God, whenever discourse about "magic in RPGs" and "magic systems in fantasy" and "tabletop powerscaling" come up my mind casts wistfully to my beloved The Lady, who forever reshaped the idea of what magic COULD BE, if only writers weren't cowards, for me
I'm not going to retell the whole story of The Lady - read the Books of the North, the arc starting with The Black Company and going through Shadows Linger and The White Rose, if you want the story. It's too big for me to compress into tweets. Too sweeping.
The relevant part starts here: She is The Lady for similar reasons to why her lieutenants are The Howler, Shapeshifter, The Limper, Stormbringer, The Hanged Man, Bonegnasher, Nightcrawler, Moonbiter, The Faceless Man, and Soulcatcher. A sorcerer's Name has power.
In the case of the Ten Who Were Taken, those names were bound to The Lady - well, technically to The Dominator, but he's dead (haha. ha. hahaha.) as part of the rite of Taking. There's another rite, though: the rite of Naming. If it's completed, a sorcerer's magic is stripped.
I'd say "spoilers" but it's a 40-year-old book, and I think knowing this doesn't cheapen anything about the experience - and I mentioned the Rite of Naming, so you probably already know. People don't mention that without reason. At the end of the North, the Lady is Named.
Now, this isn't some Gotcha. The Lady doesn't somehow escape being Named. A whole arc of the books was discovering what her Name could be in the first place. She is Named, the Rite is complete, and her powers are stripped from her, leaving her simply mortal.
What isn't stripped is her knowledge of the arcane: given enough time and communication, she can walk people through things like manufacturing flying carpets for transportation, constructing repeating fireball wands. Or teaching herself magic again.
It's thought to be impossible, but ultimately, the reasons a Named sorcerer never touches magic again boil down to - well, they get killed right away because their enemies did the Naming - they'd just be Named again, why bother - depression and exhaustion Lady had none of that.
So The Lady begins teaching herself magic again, from first principles - partly because the only people who KNOW she's been Named are the Company she's traveling with now, and it would be VERY HANDY to be able to keep up appearances - and it is laborious, torturously slow going.
And then at one point, she's accosted publicly in the street by an emissary of the local ruler, and to shut him up, she conjures "a simple spell, pathetic, one of the first spells we are ever taught; a child's spell, barely capable of anything", the Golden Hammer. It kills him.
This is not the first time we've seen magic in the books, nor the first time magic has left me breathless - though previously it had been due to the scope and structure of it, showing "oh wow, these sorcerers are POWERFUL". This recontextualized Black Company magic ENTIRELY.
Anyway, until the discourse can approach THAT experience, I'm just going to keep thinking on what my beloved The Lady taught me, and keeps teaching me whenever I do a re-read, instead. Because very few artists in the space even come CLOSE to that voice.
