Pillar of Matter
The stone pulsed beneath her palm.
It had felt the birth of oceans. It existed long before memory gained meaning.
It spoke; a tongue without sound, that only a few could hear.
It waited. Patiently. Tirelessly. Eternally.
She closed her eyes and focused. Dust lifted from the cavern floor in a breathless shiver - weightless for a heartbeat - then crashed down with the gravity of an unknown god’s will.
She whispered no words. There were none.
There was only intent.
Her touch was gentle, tracing the unseen script that had shaped the stone into what it was.
In the golden currents of magic, she searched.
The stone trembled. It relived its ancient shape, its forgotten states. But it could not resist.
The paths of reality shifted. Threads of form rewove themselves. Under her steady hand, the rock recoiled. Then relented.
The stone settled again, heavy and still, as the woman opened her eyes.
A shadowed corridor stretched before her, where just moments ago, there had been none.
She wiped the blood from her ears. Her skull rang with a silence too loud to bear.
She was afraid, but there was no turning back now.
She had to proceed.
Areas of Effect
- State of matter manipulation
- Elemental manipulation
- Stractural alteration of matter at atomic level
- Creation of barriers and fortifications
- Disruption or restoration of physical structures
- Alteration of mass, density, or cohesion
Lingering Effects
- Stones pulsing or glowing faintly beneath the surface
- Cracks forming and shifting in solid objects without physical cause
- Dust or small rocks levitating briefly before falling
- Surfaces rippling like liquid stone
- Unexpected weather phenomena
KnownWyld Surges
- Objects become unnaturally heavy or weightless for a moment
- Bone density fluctuating, causing sharp internal aches or brittle limbs
- Momentary petrification of small body parts
- Gravity distorts: objects fall sideways or hover unpredictably
Introduction
"To shape the world is to understand its memory."
Matter magic is the crossroads of reality.
And a master of this Pillar stands at the very center, where myriad paths stretch out before them. Not roads of stone, but patterns of possibility crafted into existence.
A common misconception, even among mages, is that Matter concerns only the visible and malleable: rock, fire, flesh. But nothing could be further from the truth. Matter reaches beneath mere shape and structure, down to the very foundation of the world: energy.
Memory & Stardust
To create & to undo
A first spark, born in the womb of nothingness.
Everything began from that singular breath: the only time energy ever came into being unbidden. Science was almost right in that front. Not even mages can create something from nothing. If there is one immutable truth in the universe, it is this: no mortal - regardless of their power - can mimic or recreate the moment of the cosmic genesis.
Matter mages know this better than most. They do not conjure. They reshape. They translate the possible into the existing, bending the latent forms of energy into different but equally true expressions of reality. To them, Magic is the act of unearthing lost shapes; moments retold in the tongue of memory.
As for the second part of humanity's fundamental law? The one that claims energy cannot be destroyed?
Well that... that was always a lie.
There is a threshold after which matter magic has the potential to erase. Passed that point, energy dies. Not as fire dies leaving ash, but as past dies when forgotten.
What follows is not emptiness; it is absence.
Stone forgets it was ever shaped.
Flesh forgets it once drew breath.
The air forgets how to move.
This is not entropy.
This is unmaking.
And once it is done, there is no bringing it back.
The Magic of Matter
As with all Pillars, the possibilities within Matter are vast; limitless not in form, but in potential. There are no sacred grimoires, no codified incantations etched in stone. What exists is a convergence of comprehension and will. The deeper a mage peers into the raw current of magic, the more adept they become at shaping it.
There are spells, yes, but not as the uninitiated imagine them. Effects passed down through generations have taken familiar shapes, learned forms. Yet no spell is ever truly the same, for every mage reshapes what they cast. Each perspective is a prism and each will a chisel.
What about wyld surges?
Those attuned to Matter shape it with ease. For them, Wyld Surges - if they occur at all - are mild and internal. A nosebleed. A brief hardening of the skin. A fractured memory. Nothing more than the body reminding the mage that they pushed a little too far.
