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Mana & Magic

"Mana rather than its essence..."

The practical layer of magic in Cadwallon — how spellcasters actually work, what powers them, and why the Free City is such strange ground for magic. The cosmological why lives in Cosmology; this note is the working how.

Mana — The Raw Substance

Mana is the raw magical substance of the Creation. All magic is, at bottom, the shaping of mana. Gems hold mana; magicians spend or channel it; the world is saturated with it in varying concentrations. Cadwallon's concentrations are warped by the buried presence of Desire.

The Schools of Magic

Elemental Magic (the Six Elements)

The structured, "civilized" magical tradition parses mana through six Elements: the four classical (air, earth, fire, water) plus Light and Darkness. This is the magic of:
- Cynwäll and Akkyshan elves
- Akkylannian templars
- Trained academic magicians (the Free University of Cadwallon teaches the theory)

Each Element corresponds to one of the elemental Realms and (for Light/Darkness) to the dragons Maloth and Vortiris.

Instinctive Magic

Used by orcs and shakas. Instead of parsing the six Elements, instinctive magic draws on raw mana directly through totemic affinity — "drawing its strength from the mana rather than its essence." Orc magicians "can use any kind of gem to cast their primitive magic." Effective, flexible, but crude compared to elemental discipline. The orcs' totemic connection to the Magical Groves is part of this.

Tarot Magic

The signature magic of Cadwallon. See The 22 Arcana and The Tarot-Mages for the full treatment. In brief: a tarot-mage's enchanted deck is a re-enactment of the struggle between Conscience and Desire, which draws some of Desire's power to the cards. The most advanced practitioners catch fragments of Desire's dreams and reproduce, at human scale, slivers of the gods' early powers.

Faith Miracles

Divine magic — but with a unique Cadwallon restriction (below).

The Onyrs

Dream-stones

The Onyrs are stones used to anchor and channel Desire's emanations during certain castings — particularly tarot magic and divination touching the sleeping god. They are a Cadwallon-specific magical tool, tied to the city's proximity to Desire's prison. (Mechanical detail in Secrets vol 1, Incantation chapter.)

Why Magic Is Strange in Cadwallon

The Free City is anomalous ground for magic, all because of what's buried beneath it:

The faith restriction

Only worshippers of an avatar of Conscience or Desire can call miracles in Cadwallon. Faith from any other god simply fails here. The sleeping presence of Desire (and Conscience's lock upon him) cancels the attempts of any enemy faithful. The Cadwës rationalize this with their three home-grown cults (Felicity, Pain, Destiny) without realizing they're worshipping just two gods. A visiting priest of an unrelated god finds his miracles inexplicably dead. (see Cosmology, Conscience, Desire)

Spiritual geography

Certain districts of Cadwallon are aligned to Light or Darkness — not by their inhabitants' faith, but by where The Labyrinth brushes the physical city. Maloth's domains within the maze brighten the spiritual map; Vortiris's darken it. A magician feels the difference: Light magic comes easier in some districts, Darkness in others, regardless of who lives there. The Duke and senior Militia know which districts pull which way. Most Cadwës just notice that some places "feel off." (The Windswept Hill mills, for instance, sit on ley lines where Rebirth-magic runs unusually strong — the tarot-mages experiment there.)

Magical Materials & Trade

Cadwallon's magical economy runs on:
- Gems — mana storage; gems of Darkness (hard to find here, smuggled from Acheron via the "way of the dead") are especially prized
- Grove flora — the magical groves' addictive and effect-bearing plants, harvested by the Birders, Dressmakers, and Tailors
- Vestige artifacts — Sphinx-era devices animated by Light, recovered by shrews from the Underground
- The elegratia — the flower of desire; narcotic; Ferrymen monopoly

Relations

The dead priest's miracle

A visiting priest of a foreign god insists his miracles will work — and they don't. He's furious, then frightened. A free league hired to protect him must explain (or discover) that no outside faith works in Cadwallon — and that the only gods who answer here are the two buried under the city. For some clients, that revelation is worth killing over.

See Also