Politics of the Currents

Power never moves through the world without changing more than stone and flesh. It changes who gets to speak, who gets to rule, and who is allowed to be afraid.
  In Duskfall, the four currents of magic do not just shape spells. They shape institutions—towers, temples, circles, guilds—and those institutions, in turn, spend as much effort wrestling with each other as they do with monsters and storms.
  Beneath every miracle, ward, and harvest blessing, there is a quieter struggle over who owns the right to touch the unseen.

Keepers of the Tapestry – The Order of Magi

The Order of Magi began, if its own records can be believed, as a handful of terrified Pullers who decided that dying together in a controlled explosion was preferable to dying separately in a dozen random disasters.
  From those nervous beginnings, it has grown into one of the most influential powers in Duskfall: a sprawling institution of towers, colleges, and remote observatories, all devoted to the study and management of the Tapestry.
  Officially, the Order claims three mandates:

1. To understand the Tapestry – charting safe paths, cataloguing spells, and arguing endlessly about where the power truly comes from.
2. To protect the world from Arcane disaster – regulating who may Pull, how, and where.
3. To advise rulers on matters involving Rift, Tapestry, and other Transcendent phenomena.

Unofficially, there is a fourth mandate: to make sure no one else gets better at this than they are.
  Over time, the Order has drawn more than just Pullers into its halls.

• Artificers seeking resources and protection found a home in the towers. Their Weave-work was declared a “recognized discipline of the Great Art,” slotted into its own ranks and jargon.
• Some Bards joined as specialists in morale, communication, and subtle magic carried on words. They sit at the edge of the Order’s structure: half-respected, half-feared.

From the outside, all of these people wear similar robes, share libraries, and argue in the same smoky rooms. The sign above the door says Order of Magi; the distinctions inside are invisible to most eyes. This bleeds public perception: to speak of “the Magi” is to speak of Arcane and Artifice and the odd Bard all at once.
  The Order’s influence is felt in three main ways:

• Charters and Laws – In many realms, no tower may be raised and no large-scale working attempted without Order license. “Unregistered” casters are pressured, bribed, or bullied into joining—or into leaving.
• Monopoly on Rift Knowledge – The Order hoards what it learns about the Rift and Tapestry. Some of this is genuine caution; much of it is the instinct of any guild to protect its secrets.
• Custodianship of Warlocks – By long, uneasy agreement with various thrones and temples, unknown Pact-Bound are placed under Order observation “until their patronage is clarified.”

The Order likes to present itself as a neutral service: dangerous, yes, but necessary and responsible. Outside its walls, opinion varies. Some see the Magi as guardians holding back chaos. Others see them as arsonists who insist only they are qualified to carry torches.
  Often, both are right at once.

Guardians of the Worldstream – Circles, Lodges, and Quiet Pacts

There is no single Order of the Worldstream.
  Primal power resists being marched into neat rows. The land’s stewards are scattered: Druid circles, Ranger lodges, spirit cults, wise-folk lineages, and lone wanderers who answer only to the rustle of leaves and the cry of distant beasts.
  Yet for all their difference, they share a sense of custodianship.
  Where the Order of Magi declares itself keeper of the Tapestry, Primal workers see themselves as keepers of relationship between people and place. They mark where the Worldstream runs strong and thin. They record, in stories and scars and stone, which groves have forgiven old wounds and which still hold grudges. They remember where it is safe to ask for more, and where a single extra demand might leave a valley empty.
  They have little interest in charters. Their laws are older:

• “Do not build where the land still bleeds.”
• “Do not take more than the river can give back in a year.”
• “Do not bind a spirit that has not harmed you.”

Kings and councils find these rules… inconvenient.
  Roads must be built. Trees must be cut. Stone must be quarried. The people must eat, and fear of famine is older than fear of any Tapestry-snarl. So Primal circles find themselves constantly negotiating with those who think of the world as resource rather than relative.
  Sometimes they craft compromises: a forest thinned but not razed, a mine worked only in certain months, a river redirected in a way that does not choke it. Sometimes they fail, and watch as land they have tended dries up inside, its Worldstream branch turning thin and sour.
  Their relationship with other institutions is complicated:

• With temples, they alternate between alliance and open quarrel. A god whose doctrine values stewardship can find loyal partners in Primal circles. A god who demands conquest or purity often clashes hard with any who tell them “no” on behalf of the land. With the Order of Magi, relations are chilly. Magi see circles as superstitious meddlers; circles see Magi as children playing with knives over their parent’s sleeping body. With Artificer guilds, tempers flare quickest. Every large Weave-work that nets the Worldstream’s echoes feels, to Primal senses, like another leash thrown over something that ought to run free.

