Contents
Magic in Aetheria is not what the old textbooks describe. The working position of every Reach-trained practitioner — and the working complaint of every visiting scholar from the few outer- world traditions that still send delegates to Old Wren — is that the conditions of the floating world bend the work in ways the pre-Unmaking texts did not anticipate. Some workings are easier above the sea than they were in the old continent. Some are harder. Some are dangerous in ways the texts did not warn about. The Reach has, over four centuries, worked out a practical understanding of what works and what does not.
What follows is the public-facing summary. Working practitioners will tell you it is roughly correct and, in its specifics, incomplete. Working practitioners will also tell you that the specifics are where the trouble is.
What works ordinarily
Most magic of the everyday sort — healing, mending, light, warmth, small protections — works in Aetheria essentially as the old texts describe. A village priest who can mend a broken bone, a working herbalist who can make a draught of clean sleep, a skyfarer’s- companion who can call a small stable light against the upper mist’s dimness — these workings are reliable, well-attested, and common. The Reach’s practitioners are not magically impoverished. The everyday work holds.
What the Reach also does not, in its everyday workings, lose: the small social practices of magic — the apprenticeship, the guilds, the Wren Academy’s faculty of magic, the hedge-witches of the Quiet Reach who will read a household for ill-feelings and clear the air for a fee. The Reach’s magical economy is intact. The practitioners are real. The work is done.
What works strangely
Several categories of magic behave in unfamiliar ways above the sea. Practitioners learn to expect this. Travellers from outside the Reach — there are still a few, by any decade — learn it the hard way.
Divination
The reading of futures, the consultation of distant scenes, the location of lost things by mystical means: all of these work poorly in Aetheria, and worsen as one approaches the Veiled Reaches. The Reach’s working position is that the Mistsea interferes with divinatory workings, in much the same way that fog interferes with sight. The further from the upper mist’s clearer layers, the worse the interference. Divinations near the Bloom are essentially useless; divinations in the inner Grey have been reported to return images of places that are not the seer’s intended target, which most working practitioners regard as the strongest argument against attempting them.
The Wren Academy’s magic-faculty has investigated this. The faculty’s published position, established in 287 AU and not revised since, is that divination is unreliable above the sea and should not be relied upon. Most working practitioners simply do not divine. The few who do — chiefly in temple work, and chiefly within sight of land — qualify their results.
Teleportation and dimensional working
Spells that move the practitioner or others through space at a distance, or that create temporary connections between distant points, are the Reach’s most-feared category of magic. They are not impossible. They are dangerous. The Reach’s working understanding is that the geometry of Aetheria is not the geometry the old texts assumed, and that workings that presuppose the old geometry can produce results that range from the merely absent (the practitioner does not arrive) to the deeply wrong (the practitioner arrives, but not entirely).
The Wren Academy has published, over four centuries, a small body of carefully-written cautionary literature on this category. The literature is, in working practitioner judgement, not sufficient as a deterrent. Most practitioners simply will not attempt long-distance teleportation in the Reach. Those who do typically restrict themselves to short-range workings (within a single isle, within a temple’s grounds), which are reliably safe.
The category that practitioners particularly will not attempt: any working that involves the deep currents of the Mistsea as a pathway. The reasons are not in the textbooks. The reasons, by working folk-tradition, do not need to be in the textbooks.
Detection at distance
Magical detection — of magic itself, of specific objects, of intentions — works at shorter ranges in Aetheria than the old texts assume. A practitioner who could once have detected a particular item across a kingdom can, in the Reach, detect it across perhaps a small reach-cluster on a clear day, and not at all on a misty one. The practitioners adapt. The work is still useful at the ranges it operates in.
What works particularly well
A few categories of magic work better in Aetheria than in the pre-Unmaking texts:
- Communication with stones — the working with aetherstones themselves, including resonance-reading, dimming-prediction, and the small affective manipulations stonewards employ. These workings are essentially Reach-native. Stoneward training is longer in Aetheria than the old texts’ equivalent
- Weather-reading at short range. A working caster on a ship’s deck can read the upper mist’s intentions for the next several hours with greater reliability than the old texts predict. The Reach uses this routinely
- Wind-working — the small directional aids that supplement aetherstone lift. Pre-Unmaking texts treated wind-working as a specialized art; Reach practitioners treat it as basic skyfarer- magic, taught to most working casters by their second crossing
The two-mode convention
The Reach’s working practitioners observe, in their daily practice, a small convention: most magic-users keep two practice modes.
- Ground-magic is worked while the practitioner is on a stable isle, in the practitioner’s own household or in a temple. It uses the conventions of the old texts most directly. Most apprentices learn ground-magic first
- Air-magic is worked aloft on a working ship, or on the small inhabited isles that have unusually thin upper-mist conditions. Air-magic has its own conventions, its own vocabulary, its own lineages of teachers. A practitioner who is competent at ground-magic is not automatically competent at air-magic, and vice versa
A practitioner who has earned competence in both is called, in the Reach’s working practice-vocabulary, two-modes. The convention is informal. Most working captains, on hiring a ship- caster, ask whether the candidate is two-modes; if not, they ask where the candidate has trained, and adjust the wage accordingly.
What practitioners say to apprentices
The standard apprentice-wisdom, repeated by working practitioners across reach-clusters, in roughly the same words:
- Do not divine near the Bloom. Do not teleport in the Veiled.
- Trust your stoneward when they say a working is wrong.
- Your old textbooks are useful and incomplete.
- The world here is its own world. Learn it.
The wisdom is not theological, not warned-into-dread, not romanticized. It is the wisdom of working people who have watched apprentices learn the hard way. Most apprentices, by their second season, have stopped arguing.
“From the Compendium of Practical Workings (Wren Academy edition, 397 AU revision): ‘The Reach’s magical conditions are stable enough to permit competent practice and unstable enough to reward humility. Practitioners are advised to read the local traditions, consult working captains before crossings, and assume that the published curricula of the older traditions are correct in approximately three-quarters of their particulars. The remaining quarter, regrettably, is where most magical accidents occur.’”