The Snowstone Event

The Snowstone Event at Sevendor is one of the pivotal moments of the entire saga and the single accident on which the Magelaw, Vanador, the Magical Fair, the Vundel snowstone trade, and the existence of the Snowflake all subsequently rest. It happened during the difficult Yule birth of Minalan's firstborn son, Lord Minalyan, in the freshly-claimed castle of Sevendor, when a desperate prayer to Briga through a fully-charged witchsphere transmuted every rock, pebble, and grain of soil within a two-mile radius into the permanent low-resistance white stone the Sevendori afterward called snowstone.

The labour

Alya's waters broke at Yule. The matrons of Sevendor took over the bedchamber and Minalan was put out, his only contribution a magelight bright enough to read by. Two crones told him through the closed door that Minalyan was “in position: head down, face down, bowed in reverence of the goddess.” Briga is patroness of childbirth as well as bakers and the forge, and Minalan, who had grown up around the bakers' shrine of her, began praying feverishly out of reflex.

The labour took three days. Sire Cei kept Minalan in the great hall with a flask, and Minalan got drunk and slept in fits while the storm howled outside.

Something stirring

Around midnight on the third day Minalan napped near the fire and felt something. Not sound. Magic, of a kind he didn't recognise, growing the way a young mage's Talent quickens for the first time:

Oh, shit. I whispered, as I felt the power grow and grow and grow, uncontained and undirected. It was akin to the kind of raw, naked energy that a young mage feels the first time their Talent quickens. An energy without form or fashion. Those, I knew, were very, very dangerous.

— Minalan, in the great hall

He cast magesight and saw a primal blot of bright green power flooding his own bedchamber and leaking out through the walls. He was the only mage in residence; the spell was not his. He took the stairs two at a time and met Alya's sister Ela coming the other way, ready to consent to the matrons cutting Minalyan out of her sister's belly with a knife.

The bedchamber

Minalan cleared the room and scryed. The diagnosis was unprecedented:

• Minalyan, still unborn, had wound his shroud's natural energy together with his mother's. He was manifesting Talent in utero, which is supposed to be impossible.
• Alya, who is not herself Talented to anyone's knowledge, was passively channelling that bond.
• The umbilical cord was wrapped around the infant's shoulder. He was using raw, untrained magical force to push back against every contraction, terrified.

Minalan tried a counterspell. It failed. He tried a standard Unbinding. The infant pushed back hard enough to give Minalan a headache. He tried a more powerful Unbinding. Same result. He moved to the Morath Sigil, an obscure thaumaturgical sigil normally used to deconstruct magically-augmented artefacts. It is unusual in that it scales with whatever power is poured into it.

He poured everything he had through it — the full augmented witchsphere, the magical flow he had cultivated at the axis of the keep. Minalyan slipped about three quarters of an inch on the next contraction. Then he stopped, and resisted again.

Wild magic? Baby magic? Really, goddess?

— Minalan, mid-spell

Old Peg stood by the bed with the curved knife and told Minalan he had to choose — the baby or the wife. Minalan refused both halves of the choice:

Neither! I shall have them both!

— Minalan

The prayer to Briga

Out of options, Minalan reached for a child's prayer to Briga, the rhyming praise of the Bright One that bakers' children learn before they can read. He held the prayer in his mind as a thaumaturgical symbol — a working hypothesis from the long arguments he and Pentandra had had at Inarion Academy about whether theurgy was real — and pushed the rest of his power through it.

The sigil burst. Several things happened at once:

• Minalyan's head slipped past the cord around his shoulder and his panic cut out.
• Alya's shroud weakened just enough to give the boy room to deliver.
• A bright green wave of raw magical force radiated outward from the bedroom in every direction.
• Every magically-Talented person inside the keep — both apprentices, Sire Cei, a dozen guests, Minalan himself — vomited.
• Every bit of rock, soil, and stone within a two-mile radius turned brilliant white.

Minalan, throwing up on the rushes, regained consciousness staring at his bedchamber walls.

The transformation

The effect did not fade. Surveys over the next two weeks established that the change was uniform across the entire vale and faded out only at the periphery, hundreds of yards beyond the village of Southridge. The change was selective: only the silica-bearing matter (rock, sand, dirt, the castle stones, the cliff face, the road dust) had transformed. Carbon and organic matter (timber, soil humus, dust on hall floors) was untouched, which made the suddenly-bright halls of the manor houses look filthy by contrast and inspired half a winter's worth of cleaning.

The first measurements told the rest of the story:

• Magical resistance near snowstone is dramatically reduced, in some places effectively zero.
• The effect scales with mass. A pebble lowers resistance over yards; the cliff face lowers it for miles.
• The field falls off as the inverse square of distance from the source mass.
• The change is permanent. No spell, no enchantment, no time required to maintain it — the stone simply is snowstone now and will be forever.

Minalan's own metaphor stuck:

It was as if I had grown up in an arid valley and suddenly learned how to produce a portable rain storm. Or, more aptly, a snow storm.

