Mother of Magic

Extended Reach

Stephanie went downslope slightly so that she could see the black line she had impulsively scribed into the rock. Her focus was on the problem Ava had given to, yet at the same time, a part of her mind was chewing on the implications of what she had done. Created a laser that had no mechanism to it other than her mind and the ambient magic. A laser powerful enough to make a mark on the rock. That would be more impressive if Ava had not just split rock without any outward signs other than a hand motion. A motion she was using as a focus tool. There had been a bit of a green flash when the rock split. Nothing overly dramatic.

Ava's upslope fissure line in the granite was at 90 degrees to what Stephanie was planning to do.

Stephanie estimated that she needed to go into the rock face about two feet at the deepest point to intersect Ava's cut. The rock surface was not even. Its profile slightly rounded outward in many places. An irregular waveform laying on its side. If Stephanie did this right, there would be a reverse 'L' cut into the rock.

Ava's slash downward was about two feet on average. On top of it was another wiggly shape, but the bottom was a line. Stephanie was daunted for a moment by all the topography she was trying to take into account to cut the correct highly varying depth. Then she thought about the magic she had used so far. She had no idea how the subatomic structures of wood were aligned and built. Where they came from or how they came to be, in the macro world, wood. Carbon was involved: She understood that. You grew a tree to absorb carbon out of the air. That was not all there is to it by a long shot. Never mind that carbon itself is made of other, smaller things.

Stephanie was not sure if you went down small enough that the best scientist in her world could completely describe how things worked at the smallest level. When the media talked about the smallest of the small, the subatomic, they usually concluded with it runs on probabilities. That perhaps there was a way in which the subatomic world was not particles at all. It was all waves. Or strings. Or collapsed wave functions, whatever that is. Ava did not understand the world at remotely that level. Magic took what she wanted, and made it happen. It interpreted. It did the same thing when Stephanie had lased from her finger.

Maybe Stephanie did not have to know things like the average depth of rock, but instead only she had to consider intersecting the vertical line. Picture what her goal is. No matter what the shape is, or what it is made of, slice it to intersect the vertical cut and no further.

Stephanie gave that entire train of thought an internal shrug since this was all new. She would see. Worst case they might need to clean up the cut. Or both vertical and horizontal cuts. With a glance at Le, whom Stephanie could tell was wanting to try this operation too, she focused on the way she had felt Ava do it. Directing the magic to separate the rock crystals along her line and nowhere else. No matter what the various minerals wanted, no matter how their crystal lattices were oriented, they had to obey her will, as enforced by magic.

This process of severing along a particular line was complicated by the fact that the rock was not all one thing. It had different kinds of minerals mixed into it, and each one had a different crystal structure. A different force was needed to make it come apart where she wanted it to. Crystals were bisected along unnatural-to-them planes.

Without exactly realizing it, but also doing what she had felt via the conduit with Ava, Stephanie was using magic as an extended sense. She was feeling the structure of the slope. Painting the image in her mind as magic tendrils probed the area of her desire. In the same way that a rock-cutting blade could go in and not care what it was cutting, she was forcing the various rock structures to obey her will.

Stephanie did realize that this was a way she had instinctively calibrated the force of the laser. Enough to mark, but not to burn in.

The cracking sound came, a flash of green light, and a line perpendicular to Ava's cut appeared, running the same forty feet.