The Four Forces

Body, World, Universe, Fate

Four fundamental forces govern the practice of magic across the Continent, and all power, from a knight's sharpened blade to a sorcerer's conjured flame, is born from some combination of them. The Continent's scholars have named, cataloged, and taught them for millennia. The academies of Arcanmere test for them, the martial schools cultivate them, the temples pray through them, and the Desert Sect measures them. Two are energies that a practitioner learns to command. Two are states of enlightenment that cannot be commanded at all.

Top row: two sides of one coin, the life energy within the self and the life energy of the world around it, which a practitioner learns to command. Bottom row: the two enlightened states, the first of which is perceived and the last of which is only joined.

Aura

Aura and Mana are two sides of one coin, and the coin is life. Aura is the life energy within the self: the energy held in muscle and bone and blood, found in animals, in people, and in a few of the fungi, and in nothing that does not live. It is the force of warriors and knights. Every living being possesses the pathways it moves through; the trained warrior develops them to superhuman capacity, and the discipline that does so is the foundation of every serious martial tradition on the Continent. Aura is cultivated at the Aura Heart, a physical center of power within the chest. The heart does not typically form until adolescence, though a teacher may set a child on the mental path toward it years before it stirs. It is the easiest of the four forces to learn and the hardest to perfect, which is why knights and warriors throughout history have devoted whole lifetimes to it.

What it buys is the body enhanced beyond mortal limits: strength, speed, endurance, and a reinforced frame that absorbs blows that would break ordinary bone. Practiced further, it leaves the body. An adept reads an opponent's intentions through their aura before the blow is thrown; a master projects it outward as a pressure that can drive lesser men to their knees; at the highest ranks it becomes visible, a distortion in the air around the one who has fully roused it, and a practitioner of that rank can push life energy into dead matter and command it: stone hardened by it, walls raised from it, the ground itself made to answer. Sorkhold drills its war-mages in brute-force projection. Chandran's soldiers carry a lightning-attuned variety in the blood. A person's natural reserves sit above or below the common baseline, and everything after that is cultivation.

Mana

Mana is the other side of the coin: the life energy outside the self, the energy that permeates the living world, plant and fungus as much as beast, and lies in the ambient field of every place on the Continent, to be drawn from the air, the stone, the water, and the flame around a practitioner. It is the province of mages and sorcerers, and of the war-mages and battlemages that the great kingdoms field beside their soldiers. To channel it, a practitioner must develop Mana Veins, an internal meridian system through which environmental energy can be drawn in and directed. The most powerful mages are said to have Mana Veins that run throughout their entire bodies, so that they draw power from every direction at once. Not everyone has the architecture. A court mage tests a candidate for Mana affinity by looking for the veins, and finds nothing in one who was built for a different force.

Mana is the force of the shaped element, the constructed spell, and the bent rule: wards and barriers, projected bolts, and the enchantment worked into a blade or a ring so that it draws on the world's energy and channels it through the bearer. It is the most academic of the forces. Arcanmere has spent millennia cataloging magical ability and building systems of training and advancement around it, and the mage-schools teach Mana as formula and learned pattern, refined across centuries of study. The great workings lean on maanthrika, a crystalline catalyst refined from mountain ore, without which the most demanding spells and the most lasting enchantments cannot be made.

Prana

Prana is the energy of the spirit, drawn not from the body or the environment but from the universe itself. If Aura is the energy of life, Prana is the energy of consciousness: the spark that makes a mind a mind, the force of thought and will, the thing that sets a thinking being apart from the creatures that merely live. It is exceedingly rare, rarer than Aura and rarer than Mana, and most beings never touch it at all, because the connection it requires cannot be built by training. One either has the spiritual architecture or one does not. It is said to run in bloodlines, though it can skip generations or appear unexpectedly where no seer was known before. Some peoples carry the affinity more naturally than humans do; the dwarven lines are the best known.

Prana takes three forms, and only two of them are open to humans. Prana Eyes grant foresight: those who possess them may glimpse possible futures, see the threads of fate that bind living things, and read a soul the way others read a page. The sight flows strongest through direct contact, which is why an oracle asks for your hands. Prana Touch grants healing: it works not on the wound but on the disruption of life force beneath the wound, and so it can mend what was thought beyond mending. Prana Mind is the third form, and no human has ever held it. It belongs to the other peoples of the Continent, and even among them it is rare. It greatly widens what Prana can do and compounds the practitioner's Aura besides, and it is the root of the arts the Continent calls the mancies: telepathy, necromancy, pyromancy, metalmancy, and a slight telekinesis, the moving of small things by will alone. The same force runs the other way. The energy that knits a body back together is the energy behind every curse, and a Prana burn eats its victim from the inside out. Every Prana working is paid for by the one who works it: a healer spends their own spiritual reserves, and one who overdraws them can be permanently damaged. Prana is called the initial enlightened state. It is the first step toward understanding the deeper nature of existence, and there is only one step after it.

Brahma

Brahma is the fourth force and the rarest, and it is not a force one wields. It is not manipulation at all, but cooperation: alignment with the correct flow of cosmic fate and destiny. Brahma cannot be forced or controlled. It can only be joined, as a leaf surrenders to a river's current. It is the finalization of the enlightened state, the highest tier of magical achievement, and in all of recorded history only a handful of beings have ever touched it.

Put plainly, Brahma is causality. It is the force that decides which of the things that could happen does happen, and to touch it is to have that decision lean your way. A being aligned with Brahma does not cast anything. The blow that should have landed misses by a finger's width; the road that should have been barred is open; the one chance in a thousand comes up, and keeps coming up. It cannot be trained, because fortune is not a skill. No academy teaches it. The theoretical literature that exists describes it in terms so abstract as to be useless, and the few who have brushed against it agree that it is the fundamental force of existence itself, the power that maintains the fabric of reality, and that it is not meant to be grasped by mortal hands. The histories hold that to force what should only be joined exacts a price that no one pays willingly.