Sixth Law of Magic

The Sixth Law 

  Never Swim Against the Currents of Time 



So far in the casefiles, we’ve seen precious little of this Law in action, in great part because if someone is breaking it, he’s doing so in a way that fits right into Harry Dresden’s non-time traveling investigations. Time travel is hard to spot or confirm if you aren’t doing it yourself. Still, it’s clear that mucking about with time is another one of those “don’t mess with the natural order” things. We just don’t know what the consequences are likely to be, even though we can speculate. There are the classics, straight out of science fiction: paradoxes, traveling back in time to stop someone bad from coming into power, altering the course of human history for better or worse, questions about alternate universes, the “elasticity” of time, all of that. Due to the nature of this sort of magic, it’s difficult to find concrete conclusions.

Similarly, we can reasonably anticipate what breaking this Law would do to the practitioner who broke it. We know what holding power over life and death can do to a necromancer; imagine the effect it would have on the personality of a chronomancer (for lack of a better term), who can skip right past killing and go straight for the “cause something to wink out of existence” trump card.

<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">It’s bad news, and it’s the kind of dark cloud that has an even darker lining. How do you catch someone in the act of time travel? How do you enforce the Sixth Law in a way that’s meaningful? How do you <span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It; mso-bidi-font-style:italic">prove <span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">the crime so you can prosecute the criminal? Are the Wardens even equipped to take on a threat like this? And how much of our present day is already formed by the meddlesome acts of a wizard who thought he knew what he was doing? We’ve already talked about how the body and the mind are too complex to alter successfully, without trauma—now take that up several orders of magnitude to contemplate the complexity of time itself, and what a single, blundering human agent might do if he had the power to change its flow. What sorts of cracks might form in the universe at such an unnatural strain?

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">When it comes down to it, only a very small number of White Council members truly have the authority to do something about the Sixth Law (many more might have the <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">power <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: AJensonPro-Regular">, but this is explicitly a case of <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: AJensonPro-It;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">authority <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: AJensonPro-Regular">). The Blackstaff, a quasi-secret agent of the Council, is empowered to break all seven of the Laws should he see fit, but when it comes right down to it he’s essentially just a heavy brought in to fix the largest of problems by any means necessary.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">The real guardian of time is the Gatekeeper, the member of the Senior Council entrusted with watching over the Outer Gates (we’ll talk more about those in the Seventh Law). As far as we know, he doesn’t have the blanket authority to break the Laws of Magic that the Blackstaff enjoys, but he does seem to peer deep into the flow of time, foreseeing events that are yet to come—or even receiving communications from his future self. Such communications are <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: AJensonPro-It;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">always <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">very indirect and unspecific. The Gatekeeper can’t pass much real, factual information back from the future, assumedly because doing so would introduce a paradox, or at least cause events to unfold that <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It; mso-bidi-font-style:italic">shouldn’t <span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">. All he can really do is subtly <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It;mso-bidi-font-style: italic">nudge <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">people who might be able to do something about those future circumstances in the right direction, and then let things unfold without his guiding hand upon them. In the end, we have to pray that’s enough. Heck, it might not even be <span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It; mso-bidi-font-style:italic">possible <span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">to do time travel via the magical arts. Maybe even the attempts to do so lead to really bad things.

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<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"NewcomenBold","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: NewcomenBold">Slowing Down, Speeding Up 

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">If a wizard uses magic to speed time up or slow time down, is he swimming against the flow? <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-It","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-It;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Probably <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family: AJensonPro-Regular">not. Most magic that works this way is achieved by messing around with perceptions, rather than actually laying hold of time itself and pressing the fast forward or slow-mo button. Mages have gotten short bursts of speed in the past by speeding up their own perceptions and then channeling some extra juice into their body to get it to move and react faster than usual. While that isn’t a violation of the Sixth Law, it’s definitely tough on the spellcaster who tries it—there’s plenty of risk of fried synapses or physical trauma from pushing the body and brain too hard, too fast.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"AJensonPro-Regular","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:AJensonPro-Regular">Ultimately, grabbing hold of the entire spacetime continuum and trying to bend it to your will is probably in that “wizardly hubris” area.

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