Exchange of Realities

The ability to sense magic is as much a staple of fantasy novels and games as the magic itself. We see it, crackling in the corner, or limning the leaves in light, golden halos around the protected or black veins corrupting their target. It’s there, like light on crystal, like the moon through faint mist…

So I have one question. Why is the sense by which we see this stuff almost always vision?

I’m not going to say it always is; I’ve seen exceptions. But most of the pieces I can remember give it color and luster, rather than some other quality. After a while, though, I get bored, particularly since the colors always seem to mean the same things. The good guys use blue and gold, or silver and white, the bad guys tend more towards reds and blacks with the occasional purple, nature spirits always seem to end up green or whatever color is most closely associated with their element if they have one… I could go on. And just look at the role-playing games. In D&D, detect magic registers as auras, and the upgrade is, you guessed it, arcane sight. Exalted—five out of six varieties of magic users, when they sense the flows around them, sense it visually, and four out of those five use the same mechanic. (My group has a lot of houserules to fix that.) The others—as far as I know, it’s all vision.

Part of it is that we humans are very sight-oriented. Here’s a quick exercise for you: List me off ten to fifteen words for colors.

Now try sounds.

Now textures.

Now scents.

Now tastes.

Getting tricky, isn’t it?

So we stick to the easy stuff: color and luster. But not everybody in a fantasy setting is going to be sight-dominant. Shapeshifters, or beings with a more animal feel, might favor scent, or even taste. Creatures for whom magic is innate might go all the way and feel it. Those who live mostly in the dark could work by hearing, or by touch, or combinations of the above; if you’re willing to really go out on a limb, you could take the spider route and sense it as tremors. Why would entities like this end up working by sight anyway?

Part of it is the level of description. It’s easy to use color, luster and pattern. I had one character who heard the world’s magic as music, and extended this to comparing people to different tunes on instruments (“Solada? She’s rather like a slow piece on koto—she moves and pauses, like individual notes being plucked and fading out before the next one is played.”). You can get a lot of imagery out of pitches and voices, or the cries of animals, or the sounds of the world around you: wind in the leaves, fingernails on a blackboard, the ring of pure glass as the goblet touches the table, that high thin buzz you hear when the television’s on but the screen’s blue or black (this, of course, works better with a modern setting).

Scent and taste are a bit harder, but not impossible; there’s always food to fall back on, or the mess of aromas you get when you walk into an arboretum. Magic can smell like what it affects: a fire spell like smoke or like burning applewood, a sailor’s weather-magic like a whiff of brine.

And then we have touch. It’s easy to doubt the use of touch as a detection method; as one of my friends put it, “you don’t get all of them strongly; you shift from one to one.” But touch isn’t just the sensation under your fingertips. Do you remember standing in line for the high dive at the pool at summer camp? The soles of your feet are burning from the hot concrete, but between the slight breeze and the water evaporating off of your shoulders, you’re shivering. Around your waist and/or your shoulders is the too-tight, slightly slimy feel of wet spandex, and water is dribbling down your back. Magic can work the same way. A protective spell can feel like wearing a slightly overstarched jacket, or like balsawood armor, hard but so much lighter than expected that you find yourself adjusting for weight that isn’t there; someone calling down rain might feel like walking through weather a Northwesterner would call “Aggressively misting”, where there’s water in the air but it’s not big enough to really qualify as raindrops; someone kicking off big magic of any sort can feel like ears popping, or like the pause and sudden-drop feel at the beginning of an earthquake. One of my favorite examples is in Sherwood Smith’s Wren to the Rescue, where the title character describes going through the barrier around the Vale as feeling “like worms through the brains”.

So don’t let your sixth sense always be vision; vary them up a little, and have fun!