The conjuring Ants and the birth of modern magic
The world is filled with magical animals. Some are the descendant of the creatures of the myths, the elusive wonders of the time Before: dragons, sphinxes, hydras… but their numbers are dwindling and maybe some of them are already extinct.
A lot of other magical animals were born in the chaos and fire of the Collapse, the event that caused the end of all things beyond reality.
One of the most notable animals of the latter kind is the Conjuring Ant, both for its ability and the role it played in the development of Modern Magic.
The Conjuring Ant is a native of the southern continent of Uxali but, thanks to ships and sailors, it spread also to the northern continent of Axam and possibly elsewhere.
The Conjuring Ants (also known as blinkers) have the same complex social structure of more mundane ants.
The difference is that Conjuring Ants can teleport objects. When gathering in a group of three or more they can instantly transport the object they are surrounding to another group of ants. Such a group can transport an object heavy up to a coin to a distance of ten spans: it may not seem much but is equivalent to a master-level spell, like transporting a cart with horses and load many leagues away (and without a special magical focus).
Usually, the ants will create a network of groups, some will send food to another group that will forward it to another, and so on. This is similar to the supplying line of the “normal” ants but, thanks to these big gaps, it is difficult to spot. Also difficult to spot are the nests of the colonies: since they can teleport they have not a real entrance, only small ventilation tunnels.
Ants can teleport without a receiving group and this means that Conjuring Ants can (almost literally) enter anywhere, even hermetically sealed containers. If needed, they use this ability as a defense: if something threatens the nest they will teleport some of them inside the attacker. These attacks can be massive, with many ants moving in a frantic spiral motion and “shooting” inside the enemy tens, if not hundreds, of their own.
Workers can only teleport other things but, conversely, queens and drones can only teleport themselves. When the time of mating comes, the queen and the drones will do their version of the “nuptial flight”: the queen starts to quickly “blink” (short teleport) all over the nest and the drones will “blink” as well, in an attempt to intercept her.
A conjuring ant can be easily recognized by its long “tusk”, a peculiar kind of antennae that allow them their ability and, it is speculated, give them the ability of true spatial awareness (a sort of “true sight” independent of light and any kind of obstacle). The antennae take the form of antlers in the queen (the shape of which seems to resemble the structure of the nest), while in the male drones they are shaped like long mandibles (to catch the queen).
The Great Shinar and the study of Ants.
Shinar Goezer (907–959) was a Wizard and Natural Philosofer from Gremory, the main city of the principality of Stygia.
It is said that his fascination with insects started at a young age and it was at age of 10 when some ants ruined a lunch on the grass, he decided to dedicate his life to catching a blinker. This humorous anecdote Shinarhimself liked to tell may not be entirely true but Shinar was indeed precocious: he was the son of a noble’s butler and he read a good part of his master library before age 12. When the lord saw him tutoring his daughter in science and history, he decided to sponsor the young Shinar’s education.
Shinar went to the magic academy and focused his study on the conjuring disciplines, the magic art of making things appear and disappear. The blinkers were the most at hand creature that can perform such a feat. There are other animals able of teleportation like legless hens, disappearing sardines, and blinking dogs but all are from exotic lands and are equally difficult to catch and keep captive.
For years Shinar was able to catch ants with great patience: the technique was to put bait in a sealed glass container and took away the jar as soon as just one ant entered. To complicate the issues if an ant escaped, for example after an experiment in which more of them were together, the other ants will soon be rescued by their “sisters” if the container was not moved.
Shinar had the intuition to analyze the ability of the ants as they were casting a spell and not just doing something special or unique to them. With this approach, he was able to use anti-magic circles and mana dampening substances (like the blank flowers of the Grey Bad Lands) to create better traps and to catch a queen, and create an ant farm in his laboratory.
Catching a queen ant was the reason for the greatest triumph and ultimate fate of Shinar. Shinar used an anti-magic circle with a short radius: big enough to inhibit the queen powers but not wide enough to impede him to concentrate on the mana field. He wanted to see the twisting of the magical energies caused by the other ants once cut off from the queen . This meant that the ants could attack: they created a big mill trough in which they transported at least forty ants directly inside Shinar’s body.
The transported ants caused internal bleeding and infections but thanks to his assistant he was carried to a healer. After many operations to remove the extraneous body the wizard eventually survived but lost three fingers, the tip of the nose, the use of an eye, and was covered in many scars. Eventually, some unremoved ants had caused complications that lead to his death. But first, he had five years in which he could expand and developed on his big discovery. While he was attacked he saw that the ants were whirling in a pattern that was reflected in the mana field, in the same way, the hand of a wizard moves to alter the mana strands and cast a spell. He then tried to imitate the shape he saw to recreate the effect. Shinar was successful, He replicated the blinking effect of the ants… it was like the insects teach him a spell! The incantation took the name of “the ant knot” in honor of this discovery.
After Shinar died his assistant, Gwennifer, petitioned the magic academy to give him posthumously the title of “Great” reserved to master who had a great breakthrough or made “a magus opus”. The academy was not so impressed with the work with the ants but was stunned by the equipment he created to do it: ablative glass to contain magic, gnomic lenses calibrated to see mana strands, magic dampening rooms to create a controlled environment for experiments… but the object choose to be exposed in the academy (all the Great have one of their masterpieces on the wall of the main hall) was his wand: shaped like the “tusks” of an ant was the focus he used to (re)create the “ant knot”.
Gwennifer continued her master’s work on insects, studying other magic-using species, like the divining cicadas, the necromantic fly-bees, and expanded to other vermins, like the transmuting slug and the enchanting spiders.
Shinar’s lab equipment inspired many young wizards to have a new approach to magic: putting the mana field front and center the theory, direct observation, measurable and repeatable experiment, using a specific instrument for a specific task…
All of this is creating a new and modern kind of magic.
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