the Art

How wizardry works

 

 

 

 

It's all about the words.
The Manual says it best:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a good deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world - a tree, say, or a stone - that it's not what it thinks it is, that it's something else, is the very heart of wizardry.

...Because wizardly people tend to be good with language, they can also become skillful with the Speech, the magical tongue in which objects and living creatures can be described with more accuracy than in any human language. And what you can describe, you can change. With the Speech, a wizard can freeze fire, burn rain, stop time - even (locally) slow down the death of the universe.

That being why there are wizards...