Magic#

What a caster needs to know

Magic is five elements woven together, and a spell is a chant, a sign and a voice. Every tradition of casters explains it its own way, and every explanation works. The scholars’ wheel of threads and seams is underneath all of them, and nobody needs it to cast.

What everyone sees#

Most people in Urd never see magic itself, only what it does: a fire that burns without wood, lightning thrown across a room, frost riding a blade, acid eating through a shield, rot spreading in a wound, a ward of gold light around a priest.

This account comes in three parts. The first tells magic as anyone would. The second tells it as each tradition of casters sees it. The last tells it as the scholars do. Nobody needs the last part to cast a spell, and the scholars still argue over it.

Five elements#

Everything in the world is woven from five elements: fire, air, water, earth and spirit. Because every part of the world leans on the others, changing one thing can have dire consequences.

Who casts#

Some people can see the weaves of magic. Fewer understand them, and fewer still can work them. Most of those who can see and work the weaves are mages, whose order keeps the Mage Spire, formally the Maginaerum Arcanum.

Priests, woodsmen, monks, minstrels and others cast spells too, but most of them never see the weaves at all and explain their magic in their own ways.

What a spell looks like#

A spell has three parts. The caster speaks a few words, called the chant. The caster’s hands make a shape, called the sign. And every spell is cast at its own loudness, called the voice: a whispered spell is cheap and weak and only those close by can read it, a spoken spell is the ordinary kind, and a shouted spell costs the most and strikes the hardest, and the whole room reads it. A caster does not choose how loud to cast; a stronger voice is a different spell, learned in its turn.

To most watchers a spell is only someone gesturing and shouting something. Anyone who has heard the words can say them, but words with no sign do not simply fail: they go off unshaped, right where the speaker stands. A whispered word for fire lights a pipe. A shouted one with no sign burns the one who shouted it. What makes a mage is not knowing the words but the training to shape them.

The Spire and spirit#

The Spire has outlawed the use of spirit in its own ranks. Spirit can seize or harm the soul of a living being, or of one already dead, in an instant.

The Spire has a deep distaste for anyone who works spirit and calls them unlawful necromancers. No city has made the Spire’s ban its law yet, so necromancers may still live in the cities, but their trade is frowned on and most keep to themselves.

Necromancers are as a rule obsessed with death. They delve into poison, spirits and death itself, and they use spirit as often as they can. It is said that spirit, unlike the other elements, may be slightly tainted, and that it acts like a drug on anyone who handles it directly.

Each tradition’s way of seeing it#

Many of the classes cannot actually see the weaves, and so they understand their own magic in other ways. Each account is true as far as it goes. None of them is the whole of it, and some are wrong in places, the way two healers can describe the same body in different words.

Mages#

Mages see the weaves as threads of color: crimson fire, silver-white air, deep blue water, ochre earth and violet spirit. They work the threads with a will they are born with and trained to direct, laying one thread on another, and they name each thread with a syllable as they go: du for fire, ran for air, sel for water, tor for earth and ves for spirit. A mage’s lightning is fire with air laid on it, chanted ‘du ran’. Mages will study almost anything except spirit, which their Spire forbids.

The mageling class

Priests#

Priests are taught the seams where threads meet as whole things, not as pairs, and they speak each seam as a single old word. Where a mage chants ‘du ran’, a priest says ‘khai’, and the lightning is the same. Most of a priest’s magic is the gold light that spirit makes where it meets fire, the radiance in every heal a priest lays.

The priest class

Hermits#

Hermits see the weaves of the world and are curious about all of them, and every element is open to them. Like priests, they speak the seams whole. However much they know, they look for more meaning, and the psions among them go after the heart that all magic turns on.

The hermit class

Woodsmen#

Woodsmen work earth, water and air, and feel magic as a calm heartbeat and the pull of nature.

The woodsman class

Gravediggers#

Gravediggers work spirit and the two seams spirit makes with its neighbors: the gray of rot where it meets earth and the gold of radiance where it meets fire. They feel magic as a pulse along lines that connect them to things.