Yet when monsters rise from Titan scars, when cities crumble and the Worldstream wails with sudden loss, it is often Druids and Rangers who arrive first, guided by currents others cannot hear. Even Magi and priests have learned to send word to the circles when the land itself seems to hurt.
  No one appoints them. No one crowns them. But when the Worldstream cries out, it is usually their hands that lift first.

Thrones and Temples – The Divine Game

If the Order of Magi claims the Tapestry and Primal circles claim the Worldstream, temples claim meaning.
  Divine institutions are less concerned with how power flows than with what it proves. A successful miracle is a stump speech written in light: “Our god is real. Our vows are heard. Our way is correct.” A failed miracle is an embarrassment to be explained away, or a political opportunity for a rival faith.
  Temples and holy orders play three overlapping games:

1. Legitimacy – convincing rulers and commoners that their patron’s favor defines which laws are just, which wars are righteous, which marriages, oaths, and treaties the world itself recognizes.
2. Monopoly – arguing that all Gifted magic should flow through them: that Primal pacts are “misdirected worship,” that Warlocks are “stolen property,” that small household gods and shrines are “confusion at best, blasphemy at worst.”
3. Containment – deciding which other magical practices are tolerable “in their proper place” and which must be hunted, converted, or destroyed.

Some temples cultivate friendly ties with the Order of Magi: blessed wards over towers, joint expeditions into Rift-scarred lands, Magi on retainer to investigate “unusual phenomena” that might be miracles—or might be something much less welcome.
  Others treat the Order as a necessary evil at best, an affront at worst. Their sermons thunder against “those who would seize what should be asked for,” even as their palaces quietly hire Artificers to build conveniences behind the altar.
  Their view of Primal circles ranges from respectful partnership—“you tend this valley; we tend the souls in it”—to outright war. Excommunicating a grove is hard; you cannot drag a forest to the pyre. Burning its Druids is easier, but rarely ends the argument.
  As for Warlocks, most official stances are clear: pacts made outside sanctioned doctrine are heresy. What happens in practice depends on the patron.

• A Pact with a recognized Celestial or Titan may be retroactively blessed, declared a “special vocation” and folded into the temple’s hierarchy.
• A Pact with something that can be painted as a demon, false god, or rival power is denounced, its bearer marked for purification or destruction.

Of course, behind closed doors, there are always exceptions. A Warlock whose gifts are too useful, whose patron whispers answers the temple wants, may find themselves quietly tolerated so long as they never speak their true source aloud.

Guilds, Colleges, and the Price of Wonders

Not all politics are grand. Much of the day-to-day struggle over magic concerns who gets access to what, and at what price.
  Artificer guilds control the spread of practical wonders:

• Enchanted lamps in city streets.
• Self-mending bricks in important walls.
• Messaging devices that let rulers whisper across kingdoms.

They charge dearly for such things, not only in coin but in concessions: workshop rights, exemptions from mundane law, say in how new districts are built. When a guild chooses to deny its services to a city, that city falls behind its neighbors in trade, defense, and prestige.
  The Order of Magi resents these guilds’ independence, but cannot easily absorb them completely. Artifice requires contact with the Worldstream’s echoes that many tower-bound scholars do not possess, and guild-masters are careful to hold some secrets back.
  Bardic colleges trade in subtler currency: influence.
  A college that can promise a lord that their messengers will be heard, their victories sung, and their enemies mocked in every tavern has considerable leverage. Many such colleges maintain ties both to the Order of Magi and to temples, walking a dangerous line between naming themselves servants of truth and admitting that they can tilt the mood of whole nations with carefully placed stories.
  In the midst of this, ordinary people learn to read the signs of who owns what magic:

• A ward-stone bearing both a temple’s sigil and the mark of a tower means that street has been paid for—twice.
• A bridge shored up with runic plates bearing a guild crest hints at who funded it.
• A traveling healer with no obvious symbol, no guild-token, and no tower mark is either a harmless charlatan… or something much stranger.

And threading between these structures move the Pact-Bound, who belong to no one—or to someone far outside any mortal charter.
  In the end, the Politics of the Currents all circle the same unspoken question: Who decides what is “allowed” to happen in the world?

• The Order of Magi answers: “Those who understand the Tapestry.”
• Temples answer: “Those whom the gods have chosen.”
• Primal circles answer: “Those who listen when the land says no.”
• Guilds and colleges answer: “Those who can pay, and those who can make others pay.”

The currents themselves do not answer.
  They simply move, and remember, and wait to see what mortals will do with the threads they have taken in hand.