While the practice of magic was forbidden in Lacquer City, instructional tomes were preserved.

The Council took the view that censorship was a primitive form of governance, and rather preferred to allow monks to examine the tomes as they pleased. This usually sated curiosity and counterintuitively made it less likely that magical experimentation would be attempted, since the impression was given that magic was an ongoing experiment of less disciplined societies, doomed to failure. The Library was the Council’s way of saying, “Yes, see, we know — but it’s a waste of time.”

The only magic tolerated within the city limits was magic detection. The soulshard-golems that had been appropriated from the Academy were powered foremostly to enforce the Council’s desire to keep the territory as free from aether manipulation as possible, and the golems’ enchanted construction was able to sense local disturbances in the aether, which was the very stuff of magic.

The thing to do with magic was that it required a sort of sensation beyond sensation. One had to use their fingertips, to be sure — the most sensitive physical parts of the nervous system – but this concentration served a higher purpose, to manipulate a field that could only be felt by something the Baenes called intuition. The fingertips were the instrument by which the aether field was most readily manipulated, and intuition was playing the instrument. Magic was as natural as intuition, and it looked like the most terrifying sorcery to the less practiced.

“But with the liberalism of intuition comes the liberalism of magic, and with the liberalism of magic comes the permission of chaos!”, and certain conservative factions that inevitably emerged were wary to the point of paranoia of the kinds of chaotic civilizations the use of magic could bring about. “Forget notions of progressive society,” The Council said. “They are doomed to failure. Focus on the more important aspects of life. Living in balance with the natural world.”

All of this, of course, was hilarious to Danzenn, who grew up in the Lacquer City. Ironically, as more youth like themself abandoned the magic-free city, it doomed itself to the sort of failure it feared. Dogmas simply cannot comply with reality. And what’s realer than magic?

Nevertheless, the Lacquer City maintained a persistent dignity, and attracted a consistent following. It sustained itself despite the glimmering magical cities beyond it, and remained enclosed, and largely shielded, by its self-imposed ignorance.