Introduction

This volume is not the original Art of Being Struck.

I place this clarification first because prior readers have shown a durable belief that warnings are written for other people.

The original artifact remains behind the Emerald Doors at Candlekeep, under ward, supervision, and restrictions whose full list is not reproduced here. It contains active sensory-stone impressions. This Adventurer’s Edition preserves written accounts only. It cannot reproduce those experiences.

It is not a spellbook. It is not a manual of battle magic. It does not preserve the triumph of the caster.

It concerns the receiving body: the skin before flame, the jaw before thunder, the first wrongness of a command entering the will, and the moment when force gathers in the air before the body is thrown.

A spell is often described by those who cast it. Such accounts have value. They are also incomplete. The target knows a different truth. The person struck by magic learns its arrival through breath, balance, thought, heat, fear, pain, beauty, pressure, or absence.

Orentha Vale preserved impact.

This edition asks what may be learned before impact arrives.

It is therefore a small, portable selection from the written accounts compiled by Orentha Vale, The Witness of Impact, with notes added for readers who may meet hostile spellcraft on roads, in ruins, in taverns, in ambush, in badly negotiated employment, or in the company of wizards who assure them that “this should be fine.”

I have chosen eight accounts: enough to begin, not enough to satisfy anyone with a quill and an objection.

I have also taken the liberty of arranging them for reading rather than indexing. A proper catalogue would sort by circle, school, provenance, injury pattern, or some other virtue pleasing to scholars and fatal to momentum. Adventurers possess many admirable qualities. Sustained attention is not reliably among them.

Some omissions were painful. Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Silvery Barbs, and Mind Sliver each deserved consideration, complaint, and possibly restraint.

They are not here.

A book meant for adventurers must be small enough to copy, cheap enough to lose, and clear enough to read before the next chest attempts to devour someone.