Earth, the Magicless Plane

Athenaeum entry. Correspondent of record: Vel Asharen. Drawn from two personal visits, the records of prior correspondents, and conversation with the gatekeeper Hjarn. This correspondent does not intend a third visit.

Overview

Earth is a plane that, by every physical measure the Athenaeum can apply, functions exactly as a world should. Mountains weather. Rivers run downhill. Things fall, and fall at the rate they ought to. And yet it is, in the most literal sense available to this correspondent, a dead world — not lifeless, but inert. Magic does not exist here. No arcane, divine, primal, or innate working functions within its borders. Spells fail. Enchantments unwind on arrival. No mortal of Earth has ever cast so much as a cantrip, and the overwhelming majority do not believe such a thing is possible.

I have visited Earth twice. I am a competent practitioner, and I have never in my life had cause to think about the arcane — it is simply present, the way air is present, a faint texture underlying every place I have ever stood. On Earth that texture is gone. The silence of it is total. I found I could not stop noticing it, the way one cannot stop noticing a missing tooth. I do not intend to visit a third time.

---

The Gods Still Hear

A common misconception, even among the educated, is that Earth is a plane where magic has been forbidden — that some power holds it shut. This is wrong, and the truth is stranger. Magic is not suppressed on Earth. It simply has nothing to be made from. The raw stuff a practitioner shapes into effect exists there in quantities so vanishingly small that no working can take hold. A wizard's formulae find nothing to bind. A sorcerer's blood sings to an empty room. A druid reaches for a wild that does not reach back. They do not fail through any fault of skill. They fail the way a swimmer fails in a dry basin.

There are two exceptions, and the distinction between them and the rest is instructive. Warlocks and priests do not shape ambient magic — they receive it, piped directly from a deity. A conduit of this kind bypasses the dead world entirely. I am told — I have not witnessed it — that a banished priest standing on Earth can still draw on their god. But only as a trickle. The power arrives throttled near to nothing, and what little comes through costs the caster dearly, leaving them wrung out by efforts that would be trivial elsewhere. A working priest on Earth is the only true magic on the whole of the plane, and they must spend themselves to the bone to produce so much as a flicker. (Whether sorcerers of patron-blood share this thread, no one has tested. No such person has been banished. The gods are not careless enough to send us the data.)

The ordinary faithful of Earth — and there are a great many — receive no such thread. Their prayers are heard. This must be understood plainly: the gods of Yggdrasil can perceive Earth without the slightest difficulty, every prayer from it as clear as any other. They simply, in overwhelming majority, do not care to look twice. And even when moved to answer, they cannot send a miracle down into a plane that has no means to manifest one. What they can send is coincidence. A dream that proves true. A near-miss on a dark road. A recovery the healers cannot account for. The answer arrives wearing the clothes of luck, and is almost always mistaken for it.

Three of the gods are the exception to the indifference. Meni attends Earth because death works there as it works nowhere else — clean, total, and permanent, untroubled by resurrection or soul-craft or the lingering dead. To a god of endings it is something close to restful. Krorus, the time-serpent, the coiled and unreadable keeper of what-is-known, attends because Earth is the most extraordinary experiment in the cosmos: a people told no by the very structure of their world, who answered by building wings, and calculation, and a pane of glass through which they speak across oceans. A god of knowledge does not look away from that. And Lobelia attends, quietly, wherever Meni's attention goes.

The faithful of Earth, meanwhile, pray to none of these by name. They pray to their own gods, in their own thousands of traditions — and are, without knowing it, almost always correct. The sun-gods of a hundred Earth faiths are Aerith Soln wearing a hundred names. Half its gods of death are Meni. Its smith-gods and forge-saints are Thurim Ironwake, thanked over anvils by people who will never know they are thanking anyone real. The gods of Yggdrasil have not troubled to correct the record. They got close enough, and it would be unkind.

