Published on April 21, 2025 6:53 PM GMT
In the days of yore, you do not invoke magic, but to become for a moment the faucet it pours from into this world. In the good tsarist years, the scaffold known to us witches today as the fundamental layer of magic was not yet invented. Without these precautions, our predecessors practised a greater degree of freedom in how they perished.
Some lit themselves on fire eternal, seared their shape into the air like some remnant of a flesh statue lighting the way towards folly. Others still lie flattened to the atoms, scattered to the winds with their mind still intact. A few have achieved immortality but as some forgotten bricks of flesh trapped under sediments and dead matters; Only a few had obtained the ultimate prize.
All witches today owe a debt of gratitude to those that have achieved that prize. Gullveig-then-Heiðr comes to mind, who consoled kings and gods on immortality. Others, unlike Heiðr who performs the dance of seidr that re-weaved fate by her lonesome, have sought a more egalitarian means to order. Serving not demiurges, they wanted to disenchant magic and bring them to heel. To decompose magic is to be a class traitor of the divinely chosen few and to risk the wrath of the wicked and the righteous. Breaking them down bit by bit, syllable by syllable so that it may become simple. So simple that anyone can reweave fate with their fellows.
The Great Lord Yang-of-Shang the Lawchanger may be better known for his staunch defence of the equality of law and beheading the king's relatives. But he beheaded more than just princes - all needless abstractions are his enemy. By the time he was finished with his works, Yang‑of‑Shang had beheaded almost everything that could not be cleanly named and purposefully used.
He razored secret glyphs away from the public ones, tore prefixes from nouns, and balanced each symbol’s weight upon a scale of lead millet seeds. When scribes complained that the lexicon would no longer breathe, he answered, “Breathing is an accident. Let us keep only what is essential.” He began by chiselling every known charm onto a cypress tree the size of a threshing floor, then reduced it to the size of a mill, then to the size of a measly plank - and then he splintered it to pieces.
Each shrapnel bore a single stroke — be it a hook of ink, a turn of a brush, a half‑rung in a ladder of thunder where the moon climbs. He showed that any spell, however extravagant, could be re‑assembled from those splinters if you observed the rules he set. What mattered was not birthright but ordering, and ordering could be taught to a goat if the goat were willing to count.
Next he declared that every working must lift one if the three weights: one in gold, one in silver and another in lead:
- Lead One that Names the thing.Silver One that Changes the thing.Gold One that Proves the thing is changed.
Failure at any link collapsed the spell into harmless smoke. It sounds trivial until you recall that, before Yang, witches often trusted the universe to notice what they meant; after Yang, we learned to make the universe sign a receipt.
Having pared magic to joints, timbers and serfs, Yang opened his compute inside a granite quarry, where daylight could not distract them. There he drilled souls through recitation and permutation until they could rebuild a rain‑calling lattice blindfolded.
Every graduate left with the same marrow‑deep reflex: when faced with the inexplicable, see it, count it and name it. From these three gifts the Fundamental Layer eventually condensed — a sober, load‑bearing grammar beneath all later architectures.
So, as invisible and as taken‑for‑granted as the concept of zero, our modern “scaffold” is only its latest iteration. Bit‑code, sigil tables, verified stack‑maps — all neat dovetails of Yang‑wood.
Yet Yang paid for clarity with a tax on wonder. When you disassemble a phoenix to catalogue its feathers, you may recreate heat and lift and the exact cadence of wingbeats, but the long attrition of awe is forever hard to mend. So remember him with gratitude and with caution. Invoke the Board when your workings sprawl, the Chain when your proofs wander, the Compiler when your code despair. But on the first night of new snow — when the air is soft sharpness and even bytes seem to hum— step outside, set down your tools, and listen for the one thing Yang could not coffin in cypress: the silent murmur of a universe still willing to surprise us.
A tribute to Aphyr
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