"Diane Duane - Wizards 1 - So You Want To Be A Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

will never see this manual for what it is. That you have found it at all says a great deal for your
potential.
The reader is invited to examine the next few chapters and determine his/her wizardly potential in
detail—to become familiar with the scope of the Art—and finally to decide whether to become a
wizard.
Good luck!
SO
WANT TO BE A WIZARD
15
It's a joke, Nita thought. Really. And to her own amazement, she wouldn't herself—she was too
fascinated. She turned to the next chapter.
PRELIMINARY DETERMINATIONS
An aptitude for wizardry requires more than just the desire to practice the art. There are
certain inborn tendencies, and some acquired ones, that enable a person to become a wizard.
This chapter will list some of the better documented of wizardly characteristics. Please bear in
mind that it isn't necessary to possess all the qualities listed, or even most of them. Some of
the greatest wizards have been lacking in the qualities possessed by almost all others and have
still achieved startling competence levels....
Slowly at first, then more eagerly, Nita began working her way through the assessment
chapter, pausing only to get a pencil and scrap paper from the checkout desk, so that she could
make notes on her aptitude. She was brought up short by the footnote to one page—
Where ratings are not assigned, as in rural areas, the area of greatest population density will
usually produce the most wizards, due to the thinning of worldwalls with increased population
concentration...
Nita stopped reading, amazed. "Thinning of worldwalls"—were they saying that there are other

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 Prologue


worlds, other dimensions, and that things could get through? Things, or people?
She sat there and wondered. All the old fairy tales about people falling down wells into magical
countries, or slipping backward in time, or forward into it—did this mean that such things could
actually happen? If you could actually go into other worlds, other places, and come back again...
Aww—who would believe anybody who came back and told a story like that? Even if they took
pictures?
But who cares! she answered herself fiercely. If only it could be true....
She turned her attention back to the book and went on reading, though skeptically— the whole
thing still felt like a game. But abruptly it stopped being a game, with one paragraph:
Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential
wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and
fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a
piece of the world— a tree, say, or a stone — that it's not what it thinks it is, that it's something
else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skillfully used,


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