riversmelodie
The secret origin behind the seemingly magical powers of the Occult caste, from the Shiakar Empire, explained by one of its rebel.
A form of sequel to a previous short story called The Greatest Enemy, starring both characters Laki and Menrva.
I wanted to write about this for some time, but finally found the right opportunity. The idea came to me awhile ago, when I was trying to find a scientific way to explain magical symbols. I know there isn't one, but since many, many civilizations have them, and matter-manipulation properties are attributed to them across these civilizations, the curiosity got to me, and I started a thought experiment, wondering, for the fun of it, how I could possibly find a scientific source behind symbols in a magic ritual.
The answer came to me while I studied web design. Basically, what you are looking at right now, the page you have in front of you, with all the animations, with all the links and the commands... result from a code. An abstract code of seemingly illogical set of characters (for those who don't study web design), called HTML coding. Within that code, there is two or three main "platforms" that take care of more complex operations such as font, colours, image zooming, animations, etc, called CSS, Javascript, and (mainly for softwares), Python and C+. All that is still, however, a bunch of codes, carefully set up to give a specific result. And these codes, basically (there are more complex operations at work), direct the flow of electrons across the computer's chips, and create what you see and interact with.
Now... what if (and its purely a science-fiction idea), symbols can do the same? We have to write a bunch of characters, but what if we could replace all that code, with a simple symbol? And what if the coding can be pushed further, and instead of manipulating electron flow within a chip, it manipulate atoms instead?
Its of course, just a scifi idea I had.