Even as he ground away at the technicalities, some of the larger functionality of the enchantment was becoming clearer to him, its outlines picked out in a thousand trivial practical details. A lot of it seemed to have to do with space. There were spells in here designed to make it: literally to fabricate room, to weave together new space-time out of whole cloth. Here was a spell that expanded the space, blew it up like a balloon. This one shaped it. That other one stabilized the borders and made sure it didn’t collapse again into the nothingness whence it came.

But after that it got really arcane and hard to follow. There were spells to summon matter into being. This part sucked entropy out of the system, forcing the matter to organize; these pushed it through a series of very obscure transforms, some of which appeared to do nothing at all, or cancel out earlier ones. There was a lot of fiddly magical-matter stuff that would have mystified him if it didn’t overlap in places with the page from the Neitherlands. There was a whole laundry list of botanical spells, weather and water and wind magic, spells for shaping living rock. There was some really head-cracking bits that looked like attempts to reset the basic physical parameters of the universe: elementary charge, speed of light, gravitational constant. For all its elegant complexity the spell had a primitive, primordial feel to it. It was an old working, and a weird one, a relic of another age of another world. It felt like it hadn’t been cast in a thousand years.

One thing was clear: this was grand magic. It was sorcery on a scale he’d never attempted before, and it was going to test him severely. Until now he’d been a journeyman magician, and a competent one, but if he could execute it this spell would make him into a master. It would force him to become one. It would accept nothing less.

Early one morning a dawn thunderstorm woke him up, and as he was lying there wondering if he was going to be able to get back to sleep an image of the whole thing appeared in his mind all at once. It assembled itself spontaneously, unbidden, as if it had been waiting for him to just get out of its way and let it form. There it was, dim and shimmering but complete, with all its parts working together.

It wasn’t war magic. The spell didn’t shield you, and it didn’t hide you. It didn’t kill, and it didn’t summon something to kill for you. It wasn’t going to restore Alice either. But it did do something wonderful. This was a spell that created something. It was a spell for making a land.