In the beginning, there was Thought. Then, Thought started disagreeing with itself, and that’s where People came from. People needed to disagree louder, so they made Language. Language needed to have Words in it – and so it took from Thought. And in doing so, the Language stole a bit of Majuscule, or as people ended up calling it, Majick. Or Magic. It doesn’t really matter how you spell it, so long as you know what you mean, and you Capitalise the Important First Bits.

This is the opening to the Book of Action, a document which, like many others, purports to contain Very True Details about how the universe came to be and Very True Rules about how to live one’s life. Like all the others, it is mostly metaphorical – but unlike all the others, it is Actually, Legitimately Very True.

Also unlike all the others, it is a Very True Guidebook on how to do Magic.

We’re looking over the shoulder of Rikki DeRouen (17 years of age, sitting cross-legged on her bed, absentmindedly chewing the paint off the rear end of a pencil) as she’s going through this book, and trying to figure out what kind of Er she should be. There’s Makers and Twisters and Fitters and Turners, all kinds of Erchetypes, and really, if you want to be any good at any kind of anything, you need to pick just one or two. The first thing that she has to be – NEEDS to be – is a Decider. Not funny. She sighs and bites harder into the pencil, wood giving way a bit under the pressure and leaving a solid impression of her molars on its surface.