Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Wizard who is NOT a sorcerer OR a warlock and furthermore how dare you
"You're from down in the Hundred-Thousand, by the look of you, friend," the wizard drawls over his pint. "One of the island nations in the Amber Sea, yeah? Let me give you some advice, friend: I know a lot of people down there take the attitude that magic is magic and a lot of you speak languages that don't draw much distinction on where it comes from. Here on the mainland, that word is one to be careful with."
"Sorceror?"
"Say that too loud and someone's getting tossed onto a bonfire."
The tanned and tattooed sellsword's eyes widen.
The wizard quirks their lip, and lazily signals the barkeep for two drinks. "Put yourself in a chair, I'll tell you about it. Ever hear of Polyvarius the Astromancer? No? It's common for wizards to take a nom de magie when they begin, for purposes of arcane obfuscation, and Polyvarius is popular with those making a bold claim about their pure puissance. Arrogance and flash. Of course, friend, it's a profession for both.
"Polyvarius the Astromancer, the first Polyvarius, was the greatest living thinker of his time. Credited with laying the foundations of modern thaumaturgical enquiry. At the time of his death, a great debate raged among his peers: what is the fundamental disposition of physical substance?"
The wizard knocks a knuckle of the wood of the table.
"Two schools of thought were locked in debate, arguing at symposia, scuffling in the streets, enflamed with a question posed by the thinker Enigmates: if one breaks a rock down into the finest sand, each grain is a smaller rock of the same stony substance. If one were able to shrink oneself until each grain appeared to you the size of the original rock; and one were to break that into the finest sand; and one were to repeat this shrinking and grinding again and again; would there come a point at which it became impossible to further divide the rock? Is there an intrinsic Smallest Rock?
"One school held that the scale of physical substance knows no more lower bound than upper; that as the multiverse is infinite, so one would merely create an infinite regress of smaller rocks. Opposite these Divisibilists were the proponents of the theory of mikrótera: that the stuff of all things is made of great conglomerations of tiny, indivisble wholes.
"Even now, transmutations of scale don't have the reach to observe any direct evidence. However, Polyvarius, in his genius, devised an experiment which he believed would prove the existence of mikrótera.
"The mark of the sorceror is the ability to warp spells themselves, to perform intuitive alterations of scope and scale in the act of casting, the meta-magic. Such was his intellect, Polyvarius devised from whole cloth the first meta-magic not innately born to a sorceror: eftsonation, the technique of immediately-again-thereafter, which is hard to exactly explain, but—
"Well, he took the ancient merchants' cantrip of Division-by-Exact-Halves, and arranged a public spectacle. Commissioned a great slab of cut stone. Under his eftsonation, the cantrip would exactly divide the slab into halves, as usual; however, the cantrip would eftsoon immaculately spawn twin offspring, two cantrips identical to their parent, each targeting one of the halves of the original whole. Thus those two pieces would be rendered into halves, each a quarter of the original; and under his genius scheme, the two cantrips, being identical to their parent, would each eftsoon birth twins of their own, rendering the four unto eight, which in turn would eftsoon be rendered unto sixteen, and so forth.
"Armed with his magical invention, a trivial cantrip, knowledge of the casting time of the Division-by-Exact-Halves, and by means of a great water-clock, Polyvarius proposed not only to prove the existence of mikrótera - for their indivisibility would cause the cantrips to ultimately fail due to lack of targets; but also, by measuring the time taken to fail, and the dimensions of the original slab, he endeavoured to precisely calculate what fraction of the whole a mikrótero comprised, and thus their size. A genius.
"We know of the experiment from the account of one of the great man's students, who was taken ill and rushed from the city to convalesce, over his objections, by his family. The gods, moved to insecurity and spite by Polyvarius' intellect, fearing it rivalled their own, interrupted mid-experiment; smote the entire city and all its inhabitants with wrathful fire, leaving only a blasted, glassy waste, a towering cloudy sign of doom and accusation, and a wasting curse on any who dared go there ever after.
"That's the interpretation of the Omni-Faith Inquisition, in any case." The wizard smiles thinly, and takes a deep draught of ale. "La Cattédral della Musica Universále thus say that meta-magic is an affront, an hubristic excess of cleverness in the sight of the gods, which cannot be risked. Sorcerors, in whom it is inborn through no fault of their own, are therefore a dreadful threat to the lives of all around them; and the Inquisition seeks to avert divine wrath by rooting them out and putting them to the sword, the flame, and the arcane ray of death. Pass the collection plate and spy on your neighbours, citizen."
"I'm very sorry," the islander says, tugging nervously at their shirt. "I didn't mean to call you— anything bad."
"If in doubt, just call someone a warlock," the wizard says. "If they take offense to that, they're a wizard."