Arcane Magic

Most people think of Arcane power when they hear the word “magic.”
  It is the fire hurled from a tower window in the middle of the night.
  It is the invisible hand that lifts a man from the ground by his throat.
  It is the glowing circle of sigils under the feet of a fool who read the wrong line out loud.
  Arcane Magic is the art of Pulling on the Tapestry—of reaching for the Transcendent essence that presses in through the Rift and dragging it along precise paths until it does as you wish.
  It is Claimed power: taken, not given.
  And it is Transcendent power: foreign to the world that uses it.
  Those who practice it are called many things—Magi, witches, sorcerers, hedge-wizards, rift-meddlers. The Order of Magi insists on “Arcane practitioners,” but even they mutter “Pullers” under their breath, with a mix of pride and unease.

What Arcane Magic Feels Like

Ask ten Pullers what the Tapestry feels like, and you will receive a dozen different metaphors, most of them unsatisfying.
  Some describe the moment of contact as cold strings inside the skull, threads they can pluck with an act of will. Others say it is like standing on the edge of a cliff in a storm, feeling invisible lines of force slamming past them, waiting to be hooked and redirected. A few speak of songs: geometric melodies that the mind hears but the ears do not, each pattern of notes a path for power to follow.
  For the untrained, these sensations are simply overwhelming. Many latent talents go their entire lives thinking they are merely prone to headaches and strange dreams. The lucky ones die of something ordinary before those dreams teach them how to reach out.
  For those who survive long enough to learn, the first true Pull is unforgettable.
  There is an instant of weightlessness, as if the soul had taken a step outside the body. Then a pressure, like a great wind pushing against the inside of the bones. The Tapestry thrums, thin and taut and impossibly vast. The caster is a mite clinging to a single thread, daring to twist it.
  Done well, the power rushes along the pattern prepared for it—down the lines of sigils inked on a page, through gestures drilled into aching muscles, along the shape of an equation memorized until it feels like a prayer. It bursts out where intended: as flame, ice, light, force, a word that breaks stone, a command that ignores distance.
  Done poorly, the power does something else.
  Pullers speak, very quietly, of “snapback.”
  Of the line slipping and the weight of the Transcendent surging back along it. Of minds scorched, not by fire but by too much pattern forced through a space that cannot hold it. Of scars that leave the victim alive but wrong—unable to sleep near others, always listening for a music only they can hear, or forever seeing faint lines overlaid on the world, like spiderwebs of light no one else can see.
  Some never let go again. Those are the ones the Order of Magi does not speak about outside closed doors.

How Arcane Casters Work

From the outside, Arcane practice looks like obsession.
  Tomes thick as bricks, crammed with diagrams and notations. Chambers covered floor to ceiling in chalked circles and half-erased sigils. Young apprentices muttering strings of numbers and syllables under their breath until their tongues stumble and their throats are raw.
  This is not vanity. It is self-defense.
  The Tapestry is too vast to be held in any one mind. No mortal can grasp more than small, safe fragments of it. Every spell, every ritual, every “simple trick” is a fixed route through that pattern: a way to Pull without being devoured by wonder or terror.
  Two broad kinds of Arcane worker are known in Duskfall.

• Some are born already touching the Tapestry. Their dreams are woven with it; their emotions pull on it without conscious thought. Power leaks out around them when they are frightened or angry. In time, these folk either learn control, find a mentor who can teach them, or die—sometimes alone, sometimes in a crater. People call them “natural talents,” “storm-blooded,” or simply “dangerous.”
• Others have no such gift and must cut every path for themselves. They study lines and symmetries, experiment with sigils and gestures, test the response of the Tapestry the way a carpenter tests a board. Over years, sometimes decades, they carve out a repertoire of patterns they trust. These are the classic tower-dwellers, the robed Magi of story and fear.

