Ends of Magic

“What’s smothered your fire?” Sarah asked, observing Nathan’s suddenly downcast expression.

He grimaced. “My tutoring skill. It just developed into an unambiguous social skill. ‘Listeners will understand your explanations and feel that what you say must be accurate, even when they would normally not be persuaded.’” Aside from some exchanged glances, his friends’ reactions were pretty muted to the revelation. He'd been expecting anger and disgust.

Stella waved his concern away. “We follow your light regardless, and have since we began our journey.”

Nathan looked around at the rest of the Heirs, searching for reservations. “I’ll be careful in using it. I don’t want to unilaterally dictate what we do.”

“Speak the truth, and your skill will not harm us,” Khachi said, words deliberate and thoughtful.

Nathan rubbed his neck uncomfortably. “But if I’m wrong, I need somebody to argue against me. I won’t always be right, and if you can’t tell me when I’m being an idiot, then some stupid plan is going to get us all killed.”

“Our mental protection skills should let us bear that weight.” Aarl’s voice was wry. "Just hear our objections the first time."

Stella waved her hands to reclaim his attention, seeming not to care much about his disclosure. “Let us speak of the danger behind these Insights of fission and fusion. How could a spell cause either, and what are the dangers?” Her eyes flicked back to the periodic table he'd been holding. “It seems either could provide a powerful spell, but which is more suited to safe spellcasting?”

Upon seeing that nobody else was going to raise any objections to his new skill, Nathan turned his attention to the more pressing problem. “The next thing to explain is the different kinds of radiation. They’re each dangerous in their own way and require their own protections. Both fission and fusion produce all sorts of radiation and that’s how a lot of their energy comes out. Fission would take less energy and cause smaller explosions, so it would be safer in that regard and easier to experiment with. But it’s got one significant problem, in that it tends to create deadly and long-lasting fallout.” He hesitated, not confident in his next words. “We might be able to figure out a fission spell that didn’t cause fallout, but fusion reactions don’t produce any, at least if you’re using light elements like hydrogen and helium.”

“Fallout?” Stella asked, sounding out the last word. “What is that?”

“I mentioned that many elements could exist at multiple weights, but some of them are only kind of stable,” Nathan replied. “For the heavier elements in particular, there are a lot of allowed versions that are only kind of stable, and they’ll break down and continue the nuclear reaction over days or years. If those get inside your body first, then they’re incredibly poisonous. They’ll burn you with radiation from the inside.”

“Ah,” Stella said, whetting her lips nervously. “Years. That’s the spell that the Esebus soldiers were using?”

Nathan nodded. “I think I understand their spell a bit, and it’s possible - even likely - that they were using a version that doesn’t produce fallout. But I don’t know how to tell if they were, or how to be sure that we aren’t. That's why I took us away so quickly. I don't know if I can replicate a safe fission reaction, so let’s stick to fusion.”

“And radiation?” the mage asked, focusing on him. “That’s the danger of Dalo’s spell? The reason he insisted that anybody who saw it was healed?”

“Most likely,” came Nathan’s thoughtful reply. “There are three primary forms of radiation and a few secondary ones. The big one we need to worry about is gamma radiation, and I think I mentioned it when we talked about light. All it is is incredibly high-energy light. Much stronger than anything your lasers can produce.”

Stella’s eyes narrowed as she absorbed that. “I know blue light holds more energy than red, and some light is invisible and even more dangerous - but why can’t a laser spell make gamma radiation? I could simply make it more powerful.”

Nathan absentmindedly answered her question, trying to figure out how to explain particle radiation. “Ultimately, what we’re doing in your lasers is electrically exciting a gas and then amplifying the energy it emits. That can’t emit gamma radiation because they’d rather emit more radiation of a lower wavelength. There’s a cap on how powerful a photon released in that process can be, and it’s weaker than gamma.”

“But light mana can still control gamma light because it is a photon.” Stella was thinking out loud as much as anything else and started sculpting reflective spheres of mana. “Will this work?”

Nathan probed the spells she was trying out, trying to decide if it was up to the task. “We’ll need to test those spells. I think they’ll work, but there’s no nonmagical way to reflect gamma rays since they'll go right through a mirror. The only way to block them is a whole ton of mass. Being able to reflect them would be something unique to magic.”

Stella shot him an unamused look. “I should be able to carry that weight, but we’ll test it. What of the other kinds of radiation?”

