Sapienophobia

Chapter 20

I hopped down the stairs and made a beeline for the reception desk.

As Herl was the master of child palettes, Danny was the king of boredom eradication. I saw it as a pity I had to brave through the Anide killing gauntlet to see him. He made the babying worth it. His novel recommendations were all brilliant, tailored to engage me in the first few pages. It took him all of two attempts to hone in on my tastes after I shabbily explained them to him.

I think he was so eager to lend me books because it kept me from annoying him. It also spared him my nervous jabbering.

I didn't prefer books with human protagonists, but it couldn't be helped. They were everywhere in fiction at least. The only one Danny could find written by an Anide was an autobiography. So if I had to read about humans to read what I wanted, I didn't want pictures. Then, I could make different assumptions about bodily descriptions the author didn't care to describe.

I didn't understand the common spells the characters used, further implying who the author's target audience was, but figuring out the context after reading the effect was simple enough.

Learning new things wasn't fun for me, I wasn't a wildly curious child anymore, but I would learn if it could serve my benefit.

I was only able to gather this much: humans don't "channel" magic like a water strait as everyone implied, they just forcefully direct it, the way a human hand would. It isn't the magic's natural state.

That must be why it can be so destructive.

Humans weaved and amplified magic from the way it's drawn. Lines, with two endpoints, were generally used for forces with one working energy acting upon an object, like forming a fire that only smoked upwards. Triangles were for stability in walls to keep things out; the shape can not have more than one right angle and as a result, at least two of a triangle's angles must be forever subject to implosion. Magic meant to encage with triangles was bound to fail. Contrarily, squares were for seals to keep things in, that's why jail cells are rectangular. The circle, the shape that would've made sense to me to be the weakest, was the most malleable of shapes, and therefore had multiple uses. It is precisely because it had no sides that it could act in different directions. Other shapes were usually placed within it to enhance or assign a property to the circle. I had never seen only rough-sided shapes being used by humans in the very few times I came across their magic, and this was to blame.

The original shape's meaning was also interpreted to be a religious icon. The suns, the moon, the pupils; the presence of the circle across nature made it an idol to be deciphered and revered for its perfection.

I grew tired of hearing it; if it wasn't perfect, it wouldn't be a circle in the first place.

Figuring out that shapes were a concept of human magic took a lot of cross-checking books, ones that weren't even nonfiction, and trusting my intuition. Of course, there were a couple of exceptions to my geometrical magic rule in the books but not so many that my deduction was rendered null.

What humans could conjure with their magic had to fall within the range of a living being's composition or as an elemental force of nature. That meant they couldn't magically produce tools or metalworks. I didn't let the fact that magic wasn't all-powerful comfort me; it might as well have been when I was in the presence of a human. Having knowledge, iffy knowledge at that, doesn't mean I would have been able to apply it when needed. My fear could make certain of that.

Magic is still not completely understood, either by fault of myself or its users, but it is no less marveled by the people. The application of it into so many texts whose plots would be fine without it was confirmation enough.