Divine Magic

Where Arcane workers seize and Primal workers ask, Divine casters receive.
  Their power comes not from the Tapestry or the Worldstream, but from willful beings that stand beyond both: gods, Titans, exalted spirits, and stranger Thrones that claim no name mortals can pronounce. These patrons look down—or across, or up, depending on which theologian you ask—at Duskfall and choose, for reasons of their own, to extend a hand.
  Divine Magic is Gifted: it must be given, over and over.
  And it is Otherworldly: its true source lies outside the natural cycle of Duskfall.
  Those who channel it are priests, paladins, ordained miracle-workers, and sometimes reluctant intermediaries dragged into service by dreams and omens. They do not Pull. They do not Weave. They open.

Patrons Beyond the Worldstream

The Worldstream holds the memory of everything that has lived on Duskfall. The Tapestry hangs around the Rift where something else presses in. Divine patrons, in most accounts, stand above both.
  Some claim them as the makers of the Worldstream, pouring life into the first oceans and forests and setting the river to turning. Others say they arrived later, drawn to the Worldstream’s glow the way moths are drawn to flame, then set up courts and creeds to claim a share of its worship.
  Titans loom largest in the oldest myths: colossal, half-comprehensible beings whose wars scarred the land and tore open the Rift in the first place. Around them cluster lesser gods and great spirits, each staking a claim: over seas, over oaths, over the concept of justice or the simple act of harvest.
  Where Arcane workers sense structure and Primal workers sense feeling, Divine casters sense personality.
  The presence that answers a prayer for safe childbirth feels different from the one that answers a vow of vengeance. A Titan of storms has a flavor to its power—salt, thunder, exhilaration—that no Druid’s calling of local weather can quite match. A god of secrets sends power that feels like a closed door opening a crack, just enough for the supplicant to squeeze through.
  Importantly, these beings do not simply are. They choose.
  A forest cannot turn away a Druid’s call without first knowing that Druid; it must learn mistrust. A Divine patron can deny a prayer on principle: because the petitioner has broken a law, failed a rite, or belongs to the wrong people entirely.
  The Worldstream responds to presence. The Tapestry responds to pattern.
  Divine patrons respond to relationship and allegiance.

How Divine Casters Work

From the outside, Divine practice looks deceptively simple.
  A priest kneels, speaks a few familiar words, and a wound closes. A Paladin raises their symbol and a wave of radiant force smashes into a charging horror. A shrine-keeper whispers over a field, and the next morning the blight has turned, leaving green shoots where rot had begun.
  Yet if you strip away the trappings of incense, vestments, and carved icons, Divine Magic follows a consistent shape:

• Recognition – The caster aligns themselves with their patron: through title, symbol, posture, or a remembered moment of calling.
• Appeal – They frame their need in terms the patron understands: justice, mercy, vengeance, duty, love, change, stability.
• Consent – The patron either answers, sending essence along the bond, or does not.

This final step is what separates Divine casters from all others: they cannot force the gift.
  An Arcane caster whose spell fails has misjudged a pattern or their own limits. A Primal caster whose call fails has misread the land or exhausted its patience. An Artificer whose device sputters has built badly. A Divine caster whose prayer fails has, in some sense, been refused.
  Sometimes the cause is obvious: a broken vow, a forbidden request, a rite performed incorrectly. Sometimes it is maddeningly opaque.
  Priests keep long lists of reasons why a miracle might not come—“the god wills you to endure this trial,” “we are too far from the holy places,” “the sin in this town is too great”—but behind their explanations lies a simple, unsettling fact:
  Divine power is a conversation between mortal and patron, and one party holds far more of the words.
  Those who live by such gifts become meticulous caretakers of their bonds.
  They keep holy days not because the calendar says so, but because repeated rites deepen the channel through which power flows. They teach doctrine not only as morality, but as alignment: a way to keep their communities thinking and acting in ways their patron will recognize and favor. They carve temples into places where the Worldstream already runs strong, or near the thin spots of the Rift, using existing currents to steady the incoming Otherworldly flow.
  They are not, whatever they sometimes claim, in control. But they learn how best to be aligned with something that is.