“Alpha and beta. Both are charged, so electromagnetic shielding should work. Alpha is just a helium ion moving fast and should be very easy to block that way. Beta is a bit harder - it’s just an electron, but they tend to be going very quickly, so they're hard to stop, but a good electromagnetic shield should work. The secondary kinds of radiations are protons - so just a small positive charge - and neutrons, which might be the hardest of all.” He stopped for a second, squinting as he delved back into his memory.

“I looked through all of this decades ago, when I was deciding if I wanted to be a physicist or not, but I can’t for the life of me remember if fusion radiation produces neutrons. We should assume it does.” He nodded in satisfaction. “Neutrons aren’t charged, they penetrate more than gamma rays, and they’re pretty lethal to anything biological. I think a couple layers of force shields should do it, but we’ll need to test to be sure.”

Stella added that to the list of notes she’d started making. “How do we test these - should we invent magic for the purpose?”

Nathan smirked. “After one of Badud’s spells, I know what radiation damage feels like. If you’re hiding behind a mountain with me exposed, we can test it. I’m a pretty good guinea pig.”

“Guinea pig?” Aarl asked in confusion. He’d been quietly listening to the conversation with the rest of the Heirs, but that comment made him break his silence.

Nathan waved the comment away. “Test dummy. I’ll be able to tell if you’re properly shielding things, and I should be able to survive the blast even if the spell breaks containment.”

I survived getting vaporized once, after all.

Stella seemed to be intent on her spellforms again, layering light, electromagnetic, and force spells in a shell around a ball of mana that was serving as a placeholder for an eventual nuclear spell. She was trying to come up with a stable arrangement of the different kinds of mana that would be effective at containing energy instead of warding it off.

“Tougher. If you want a successful reaction in there, those spells are going to need to withstand your strongest spell. Even if you make it as weak as possible.”

The exhortation only sharpened Stella’s focus, and she scrapped the containment spell and started over. The new version was beefier and used Insights Nathan recognized from various shielding and containment spells. It felt to his magical senses like a hodgepodge of a laser spell, one of her capacitor spells, and a reinforced triple-layer forcefield. The spellwork expanded, and he had to take a step back to the edge of the cavern to avoid interrupting the revolving layers of magic.

The Heirs drifted off to other tasks, taking care of the camp as Stella worked on her spell. Nathan kept an eye on Stella and her spell, making sure not to disturb her. Eventually, she put some finishing touches on the magic and shrunk it down a bit, looking to Nathan for approval.

He studied it for a minute, noting how excessively overbuilt the whole thing was. Each individual layer of the force shield would deflect the strike of a grave tangle, and the internal layers were no less durable for being specialized against particular types of energy. He shrugged. “It looks good to me, but I’m not completely certain it’ll hold against the forces involved. We’ll test it tomorrow, once we find somewhere good.”

“Won’t that bring eyes to us?” Sarah asked, concerned.

“If this shield works, it shouldn’t,” Nathan replied, gesturing at the spell in front of him. “Even if it does, they’ll probably think it’s a dungeon, or a soldier shooting monsters.” He turned back to Stella. “Let’s just discuss how to actually trigger it. I think something like your father’s spell is a good idea, but we should be able to tune it in a few ways if we know what’s actually going on. Instead of just using air, we can use hydrogen, or maybe even helium. We can also try separating for deuterium, though I’m not sure if that will work.”

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“My target is nuclear mana,” Stella replied carefully, the fires in her eyes casting a flickering light around the cavern. “That Insight will allow the best possible control.”

Nathan held up a calming hand. “The Insights I’ve given you will work, but I’m not sure they’ll be enough to get all the way to something like nuclear mana, if it exists. It might be split into fission and fusion, or something else. We’d probably need to go into the strong and weak nuclear forces for that.”

“What are those?” The question was quiet, but intent. The mention of deeper forces had captured all of Stella’s attention. She looked at him cautiously, like somebody wary of a trick.

Nathan shrugged. “I’m not really sure. This is the limit of my knowledge. I know they’re why some atoms are stable and others aren't, but I don’t know how, or why, or the math to describe it. But they're the reason that only elements of certain weights are stable."

She looked disappointed but didn't push further, instead unraveling the shielding before spinning up a different spell from air mana. “Then let’s talk about how to filter out deuterium from hydrogen. Which I can get from zapping water with electricity, right? And then the deuterium is heavier than hydrogen. But it’s still hydrogen, so I can’t separate it out with a simple air spell.” She cocked an eyebrow at Nathan, pulling out a dimensional waterskin and extracting some water.

The rest of the Heirs sighed and got back to the process of preparing camp. Stella was in the groove and wasn’t going to come out of it until she was satisfied.