But to touch it without attunement is to strike the bones of the world blindfolded. Only the most experienced mages dare such interference and even then, only when absolutely necessary. For when Matter rebels, it shatters and wyld surges in such cases can be merciless.
Limbs turn to stone mid-thought. Atmosphere condenses into blades. Volcanoes awaken from their torpor. Gravity forgets its duty. And in the silence that follows, the mage is often no longer part of the world they tried to reshape.
Sample Spells
Cast them. If you dare.
Most Matter spells shape, alter, or reweave what already exists. These are the workings of disciplined hands and tempered wills: barriers summoned from compressed air, weapons folded from sand and fire, healing done by persuading bone to remember its wholeness. But there are spells whispered only in silence, that have a single purpose: to undo.
To sever memory is to cut the thread of being. What is unmade does not fall. It does not rot. It does not return. It vanishes so completely the world forgets it ever held that form.
Even among mages, such practice is heresy. The knowledge exists, but those who seek it are feared. To reach such power is rare. To use it is unforgivable. Because those who do, rarely choose to stop.
They are called Unravelers: mages whose touch could silence a mountain, a city, a soul.
Not many walked that path.
Fewer even survived it.
And those who did were hunted.
Colossus Heart
From the mountain that crowned the gates, a statue long silent stirred; a body carved from stone. The mage who awakened it touched no glyph, spoke no word. They simply listened, and the stone answered.
There is something in your skull that isn't you.
It thinks you're the enemy.
Flesh of Defense
Where blood is spilled, matter mages can raise a shelter. Bone becomes scaffold. Muscle sets like mortar. It is said that those who pass through such sanctuaries can still hear the heartbeat of the wall.
Your ribs hollow themselves.
You are no longer the architect of the shelter.
You are part of it.
Weight of Memory
Matter remembers mass. A skilled mage calls upon this remembrance, urging a space to recall its densest truth. In a breath, air grows dense. Limbs buckle. Caverns collapse inward like lungs exhaling stone.
You forget how to stand.
Gravity is your enemy now.
Legendary Matter Mages
Mages might have chosen to vanish from the eyes of the world, but even in silence, some names leave ripples. Echoes that live in the embrace of the wind, in the breath of fire, in the hollow stillness before a landslide falls.
Among all the Pillars, Matter draws the most seekers. It is familiar. Tangible. It offers illusionary simplicity. But mastery is rare. Most barely scratch the surface: shaping stone, shifting weight, crafting barriers. Few ever touch the deeper layers where reality forgets what it is and begins to remember what it once was.
Rea of Thera
“There is nothing broken that has not once stood whole.”
Long before the Cataclysm, one of the oldest recorded ruptures of Magic tore open beneath the island of Thera. A leyline cracked. The earth howled and the sea rose to answer it.
It was Rea the one who descended into the dark to fix it.
Trained in the earliest traditions of Matter, Rea was a weaver of structure; not a warrior in any sense, but rather a restorer. When the leyline fractured beneath Thera, she understood what few else could: while the eruption could not be stopped, the wound beneath it should.
She descended into the rupture’s heart alone and rewove what was breaking. She succeeded, and was never seen again. They say her body still rests beneath the caldera, cocooned in golden threads of memory, her breath slow and deep, synced to the leyline she became.
Aodhán
“Change is not chaos. Change is memory moving forward.”
Aodhán moved with the world; watching how fire became ash, how ash fed soil, how rivers turned to steam beneath the sun. Others saw elements as weapons to be held. He saw them as stories - patterns of remembering.
Wind holding the echo of flame.
Water lifting the weight of forgotten mountains.
In his presence, flame softened without dying, storms circled without breaking, and saplings grew from where he passed. His work gave rise to the Belt of Ashleaf, a grove that became the largest center of Verdant Chorus mages. It is said that no season reigned there. One could walk from ice to fire, from stone to mist, and never leave the garden’s edge.
No one knows where he is now.
Some whisper he embraced the depths when the Cataclysm happened, uniting himself with the currents, surviving underwater when the world broke.