— Minalan

Talent quickened in the unsuspecting

The most uncanny effect of the transformation was on people. Living adjacent to a substance that lowered etheric resistance to near nothing brought out latent rajira in a substantial fraction of the Sevendori-born population. Three cases stood out at once.

Sire Cei the Dragonslayer, Minalan's castellan and a wholly mundane knight at the time of the spell, developed a sport Talent expressed entirely through the mounted charge. When he couched a lance and rode at speed in formation, the impact of his and his lancers' arrival now produced a powerful concussive shockwave that dropped enemies before the steel ever reached them. Pentandra and Minalan diagnosed the effect after the first action where it manifested:

It may well be that Sire Cei has developed a primitive magical Talent while in such close proximity to so much snowstone for so long. In his case, it is being expressed in battle. With time and practice he could learn to control it, even.

— Minalan, on Sire Cei's sport Talent

Am I to be a knight mage, then?

— Sire Cei, on receiving the diagnosis

Lady Dara of Westwood, then a fourteen-year-old falconer's daughter from the Westwood clan, found her dormant rajira quickening into the rare beastmaster Talent. She had unconsciously been bilocating her consciousness into her hunting hawk Frightful for months; the snowstone field broke that into open expression and she became, almost overnight, capable of riding the bird's eyes at will. The narrator hedges on whether the snowstone caused the quickening or merely uncloaked what was already there:

Perhaps it was the sudden appearance of snowstone that quickened the effect (Westwood was well within the two-mile radius of the spell) or perhaps it was Dara's natural Talent expressing itself, we'll never know. But she was able to manage this fairly sophisticated feat of magic without a bit of training or even much awareness.

— on Dara's emergence as a Hawkmaiden

Within a year Dara would be Minalan's formally-taken apprentice and the founder of the Sky Riders.

Sir Festaran, a young Riverlands knight Minalan was holding for ransom at Brestal Hall at the moment of the event, was the controlled experiment. Brestal Hall sat on the edge of the snowstone field, partly inside the radius and partly outside. Festaran tested as having a small but burgeoning Talent — isolated enough from the central field that Minalan could place a piece of snowstone on his person to study how the substance and the Talent interacted. Festaran, who would never have been a mage under the Bans, learned cantrips and was eventually counted as a Knight Mage.

Festaran was not the only one. Quiet emergence of dowsing, magesight, beastmastery, and other useful low-end Talents turned up across the resident population over the following years. Snowstone proximity, the family of effects came to be called.

The hand of the Bright One

Minalan never received an unambiguous receipt from Briga for the working, but several lines of evidence pointed at her hand:

• The labour resolved at the moment the prayer was channelled.
• The transformation that day fell on the threshold of Briga's Day, the goddess's feast.
• White is the goddess's colour, and stone — the bedrock of every smithy and oven — is broadly within her domain.
• The Talent quickening that swept through Sevendor over the following years matches Briga's long-standing patronage of magic.

Minalan, ever the materialist, hedged in public and called it a magical phenomenon, but to Yeoman Guris and his goodwife on Briga's Day, when they asked if it had been a sign from the gods, he conceded that it was a better explanation than most.

The naming

From the bedchamber stairs, Minalan announced his son to a hall packed with Sevendori and Bovali guests:

I have a son. Lord Minalyan the Snowborn, son of Minalan the Spellmonger. And Lady Alya is hale and resting comfortably.

— Minalan, announcing the birth

The hall erupted. Minalan fainted again. Alya, when he returned with biscuits and cider, gave him the only theory anyone ever credibly advanced for the spellcraft itself:

I thought it was some spell you'd planted to celebrate.
I'm not that cunning. Of course, the only conclusion that leads me to is . . . our son did it.

— Alya and Minalan, the morning after

Downstream

The downstream effects of the Snowstone Event drive the next several volumes of Sevendor's history:

• Snowstone became the rarest and most coveted enchantment substrate in the Five Duchies. The Karshak, the Alka Alon, the Vundel, and every adept who could afford a sample wanted some. Banamor built a fortune brokering it.
• Carmella rebuilt much of Sevendor Castle and the Magical Fairgrounds in snowstone block, exploiting the lowered etheric resistance for everything from city walls to enchantment workshops.
• The Snowflake, the lattice paraclete that grew inside the transformed mountain over the years that followed, became a permanent magical presence beneath Sevendor and a council-class entity in its own right.
• The Vundel emissary Moudrost arrived in Sevendor within years to negotiate the snowstone trade, paying in the alien gold-silver-copper bullion that funded the Magelaw's entire later economy.
• Minalan would not successfully reproduce the spell for years — despite repeated attempts, the precise combination of timing, divine assent, channelled birth-energy, and the obscure Avalanti folk-talisman called Sointula eluded him until the events at Vanador with the birth of his second son.

None of which would have happened, on the Spellmonger's own honest admission, without the desperate prayer of a frightened new father over a witchsphere full of every drop of power he could pull, and the goddess of the hearth choosing to answer it.