Perhaps, for completion's sake, I should take some time to explain the importance of Durin the Heavy. To explain Durin requires jumping back well before his birth, however, back to the science behind his magic.
The theory of gravity was put forth in an enormous publication written by Septimus Quattuor, alumnus of Virasim University. It has never been debated, like many other theories, whether Quattuor was ahead of his peers in knowledge or mere publishing speed; rather, it is debated how many decades or centuries it would have taken for the rest of academia to develop his ideas without him. No one else was working with anywhere near the depth of understanding he demonstrated in his papers.
The first twenty-two pages of the paper lay out the physical mechanics of gravity. The forces applied to distant masses, the equations governing those forces, the movements of gravitons to apply those forces, all of it was there. The math behind this was well known, but Quattuor took the lengthy step of explaining the full mechanics of how gravity worked in a real, physical sense.
He then spent one hundred and forty pages describing, in excruciating detail, a unifying theory on how gravity integrated with magnetic, electric, entropic, and nuclear forces. For those interested, these two sections had a supplementary 1408 page stack of experiments and observations supporting the main thesis. The sheer amount of effort put into this single publication was unprecedented at the time and still bears few rivals.
The last few pages are the only pieces that aren't fully developed, as Quattuor lacked the magical expertise to theorize in detail about how magic circuits could affect gravity. He laid out a couple of short concepts, the curvatures of different components and the expected similarities to other circuits, but he could not develop a complete circuit on his own.
Quattuor was a recluse, but as a result of his theories on gravity he became acquainted with Nonal Octavian, one of the preeminent magical engineers of the period. She was an alumnus of Docet Barrington and early in her career worked on the gyroscopic stabilizing circles used for the next three centuries in hypertower construction. From there her projects seemed to get more complex and more varied as contracts had her working on city defenses, magic tools, agricultural problems, and fundamental circuit design. It was Nonal who developed the full range of circuits required to manipulate nuclear forces, as well as streamlining electric and magnetic circuits into a single design domain. While she developed no theories, all of modern magic engineering is built upon Nonal's work.
When she contacted Quattuor and started their collaboration, both of their impacts on magic would expand beyond anything know before. Alberich the Great was the first mage to cast a magic spell, yet even his contribution to the history books feels minimal next to the universal magic theory constructed by Nonal and Quattuor.
Their partnership started in the obvious place of magic circuits for manipulating gravity. Nonal was one of the few on the continent capable of understanding how to implement what looked like Quattuor's half-baked suggestions. He had a shaky understanding of the fundamentals, but he had an odd intuition about circuit design that meshed well with Nonal's skills.
Nonal had constructed a gravity circuit within a week of working with Quattuor. Even she was surprised; a whole new type of magic was unlocked in mere days. It was more than simply Quattuor's suggestions and her fundamentals, though. She saw unexpected similarities to her work elsewhere. The stabilizing elements were similar to her hypertower work. The energy transference bore similarities to her electromagnetic designs.
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It planted an idea in her head: what if all these circuits were just variations on the same theme? What if all the different types of magical circuits, each covering a separate domain of magic, could be unified into a single concept?
Quattuor had a unified theory of physics that, with minimal doubt in the academic community, pointed to all the different forces that governed the universe being related to one another at a fundamental level. He could describe how these forces related to each other interacted, and even how one type of force could, at times, shift into another.
How this applied to magical engineering was less clear. It was like they had a workable foundation to build a house on, but they needed a lot more of the house built before the roof could be put on.
They weren't too concerned about this, however. In the whole world there was no pair better positioned to solve the problem. Nonal had done the first step, after all, with her unification of the electromagnetic circuits.
Over the course of about a decade Quattuor and Nonal expanded on their fundamental circuit work in order to pull more forms of magic into their framework. They first expanded Nonal's electromagnetic circuit to incorporate the nuclear forces holding matter together, as the mechanisms that allowed interaction between matter and electricity were well documented. From there they had an idea of how to incorporate the entropic forces driving the universe forward, contrasting the dissolution of matter with its creation.
A gap in Quattuor's fundamental theory was exposed with the development of new telescopes a few years later. Observations of galaxies were only consistent with his unified theory if their masses were significantly larger than what they had observed, and on top of that there seemed to be unknown forces pushing them away from each other in ways never before measurable. Dark matter and dark energy, as they came to be colloquially known.
Because he was working backwards in this case, seeing a result with no concept of the reason, he worked with Nonal to examine both their unified circuits and their gravity circuits to find gaps in the designs. Electricity and magnetism wove together elegantly; the nuclear and entropic forces were practically opposites; what if this force throwing a wrench into his theory of gravity had a similar design complement?
Nonal found a solution of sorts, something that served as the complement to the design of their gravity circuits. They called it the vacuum force, as it served to hold a vacuum together - and thus clear out matter from an area - in the same way gravity clustered matter together. Quattuor linked this vacuum energy to his theory while Nonal tried to fit this new joint vacuum-gravity circuit in with the others. Both of them found success in this pairing of their forces: the complementing concepts stabilized the joint circuits and filled in the theoretical gaps exposed in the other forces.
With this success they had a universal casting framework. Whereas before circuit design was considered according to different rules according to different types of magic, now they had a singular set of rules that governed all ways in which magic could manipulate reality. Nonal used Quattuor's prowess at writing lengthy, overly detailed technical documents to put together the first textbook covering magic circuit design from start to finish, and the theory behind it has held for five hundred years.
Fundamentally, gravity was merely a component of the larger casting framework the pair had developed, but it was a troublesome component. The forces involved were small, and acting at great distance between great objects. Simple concepts could be implemented, but implementing them as an application of any other force - even the vacuum force - seemed simpler to manage. Manipulating gravity to a large effect required energy beyond what Nonal and Quattuor could produce.
Though they could develop Quattuor's theories into proper circuits and cast magic with them, they ended up publishing only a few practical circuits implementing gravity magic on its own. Any problem worth solving was solvable without the use of gravity. Through their universal framework, the other magical forces could be cast more easily and efficiently, and that would have to suffice for the time being.