---

Technology

It is tempting to describe Earth's machines as a replacement for magic, a thing built to fill the hole where the arcane should be. This is a comfortable error and I will not indulge it. Earth never had magic to lose. Its people were never told they were going without. They simply found the universe shut against them on every side that we, on the other branches of Yggdrasil, leave open — and they pried at the seams anyway, with nothing but their hands and their stubbornness, and they got in.

The results are difficult to overstate to a reader who has not stood among them. They have harnessed the lightning and made it run in wires through the walls of nearly every dwelling, tame and waiting. They have built carriages that need no beast and ships that cross an ocean in a day. They fly — not by feather-fall or borrowed wind but in vast metal vessels heavier than a keep, and not only through the air; they have stepped beyond the atmosphere of their own plane and looked back down at it. Nearly every soul on Earth carries a flat pane of glass that performs, casually and constantly, the work of a dozen divination rituals — speech across oceans, the answer to almost any question, the location of any place — for a child, for a fool, for anyone, with no gift required and no price paid but coin.

Here is what the visiting scholars are not warned about loudly enough, and what I will state plainly. Imagine a nation of artificers, every one of them crippled — denied the limb the rest of us are born using without thought — and imagine that this nation, so handicapped, still produces engines capable of ending other nations. That is Earth. They built a fire that unmakes cities. They built thinking-engines that are beginning, slowly, to answer back. Every great work of theirs carries the same quiet, appalling subtext: we did this with nothing. The Athenaeum now cautions scholars before study not because Earth's technology is frightening in itself, but because of the arithmetic the mind performs unbidden after a while among it — the simple, sickening multiplication of this much, from nothing, by what we have.

I will give one instance, because the surveys do not convey it. On my second visit I was shown — shown casually, as a matter of settled history, by a person who thought it unremarkable — the record of the fire-that-unmakes-cities, the first time they used it in earnest. Two cities. The better part of a morning. And the thing that stayed with me was not the death toll, though it was monstrous. It was that my host had moved past it. It was old news to them. They had built the worst working I have ever beheld, used it, catalogued it, and filed it behind them, and gone on to build a hundred thousand other things. No god gave them that fire. They reached into a locked universe and took it out with their hands. I did not sleep well, and I do not intend to return..

---

Cultural Footnotes

What follows is miscellany — observations that fit nowhere else, recorded because a true account of a plane is made as much of its small absurdities as its great terrors. I make no claim to having understood any of it.

The glass oracle, revisited. I have described elsewhere what the device does. I had not, at the time, grasped what it is chiefly for. Having now watched many Earthlings use it at length, I can report that its primary function is to deliver, in an endless unceasing stream, news of every misery and injustice occurring anywhere on the plane, which the user absorbs with a grim fixed expression for as long as an hour at a stretch before setting the device down, feeling worse, and immediately picking it up again. They are not compelled to do this. No one compels them. I watched a woman do it on a sunlit morning in a pleasant garden. I do not understand it and I have chosen to stop trying.

The death of coin. Earth is, within my lifetime of visiting, abandoning physical money. Payment is increasingly made by waving the glass oracle, or a thin card, at a reader — the wealth itself having become a number kept somewhere I was assured exists but could not be shown. I found this unremarkable until I considered that an entire plane has agreed, more or less by consensus, to treat a number no one can hold as more real than metal one can bite. We would call that an enchantment of staggering scale and reach. They call it Tuesday.

True crime, performed during chores. A peculiar and widespread custom: Earthlings will play, aloud, lengthy spoken accounts of the plane's most grisly murders — recited in a warm, companionable tone by narrators who treat dismemberment as light conversation — and they will do this specifically while scrubbing dishes or folding cloth. The horror is the entertainment; the chore is the occasion. I am told it is soothing. I did not ask whom it soothes.

Food, summoned. One may, on Earth, cause a hot meal to appear at one's door by manipulating the glass oracle, without speaking to a soul or leaving one's dwelling. The meal is carried the final distance by a living person, paid a pittance, whom the summoner has arranged their entire transaction to avoid meeting. I will note, dryly, that conjuring food from nothing is a high-order working on the Common Plane, attempted by few and mastered by fewer. Earth has achieved the effect precisely, at the cost of one stranger's afternoon, and finds the stranger the inconvenient part.

