@Mary I don't see how the crown can't operate under the same logic of urgency=promotion. Am I missing something?

@JiminyCricket. I love the latter three ideas. Fits what I was going for.

So my other other setting has mages and stuff. I have a space mage that can control space. They can travel thousands of light-years away in a few seconds by bending space in a certain way--FTL. They don't use portals. I want their travel mechanism to be similar to the principles used by FTL drives. I need some plausible-sounding, easily digestible for readers, catchy magic-technobabble as to how they can achieve this. Any ideas anyone?

They then collapse (through magic) the wavefunction, this realizes the actuality (that part of the probability wavefunction that's known) at their destination. There they are at the destination. See wavefunction collapse - Wikipedia for a technical explanation involving stats and technical language.

For pre-existing art of something like this see Ann McCaffrey's Pern series - Between, or Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide Infinite improbability drive. @Dmyt

As far as technobabble goes, that was covered by Adams above. If you're looking for something new - then for inspiration look to JK Rowling's use of "Latin" (it was sort of Latin-ish) in the harry potter series. Other languages can be a wonderful inspiration for stuff.

For something odd sounding to the western ear, try Mandarin or Cantonese perhaps, maybe an African language like Yoruba - that's got lots of rhythmic pulsing and open vowels. Yoruba to English Translator. If not that, then there's plenty of languages to take inspiration from. The Bantu group of languages has clicks and glottal sounds too.