The first known mage to attune to Matter - long before the Pillars were formalized - was Christian, one of the four Primordial Immortals. He saw his control over structure not as a gift, but a promise: that reality could be bent, ordered, rewritten. He dreamed of shaping a perfect world and remaking himself to rule it. In the end, he abandoned his magic in pursuit of immortality. But to those who study the Pillar of Matter, his name marks both the beginning and the first betrayal.
Mysteries of Magic
Magic doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is engraved into the bones of the world, hidden beneath everyday reality. The Pillar of Matter, more than any other, leaves traces and scars upon history. Sometimes these scars are blatant; echoes of power that reshape land and sky. Other times, they manifest as mysteries: events that defy explanation and whispers that hint at forces no mere mortal could wield. Such moments are not rare. The world was always littered with mysteries; events that science could not explain, but magic might yet remember.
- The Green Children of Woolpit, (12th Century)
- The Tunguska Event, 1908
- The Dyatlov Pass Incident, 1959
The strange tale of The Green Children of Woolpit is said to have unfolded sometime between 1135 and 1154. One day, two children appeared in the village of Woolpit, Suffolk, England, both with skin the color of fresh leaves. They spoke no tongue known to the villagers and would eat nothing but raw green beans.
Despite their otherworldly appearance, the villagers took them in. Over months and years, the children’s verdant hue faded, and they began to eat the common fare of the village. When at last they learned the local language, they told a singular tale: they came from a verdant village no one knew; a place where nature grew wild and unchecked, yet where the sun never pierced the canopy.
A mage attuned to Matter sought to protect a remote village on a distant island during a harsh famine. By weaving the elemental memory of the barren land into one of abundance, he hoped to rewrite their fate. Though the village itself was not saved, something unexpected blossomed.
Children born after the mage’s work bore a mark of Matter’s quiet defiance, their skin tinged with the green of life and their bellies filled with the bare minimum.
These two children were the only ones to appear, strange and verdant, as if carrying the world’s whispered promise on their skin. Why they alone came remains a mystery.
On the morning of June 30th, 1908, a fireball tore across the Siberian sky. Moments later, a colossal explosion flattened more than 2,000 square kilometers of forest near the Tunguska River. The blast was felt hundreds of miles away.
No crater was found. For decades, the cause remained unknown. Most now believe it was a meteoroid that exploded mid-air, but the Tunguska event remains a mystery in the minds of many.
Deep in the frozen wilds, an exiled mage sought to raise a floating citadel from ice and bedrock in order to escape his icy prison. But the spell faltered. Energy tore loose from the bonds of the earth and the mage's control. The sky fractured as weight collapsed into weightlessness, then snapped back too fast to hold.
There was no crater, because there was no descent. Only a piece of the world briefly falling upward, before collapsing into a pillar of fire and light.
In February 1959, nine experienced hikers died mysteriously in the Ural Mountains of Soviet Russia. Their tent had been slashed open from the inside in haste. Some of the bodies showed signs of massive internal trauma including crushed ribs and fractured skulls, but without visible external wounds. One woman was missing her tongue and eyes.
They had fled barefoot into sub-zero temperatures. Despite extensive investigation, there was never a conclusive reason for the hikers' actions or their cause of death. Theories about the Dyatlov Pass Incident have ranged from avalanches to secret military tests and alien experiments, but none manages to explain it all.
One of the hikers unknowingly carried an object they should never have found: a shard of raw Matter magic, trapped inside an amulet. At that altitude, in the thin breath of the mountain, the shard awakened. The air grew heavy and gravity began to invert.
Pressure condensed and folded around their bodies as the world around them began to recall its densest form: when stone crushed thought and the sky had not yet learned how to lift.
Their ribs did not break from impact. They broke from the mountain remembering.
Matter is memory.
Maybe somewhere,
beneath the weight of silence,
the earth still remembers.
A quiet spark in the endless dark.
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Effing loved the real world stuff.
Thank you Asmo! Glad you liked it :)