Over the course of his first life, Xander had become something of a connoisseur of magic. He'd seen it all; from the first fumbling efforts to float a pencil to the false impressiveness of flashy spells to the true mastery of minimum effort for maximum effect. He'd seen witches study theory for years before they tried their first spell. He'd seen scholars do things that whole covens working together couldn't, because they knew theory well enough to change one minor thing and set off a chain reaction. They'd been called the Philosophers, after Archimedes and his saying "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
Compared to them, no person in the wizarding world was more than a rank amateur, skilled enough to dazzle those who hadn't seen anything more impressive than sleight of hand but unimpressive to those who knew what real skill looked like.
No comments:
Post a Comment