Magic: Everything is connected.

The angel explained it to Tal:

Everything is connected. Everything. It’s like when you draw your saliva-coated fingers apart, and that string of saliva stretches between them. But these threads never break – they only draw thinner and finer, impossibly thin and fine. You are connected to everything. To the other quarter-billion people, to each tree, each insect, each hair on my head. Luckily for your soul, the threads to each of my hairs, my cells, my atoms, are woven into a rope that signifies “me”.

You are connected more strongly to the things around you, the things you touch, the things with which you are familiar, and the things to which you are related. Your thread with this tree here is much tighter, much broader than the your thread to that tree on the horizon, because your distance does not stretch it so thin. If this tree were on your moon, its thread would be so narrow your mind could not detect or even comprehend it. If you were to lay your hand on this tree, your connection to it would be orders of magnitude stronger than it is only this far away. If you were to study this tree for the next year – develop a kinship with it, learn its desires and purpose, fully understand its causative forms – your connection to it would be stronger than any other tree, even if you walked past the horizon. But your connection to this tree, no matter how deep your bond, is unlikely to surpass your connection to another human, and no other human to your sister, mother or father. Do you begin to understand?

Also, the size or power of an item creates a larger thread, or woven rope of threads, but it is not just a matter of summing the parts. No. The stars spin threads larger around than your soul, but your sun in particular has immense bonds, though he is not particularly large or bright. Do you see? No. It is too much for you.

You must remember, these threads are not matter, like this flesh. They are related, in a sense, for your flesh is a manifestation of your spirit, and also its cage. But when your body dies and your soul prepares to re-incarnate, its threads are not cut or began anew. Simply because it has no matter, it does not disappear from the fabric of Mehr. Had you been very close your sister, you may have found yourself tied to her again in another life, even if you did not live near each other or at the same time. Of course, the more time you spent apart, the further that thread would stretch, until you lost your sense for it.

So perhaps you have a sense of it now. You had asked of ‘magic’. Your magic is just a matter of manipulating these threads to your advantage, of gaining some kind of leverage.

Most often this is done through supplicatory magic. Your connection to this tree might be very fine, whereas you know my connection is much stronger. You might petition me to act on this tree on your behalf, and if I am conviced, I shall. Perhaps your connection to me is also much stronger than it is to the tree; you might be able to force me to take action upon this tree by taking action upon myself. Occassionally very powerful creatures will have very vulnerable leverage points, or might even behave mechanistically. For many generations, long ago, this planet of Ohida was such a machine for magic, but those gears and pulley and levers have since worn smooth.

You may also use fetish magic, where the intermediary is not an active player. You might be too far from or unfamiliar with this tree to act upon it, but if you had a piece of bark, an acorn or a leaf, or even perhaps a stone which had lain among the roots for many years, if you held it in your hand and focused on it, you may be able to use its very strong connection to the tree to pass along your influence.

Of course, if you have the power for direct influence, it is the most powerful. If you learned to perceive these threads more really, if you learned how to pull and tug and treat the things on the other ends as puppets, you might be considered a god.

There are other sorts of magic, other ways to manipulate the threads. You might bind threads where they would not previously have been intertwined – tie this tree to this stone as though they were a single object, not simply nearby, and burn the tree to destroy the stone.

Or you might take the tree completely into yourself, so its threads become your own, and its connections yours.

Or you might cut every connection between yourself and this tree, and as far as you each were concerned, you would cease to exist. You could not see or feel it, and you would pass right through it if you walked that way. But things were meant to be connected, and breaking threads leads to chaotic results. The ground beneath the two of you might bridge the gap, and you might become rooted to the earth. Or perhaps your connection to the ground was already so tenuous that snapping your thread to the tree stretches your connection to the ground out of shape, and your next step send you floating into the sky. It would be nearly impossible for a mind like yours to predict the results, and even more impossible for you to reconstruct a thread you had cut, were you even to learn how to cut it in the first place.

Before you think that this magic is something you might master, remember one thing: there are two objects on each thread. If you are strengthening your connection to this tree, its connection to you is also strengthened. Can you be sure, before you think to use it as a tool of your will, that it did not have some evil plan for you?