As many know, Necromancy is a form of magic wherein the caster manipulates Shyish which in turn manipulates Dhar, and in doing so is able to tap into the power of Dhar without the caster coming into direct contact with it. Where a human directly wielding Dhar will be driven insane in short order, a Necromancer can go many years without going mad, and even then that madness comes from the environmental Dhar that Necromancers tend to surround themselves with, rather than as a direct result of their spellcasting.
A question presents itself: if Necromancers can use one form of magic to manipulate another, can other combinations be achieved?
The answer: Probably. Wild Magic, the magic of Beastmen, is often suspected to be a corruption of Ghur in a similar manner.
Your answer: Definitely. You saw for yourself a Clan Eshin magic-user wielding a combination of Dhar and Ulgu.
Another, safer question: can a combination be achieved that doesn't involve Dhar?
The answer: Possibly, but any misstep might cause Dhar or a miscast, so it would be terribly dangerous. At least, it would be for someone who doesn't already have at least a theoretical grasp on the techniques of a Dhar based magic, which no Magister should ever have. So it would be folly to even try.
Your answer: A significant, thoughtful silence. One that's been lurking in the back of your mind for quite some time.
To make the attempt, you're absolutely sure, would not be a breach of the Articles. It risks the accidental creation of Dhar, but the same could be said of any manipulation of magic. If it does not use Dhar and is not intended to result in it, then it's legal. A success, if reported to others, might raise certain questions that you'd want to be very careful to create plausible answers to, but that's no reason not to make the attempt in the first place.
So with a stack of reference materials and Wolf on the lookout for unexpected visitors, you read up on an alien Wind and ensconce yourself within the protections of your White Tower. You've settled on Ghyran for your first attempt, in part because of pleasant associations, in part because of your hopes the Wind of Life would be the most benign and familiar of the possibilities, in part because if all goes terribly wrong you could blame it on the Seed embedded in your palm. With utter focus you grasp Ulgu with your soul, and instead of shaping it into a familiar form to be projected out onto the world, you try to push it outwards to wrap around a strand of Ghyran.
It is, you quickly discover, rather like trying to catch a live eel in a cat's cradle, if the cat's cradle was also made of eels.
As every Apprentice knows, the Winds repel each other. If that was not the case then there would be no Winds at all, as they would all merge and decay into Dhar shortly after emerging into the world. You had hoped that you could move skilfully enough to encircle and thus control a strand anyway, but when after hours of concentration you finally manage to entrap a strand of Ghyran so it can't slip free from the web you have built around it, its thrashing attempts bring it directly into contact with the Ulgu and a bloom of Dhar forms and begins to spread, slowly but interminably. You expel the Ulgu and activate the protections of the Room of Calamity, and the curdling Winds are drawn out of the room and flushed into the air.
There's no danger in that, you remind yourself. You looked into it when you first built the room. At this height it will be blown away, and if it blows west or east or south it will be one more drop in the oceans of the Badlands or the Dark Lands or Nehekhara, and if it blows north it will be drawn into the Waystone network and be dealt with by the ancient artifice of the Elves. When you learned that the Karak itself is eight enormous Waystones it simplified it even further. Within the hour it will have been captured by one of them and will be on its way to Karaz-a-Karak, where some ancient Runic masterpiece will somehow break it into usable and benign energy.
You repeat the experiment until you're sure there's no happy medium where you can constrict the Ghyran tightly enough for it to be under your control, but loosely enough that it doesn't come into contact with the Ulgu. But it does not react reliably, the way a solid or liquid would always act the same way when presented with the same circumstances. It reacts like a maddened animal, reacting to being cornered with escalating aggression until it either escapes or tears itself apart. Again and again Dhar blooms and is then flushed away, and many days end with a throbbing headache from seeing the beauty of Winds being corrupted into the malevolent substance of destruction.
You abandon your torment of Ghyran in the hopes that it acts like a living being because it is the Wind of Life, and move on to Chamon, hoping that the Wind of metal and logic will act more, well, logically. And it does act differently, but only in the way that it drives itself wild in your grip before another bloom of Dhar confirms a failed experiment: this is more like a roiling boil than a thrashing creature, but the result is the same.
With five more Winds you reach the same conclusion, the only variable being that some Winds require a tighter or looser grip before they are no longer able to slip free. The conclusion is inevitable: the Winds just don't want to be near each other, and if you make them, then they react with escalating chaos until they touch and form Dhar.
Which should be the end of it, but... well, there's no crime in mere speculation, is there? Say you did force them, and a minute amount of Dhar did form, as it has many, many times in the preceding experiments. It would, in time, corrupt both Winds involved. But during that time, the corruptive power of Dhar would counteract the repellent power of the Winds. During that time, if someone acted quickly enough, they could reach through Ulgu to to more directly manipulate the subject Wind. They could shape that energy into a spell, and unleash that spell with enough force to sever the connection, leaving the Dhar with the caster and the spell free to act. That tiny amount of Dhar could then be shaken off by the caster before it corrupts the entire strand of Ulgu, leaving only a trace amount of environmental Dhar and minimal danger to the caster.
It's plausible. Very plausible. The only problem is that unlike your experimentation so far, it would undeniably be a 'sorcery or witchcraft that utilises the wicked powers of Dark Magic'. From there the Articles go straight to Abominable Act, Heretic and Traitor, put to sword and fire immediately.
You've never outright breached the Articles before, at least not by your understanding of them. But the only way to pursue this further would be to change that.
With that conclusion, and with its unspoken question hanging in the air, you encode your notes, lock them securely away, and burn the originals.
- For the record, there were no dicerolls involved with the 'tongs' section. This is the quest-canonical metaphysical answer to the question that was asked.
