Bakker's The Aspect Emperor trilogy may be dense, but his magic crackles from the page.
Maybe it's the idea that magic users are marked as damned for their inborn ability to manipulate the physical world and thus violate the gods' laws.
Maybe it's because so much of his description of magic involves various kinds of light.
Maybe it's simply because his is the first magic system I've encountered that I've really enjoyed since The Sword of Truth (aside from A Song of Ice and Fire, the only series I've really ever read to date).
Whatever the case, he can dole out a battle in the chapter before, a tete-a-tete in the section before, and dress it up with mention of a naked nubile woman, but add magic into that last one and the honey's so sweet my reading teeth are on the verge of melting. Of course, in chapter eight he doesn't mention magic itself so much as delve into the way in which humans and gods (the World and the Outside) interact. He expresses this relationship beautifully in the possessed Psatma Nannaferi, the outlawed high-priestess of Yatwer, the terrible Goddess of Birth.
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