Sorcery

When the Gods first put Magic into the World, pushing down energy into the scars left by the Colossus War, that energy began to seep into the fabric of the material. It pooled in sacred locations, flowed along sacred rivers; it permeated living flesh, concentrating through food chains and bloodlines, imparting strange abilities to certain creatures.   In Mortal Lineages, this first manifested, in children born after two or three generations of exposure, as Wild Surges, half-controlled releases of arcane energy. Noticeably distinct from the controlled release of Wildcraft, let alone any more developed magical form, at first these manifestations were always chaotic, but time and practice led to the development of the first deliberate sorcery: Magic worked by a combination of inborn power and practiced discipline.   A sorcerer's power comes in two parts: the source of their power and their mode of practice. Unlike other magicians, sorcerers do not filter magical energy from the world, but instead they draw it from an internal wellspring. There are many things that can cause a child to be born with such a wellspring, but they fall into three general categories:

• Environmental sources are external magical foci which subject an infant - often before birth - to intense magical fields. This might be an intense pooling of divine, arcane or even ifril energy, the presence of a powerful extraplanar being, or simply a series of powerful spells. One such catalyst is exposure to Void energy, which can lead to the practice of Void Sorcery a quite distinct type of magic, similar only in that it is not studied on a theoretical level.
• Inherited sources are the result of a non-material heritage, or sometimes the intercession of a powerful, magical being, and are always inborn.
• Conjunctional sources arise from a child's birth, or some other formative event, occuring not just in the right place, but also the right time, for example at the moment of an alignment of the sun or moon with one of the Wandering Stars.

While the power of the sorcerer is innate, flowing in every fibre of their being, sorcery also requires method; if not study, then certainly practice. The form of this practice is how the sorcerer marshalls and understands their own capabilities. It is their mode, or sometimes their praxis, and again tends to fall in one of three categories:

• Archaic praxes make use of dead Languages, borrowing heavily from wizardry for their somatic workings and paraphernalia, and leaning heavily on a presupposed dignity of magic. Archaic praxis is the mode of choice for the sorcerer who takes themself very seriously.
• Constructed modes are associated with family traditions, and sorcerous orders who reject wizardly influences. They have rules, structures, and a thematic consistency, and usually a definite and proud sense of their own history.
• By comparison, a piecemeal praxis is one developed by a sorcerer with no structured teaching, consisting of bits and pieces of whatever they have found that works. These sorcerers are usually the ones that annoy wizards the most.