The gravedigger class

Elementalists#

Elementalists work all five elements. Their magic comes to them on its own, in the presence of fierce emotion and the will to survive.

The elementalist class

Monks#

Monks do not see magic, but they conjure weaves from the seams by the will of mantra. When they touch magic they hold it from a strange, unnatural angle: they keep the balance and flow between the elements rather than the elements themselves, and it gives them odd abilities and powers. Their stances carry the seams’ old names: the tiger stance is the one the old monks call khai, the turtle han, the serpent nu, the crane cho and the dragon omn.

The monk class

Runescribes#

Runescribes see the make-up of nature in finer detail than the common weaves. The draconians among them work the tiny, quick seams between the threads, yet steer them with a mage’s will, with dangerous accuracy.

The runescribe class

Minstrels#

Minstrels touch every element and every seam by harmonizing their celestial tunes, an ancient art revived only lately, in the Age of Man.

The minstrel class

What the scholars say#

Under the traditions lies one account, taught by the Spire’s scholars and preached among psions, though they quarrel over parts of it. Nothing in casting a spell needs it. Its map is the wheel of constants, read here from fire around to spirit, with each seam beside the two threads that make it:

Threads and seams#

Every weave is made of threads of the five elements, which older books call strings, prime elements or outer elements. Where two threads that sit side by side on the wheel meet, they make a seam, so each thread borders two seams, one on either side, and each seam lies between two threads. The old tongue names the five seams khai, han, cho, nu and omn. Older books call them sub-elements, inner elements or interconnectors, after the fine strands that tie the threads together. A seam’s color lies between the colors of its two threads.

A spell is threads laid one on another: the first carries the weave and the rest ride it, and each composition is its own spell. Most spells take one thread or two. Advanced weaving takes three.

The wheel of constants#

Scholars draw the threads and seams on the wheel of constants, usually with nothing more than the astronomical symbols of the constellations that stand for each one. Each thread dominates its neighbor counter-clockwise and yields to its neighbor clockwise, just as each stage of life yields to the stage that follows it. A weave is countered best with the thread that dominates it.

Psions preach these stages to one another and rarely speak of them in detail to anyone else, because the wheel’s idea of rebirth and transcendence competes with the common belief in three gods: Ettephemone of Rebirth and Life, Dekkashraen the god of Transcendence and Death, and Lythantos, who controls the spinning of the wheel of constants and so magic and the land itself.

The Controlling and Inner Forces#

Mages are taught the threads through the Controlling Force, the will they are born with. The seams are taught by clerics and take the Inner Force to work. So a mage builds a seam from its two threads and chants both, ‘du ran’, while a cleric, taught the seam whole, speaks it as one word, ‘khai’. A listener who knows both tongues hears that the mage’s lightning and the priest’s are kin.

Seam theory#

The theory of working the seams directly is sometimes disputed, but it is rumored to grant incredible power, because a seam tends to change a weave’s element entirely: where fire and air meet there is no longer fire or air but lightning. The theory is said to be a remnant of the ancients, the first children of the gods. The runescribes’ draconians are its sharpest hands: they focus on the tiny, quick seams but direct them with the Controlling Force, with dangerous accuracy.

The Arcane Core#

The seams react with the threads they join and pass word to what is commonly called the Arcane Core, so all of existence is a synergy of the Core.

Psions control all magic not thread by thread but by expanding or contracting the Core itself. The Core is described as quick and extremely heavy, and novice psions sometimes cannot move it well. Working it takes mastery of both the Controlling Force and the Inner Force, by meditation and by directing it through one’s own body. Mages have barely been known to touch the Core, but the few who have were the most powerful mages who ever lived.

Gold and gray#

Spirit takes the color of what it is woven with. Where it meets fire its violet runs gold, the radiance of omn that a priest lays on a wound. Where it meets earth it sinks to bruise gray, the rot of nu that a gravedigger works. A mage watching sees violet laced with gold, or violet gone to bruise.

The Spire holds that spirit is spirit, whatever it is woven with, and outlaws all of it. By its reasoning a priest’s healing is as much a working of spirit as a necromancer’s. The clerics hold that the gold and the gray are different magics. The quarrel is not settled.