Magic

How it works

There are two types of magic you can have, active or passive: active magic can affect the world around you and is used with potions and blood, passive magic manifests under specific situations and can only affect yourself. While everyone has a magic power, its considered on a societal level that a big part of the populance has none, simply because their power is subtle, useless, or incompatible with their current context.

Magic comes, in the very literal sense, from blood. Human blood, interacting with different factors, is how magic happens, and the amount of magic someone can do is limited by the amount of blood they can take from their own body. Every individual is different, and so every person's blood can do a different, usually very specific, type of magic. For that reason, stealing somebody's blood is one of the highest offences that can be comitted and it is also why some places where a lot of blood has been spilled in the past can change the environment in it. For example, there is a field of flowers, in Liv's kingdom, where due to some mysteriously buried the bodies, the bees that take nectar from that field make floating beehives. Those domestic bees belong to an old lady who makes and sells floating candles.

Active magics need a lot of experimentation and study to be used effectively, which not everybody has the resources for. This is why most magic users in the alliance are wealthy or have a patronage of some sort. The most common type of patronage comes through different guilds that regularly test and recruit in towns to find people with magic suited for their speciality.

Magical abilities in the cast

Ash

His passive fire-based magic indicates how favoured he is by the fire-deity. When he was 9 years old, it was revealed he was immune to any negative effects of fire, be it burns or smoke inhalation. Ash feels comfortable in the highest of temperatures, and were it not for the lack of fire-proof clothing, he could happily sleep inside a lit hearth. Despite this, touching hot metal still feels very uncomfortable to him, and he is susceptible to cold temperatures and snow.

Liv

Her healing abilities are strong enough that she was taken in by the healer's guild as a toddler, and developed her active magical abilities in accordance to their tenets until her uncle Robert found her. She can enhance the healing (or harming!) abilitites of any plants she grows, making for very effective tinctures and potions, as well as revive any dried plants to their full efectiveness as if they were freshly harvested. With her uncle's and step parent's support, this has allowed her to run her own apothecary.

Ember

As a knight-adept, Ember has not developed her magical abilities after being tested for any extraordinary powers as a child. However it seems that animals feel strangely calm and unthreatened around her, which has led to her life-long interest in studying magical beasts. Ember may, however, sometimes underestimate the danger these present to other people.

Fiona

Beyond the initial tests that proved inconclusive, her contact with magic has been limited. Since none of her passions have been enhanced by the addition of blood, Fiona remains unconcerned with the matter - not everybody's personal magic is suited to their lifestyle, after all.

Robert, the dark lord of bones

As his title may suggest, the dark sorcerer of the Valrutis kingdom has the unique ability to animate full skeletons to do his bidding. Robert discovered his magic on accident at a fairly young age and has been experimenting and growing his territory ever since. The amount of independence and intelligence the raised skeleton posesses, depends entirely on the concentration of blood used during the revival process. Skeletons bound to a single task like digging in a mine require relatively little effort to produce, while the production of Cadmus, his seneschal, was a long and complicated undertaking. Once animated, the skeletons can stay like that for several months to years, depending on their complexity.

Virgil

When the only legitimate offspring of both the queen and the king was born, hopes were high for Virgil to posess great magical abilitites. But despite many tests in his toddlerhood, he showed no magical reaction to fire, danger, or any of the guild domains, which is why the monarchy started searching for a more blessed half-brother to serve as crown prince. None of those tests accounted for a lesser-known passive ability that hadn't been found in decades: being able to nullify the magic in a radius around the person. In the past this talent has been highly sought after in the dragon war, as it could reduce a dragon's natural defenses, and in military skirmishes where the opposing side used enchanted weapons. This ability has not led to a long and peaceful life, however, and revealing it might put Virgil in a very precarious position.