Ëaran stood before the rubble of cracked stone. A thin light filled the cavity, and he could easily be seen. His large, old hands lifted slowly, and his lips formed words that came to Aanrasti's ears in half broken verse. The language was as old as the wizard.

His hands lifted, lifted. There was a strange, shifting groan. The crack in a slab of stone grew narrower and drew together, the two pieces scraping. Suddenly, with the energy of a flock of birds rising and the dizzying speed of a train in a tunnel, every block and fragment shifted from its place. The wizard's hand jerked, as if he was cutting a cord with a knife, and with a tearing rumble the motion-filled stones, in the instant of shaking themselves into walls and roof like the pieces of a puzzle, exploded outwards, brilliant sunlight drenching Ëaran's gray hair. Several pieces fell with thundering crashes into the hall, but the rest were gone.

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Diki took a step back and found himself against the wall. “You do not need to know that,” he said. He tried to hide his fear.

But the man could see it. He put his hand on Diki's chest and pressed him against the creaking planks.

“I think I do,” he said. “And that is what matters, eh?”

The sunlit world suddenly spun like a top and the only thing Diki could feel was the hand on his chest...squeezing.

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He wrenched himself up a little. His hand reached up and the cloth in it touched the door. It felt as if something had slapped his face, but it was deeper than that. And as he sank he seemed to feel all the ancient, passionate obstinacy in the walls around him and the twisted tower below him and the fortress it pointed up from like a finger uncoil and drop away.

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There are many aspects of how the cobha affects life and living. It is an interconnected element. I hardly know where to start in telling about it.... But perhaps the best thing to begin with is – there are no magicians. There are no people who deal in magic, and people who do not, anymore than there are people who use their arms and people who do not. The cobha is a thing that is quite as natural as wind and speech...it touches the rocks in the desert, and the plow horse, and the Queen's breakfast.

It is Binding.

Now to explain what that means.... It is, in essence, making an object be something, in more than the physical sense of chemicals and molecular structure. A man can bind a house to be a house – to stand much longer than an unbound house would. A man can bind his butchery knife to never hurt a human. A man can bind another man to him, to be a slave to him in mind.

And this binding is not only done to things...it also happens quite innately, to rocks and mountains and trees. A thing gets into a habit, you might say, of being what it is. A wall that has stood for a hundred years will be harder to raze. A stone balanced for a long time will not fall as easily in an earthquake, or if someone tries to push it down – even if, in reality, it is only balanced finely.

This is a realm that deals in the mind, in meaning and thought. Those also can be touched directly by a mind. 'Reading' someone's mind is a common method of communication among some of the peoples. And 'reading' is not the only thing you can do to a mind either....


I feel sure I have missed something about this... * disgruntled * I'll think of it someday, I guess.


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She stood with her hands pressed against the wall, face pale, whispering. “Wrenched from a cliff, Wrenched in cliffs again, Grinding one against another, Stand, stand, stand by brother, Stand by sisters, stand by mate, Stand by time, stand by fate, Drenched in waving power calmly, Storms and breezes echo dimly In your iron memory, Rain, the stinging cavalry, Trampling over highest turret, Towers creeping with the sweat Of cracking, burning, circling sun, Twisting earth and you are one, Rocks grinding, fretting under knees, Standing, standing with the trees, That die and rise and never leave, Shake and quake and rest and rise and stand before the stony eyes of men who made you into cliffs that rise in straight and sullen order in the slender, falling rain that whispers always to the sun to stand by fate and stand by mate and stand by stone.”

That is a fascinating concept.

Indeedly.

So... *hopes this isn't a question that was answered in the thread* Can something be unbound by someone else?

I agree that this is a fascinating concept; it reminds me (to an extent) of "ground" in Bujold's Sharing Knife series and David Brin's "practice effect".

Thankyou.

* looks * No, it wasn't. * smacks self *

Yes, binding can be broken. It can be done by force, cobhaic force, you know, and how easy it is to break depends on how strong the binding is. Sometimes a person makes a binding purposely in a way that it will be easy for him to break or manipulate, though it would not be so easy for someone else. This happens naturally to some degree anyway because they are so familiar with the binding (having made it), and someone else would not be so familiar with it unless they worked very hard to understand and immerse themselves in it.

Binding can also be broken by other measures, the same as it can be formed. Simply because someone is not strong in cobhaic power, or is not using it, does not mean that they cannot affect binding. If they know what they are about (or even if they do not, accidentally), they can do a lot.

One of the reasons is that binding, especially when it comes to a person, is...not so much a force as a – meaning, sometimes. Someone can be bound never to do something – but that does not really mean, always, that he never could, simply that he never...would. Do you see? It is a mental thing. It is no less powerful – someone could not simply decide to do it and then do it – because it's the deciding to do it that is stopping him, not the doing it. * has a feeling that she's not explaining this well *

For example, a man once was bound to another man. He was Yesaré, and much more powerful than the man he was bound to (who was a Nnanwé), though the Nnanwé was very strong. However, the binding was very deep. It was broken first by his wife – in a way, I suppose – though she never did anything, she only got in the way. The Nnanwé attacked the Yesaré's wife. And the Yesaré protected her. Against his binding. He did not have overmuch difficulty in defeating, at least partially, the Nnanwé, once he decided to do it. But it took that much to make him decide.

That didn't break the binding completely, however, only partially. It was broken even more (though it never was, and never could be, completely broken) by his friend, later. This friend was a Man, and weak. But he used words to break it – he is wonderful with words, especially manipulating people (yes, he's a nice character, but he has his faults...).

Long answer, sorry.

I'd never heard of those...cool. Yes, they are similar, to a degree. I would say especially practice effect – though things don't get better over time, in Ccwiicc, they just get...more the same, I suppose. They still wear out.


And I did forget to mention something. It is sort of interconnected with the rest, but I did not mention that one of the results or aspects is that things can be done from a distance – like moving something – and that things can be made to appear a certain way without being that way – like illusion and things connected – and that you can...start fires without matches, and light a room without a lamp or candle for a bit, and play a pipe from several paces away, and do all sorts of things like that.

I also forget to mention that many things are used to help concentration when using this power. Words are used, motions, many things, whatever works to help you focus on what you are trying to do. Like if someone is trying to knock down a door, he will often move his hands, like he is striking it, or clap them together, or point, or something.

That makes sense.



No no, I like it, thanks for the explanation.



That's cool! It reminds me somewhat of the cobha in ...whatever the world is called in Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

Wow, this is awesome, Juliet. Your cobha is absolutely fascinating. I can just see how well this will work in a story.

Is it possible at all for anything to completely unbound, or does part of it always stay bound? (Sorry if I missed the answer)

Yes, it is possible, however it is only synthetic – it never happens naturally. The Nnanwe on Vebetl were the first to experiment with it, I think, and I believe the merpeople also do it. The most common reason would be to make a 'thinking place' – there are always downsides to any power, and this cobha hampers innovation. Everything gets full of thoughts – all the old thoughts – and it's very hard to think new ones, sometimes. In the wilderness, where there have been no thoughts, or none but animal thoughts, there is the problem that it is hard to think very well at all, except on an animal level. But the Nnanwe in Vebetl made houses that were stripped of binding, where they would sit and think about things.

Of course, there is the problem that you would have to keep on stripping whatever it was that had no bindings – bindings just happen, and it would be gathering new bindings at every second that went by. Later, someone made a new way of forming free places by binding it to be empty, in a way – they filled it with emptiness, until it couldn't take anything else. In that way, the longer one of those places lasted the more free they would be. However, there were other things that that affected, and all that... I think I'm rambling, sorry.