Water, sold in vessels. Earthlings will, in great numbers, purchase water — sealed in single-use vessels, at considerable markup — in regions where clean water already runs freely from their walls at a turn of the hand. When I asked why, I received four entirely different answers from four people, each delivered with total confidence, none agreeing with another. I have included this footnote chiefly so that you will believe me about the rest.

The astrologers. Earth possesses a class of persons who hold that the positions of distant stars govern mortal affairs, and who claim, on this basis, to perceive a vast unseen order surrounding their world. The educated of Earth regard them as harmless cranks. I feel obligated to record that they are, in the broadest possible sense, correct — there is indeed a vast unseen order surrounding their world — and that they are wrong about every single detail of it without exception. Both things are true at once. I found this very funny and have nothing further to add..

---

The Exile Trap

Every plane Yggdrasil threads through has the same valley at the base of the World Tree, and in every valley sleeps the same gatekeeper — Hjarn, the Slumbering Gate, who alone grants safe passage between realms. I count him a friend, insofar as the word fits something the size of a small mountain. Which makes what I must record here the harder to write.

Earth's valley exists like all the others. Hjarn is coiled at its base. He even wakes on its full moons. But Earth's gate does not open from the inside, and never has, and not even Hjarn will say why — only that it is not his to say. One may be sent to Earth. One cannot come back. To leave requires a god to reach in and lift the exile out by name, an intervention so costly and so rarely judged worth the trouble that, for every practical purpose, banishment to Earth is forever.

It is, without serious rival, the most secure prison that exists — and it is used as one. Not by any single hand. The Empire and a dozen lesser powers consign their problems there; Korin Soln exploits the arrangement most aggressively of all, but she is far from alone. What unites the exiles is rarely their crime. It is their craft. Earth is, above all, where you send a mage.

Consider the cruelty of it properly. To imprison an ordinary mortal is merely to confine them; they lose their freedom and keep themselves. But a practitioner is their practice — a lifetime poured into a discipline, an identity built atop a power as fundamental to them as sight. Send that person to Earth and you take none of their memories, none of their training, none of their knowledge. You leave all of it intact and you simply switch it off. They arrive whole and wake hollow, reaching all their lives for a thing that no longer answers, in a world that never knew it was missing. No dungeon inflicts anything that compares. The exiles know precisely what they have lost, in exhaustive detail, forever.

There is exactly one rule governing the practice, and it is absolute: you do not banish a priest or a warlock. Ever. A conduit does not draw on the world but on a god, and a god's thread reaches even into Earth — throttled, costly, a trickle against the flood they once commanded, but a trickle, in a plane of nothing, is the only fire in the dark. Send a wizard to Earth and you erase a mage. Send a warlock to Earth and you place the single most powerful being on the whole plane there — armed, unkillable by any means Earth possesses, and with every reason for fury. This is not theory. It was done once. It is not spoken of in detail, it has not been done since, and the prohibition against repeating it is the nearest thing the practice has to sacred law.

So the exiles of Earth are mages, and only mages, stripped and scattered and silent — every kind save the two that were, after that one buried catastrophe, never sent again. I have stood in that valley on a waking night and watched Hjarn stamp a pilgrim through with the gentlest press of one talon, and thought about the others — the ones shoved past him the other way, into a door he keeps but did not make and cannot open. He knows. He does not like it. It is not his to say why, and it is not his to undo.

---

Correspondent's Note: On the United World Institution of Abnormal Entities and Events

---

See Also

• Planes Index
• Hjarn
• Korin Soln
• Meni
• Krorus
• Lobelia
• Vel Asharen
• The World Tree (Yggdrasil)
• The Interplanar Athenaeum
• Yggdrasil World System

— Vel Asharen, The Interplanar Athenaeum