Backlash

Overview

Backlash is what a spell does when it gets loose. Every working costs something, and a failed one costs more, because the force no longer runs where it was sent and finds the nearest body instead, usually the caster's. Every people that works magic knows the sight: a caster on the floor with a bloody nose and shaking hands. Most backlash is survived; the fear is of the rare failure that takes the house with it.

Cause

Magic moves energy that already exists, and control keeps it on its path (see Costs and Side Effects). When control breaks, through panic, a lost word, a smeared rune, or more force than the body can carry, the working rebounds or collapses. How hard it rebounds is graded in the four severity bands used by temples and schools; what it feels like depends on the school.

Who It Strikes

Anyone who casts can take it, and those standing near can take some of it. Apprentices take it most often, and so do the exhausted, already near the biological limits of what a body can move. The desperate, pushing a spell they know is too big, take the worst. Species with low affinity for a school take it sooner in that school.

Signs and Course

At the moment of failure there is a flash, a crack, a cold, or a smell, and the caster falls. Then come numbness, bleeding from nose or ears, burns or frost-marks on the hands, nausea, blindness or deafness that lifts within a day, a gap in memory around the casting, and shaking.

Then the school's own signature shows:

• Surging: a crushing chest, swollen limbs, fluid in the lungs.
• Vital: flesh that grows wrong, wounds reopening.
• Blood: pallor, a racing pulse, collapse.
• Frost: cracked skin, cold limbs, a failing pulse.
• Morphic: an unfinished reversion, a hand left a paw.
• Sanctified: oath-scorch along the lines of the vow, a crash of spirit.
• Crucible: burns and a fierce fever.
• Sacrificial: depletion, as if years were spent at once.
• Augury: the mind looping on one moment or one dread.

The turning point is the first night. Most cases ease into a few days of exhaustion; one still worsening by the second day is settling into Channel Scarring, or into Failed Mending if healing was forced on it too hard. Morphic blur can linger for weeks: Many-Shaping held too long leaves a person unsure which shape is theirs.

Contagion

Backlash does not pass between people. Bystanders are hurt by the spill of the failing spell, not by the patient.

Treatment and Its Limits

First the spell is stopped: aborted, its discharge grounded, any still-drawing link broken. Each school has its own first containment (warming after Frost, drainage after Surging, staged reversion after Morphic), set out in the failure matrix of Costs and Side Effects. Then rest, warmth, water, and quiet.

Healing helps only once the body has steadied; worked on fresh Vital misgrowth, it makes things worse. Pattern Recall can lead regrowth back towards the right shape if it is used early. All such healing draws on someone's lifeforce, and it works best between people of the same species (see the compatibility bands). Acute backlash often clears well; harm repeated until it scars does not.

Mortality

Lesser failures seldom kill a caster who is cared for; cascading and catastrophic ones kill or maim casters and bystanders alike. Survivors may keep a tremor, a scarred hand, a deaf ear, a gap in memory, or a feature that never changed back.

Lore and Belief

Villagers say the working "turned" or "bit", and many believe a god or a Prime struck down a caster who reached too far. The schools call it an error of method and log it like any other accident. A survivor of a bad backlash is trusted less afterwards, as if the spell were still in them.

Battle tales are full of the war-mage who pushed one fireball too far to break a charge and was found in the ash beside the riders he stopped; sellsword companies pay a mage well and watch her hands.

In the Medieval Era

Backlash is common among hedge casters, apprentices, and battle-mages, and rare in households, where ordinary spells are small. Where a school or temple keeps a firm hand on its casters, it orders rest after heavy casting and stops those who keep failing. War-camps send backlash cases to the Vital hospices of the Red Mercy; a village calls its folk healer, as for a hearth accident.

Where It Appears

• Costs and Side Effects (side effects during casting, the failure matrix, severity bands, failure and backlash)
• Biological Affinity (safety and biological limits)
• Casting Methods
• Morphic Magic (Many-Shaping, Other-Form)
• the Writers' Guide chapter How Magic Works