New Story Asks: What If Magic Ran Out Like Fossil Fuels?

LessWrong is running a new serial fiction, "The Latter Days of Magic (1)" by testingthewaters. It's set in a world where Magic is going out of the world — a fact known to every graduating student of the colleges, who sooner or later ask their tutor, "Is it true?" The art of Magic is the extraction of Potential from sources to create feats of labour or power, and the laws of Magic conclude that there can be no self-sustaining or ever-lasting Work: each spell uses up more Potential than it creates, and Magic is discovered to be self-extinguishing. In the kingdom of Lormande, the Five-and-Six colleges are threatened by taxmen and angry mobs who declare Magic blasphemy, but most of all by low and decreasing enrollment, while the spells themselves fade in power and the runic arrays provide less Potential than the lore of forebears claims.