Sources of Power

Universal Magic

Magic exists throughout the cosmos as a universal force. It is not a substance manufactured by casters or a privilege invented by civilization. It is part of reality itself.

Because of this, every act of magic begins from the same truth:

• the force exists already,
• the caster does not create it,
• and successful casting depends on access, control, compatibility, and cost.

Ley Lines

Ley lines are channels or concentrations along which magical access is easier.

They do not create magic from nothing. Rather, they are regions where the ambient force is easier to reach, easier to shape, or more densely available. Casting near a ley line is therefore usually:

• easier,
• more efficient,
• more stable,
• and capable of greater scale.

Where ley lines cross, people raise shrines, holds, and mage-towers, and fight over them. Many a ruin on the old roads was a keep on a crossing, taken, burned, and taken again by whoever wanted its magic, and delvers still dig in such places for the charged stones the last defenders never spent.

Ley Nodes

Ley nodes are local concentration points where one or more ley lines knot, intersect, or narrow through high-coherence terrain.

Nodes are not identical to lines. A line is a path of easier access. A node is a pool where the force lies denser, answers a working more readily, and lets a working grow larger before it slips.

Mages speak of three kinds of node:

• minor nodes: reliable for a village rite, a ward-stone, or a well-charm,
• major nodes: stable enough for a city, a great shrine, or a school of mages,
• grand confluences: rare sites where great enchantments, long-range gates, or wards over a whole region become possible.

Overdrawing a node does not destroy universal magic, but it can throw local flow out of step. The signs are workings that come late, conversions that go wild, and a node that falls silent for a while. A village whose well-charm fails on the same night its healer's hands go cold knows someone near by is drinking the node dry, and more than one feud between neighbouring mages began that way.

Long-Term Ley-Line Movement

Ley lines are not fixed forever. Their positions drift over long timescales under the strain of the cosmos, the slow change of the land, the scars of great rituals, and long divine activity.

Observed movement follows four broad regimes:

• dormant stability: little measurable shift over generations,
• seasonal breathing: predictable local widening and narrowing,
• secular drift: slow directional migration over decades and centuries,
• shock displacement: abrupt rerouting after extreme events.

People who live on a line expect it to wander. A ward-stone set on a line must be reset as the line wanders off it, and a shrine whose line slid away from it, leaving its wards dead and its tombs open, is an old sorrow in many songs.

Long-term maps are therefore guesses. Line-walkers draw a line as a broad corridor and a node as a wandering patch, and the best of them sell their charts dearly to mages and to ruin-delvers hunting a dead node under some fallen keep.

Environmental Energy

A mage may draw upon energy already present in the surrounding environment.

Examples include:

• heat from air, flame, or stone,
• pressure and movement from wind or water,
• biological vitality from living environments,
• and other ambient conditions aligned to the spell being cast.

This means spells are never equally easy everywhere. A working that is simple in one place may be dangerous or wasteful in another.

Living Sources

Plants and animals are also valid energetic sources because they possess their own lifeforce patterns.

This means casters may draw upon:

• medicinal herbs,
• prepared teas and tonics,
• animal vitality,
• cultivated groves,
• sacrificial livestock,
• or carefully harvested biological material.

Such sources are especially important in:

• healing,
• alchemy,
• nature magic,
• blood and sacrificial traditions,
• and everyday low-scale restorative practice.

In general, plant- and animal-sourced lifeforce is less efficient than a clean direct transfer between compatible members of the same species, but it is often easier to obtain, easier to excuse before the neighbours, and safer than directly draining another person.

Internal Channelling

Mages may also use their own bodies as conduits.

This does not mean the caster creates magical energy internally. It means the caster provides:

• a channel,
• a regulating shape,
• and sometimes part of the energy cost through bodily strain or lifeforce expenditure.

This method is often flexible and immediate, but also dangerous. Repeated overuse can injure, exhaust, or kill the caster. The hedge-mages who follow sellsword companies are known by grey hair before thirty and hands that shake when the fighting is over, and few of them grow old.

Divine Provision

Divine magic follows the same general laws as mortal magic. The difference is that the needed energy comes from beyond the caster: from a Prime's current, open to those aligned with its principle, or from a Resonant (rarely a Steward) who chooses to supply it.

This makes divine casting:

• safer for the mortal caster,
• less dependent on the caster's own reserves,
• and more stable while the caster's alignment holds and the patron is willing.

Its weakness is dependence. A Prime does not refuse, but a caster can fall out of alignment with it; a patron can refuse, withdraw, or be absent. See Divine and Traditional Magic.

Stored Magic

Magic can be stored.

In principle, it is held much as water is held behind a dam. The stored energy may then be discharged, transferred, or used to support later casting.

This shapes:

• wards and lasting works,
• war,
• healing,
• travel,
• artefact creation,
• and long-term preparation.

Stored magic is never lossless. All storage behaves as controlled delay, not perfect stasis.

Storage Decay

Stored charge decays through three channels:

• passive leakage: slow dissipation through containment boundaries,
• pattern drift: inner reshaping that makes stored charge harder to discharge cleanly,
• contamination uptake: noise introduced by environmental turbulence, nearby casting, or handling errors.

Decay rate is governed by containment quality, source purity, ambient turbulence, and storage duration.

Those who handle charge speak of four condition bands:

• fresh: high-output, low-noise, predictable discharge,
• aged: moderate output reduction, still reliable,
• unstable: substantial noise and efficiency loss, use only with corrective workings,
• spoiled: charge no longer fit for precise work and unsafe for anything that must not fail.

As a broad rule, concentrated stores decay faster than diffuse stores of equal total charge unless stabilization arrays are present.

Spoiled charge is a ruin-delver's oldest trap. A charm-stone left a thousand years in a sealed hall looks no different from a fresh one, and the delver who lifts it bare-handed may lose the hand. Experienced crews test old stones with a dead stick before they touch them, and sell the safe ones dear.

Storage Media and Reliability

No single medium is best in all contexts. Selection depends on intended duration, transport needs, precision requirements, and acceptable loss.

The most reliable media by use case are:

• crystalline matrices: best for high-density, long-term archival storage when properly warded,
• inscribed metal lattices: best for large lasting works and repeated discharge cycles,
• living reservoirs (seeded groves, bonded organisms): best for adaptive low-noise regulation, weaker for rapid burst output,
• liquid suspensions and alchemical vials: best for portable short-duration use, poor for long storage,
• untreated organics (wood, cloth, bone): cheap and available, but high leakage and contamination risk.

Those who can afford the choice keep crystal for long hoards, metal lattices for a city's great wards, and vials for the road and the war-camp.

A lord who hires mages for a siege wants to know what charge they carry and in what condition: a cart of vials gone unstable can do the enemy's work for them, and siege-camps have burned that way.

Beyonder Exception

Beyonders complicate the discussion of magical sources.

Some Beyonders may learn to interact with magic, but many come from cosmologies where magic does not exist or does not operate in a familiar form. As a result, they often manipulate the environment by alien means rather than through the magical systems native to this cosmos.

This means that a source of power recognized by mortal or divine casters may be irrelevant to certain Beyonders, while some Beyonder effects may not map cleanly onto local magical theory at all.