On My Studies of Verbomancy

In Dimension 20’s Burrow’s End, Lila the stoat learns how to read. Upon a piece of bark, she reads the words, “Follow your instincts towards the Light,” with a flash of Blue behind her eyes as they connect scratches into comprehensible language. As her family tries to understand what ‘read’ is, she explains it thusly to her brother:

Jaysohn. You know when we would be awake? In the middle of the night. … There would be a tiny little bit of light that would come in from the crack. And then we would make, like, fake Auntie Beatrixes, on the wall. … And we would like make it look like she was pooping on the wall, but it’s not real her, it’s on the wall. … And then sometimes we would also make it, like, to like say to each other, like, “Oh, Mom’s mad,” we’d make mad Mom on the wall? The wood is saying to me, “Follow your instincts towards the Light.” - “A Second Sun,” Izzy Roland

Her mother Tula responds, “So these scratchings on the wood are like shadows that only you can tell what they’re shadows of?” (“A Second Sun,” Brennan Lee Mulligan). Lila affirms her mother’s understanding of the concept of reading.

Since encountering this, I have yet to find a better explanation of what the concept of reading is.

Though I am not a stoat granted supernatural knowledge and magicks via radioactive fallout from the meltdown of reactor Charlie, Lila and Tula’s words have stuck with me. The deep childishness of making shadows of family members on the wall intertwines with some simulacrum of Plato’s allegory of the cave in a way that tickles something deep in my brain, that reminds me of some primordial truth that I forget in the day to day act of existence. Our acts of reading are not acts that should be taken lightly. When we lift meaning from pages through a mere glance, we are performing powerful magic that we take for granted merely because it is learned in our infancy.

I became a verbomancer at still a relatively young age, much to the chagrin of my brother, born a year before me. Though he quickly mastered physical skills, he struggled with the charms and cantrips of our early readers. According to my mother, I would often anger him as I attempted to turn a page before he was finished with it.

But I was not satisfied with the basic spells of picture books; I wished to master all forms of magic.

Soon, at around age three, I could be found in the children’s section of the library, summoning dinosaur after dinosaur from the thin hardback books. I became quite partial to the brontosaurus, even keeping one as a familiar for quite a time. I also soon mastered spatial magic, making constant trips across the solar system. I was especially distraught when at age five, I visited Pluto from a scroll in the waiting room in the doctor’s office only to discover that they had been rudely stripped of their noble planetary status. Under the watchful eye of my godmother, quite a proficient sorceress herself, and my mother, a witch of great renown, I flowered into bardic magicks at a young age.

My favorite journeys I made as a fledgling magician were with fellow alchemists Jack and Annie of the Magic Tree House. With them, I swam with dolphins, hid from tornadoes, escaped the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and even learned to play Mozart’s prized talisman, the Magic Flute. After my travels with them, I was learning any spells that I could get my hands on. I learned necromancy and summoned Death themself through a tome called the Book Thief, again to the frustration of my brother who found no enjoyment in the studies of magic, and had tossed the volume aside after a half-hearted perusal. I learned survival and how to start a revolution in District 12 and the Capitol. I helped to steal the hoard of Smaug, barely managing to avoid the allure of the One Ring’s grasp. When I was older, in high school, I spent some time in Japan trapped in 1Q84 with the Little People, then helped Toru Okada to search for his cat, and then later his wife. I continue to study divine magicks after having claimed a godly parentage from Calliope at Camp Half-Blood, traveling to Tartarus, Olympus, across America and back so many times over.

Ah, and then there were the years that the magic began to rebel against me.

It began subtly, softly, during the great plague. I had dreamed of weaving spells of protection for sweet and awesome Nature, that she might look upon her lowly subjects kindly, when those shadows whispered in my mind: Seek us out. Find us. Harness us. And how I longed to! I began to delve into these shadows, and thought to pull realities and pocket dimensions of joy and adventure from the weave itself.

My mother assured me that such a field of magic was unprofitable and unbecoming and that her patronage would not follow me into these realms. And so I wondered, what magic might be acceptable? Thus I turned my studies toward those of the cleric. Leaving from the great plague, I would be a righteous and holy man.

Except among those brick and stone halls, I felt my magicks fighting me.

The shadows pleaded with me, We do not belong. We are not like them. We are profane and powerful. Though I roiled in my soul, tugged in two directions, I still came to know a new magic. I studied the charms and enchantments and divinations of the mind, reëncountering what it was to think, to learn, and studied the very weave itself, plucking at its strings like so many violins. I made music with Plato, waltzed with Aquinas, lay with Nietzsche into the early hours of the morning. I wished to remain in that light, for things felt so clear, so easy to see, so simple.

In that time, I learned more of that darker side of magic. I found it huddled in London alleys, in the cave of Grendel, in the Arctic with Walton, in the shadow of the hanged body of John the Savage. And I uncovered great sorcerers of that shadowed magic, that understood that the light blots out so much possibility. Beauvoir taught me of the dark graynesses in sex and gender that one could weave to their own designs. Sartre reminded me of the darkness that we can find in every person, and how those shadows leave us to determine our own destinies. Weil taught me the powers of those shadows that lie just at the edge of sight, that dwell between the liminal spaces of here and there.

So, I stopped fighting the shadows.

I melted into them as sunset into nightfall, warm and comforted in their dark caresses. And my family, my friends, who lived in those bright places, I let them go, for a time, falling with reckless, joyous abandon deeper into that abyss. I soon began my own practice of magic, in a faraway realm of cingssiigek, mountains, and sea, where spirits roamed freely and bear-women walked through town. I spoke an old tongue that tastes of uquq and frost, a tongue that existed only in the shadows of the mind, a tongue that loathes the rule of magicians. I learned new magic; the power of yuraq to summon ancestors, the silver tongue that can call even the most stubborn mind to higher knowledge, the force of the stubborn bonds between people. I lived in yuuyaraq, and let its magic suffuse me. I fully entered the shadows.

Forth from that mountain river, I pulled the corpse of a man who once lived in the light. I have torn it open and have used his entrails to string instruments upon which I play ecstatic, screaming, discordant melodies, broken and jagged lines and verses that grate the soul like sandpaper; painful, yet, it slowly but surely allows one to take control of them, to use their roughness to understand and shape their own soul.

And so I have come here, to this coven, this ancient tower, to finally fully grasp these shadows, to force them, stitch them, call them to my bidding.

With their power, I will craft new songs, and like Lila and the stoats of the Last Bastion, I will harness what I have learned to create new spells with which a new generation of magicians may find their own pools of darkness, that they might be able to shape their own souls into the forms that they must become.