Divine Vs Primal – Two Kinds of Gift

From a safe distance, it is tempting to lump Divine and Primal workers together. Both kneel. Both speak to unseen powers. Both work through relationship rather than direct seizure. But the difference is as deep as the one between a river and a throne.
  The Worldstream gives because that is its nature: it circulates, returns, and balances. When it gifts power to a Druid or Ranger, it is in the way a body sends blood to a hand that needs to close into a fist. There may be local refusals—places hurt or bitter enough to withdraw—but as a whole, the Worldstream does not judge in words. It remembers. It responds.
  A Divine patron gives because they intend to.
  Their gifts are acts of will, not reflex. They withhold or bestow according to their own nature and goals. A god of mercy might flood a temple with healing power after a disaster. A Titan of conquest might pour strength into its chosen soldiers at the moment of battle and ignore their villages’ pleas for rain.
  Primal workers tend to view Divine casters as people who have chosen to speak to the sky before they speak to the ground. Why beg favors from distant Thrones, they ask, when the world beneath your feet is already listening?
  Divine casters tend to view Primal workers as people who worship the tools rather than the maker. Why treat rivers and forests as if they were the source, they ask, when you could appeal to the hand that shaped them?
  The argument is old, bitter, and unlikely ever to be resolved. Both sides have their stories:

• Primal circles tell of gods who abandoned their worshippers, leaving only the Worldstream to comfort the land.
• Priests tell of wild spirits gone mad, of storms and beasts that turned on their own stewards until a god’s hand imposed order.

Some rare individuals walk in both worlds: a priest who honors the spirits of their god’s sacred grove, a Druid who acknowledges a Titan as “the greatest of the land’s children.” They tend to cause trouble for everyone’s neat diagrams.
  Still, in the scholar’s grid, the distinction remains:

• Primal: Gift from within—from the Worldstream and its many small voices.
• Divine: Gift from outside—from beings who may shape or drink from those currents, but are not bound to them.

The current may feel similar as it pours through a body. But its origin changes everything about how it can be lost.

How the World Sees Divine

To most of Duskfall, Divine Magic is what magic is supposed to be.
  It has rules you can see: temples, scriptures, hierarchies, holy days. It has people whose job it is to say when a miracle is justified and when it is not. It has stories that explain why a prayer was answered in one case and refused in another—even if those stories sometimes sound thin.
  In small villages, the local priest is often the only regular miracle-worker anyone ever meets. When the livestock fall ill, when a child won’t wake, when drought bites, it is the priest they go to, not the distant Magi or the mysterious Druid in the hills. If the priest succeeds, the god is praised. If the priest fails, the god “had a reason.”
  The appearance of order is comforting.
  Rulers rely on this. A king whose coronation is backed by visible Divine blessing—glowing symbols, a brief, unseasonal rain of petals, a sudden hush in the Worldstream’s surface—has an easier time keeping power than one who must rely on naked steel. Temples and thrones trade favors constantly: legitimacy for protection, miracles for coin and law.
  This cozy arrangement makes other traditions nervous.

• The Order of Magi bristles at churches claiming that Divine power is morally superior to Arcane or Artifice. They argue that whether a spell is gifted or claimed has nothing to do with whether it tears holes in reality.
• Primal circles resent temples that declare their sacred groves to be “unclaimed ground” in need of a proper altar. They remember all too well the times when Divine crusaders cut down old forests in the name of “purifying the land.”
• Artificers both fear and covet Divine power; a device anchored in a god’s favor is a powerful thing, but a dangerous dependence.

Common folk mostly measure Divine casters by results and temperament.
  A gentle shrine-keeper who blesses crops and always has time for the sick is beloved, whatever god they serve. A stern inquisitor whose miracles all involve fire is feared, even if they mouth all the right prayers. A Paladin who rides out to break a bandit gang is welcomed. A Paladin who rides out to break a “heretic” healer or a “witch” who has saved half the valley may find the road behind them very quiet.
  There is one more reason Divine casters hold a special place in people’s minds: they can fall.
  Stories of “fallen priests” and “oathbroken paladins” are as common as stories of saints. The idea that a person could once call down light and now cannot—that the bond has been severed—is a potent warning. It says that even the favored can be cast aside, that the gift is never entirely safe.
  And then there are the worrying stories of those who lost one patron and gained another, quietly, without telling anyone.
  Those tales belong to another chapter, and to the Pact-Bound who stand uneasily between all corners of the grid.