Essence

magicphenomenon

Nature and Use

Essence is a type of particle that exists throughout the world. Mages use it to cast spells, power devices, open gates, and keep some beings together.

Appearance and Distribution

Essence often looks like tiny white particles. Most people do not see it clearly. High-level mages can see or feel it because their magical senses are sharper.

Essence is in the air, land, water, living bodies, spells, artifacts, cores, gates, towers, and other essence-powered devices. Mages draw on their own reserves, on essence cores, on artifacts, or on the surrounding world. They shape that essence into spells, shields, movement, healing, weapons, gates, and other magical effects.

Essence can carry a person's signature. Skilled mages can use those signatures to identify people, track traces, notice weak or fading essence, or detect strange magic.

Some beings are made from essence or held together by it. Gods, pure-essence beings, essence-made bodies, and Malverand creations all use essence in different ways.

Rules & Properties

Essence is everywhere in the world.
Essence often looks like white particles to mages who can see it.
Mages spend essence when they cast spells.
Mages can draw essence from their own bodies, from cores or artifacts, or from the surrounding area.
Essence can be stored in crystals, cores, devices, hearts, towers, engines, weapons, clothing, gates, and ships.
Essence density varies by place. Some regions are essence-rich, some are depleted, and some rifts or breaches leak essence.
Drawing too much essence from a body can exhaust, destabilize, or kill the person.
Drawing too much essence from land or living things can leave blackened ground, dead areas, and corruption. If the damage keeps growing, it becomes darkness.
Too much essence inside one body can cause essence overload.
When some beings die, dissolve, or overload, their bodies break into white particles and return to the world.

Reserves and Spellwork

Essence reserves

Essence reserves are usable stores of essence. A person, core, artifact, tower, gate, ship, city, or region can have reserves.

Spells, movement, shields, healing, gates, and large defenses all spend reserves. When reserves run low, casting gets weaker or stops. Low reserves can also make a person harder to sense.

Stored reserves are held in essence cores, god cores, Malverand hearts, shards, ships, towers, and gates. Cities and armies can depend on these reserves.

Essence in spellwork

Spellcasting uses essence. A mage shapes a spell through control and visualization, then powers it with personal reserves, essence cores, artifacts, or nearby essence.

Some mages can learn spells by watching another mage form the spell in essence.

Failed visualization can break the spell before it finishes. Incompatible magic, direct hits, counterspells, hostile conditions, and disruptive devices can also make spells fail.

Sensing essence

Sensing essence uses a mage's magical senses to notice essence particles, signatures, traces, flows, or concentrations.

Mages who cannot sense essence well rely more on books, teachers, and practice. Mages with sharper senses can judge density, movement, suppression, and strange qualities. Some can identify people by signature, follow residue, or notice when someone's essence is almost gone.

Suppression, concealment, anti-magic armor, depleted reserves, and signatureless attacks can limit what a mage detects. Origin magic can also be hard to read through normal essence senses.

Gods and pure-essence beings can dissolve into essence or reform from it. Some divine follower links appear as lines or veins of essence.

Essence signature

An essence signature is the recognizable feel or pattern of a person's essence. Magical senses can also pick up signatures in creatures, artifacts, gates, places, spells, and concentrated essence.

A familiar signature lets a mage identify someone before seeing them. Strong signatures can belong to powerful mages or essence-rich places; unusual signatures can come from strange magic or depleted essence.

Signatures can be suppressed, hidden, depleted, changed, split, or absent. Malverand hearts store the wearer's signature and existence as part of regeneration.

Essence overuse

Essence overuse is using or draining too much essence. It can happen to a person, army, city, shard, tower, or region.

Personal overuse can cause fatigue, dizziness, pain, visible changes, fading essence, delayed recovery, or death. Shard overuse can blacken the body with corruption and darkness.

Environmental overuse leaves blackened ground, barren patches, corrupted land, and unstable regions. Ancient Malverand bans essence draining inside cities after corruption spreads, and later cultures also restrict dangerous draining in populated places.

Essence overload

Essence overload happens when a body holds more essence than it can contain. Cracks open across the skin, white essence leaks out, and the body may dissolve into white particles.

Overload can come from drawing too much power, absorbing too much from a core, advancing too quickly, or forcing a shard-backed feat beyond the body's limits. It can also be chosen deliberately at the end of life.

Aether magic, gates, and temporal magic can sometimes stabilize or delay overload.

Overload cases include Remiella, the former archon of fire and his wife, Michael, Lunorax, Zharrek, Jorhan, Frederick, Kira, and Master Han.

Essence veins

Essence veins are visible or sensed lines of concentrated essence.

Physical essence veins run through the walls of the source cavern beneath Zarephon, where they light the cave path, murals, and deep lake chamber near the River of Eternity.

Other large essence veins appear around Chronasis and inside the unstable God Realm, or echo of Valrindor. These veins can cross air, ground, and bodies. Divine follower links can also appear as vein-like lines of essence.

Essence shapers also have glowing essence veins as part of their altered bodies. Their veins come from the fusion of former Malverand humans with microscopic essence cores.

History & Origins

In the Malverand era, Arcanis and other researchers begin industrializing magic. They create essence cores, essence towers, essence engines, gates, lights, ships, and other devices that gather, store, move, or spend essence.

The towers gather ambient essence and concentrate it into cores. Cities, ships, gates, and devices spend those tower-charged cores instead of relying only on natural mages.

That progress creates new problems. Heavy draining produces blackened patches, dead land, and darkness. Malverand bans draining inside populated places such as Maraveth and builds towers in essence-rich regions such as Morindel.

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