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, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard's most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into it — freeze fire, burn rain — even slowdown the death of the Universe.

That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.

Nita stopped short. The universe was running down, all the energy in it was slowly being used up; she knew that from astronomy. "Entropy, " the process was called. But she'd never heard anyone talk about slowing it down before.

She shook her head in amazement and went on to the "correlation" section at the end of that chapter, where all the factors involved in the makeup of a potential wizard were listed. Nita found that she had a lot of them — enough to be a wizard, if she wanted to. In rising excitement she turned to the next chapter. "Theory and Implications of Wizardry, " its heading said. "History, Philosophy, and the Wizards' Oath. "

Fifty or sixty eons ago, when life brought itself about, it also brought about to accompany it many Powers and Potentialities to manage the business of creation. One of the greatest of these Powers held aloof for a long time, watching its companions work, not wishing to enter into Creation until it could contribute something unlike anything the other Powers had made, something completely new and original. Finally the Lone Power found what it was looking for. Others had invented planets, light, gravity, space. The Lone Power invented death, and bound it irrevocably into the worlds. Shortly thereafter the other Powers joined forces and cast the Lone One out.