The Magic System

First, there is the Source

The origin of everything. The begining and the end. The Source is life itself, and what fuels everything that's alive in the world. From the weeds in concrete, to Gods and Deities. Everything is connected to, and depends on, The Source.

Everything that's alive is connected to the Source, and eveything that is connected to the Source, has a Soul.

The Soul is the link between living beings and the Source. It is pure energy, and it fuels life into existance.

Mages can direct and use this pure energy to do magic. However, this has a limit. Magic tends to use energy faster than the Soul can replenish it. Running out, while very unusual and hard to do, would be fatal.

IDK what to name this section

From the Source, there came 7 primordial Deities, each of which was responsible for the creation of one of the 5 sapient races of the world.

Light Itself: Responsible for the creation of Humans. Light Itself wanted to create an intelligent being unreliant on magic, which is why humans are naturally blocked from accessing their own energy to use magic.

After the creation of humans, the other 6 deities, liking the creature, decided to create their own versions. However, none of them found the restriction of magic to be necessary, so they removed that blockage for their own creations.

Earth Itself: Created [Name1], the race most closely resembling humans. [Name1] were given a closer connection to Earth Itself's beloved furry mammals, and so they resemble them as well. They were created with whiskers specially designed to perceive Trails, and with the ability to speak directly to a living being's Soul.

Day and Night Themselve's worked together in the creation of Dragons, the most magically inclined of the races.

Water Itself: Then made the Merfolk, wanting a race that could explore their domain freely, but gave them the innate ability to shift their form, to be able to roam the land as well. The merfolk were also given the ability to speak Siren, and their ability to use their voice to manipulate energy given the right chords, their songs became one of the most poweful kinds of magic (Harmonics).

Air Itself was the last one, and created Avians, wanting a being that resembled their beloved birds. However, The Oracle became quickly attached to them as well, and has since taken over a lot of oversight over them.

Light itself was angered by the fact the other deities took their original idea, and twisted it in a way that went directly against their original purpose (to be a beign untied to magic). After several confrontations, Light Itself eventually isolated from the rest of the deities, and became simply known as the human's god.

Magic and Mages

Magic, by its nature, is a skill. While it can come naturally to some people, every type of magic is a skill that requires time, practice, and lots of study. Mages are respected professionals because of this.

There's several schools of magic, some more difficult than others. the most notable ones:

Foundational magic:

Manipulation of the foundational elements that make up the world. Foundational mages are, in essence, the catalyst for chemical reactions.

Elemental magic:

Manipulation of the elements of the world (fire, water, air, earth, etc). Usually comes naturally to dragons.

Divination:

Future seeing! Divination is a very tool-reliant school of magic, very easy to pick up, but notoriously difficult to master.

Apothecary:

Potion making. It uses the elements of herbs and plants for their magical properties.

Shapeshifting:

Infamously hard school of magic, Shapeshifting requires extensive, hyperdetailed, specific knowledge of the anatomy, of one's own body, and of whatever one's turning it into. Dragons and Merfolk can naturally do a very limited version of it, where they can swap between two predetermined forms hard coded in their genes, so they don't need the granular knowledge.

Medical magic:

Another infamously hard school of magic, for the same reasons. While convenient, inobstrusive and effective, medical magic is immensely dangerous in the wrong hands. It does however have its limitations, as it cannot simply alter someoneone's genetics, so things like allergies and chronic conditions are usually beyond the scope of medical magic. In a similar vein, this kind of magic cannot undo what's already healed, so scars or poorly set bones are also not able to be fixed by medical magic alone. It is because of this that this kind of magic can be so dangerous, as healing something wrong cannot be easily reversed, if at all.

Harmonics:

Music magic, essentially. Harmonics tends to be used mostly for emotional suggestion, except for the case of merfolk, who can use it for complete manipulation of just about any living being, except other merfolk.

Beast taming:

A magic intrinsic to [Name1]'s, it can, in theory, be learned. Using the trail of any given living creature, a beast tamer can use a sacred language to speak directly to their soul. While less effective the smarter the creature, it is a foolproof way to command most animals.

Celestial magic:

An extremely niche kind of magic, accessible only to those the Oracle approves of, as this kind of magic deals with forces too delicate to allow freely. These include control of things like time and space. Most people allowed this kind of magic are able to access skills such as limited teleportation, managment of pocket dimensions, dreamwalking, or more granular control of foundational magic. Most people with these skills are only given one or two of them, at most. They're not marks of uniqueness by any means, and having access to them simply means the Oracle has seen that the person will not use them in a way that causes great harm, or that they will use them in ways that benefits the deities in one way or another. The Altman family has, famously, had dreamwalking and pocket dimensions run in the family without skipping any members for generations.

Dark Arts:

Includes umbrakinesis, shadow walking, dreameating… They're less common magical skills, perfected by the Altman family, an old dragon family infamous for their skilled mages. These used to be a secret set of skills passed along within it, until Maxwell Altman, after the dissapearance of his young niece, decided to make some of their grimoire public in a book, in the hopes one day she'd find it.