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The other day someone asked a question about how to take down wards and protective magic, especially in a situation where you aren’t physically at the location where said wards and protective magic are applied to. It’s an interesting question that got me recalling my early days in practicing magic, because one of the first things I started experimenting with was protective magic and how to take it apart and also how to improve it, so I thought I’d write this post from the dual perspective of how take apart protective magic, but also how to improve your wards and protective magic.
The first thing to note is that any protective working or ward will likely have a weakness. You just have to be very patient and find where that weakness is and what it is. Once you find that you can unravel it quickly. Likewise if you create a working, you should test it thoroughly and try to figure out what the weakness might be and make adjustments accordingly.
Whether you’re creating a ward or protective magic work or taking it down it’s useful to consider the following factors:
Is there a physical embodiment of the working?
Is the working once and then done or is it done everyday?
Is it a singular working or are there multiple protective workings?
Is the protective working setup with countermeasures in case someone is trying to mess with them?
Are there any other vectors or means of getting past the protective working?
Each of the questions are worth exploring because of how they can shape your approach to either creating better protective measures or breaking through said barriers, so let’s consider each of them in depth.
Is there a physical embodiment of the protection/ward? If there is, this can be a weakness that can be exploited, provided you can find it. Breaking the physical embodiment serves to either weaken the working or destroying it altogether depending on how the working has been setup.
On the other hand if you’re using a physical embodiment, I recommend making multiple copies and putting them into places that aren’t easy to reach. You might even put specific protections and counter measures around them, as a way of deterring people messing with them.
Is the working once and then done or is it done everyday? A working that’s done once is something which can easily be undone, because it isn’t being reinforced. A protective working or ward that’s set up each day, on the other hand is constantly being reinforced and the person doing the work will be sensitive to any variances they detect. Plus if you’re trying to undo something, they’ll catch onto it when they redo the working and may even sense it as you’re doing it because of the fact that they devote a significant amount of time to redoing the workings.
Is it a singular working or are there multiple protective workings? If there’s one protective working setup, its much easier to get through, because you just have the one and once you can find its weakness, you can take it apart. But if there are multiple workings, it can take longer and if they’re layered just right the weakness of one will be covered by the strengths of the other protection magic, making it hard to break any one of them.
Is the protective working setup with countermeasures in case someone is trying to mess with them? If the protective workings are set up with counter measures, those counter measure will be deployed when you try to take the protective workings apart. Counter measures are developed when a person has thoroughly tested out their own defenses and knows where the weaknesses or simply wants to have counter measures on hand, just in case. Usually counter measures are offensive, but set up as a tit for tat kind of mechanism. You break a ward or protection and this happens in response. In such a case you’ll want to take a measured and cautious approach.
Are there any other vectors or means of getting past the protective working? Sometimes the limitations of a working can best be discovered by what the working won’t protect against. If you can find a way to bypass the protection by using its limits against it, then that can be a way to get around the protection. For example, instead of attacking a protection working head on, why not find a way to implant your attack from within the protection. I once had someone try that very tactic with me by sending me a “gift.” It initially worked, but I became suspicious and realized that the gift was anything but. I purified it and then got rid of it and learned my lesson: look for the indirect attack as well as the direct attack.
I haven’t written this post to encourage you to go around messing with other people’s protection workings, but rather to get you to think about your own protective magic workings and also to recognize the thought process that can go into breaking into a protective magic working. Understanding that thought process can help you get creative with your own protective magics, and on occasion can also help you deal with situations where you need to take action.
