These are all good questions and points, so allow me to clarify.
First:
‘Magic’ in this instance is a misleading term. It is merely the application of knowledge to ancient technological devices. For example in the beginning of the Noble path, Arinthas puts down a dainty little Fabergé egg that somehow contains an angry King Toise (who’s name is Chauncey if anyone was wondering…).
Obviously a turtle the size of a blue whale can’t be wiggled into a space that small, so something unusual must be at work here. In fact the little egg is a portable pocket-universe originally used for some bizarre purpose by the Pre-Fall humans. Perhaps it was a research tool, or possibly a sort of high-energy battery, or maybe some old lady just used it to store old newspapers and little porcelain figurines. We can’t possibly know. All we (Arinthas) knows is that anything stored in this pocket universe is kept in a perfect stasis, unaffected by the passage of time or the ravages of space. The egg can store things much larger than itself for an unlimited time and release them on command by tearing an aperture in our universe and allowing the contents of it’s own universe spill out.
Arinthas decided to use it as the world’s most unpredictable grenade.
So however flimsy, there is a semi-scientific explanation of how everything works. When Arinthas slows the passage of time, or causes fires, or seems to telepathically communicate with Myrmidons, there is a technological explanation for it. Magic by definition defies explanation, it does not require it. The world-building of this world demands that all things have a root cause that is more complex than ‘because he’s magic’.
As a Myrmidon you aren’t ‘using’ magic, you are magic. You can lift boulders over your head, take the form of anything you see, divine the causes and rhythms of the stars.
No, you more or less hit the nail on the head there. You get 10 points.
Imagined, no. Misinterpreted? Perhaps a tad. Arinthas has a positive surfeit of tattoos, detailing equations and blueprints for long-forgotten arcane processes, but they do not glow. There is fire, certainly, but there is also a cause. Arinthas can command a localized cluster of semi-sentient nano-machines that persist in the air as a fine mist around him. When he wishes, he can command them to raise their ambient temperature and enter a ‘vortex’ formation that creates a whirling blast of ignited air.
The effect might bear a great many similarities to a fireball.
That is one of the key points of Technomancy in this story, the notion that technology can look quite alien and unfathomable when you have no frame of reference.
Interestingly Homunculus was one of the original working titles for this piece, it was only narrowly beaten by Myrmidon because the Myrmidons in the Iliad were known for their unflinching penchant for following orders, no matter how brutal or heinous. It became a popular slang word in the 19th Century for people who did what they were told without question, and might well have become the word we associated with machines that serve were it not for Capek’s famous play Rossum’s Universal Robots (In Czech, robota means ‘forced labour’).
