived in cities who had them done, either for themselves or to have their children assessed at birth.
Now it’s basically everyone, usually at the magical facility where they’re born.
That’s been the case for at least two or three hundred years. ”
I glanced at Nyx and Alaric, who were both nodding to Luc’s words.
Clearly, these scans were familiar to them.
Presumably, they’d both had them done when they were born, too.
“Just to be clear, these particular images don’t show a single mage or witch’s scan,” Luc continued, pointing back at the wall.
“These are composites, as I said. They show something akin to averages over time.” Looking directly at me, Luc explained, “Researchers used a spell to obtain an image, a snapshot, really, of overall average magical ability over many, many different mages and witches within a particular population. I think in this case, it was a random sampling of around four thousand Magicals for each figure depicted, with equal numbers of mages and witches. I don’t believe this particular sample contains any Oracles or Warlocks, but the same pattern shows across those groups, too. ”
He squinted at something in the open parchment notebook in front of him.
“These individuals lived primarily in Asia, but the patterns hold for just about every continent and ethnic population in Magique over the same time period, with only minor regional variations. There are a few interesting exceptions. We can maybe get into those in a minute. For now, this is really just an example so you can see the overall trend––”
“We get it, Mocking,” Bones said, a touch impatient. “Move on.”
Luc gave him an annoyed look, but acquiesced.
He murmured another spell, and flicked his fingers towards the wall. The spell highlighted the first of the human-like images with its outline of multicolored light. When highlighted, the outline of the body looked like glass, lit from within by iridescent light.
“Each composite shows an average of around four thousand Magicals, as I said,” Luc said, his voice back to businesslike.
“Controlled for caste, age, sex, region, and so on, and with the same rough composition mirrored across the ten different groupings. Each ‘person’ depicted is roughly eighty years apart from the next. This first composite is from auric scans taken just a little over six hundred and forty years ago.”
I frowned, walking closer to the projection on the wall, folding my arms in front of my chest.
Eight bodies. Each one eighty years apart.
I was following so far.
“The next is from eighty years after the first,” Luc continued, highlighting the second form. “Then eighty years after that.” He highlighted the third. “And so on. You can see through the progression how the auric scans have changed over time.”
He removed the highlight, and suddenly I was seeing it, exactly what he was talking about, and why he was showing us these auric scans at all.
The first image he’d highlighted with his spell, the one at the top left of the projection, had a large, writhing, multicolored light around it.
That liquid light and color pulsed through the vein-like structures of the “body” like molten lava, dense, bright, fast-moving, and seemingly always changing.
The next figure depicted looked similar, but perceptibly less bright. Not a lot, but enough different that I could see it. The span of colors looked slightly less as well, as if the band of hues had narrowed just the tiniest bit.
The one after that looked less bright still.
Same with the one after that.
And the one after that.
And so on.
The final “person” depicted, the last one of eight, which stood in the far lower-right side of the rectangle of light, looked like it contained maybe two-thirds of the brightness and movement and color of the very first. In comparison, it looked much duller, and like most of the colors clustered around a narrower band in the spectrum.
I walked closer to the projection, my throat constricting.
“What happened?” I asked, quiet.
Luc cleared his throat, but when I looked at him, his eyes and mouth looked grim.
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “There are a number of things going wrong in the Magical world, and most of these problems are accelerating.”
He pulled the crystal globe off the projector and replaced it with another.
That one showed only four human-like forms, but the decline was still obvious from one to the next.
“These are only twenty years apart,” Luc said, his voice as grim as his eyes.
“Whatever the problem is, it’s degrading our magic so quickly now, it’s likely we’ll see a rash of newborns with no magical ability whatsoever soon.
Assuming we don’t determine the cause and find some way to reverse the problem. ”
Luc leaned against the back counter and folded his arms, looking up at the swirling magic depicted on the wall. I frowned at the dark purple and blue hues, absent almost entirely of the more fiery colors that had been in the earlier figures.
“You still haven’t said why this is happening,” Nyx pointed out.
Luc glanced at her, then around at the rest of us.
“Alaric and Bones likely know this, but the prevailing theory is, the corruption of the human dimension, what humans call ‘Earth,’ is destroying our world. They believe it’s destroying our magic, in particular.
It’s something the governments have kept fairly quiet about, although everyone in the magi-sciences has been sounding the alarm for ages.
And there’s definitely some merit to this theory,” he added, glancing at me almost apologetically again.
“There’s been significant evidence that our world is degrading at an accelerated pace since the human industrial era.
I absolutely believe Earth is likely poisoning our world in various ways.
But personally, I don’t think it explains the core cause of the depletion of Magical ability. ”
“You don’t?” Alaric asked, bewildered.
I glanced at him and Bones, and saw both of them listening avidly to Luc’s words. Alaric looked openly astonished, whereas Bones looked less surprised by the information, but also like he was listening with razor-sharp attention.
Luc cleared his throat again.
“No, I don’t,” he affirmed to Alaric. “Before I get too far into the details around why, you might want to look at this.” Pulling himself up off the counter, he replaced the second globe inside the projector with a third.
I followed the stream of light to the wall.
The outline of the person on the new image came through less sharply, and the glass looked yellowed and scratched.
Despite those facts, the translucent human outline had huge arcs of magic coiling off every part of them, and the veins under their skin shone so brightly it was difficult to make out the smaller branches and lines.
The churning current flooded off the form in a near torus shape, bleeding off the edges of the projection screen and lighting up parts of the room, all the way past the torches.
The entire aura was shockingly bright, and shifted between subtle colors that rippled from hot, molten white, to gold and green, orange and red, pink, lavender, purple, sky blue, dark blue, black, silver, and back to that blueish white.
Staring at the white color, I glanced surreptitiously up at my sun primal.
“This is the oldest known auric scan that’s ever been found,” Luc said, his voice somber. “It’s been dated to roughly 2400 B.C.” He glanced around at us, arms folded over his chest. “That’s roughly the same time period everyone believes the Separation occurred.”
There was a silence where we all stared at the auric scan.
Alaric was the first to voice Luc’s point aloud.
“The degeneration is old,” the royal muttered under his breath.
“Really damned old,” Luc agreed.
“A lot older than the industrial revolution,” I added, biting my lip as I squeezed my arms around my chest. “Hundreds, if not thousands of years before humans had done anything to their world cataclysmic enough to be the cause of magical loss.”
Luc met my gaze and nodded, once.
“Precisely,” he said.
There was a silence.
Then Alaric burst out in a humorless laugh.
“Thoth’s filthy cock,” he snorted, when we all looked at him.
He still had both arms wrapped around Wraith, who was asleep against his chest.
“No wonder you’re keeping this quiet.” Alaric stared at Luc with an expression that fell somewhere between admiration, awe, disbelief, and pity.
“You must know you’re going to have every royal blood fanatic and supremacist in Magique trying to kill you, Mocking, if you’re about to prove what I think you’re about to prove. ”
Luc raised an eyebrow.
“The thought had occurred to me, yes,” he said dryly.