Wyrd & Wonder: Favorite Magical Systems

The wonderful Wyrd & Wonder has started off again, hosted by Annemieke (A Dance With Books), Ariane (The Book Nook), Jorie (Jorie Loves A Story), Lisa (Dear Geek Place) and Imyril (There’s Always Room For One More). Thanks so much to them for all the effort that goes into this!

This Sunday, the prompt is top 5 magical systems (or spells) that we have come across in books. Obviously, world-building plays a huge role, but my picks are based on certain really striking book scenes.

#1 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Strange was on a quest to bring back magic to England, and has left no stone unturned in experimenting to gain access to the Faerie realms. In one horrifying scene, he even brews a potion from the entrails of the mice at a mad woman’s house:

It was like plunging beneath a waterfall or having two thousand trumpets sound in one’s ear. Everything he thought before, everything he knew, everything he had been was swept away in a great flood of confused emotion and sensation. The world was made again in flame-like colours that were impossible to bear. It was shot through with new fears, new desires, new hatreds. He was surrounded by great presences . . .

#2 Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

The characters are all dragons. And dragons have a singular custom — that of eating dragon flesh of the deceased, because that is the only way they can increase in power and sustenance. Walton gives them other dragon-like characteristics and rituals too, but at the heart of the story is the grim truth that dragon eats dragon to survive and flourish. If you can stomach that (no pun intended), then this is a magical society worth stumbling into.

There was no room for more than three in the undercave, so Illustrious Daverak came in, and the others perforce waited, most of them in polite silence, but the dragonets emitted impatient little hisses.
“Our father Bon is dead,” Penn said. “We must now partake of his remains, that we might grow strong with his strength, remembering him always.”

#3 Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

This one (and the whole series) is set in Chalion, a land where religious practice is split among the Five Gods. The Five Gods put a curse on Chalion a long time back, and people still suffer from the after-effects. How do you break that curse? The scene where Ista meets one of the Five Gods and is forced (kinda) into demon-eating is absolutely gripping.

Above the creases of his smile, cheerfully echoed by the curves of his chins, the god’s eyes glinted at her. Wider than skies, deeper than sea chasms, their complexity bent inward endlessly, each layer a lamination of other layers, repeated into infinity, or the infinitesimal. Eyes that might simultaneously contemplate each person and living thing in the world, inside and out, with equal and unhurried attention.

#4 The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia McKillip

You’d be hardpressed to find world-building better than McKillip’s. How did she do it? In this novella, there’s a mad king who sends a knight on a wild-goose chase. Magic and the Throme (not a throne, by the way) do not exist. Or do they? Those blurring boundaries between the real and the absurd are hilarious, poetic and mesmerizing.

The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame.

#5 Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Nowadays most SFF books have some prophecy about the savior. But prophecies — when done right — can be terrifying too. If Macbeth hadn’t heard those 3 witches prophesying his glory to come, would he really have gone down that path? What were those witches really up to?

First Witch: When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.
First Witch: Where the place?
Second Witch: Upon the heath.
Third Witch: There to meet with Macbeth.

Have I convinced you yet to read (or to re-read) any of these? Which magical systems or spells would be your own favorite picks?