Aurora

HISTORY

Before our world began, the six elemental primordials were independent living beings, vast and powerful. After their deaths, their bodies fused to form our world and everything in it, and their souls became formless and free. The remnants of these six elemental souls are the six sources of elemental energy used by mages, and the remnants of these six elemental bodies form the matter that these mages manipulate.

THE BASICS

The process of elemental magic is simple. An amount of formless elemental energy is drawn into the mage, who exerts their will upon it and then instills that willed energy into an amount of elemental matter. The elemental energy placed in the corresponding matter animates it according to the mage’s will.

A stone mage calls the essence of primordial stone into themselves, then uses this essence to exert their will upon physical stone. In this way, a mage can raise a mountain or carve a ravine, though either grand act would require either a great deal of power or a suitable length of time. A wind mage holds influence over the very air, drawing it around themselves, perhaps propelling themselves in flight or sending messages across great distances – stronger wind mages, capable of channeling greater amounts of energy, can even bend the weather to their wills. A water mage commands anything from the vast seas to the minute moisture in the air.

The physical matter of fire, lightning and life can be harder to find in their pure form than stone, water and wind. This is not because they do not HAVE physicality, as some have theorized, but is instead because their physicality is most often hidden away. These three elements sink within the other three without the structure they held in life. Life dissolves into water and leeches into stone, lightning lurks in wind and water, fire seeps into stone and wind. These elements can be conjured seemingly from thin air, but in fact their physicality must be present for the elemental energy to have any effect. A fire mage who conjures a wall of flame is pulling that fire from the air and stone. A lightning mage calling down the storm is summoning lightning already lurking in the clouds or the air. And a life mage can never create life from nothing – there must always be living matter for them to empower or heal.

An elemental energy cannot be applied to a different elemental matter. It will simply dissipate with no effect. Channeling an elemental energy into its matter is, in essence, a momentary reawakening of a fragment of the original primordial, and one primordial’s soul cannot animate another’s body.

SOULS

Soul energy is intensely resistant to all forms of elemental energy. Because of this property, living beings – who unilaterally possess complex tightly-woven lattices of soul energy throughout their physical being – are thus highly resistant to direct magical influence. If an unscrupulous water mage were to attempt, for instance, directly manipulating a living person’s blood, they would find their efforts stymied by that person’s soul, which would strongly resist their influence; similarly, a lightning mage cannot sabotage a living nervous system from within, and a stone mage cannot compel bones to break themselves. Only Life magic can readily bypass this soul-barrier. It has been theorized that perhaps this exception stands because the soul recognizes healing and growth as necessary changes it must allow for the survival of the body, where all other elemental incursions inevitably cause injury. However, this exception renders living beings vulnerable to chimeric alterations or mutations, and is one of many reasons why Life magic is considered the most dangerous of the six branches.

This resistance of the living soul is shared by a handful of unique substances – most notably Soulcrystal, a naturally-occurring formation of Primordial Stone that accumulates soul energy at a uniquely accelerated rate. Soulcrystal thus resists manipulation by Stone magic, but it can also be used as a construction material to create magical “cleanrooms” where no elemental energy can enter. In these rooms, mages of all kinds are powerless, as without ambient magical energy to channel, the mage has no ability to manipulate the elements. For this reason, Soulcrystal is additionally a vital component in the construction of mage prisons.

The soul of a mage differs from the soul of a non-mage in one key way: mage souls possess openings, or “channels”, that are byways commanded by the mage’s will, through which a specific elemental energy is permitted to flow. This allows the mage to draw this energy into themselves and redirect it outward, though it also puts them at increased risk of elemental corruption. All living beings are vulnerable to this affliction, wherein a high density of raw elemental energy can overwhelm the soul’s resistance and seep into their being, causing the element present in their body to react randomly, inducing illness. Mages are far more vulnerable to this threat, as they channel far more energy through themselves than a non-mage would ever be exposed to externally. Chronic elemental corruption can, in the long run, disrupt soul integrity, causing the body to begin breaking down more quickly as it loses its resistance to the elemental energies still trapped within its unraveling soul.

RUNES

Raw willpower is not the only way to command elemental energy. Runic inscriptions can also direct and limit energy. It has been theorized that this runic language of magic is the original language that was known to the primordials while they still lived, and thus their essence responds to commands encoded through it. Though the mechanics are uncertain, the effects are undeniable, and runic inscriptions are commonly used as safety precautions when invoking complex effects. While typically unnecessary for simple, physical manipulation, runic commands are considered a necessity when invoking the more complex, secondary properties of an element, such as the transmutative properties of fire or the connective properties of lightning.

Runes are also vitally important in the creation of magic items. Raw elemental energy can be contained in specialized crystals known as “lacrimas”, to be stored for later use by mages or to power magic items usable by anyone. To serve this second purpose, a lacrima must be inscribed with runic commands delineating its use. A fire lacrima, for instance, can be used to craft a simple light source (where the commands will order the energy to produce light without heat) or a mighty flaming sword (where the fire must be commanded to spring forth on activation, following the shape of the blade itself and spreading no further.) Many life lacrimas are used in the field of medical care, as it is often simpler and safer to command a lacrima to regrow lost tissue than it is to conscript a life mage to do so manually.

Aside from the basic runic command language, each element has a unique “great rune” that is used, not to command the energy, but to draw and focus it directly. When activated by the force of a mortal will (and it must be willfully activated and deactivated in order to function) this rune does nothing more than call upon the ambient energy of its elemental type and focus it into whatever object it has been inscribed on. These runes are frequently used for charging lacrimas, but it is also not uncommon for mages to be tattooed with the Great Rune of their element, which is known to expedite and ease the process by which the mage draws this energy into themselves. However, these runes must be used carefully; they are the only known way to draw on the elements without requiring a conscious, active effort of willpower. A Great Rune tattoo does not bear this risk, as it is invariably second to the will of its wielder, but if the Great Rune is inscribed on an inanimate object, it must be willfully deactivated after each use (to prevent excess energy buildup in the area) AND carefully surrounded by sealing command runes to prevent any unused energy from escaping.

(To prevent accidents or ill-planned pranks, students of magic are exclusively issued an ink made from powdered soulcrystal, the latent magic-repelling properties of which prevent ANY runes drawn with it from being activated, inadvertently or otherwise. This clever strategy prevents every textbook in the academy from being repurposed into an unsafe font of undiluted power.)