The Wizard of Elsewhere

1.2 - Oddly Enough

Wizard Merlin Thistlewood - Not THE Wizard Merlin, who has never been recorded as having any sort of last name - was the first wizard who attempted to actually categorize magic. He was reported to have eventually compartmentalized six hundred and sixty-six unique categories of magic and was still going strong before he disappeared and was presumed dead at the age of seventy-three. His legacy, the young wizard Kestrel Thistelwood was unsuited to the task of continuing his father's learning, and so Wizard Merlin's unique magic classification system was lost to the annals of time, and he was lost to a mere footnote on the bottom of page two hundred and forty-six of the Comprehensive Compendium of Wizarding History - eight book omnibus.

The next most successful attempt was made by Wizard Emanuel Mordechai Menovchinsky who broke Magic down into a mere two parts. Anima, and Mana.

Wizard Emanuel Mordechai Menovchinsky's method is still the most widely used method as of the tenth edition of the Comprehensive Compendium of Wizarding History, he is referenced multiple times in all eight books, and he lived to a respectable age of seven hundred and two.

- Excerpt from Why Numbers Matter by Wizard Barnibus Jefferson Barnwinkle, Essay (never published)

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There were seven fish which were big enough to eat. Seven. So Barnibus stood in the center of them, clapped his hand over his eye's, spun around in a wobbly circle until he was good and dizzy and had absolutely no idea which fish were where, and then pointed at the ground at random.

His finger landed on a patch of grey-green moss growing between two gnarled roots of what would have looked like a pine tree, if the needles had been half as long. So, he did it again - three more times.

The fourth time his finger jabbed directly at a spiny fish with mottled, grey and orange coloration.

Barnibus nodded to himself in satisfaction, dutifully, if exhaustedly, bundled the fish into his Hat with all of the other non-suitable-to-eat fish and carried them all back to the river where he dumped them back in.

It wasn't that there was something necessarily bad about the number seven, so much as momentous about the number 7. For one, it was odd and you always wanted to be careful around odd numbers.Moreover though, it was a prime, and if odd things tended to stack around odd numbers than primary things tended to group around primes - and that was all the justification needed for Barnibus.

If he had cared, Barnibus could have drawn from a wealth of other associative concepts. For instance the number of primary sins, or the six plus one days of the week, or lost in a desert for seventy years... and given some careful thought and some lengthy existential calculations there was a good chance that Barnibus might have discovered that there was nothing at all worrying about seven fish.

But Barnibus felt very strongly that far too many odd and momentous things had happened in one day as it was, and that there was little need to risk adding another one to the list just because he was greedy about his fish.

Barnibus gutted the fish quickly using a small kitchen knife he pulled from his robe. This was not strange. Wizards were always gutting or dissecting or harvesting materials for the odd potion or charm, and a squeamish wizard might as well be a skydiver with a fear of heights.

Out of force of habit he harvested the heart, the eyes and the fins, and stowed them each away in separate baggies he carried on himself for just such an occasion. And of course, as each fish wriggled its last, he withdrew the anima from its body as it died, and stowed it away up his sleeve for later use.

There wasn't very much of it.

In very simple terms, Anima was essentially the spiritual essence of a living thing. It wasn't really an energy as some apprentices thought of it, so much as the manifested, ephemeral summation of potential. And you could imagine that six fish swimming their way through a river, eating bugs and river detritus did not have much potential to impact much of anything. But everything had some, everything living at any rate, and it was a primary ingredient in spell craft.