Davidson, A. R.
Avery Robin Davidson was born in 1902 in the small Devon town of Ottery St. Mary, a place otherwise only known for its traditional tar-barrel-rolling festival. The fourth of his farming family's six children, Davidson's childhood seemed unremarkable to his parents and siblings. None of them had the slightest suspicion that one of the most notable careers in modern wizardry was starting to unfold right under their noses.
At first Avery (or "Tiggs", a nickname given him by his older sister) seemed an extremely ordinary child. His only unusual feature, as far as his family could see, was that as a three-year-old he began to spend a lot of time talking to the cows. What his parents, brothers and sister naturally couldn't know was that the cows were talking back. This very early aptitude with the Speech would have been surprising to most wizardly observers, but the unusually long time it took to pay off would also have been a surprise: the onset of Avery's Ordeal was delayed until he was nearly sixteen.
Once he got started in active practice, though, Avery's specialty quickly manifested itself, and never changed until he finally lost the Speech near the end of his long life. His Ordeal had involved a personally-generated timeslide which saw him, after numerous other complications, dumped into the middle of a gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Avery was able to recover from this situation and get home again by building an everted timeslide spell which should have been impossible, except that no one had told him that...so it worked. Afterwards, trying to work out the details of what he'd done right, and how other wizards could do it too, Avery started to become the kind of wizard who was never satisfied with any answer to the question "What time is it?".
He absorbed all that the Manual could tell him about the Arrow of Time and demanded more; and then, without any fuss, Avery began to reinvent the way wizards handled time travel, inventing new, less damaging ways to persuade the Universe to loosen its iron control of time's forward flow, and ways to mitigate the backlash when that flow was reversed. But even the more geekly wizards said that, though the Powers That Be and Einstein might be able to analyze Avery's spell structures unassisted, regular wizards were going to need more help. Unfortunately getting Avery to explain his conclusions, let alone how he'd arrived at them, proved difficult, since he routinely felt that everybody else could probably see whatever problem he was working on more clearly than he could. With a modesty that over the years became as famous as he did, Avery would only describe the great sequence of persuasions and instigations in the Speech which comprise Davidson's Major Enthalpy as "Speaking courteously to the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all times, distracting it if possible, and if not, whacking it on the bum with a stick till it forgets what it's doing and comes after you." When it was suggested to him that tinkering with the Second Law was more than usually dangerous -- since doing so regularly tends to attract the Lone Power's close attention -- all Avery would say was, "Is it likely to be that much worse than being run over by a cow?"
His most fertile and inventive period more or less coincided with the Second World War. It was then that Avery stumbled (or so he claimed) upon the third of the six possible solutions to Loschmidt's Paradox. This led more or less immediately to his development of possibly the best-known of his spells, Davidson's Pleromic Trap, now the basis for hundreds of other variations on the themes of stasis and timefreeze in the Manual. He was also one of the wizards who collaborated in the Time Management Studies of the 1930's through the 1950's. Much of this work was highly theoretical, and much more of it turned out to be useless for its intended purposes: but one very useful practical result of the Studies was Avery's involvement in an extremely dangerous rescue mission. Avery and his colleagues were forced to use previously untested and as-yet unstabilized amelostasis routines to "patch" a badly deranged timeslide accidentally initiated by scientists working for the US Navy who had been attempting to invent invisibility. Though the patch worked, over long periods some fragmentary memory traces from "before" the patch have emerged in the minds of the rescued -- resulting in some very garbled "conspiracy" websites and at least one truly terrible movie (The Philadelphia Experiment, q.v.).
Once in every few human generations a wizard comes along who truly embodies the concept of the polymage: a wizard good at nearly every subset of the Art he turns his hand to, but utterly spectacular at his specialty. Avery became that wizard for his generation, and hardly noticed. He married in 1940 and had two children (and eventually five grandchildren, three of these wizardly), while continuing to farm the family lands as his father and his grandfather had before him: but he always had time for the cutting-edge researches which brought wizards to consult with him from all over the world. He was surprisingly reluctant to leave the Otter Vale, and it was as if the startling work Avery did in the farthest reaches of time/space theory left him with a need to compensate by rooting himself deeply in the beautiful isolation of the West Country. Avery was quite untraveled for a wizard: he often said, "If the Powers want me, they know where to find me."
They did, and so did the thousands of other wizards who made what became known as "the Ottery run" to seek the advice of the little stocky man known all over the planet in the wizardly community as "the consulting wizard's consulting wizard". His neighbors shook their heads in affectionate confusion at Avery's constant meetings in his local pub, "The London Inn", with strangers from everywhere in the world -- people who struck up conversations with him as if they'd known each other all their lives, and then went off to talk "weird talk with a lot of strange words" in the corner. Avery was three times offered the post of Senior Regional Wizard for Europe but refused it every time: finally it seems that the Powers just stopped asking, perhaps realizing that Avery was of the most use to the Worlds right where he was. His work on spell utilities like the Davidson Bridge and Davidson's Bourdonic Pleusis remains unmatched to this day. But this was also a man who until quite late in life preferred to plough his land with a quadruple hitch of oxen -- claiming to "have trouble talking to tractors" -- and whose greatest joy, after his family and his wizardry, was in the county and national ploughing competitions he and "the cows" had won.
Avery Davidson died of Alzheimer's disease and complications in 1996, having lived to see spectacular changes both in the nonwizardly world and in the fields of errantry where he labored so long and memorably. He is buried very close to his lifelong home, in the churchyard of the ancient and beautiful Church of St. Mary of Ottery. Unfortunately his gravestone was destroyed when the churchyard was vandalized in the late '90s. But wizards know where Tiggs is. (SYWTBAW)
See also: Anthemeral constructions: Atomic structure (denaturation and rearrangement): Banteng: Bovine Word: Exomancy: Famous Wizards, Sol III / Earth: Matter, sublimation of: Nutation, indigenous: Snail, Pascal's: Spell guide: Spells, general construction and design: Time reversal invariance: Time slicing.