the start of a quiet rebellion | Glowfic Constellation

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"And yet, here I am, asking you."

Flatly: "'Great Magi' exist."

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"That seems like... an unlikely opinion to find in this particular city," he says.

"I won't deny that if you're going to give anyone that kind of power Atennesi Cohen is a reasonable choice. That doesn't mean it's a good idea for a person to have that much power."

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"All right, why not?"

"You haven't been here for very long. Do you know what a Great Mage could do if they wanted to?"

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"I've heard some things," he says. "Maybe not the same things you mean."

"It's only reasonable to trust the extant Great Mages not to do anything ostentatiously horrible, since they haven't in all this time. But no one should have to trust anyone else not to, to remodel a reasonable fraction of the planet, or commit spontaneous genocide, or..." he trails off with a vaguely haunted look. That is not the face of a man who has listed the worst options that have occurred to him. "And that trust applies only to Great Mages extant, not those yet to be."

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"...I think I see where you're coming from," he says. "But my perspective is... shaped by different circumstances."

"Oh?"

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"...In my world, we have a genre of fiction called 'science fantasy'," he says. "Science fantasy stories imagine a world where the laws of reality are measurable, quantifiable, and immutable. Where you can study and experiment and develop an understanding of those laws and then apply that understanding to make accurate predictions. We have this genre of fiction because our world does not work like that. There is a patch of desert somewhere that doesn't have a down anymore because someone tried to figure out whether dropped objects of different weights fall at the same speeds. If you are very cautious and careful and draw your conclusions tentatively from experience, you can advance your understanding of the world bit by bit, but if you come up with a theory and try to rigorously test it, you die."

"...Well, that's horrifying."

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"Yes," he agrees. "We don't have Great Magi. But we do have gods, and dragons, and fae, and miscellaneous other powerful people. If you offend any of those, they can kill you or worse. Hubris is a lethally hazardous personal flaw. I grew up knowing that I probably wasn't going to live to see my thirtieth birthday because I am not a naturally humble person and there's no way I could stop myself from trying to do something the very moment I had an opportunity that might not get me killed."

"I...can certainly see how our system would be an improvement on that..."

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"Yes," he says. "The reason why I want to be a Great Mage is because if I do that, and seek out all the other worlds I can find and learn all the magic I can get my hands on, if I'm smart enough and dedicated enough and lucky enough, then maybe one day I can go home and free everyone from that. And my world has resurrection; if I do it right, I get to see my family again."