The Chromatic Chord

Ley-Warp

Magical mutation, the lasting change that long pressure of magic works on a body's pattern and flesh, sometimes a gift, sometimes an unstable trait, and sometimes a slow decline into pain.

Overview

In a village by a ley-rich spring, a child is born with eyes that hold the light, and her cousin with joints that ache from the age of ten. Both are ley-warp: the change that long exposure to strong magic works on a body. Some of it is welcome and some of it is not, and nobody can tell which it will be in time to choose.

Cause

Magic leaves a mark on what it passes through. Under steady pressure, a body's lifeforce pattern and then its flesh shift to accommodate it. The causes are set out under magical mutation in Biological Affinity: years in a highly active ley region, repeated overcasting, ritual exposure to unstable compound energies, inheritance from lines repeatedly altered by magic, and dark practices that scar a body and then stabilize. The scholars sort the outcome as adaptive, unstable, or degenerative.

Who It Strikes

Those who live or work where magic runs strong: ley-site villages, shrine-keepers, scholars of the great schools, ritualists, and casters who overcast for years. Their children carry it more often than others. Each people's pattern resists some kinds of magical contamination better than others, but none resists all, and the changes that come in each people follow its lifeforce.

Signs and Course

It begins slowly. Over seasons or years come small strangenesses: an odd colour in the eye or nail, warmth or cold in the hands, sleep that follows the ley-site's pulse, a sudden ease or difficulty in one school.

Then the course divides. The adaptive form settles into a stable trait, a better gift for one current or a body more at home in the place, with a modest cost. The unstable form comes and goes: strength one month and failure the next, a gift that misfires. The degenerative form brings chronic pain in the joints and nerves, sudden fevers or rages, and a narrowing of compatibility, so that healing of any kind takes less well.

Contagion

Ley-warp does not pass by breath or touch. It can pass to children, but not always, and a child may show what the parent hid.

Treatment and Its Limits

The one sure treatment is to leave the pressure: move away from the site, stop the overcasting, end the rites. Early changes often fade then. A settled mutation does not fade, and no healing reverses it. Compatible healing eases the pain of the degenerative form, though warped compatibility makes each healing dearer, and teas for sleep and pain help as with any lifelong ache. Teachers of the schools watch apprentices from ley-rich places closely and keep them from the school that unsettles them.

Mortality

Ley-warp seldom kills. The degenerative form shortens lives and makes them hard, and the unstable form can kill by misfire at the wrong moment. The adaptive form harms almost no one.

Lore and Belief

Villages near strong sites call the changed "touched" or "place-marked", and treat them as lucky or as cursed, often in the same breath. Many believe the place has chosen the child. Some lines boast of their alteration as a sign of descent; others hide it, since outsiders confuse it with the corruption of dark practice and suspect the family.

In the Medieval Era

Ley-warp is familiar in the villages around ley-rich sites and among the households of scholars and temple casters; elsewhere it is rare and stared at. The schools record it in apprentices and casters as a sign of overuse; the schools separate inherited alteration from conduct, though villages often do not. Families who can afford it send a suffering child away from the site, and that is usually the best that can be done.

Where It Appears

See Also