In truth, the line between the two is not clean. Many “natural” Pullers end up in the Order of Magi or its rivals, forced to discipline their gift before it consumes them. Many book-taught workers discover that their minds have quietly grown new senses, that they now feel the Tapestry even without ink and chalk.
  But whether born or made, all Arcane workers share one grim understanding: the Tapestry does not care about them.
  It does not love them, as the Worldstream might love a trusted Druid. It does not bargain, as a river spirit might. It does not offer, as a god might in answer to a prayer. It is structure. It is opportunity. It is a door that can be forced, a cliff that can be climbed, a beast that can be ridden if one does not fall.
  It rewards only precision and courage.

The Great Uncertainty

Where Is the Power Truly From?
  Every Puller learns, early, that asking “where does the power come from?” is a good way to start a fight you cannot finish.
  On long, sleepless nights, when apprentices have oversteeped their tea and the candles burn low, they whisper theories.
  Some say the Tapestry is simply what reality looks like from the other side. That the essence they Pull is the world itself, viewed at a strange angle, and that the Rift is not a tear but a mirror that never learned how to reflect properly.
  Others insist the opposite: that the essence flowing along the Tapestry is entirely foreign, a sea that would never touch Duskfall at all if not for the Rift. In that telling, every spell is an act of smuggling—stealing a moment’s worth of alien fire and burning it in a place it was never meant to reach.
  Then come the more unsettling thoughts.
  What if the Rift is not the source at all, but only a leak? What if the Tapestry is simply the ragged edge of a much larger design, a pattern that belongs to a reality so far beyond Duskfall that no mind here could ever grasp it? If so, then every Arcane working is a tug at a loose thread in someone else’s weaving.
  There are old stories, carefully not written down, of Magi who tried to find out.
  Some built spells that reached past the Rift, trying to see what lay beyond the Tapestry. Some tried to unravel a small piece and watch how it rewove itself. A few claimed success: visions of endless lattices, of cities that stretched across the sky, of a darkness between patterns that watched them back.
  The Order of Magi officially declares such tales “metaphor” and “madness,” and forbids certain categories of experiment within its towers. Whenever it does so, a dozen private cabals immediately begin those experiments in cellars and caves and forgotten shrines.
  In this, as in all things, Arcane power is hungry for answers it may not be safe to know.

How the World Sees Arcane

For all the diagrams and treatises, for all the grand theories about the Rift and the Tapestry, most people in Duskfall see only the surface: what Arcane power does.
  They see fields saved from drought when a Magus calls down a week of gentle rain. They see a monster turned to glass and shattered before it can tear a village apart. They see a lord’s enemies vanish down a circle of light and never return.
  They also see towers that explode like struck hives, raining fire on everything for miles. They see a single miscast working twisting an entire street into melted glass. They hear rumors of scholars who stared too long into the Rift and now speak in voices that are not their own.
  To a farmer whose father’s house was flattened by a misfired experiment, there is no difference between a careful Puller and a reckless one. To a priest whose temple was spared by an Arcane ward in wartime, no difference between “godless wizardry” and “blessed intervention.”
  So the world holds a double mind toward Arcane workers.

• Rulers court them, for no army can ignore the value of a handful of people who can burn a siege tower to ash with a gesture. They grant them towers and libraries and a long leash—until the leash must be jerked hard, or cut.
• Temples debate them. Some orders condemn Arcane practice as arrogance, insisting that any power not rooted in proper devotion is theft. Others make polite alliances, so long as the Pullers remember who blesses the food and heals the wounded.
• Primal circles distrust them, seeing in every spell another tug on a pattern that does not belong to mortals, another wound in a world already scarred.
• Common folk mostly want them far away, unless there is a plague, a curse, a monster, or a war—at which point they want them very close, just for a little while.

The Order of Magi tries, always, to present Arcane practice as necessary, disciplined, and contained. They invent oaths, uniforms, and ranks. They punish those who flaunt their power too openly. They publish pamphlets explaining that their workings are perfectly safe “when properly supervised.”
  Yet even within their own ranks, every Magus knows a simple, unpopular truth:
  To Pull on the Tapestry is to put your hand in machinery older than the world.
  Sometimes it cuts cleanly. Sometimes it jams. Sometimes it takes the hand.