The Witch Field
The witch field forms wherever enough people believe the same thing. In battle, this takes its strongest form. Believing in survival, victory, and holding out for the men beside oneself creates such a strong physical force that the witch field forms. A witch can shape it to steady soldiers and coordinate their movements, helping to hold a line that might otherwise break in the face of artillery fire, infantry assaults, or war beasts.
Witches do not create the field. As the Kahldenmahr Witch Academy teaches its first-year students: "Compress to strike, release to endure." Compression increases the field pressure and improves the fighting abilities of men. Release reduces the field’s pressure and keeps it from rupturing and killing everybody beneath it.
The Physics Behind the Field
The magic of the witch field is partly inspired by sociology, as mentioned above, but it also draws on physics and engineering.
Load on a power grid: Imagine a modern power grid. Power flows through the system. If one transmission line fails, power flows through the remaining routes, which can become overloaded. A local failure can spread across the network and have a devastating effect far away from the original catastrophe. The magic system in The Witch Field series works similarly.
Criticality: Now imagine a pile of sand. Usually, you can add grains to a sandpile and nothing happens, but at some point, adding one more can trigger an avalanche. So, a small addition that previously did nothing to the system can trigger a larger collapse. There is always a final grain.
Engineering / load under strain: Imagine the Golden Gate Bridge. It is under load all the time. Its own weight, cars, trucks, the force of the wind. Where does the load go? From the vertical cables to the main cables, then through the towers into the foundations, with the massive anchorages at either end of the bridge resisting the cables’ pull. Cut one part, and you damage the system. Whether it continues to function depends on whether the strain can be redistributed. If it cannot, one failure can cause another.
In the witch field, some of those supports are people; some are things even Irena knows nothing about at the beginning of the story.
FAQ
What is the witch field?
The witch field forms wherever enough people believe the same thing. In battle, this takes its strongest form.
Do witches create the field?
Witches do not create the field.
What does compression do?
Compression increases the field pressure and improves the fighting abilities of men.
What does release do?
Release reduces the field’s pressure and keeps it from rupturing and killing everybody beneath it.