Book 2, The Leverage Power of Magic →
Content Advisory: This work of erotic fiction is intended for adults only. The story contains the following themes: magic; romance; therapeutic & erotic massage; naturism; stripping; exhibitionism; voyeurism; only one naked (OON); embarrassed naked female (ENF); pre-marital sexual intercourse; oral sex; mixed bathing; skinny dipping; and even applying sunscreen! My!
Disclaimer: This is fiction. To the extent that there are people or places named in this book that exist in the real world, they are not as described here. The author recommends that you do not take practical advice from fictional persons.
Dedication: This book is dedicated to all of the naked fiction authors who have given their work to the world to be read for free. Thank you.
Nature is a petrified magic city.
— Novalis
Prologue
Technology Seduced Us
Magic is natural. The closer a gifted practitioner is to nature, the more power that mage can tap. But few can do it, even in the ideal situation.
Modern humans live far from that ideal.
Nature is not kind; it is not nice. Nature is harsh, brutal, and uncaring, so humanity put it behind us as fast as our ingenuity and industry allowed. It was simple survival at first. Knapped stone knives let us wear the furs of the animals we killed with rocks and sticks, allowing us to leave Africa for colder climates. Some starry-eyed modern people think of this as a “natural state,” but go ask the lion’s ghost how natural she thinks your ancestor was, sitting there by the fire sipping palm wine and wearing her pelt inside-out. That’s technology, not nature.
“Technology” literally means the systematic study and application of arts and crafts. People conflate the term these days with “high technology,” referring to computers and such, but fire-making is technology, as is the making of fermented drinks to preserve them in the absence of refrigeration. Primitive clothing making requires use of several technologies: pelt preparation, tanning, and sewing. The better your forebears applied the technologies available to them, the longer they and their children lived, so they had more children and kept those children alive longer, so they out-competed those that tried to stay close to nature.
As humanity’s use of technology arose, use of magic fell, because the same barriers we erected between ourselves and cruel, uncaring nature also walled us off from magic.
This began to occur long before humans had even worked out the art of writing, because writing is, of course, technology. There was a period of overlap, where some few still did have access to magic while others wrote the earliest surviving books, but they were separate groups of people. The man sitting in the room on a carved wooden chair, scrunched up to a fine desk set upon a smooth-dressed flagstone floor, scribing precious secrets into a clay tablet framed up for him by a skilled artisan was the king’s accountant, not a magician. His job was to ensure that all the goatherds got taxed, and he knew as little about proper magic as you probably do. By the time technology progressed to the point where people had enough leisure to write about magic, all that was left were legends and lies.
And so, we cannot simply dig deeper into the most ancient texts to learn about magic. The material simply isn’t there for the most part. What little remains is always second-hand at best: the writers are not the practitioners. History is written by the victors, and the victors were technology users. It is no surprise then that magic practitioners are usually the evildoers in the stories that remain. Othering your foes is a key tenet to winning a culture war.
Thus, we lost magic, being ignorant of its source and thus also ignorant of the path back. It was an easy separation, since our new technologies substituted for most of our prior uses of magic. Technology seduced us.
On the Nature of “Nature”
“Return to nature” movements are fundamentally false, almost always.
Taking a motor home out to a campground laced with asphalt roads, parking it where the solar panels can recharge its internal batteries, then sitting down to a lunch of factory-farmed chicken sprinkled with lemon pepper, grilling it over a charcoal fire in a steel-lined fire pit, serving it up on plastic plates at a Latex-painted picnic table manufactured to meet a US Forest Service spec, which the rangers bolted to a rebar-reinforced concrete pad is not a return to nature. I have had a lot of fun in such campgrounds, but it’s too far removed from raw nature to permit anyone to rediscover humanity’s lost magic.
Rediscovery could not occur until the luxuries provided by technology rose to the level that we could leave their supporting cocoon and truly return to nature for a brief time, in much the same way that you can briefly ignore gravity in an airplane if it falls in a parabolic curve. It takes a lot of technology and energy for the Vomit Comet to get humans into a microgravitic state, and we can only do it for a minute or two at a time, but in that time, we can simulate spacewalking conditions inside the envelope of the Earth’s atmosphere. In the same way, the comforts and liberties of modern life are beginning to allow humans the time and freedom to rediscover magic.
Humans cannot do magic in Earth orbit or in outer space, because we can only reach those heights and survive there by use of technology. For humanity, the sad truth is that there is no magic in space. Wonder, discovery, and beauty, yes, but no magic. Sorry, NASA fans.
There are beings that do live out in space in a natural state, and they may do magic, but they cannot do magic on Earth any more than we can do magic out there. A skilled mage can summon horrors from the vasty deep, but it won’t be of any use. It is true that the horrors from space beyond time do often think malevolent thoughts about humans when the topic comes up around the old asteroid, but only because some of our ancestors kept yoinking them into pentagrams and squishing them under the crushing nitrogen-oxygen ocean that we call an atmosphere, asphyxiating them in seconds. These chitinous children of Cthulhu were too busy dying horribly to get off a spell, much less power a Great Working or warp the practitioner’s sanity. Yes, there was a lot of tentacle-waving and space-rending screaming, but you’d yell and thrash if they did the reverse to you, too! Briefly. We deserve these remote beings’ cold disregard: our forebears were assholes. Sorry, Lovecraft fans.
And sorry, space beings, we’ll try to do better. But reparations are right out, okay?
Rediscovery
Magic was rediscovered independently a number of times over human history since it was lost, but only by individuals or small groups, and they didn’t have the mental or societal frameworks that let them hang onto it or use it reliably.
The early nudists had a chance at rediscovering magic, but they failed because they treated the practice as merely the latest health craze. A mown grassy quadrangle full of middle-class German white men doing nude calisthenics in regimented rows is not a return to nature. This spectacle mystifies the ghosts of the lions killed by the German nudists’ ancestors. Drop a modern descendant of one of those lions into the quad and then we’ll talk about a return to nature; it’ll be the men returning to nature as lion droppings.
By the mid 1950s, Western societies started to become truly luxurious, with many people living better than kings of old. We’d built up fat reserves around our middles and set aside huge swaths of untouched land to buffer our cities, so that a few of us were able to get out there and truly live in nature for a time. But just as a group of trainee astronauts must shortly land and shake off the disorientation after a microgravity training flight, the first true nudists since African diaspora times eventually had to return to civilization to get themselves some Taco Bell.
As with all skills, only a small minority of people have the in-born talent to be strong mages. Then on top of that, there are social and economic factors that restrict almost everyone from getting themselves into a state where they can come into contact with magic. Then of the few that can-and-do, most of them leave the area before they grasp magic’s reins and learn to ride the beast. And then of the tiny slice of people who get through that gauntlet, most don’t recognize what they’ve tapped into, and almost none of those pass down what they learned to others.
The bottom line is that there are almost no living mages among us.
But there are a few of us, and our numbers are slowly growing as our society liberalizes and liberates us.