Two Great Seas of Essence
The sages of Duskfall argue over names for nearly everything, but on one point most will agree: the world swims in Two Great Seas of Essence.
One lies within the world, coiling through root and river, blood and breath—a slow, circling current that remembers every life it has ever touched. The other lies beyond the world, pressing in through wounds in the sky and cracks in the firmament, a vast unseen pressure that minds were never meant to hold.
Those who walk the old paths call the first the Worldstream.
Those who study the Rift speak in hushed tones of the second, and the Tapestry that shapes it.
Every spell, miracle, blessing, and curse in Duskfall touches one or both of these seas. Some do so gently, asking permission. Others hammer on them like a blacksmith on hot iron. A few—the pacts of Warlocks, the works of Titans—seem to tear at both at once.
To understand magic, one must first understand the waters it stirs.
Beneath the soil and stone of Duskfall, beneath oceans and deserts, beneath the foundations of cities and the roots of mountains, there is a river that no mortal eye can see. Those who feel it call it the Worldstream.
The Worldstream is the circling breath of the world. Every living thing drinks from it—plant and beast, mortal and monster, even spirits fashioned from memory and dream. When a creature dies, the last warmth in its blood, the last flicker of its thoughts, the weight of all it has done and felt, flows back into this hidden river. When new life stirs—a seed cracks, a child draws breath, a fledgling spirit wakes in a deep wood—it is the Worldstream that rises to fill it.
To most, this is only a poet’s tale. But to those attuned to it, the Worldstream is as real as rain.
Druids speak of standing in quiet places and feeling it lapping at their ankles, though their feet rest on solid ground. Rangers on long patrols talk of a pulse in the land that quickens near battlefields and old ruins, and slows in untouched glades. Some bards claim that at the height of a performance—when an entire hall breathes as one—the Worldstream swells around them, drawn to the shared emotion like tide to the moon.
The Worldstream is not a single smooth current. It is a braided river of memories and instincts:
Sometimes the answer is a roaring flood: lightning at a raised hand, roots surging up through stone, flesh shifting to claw and fur. Sometimes the answer is a whisper: a guiding breeze, a sense of where water lies, a single stubborn flower blooming in frost.
And sometimes, the answer is silence.
For the Worldstream remembers. It remembers forests burned for war, rivers choked with the dead, and cities that feed upon the land without giving anything back. In such places, the current may run thin and bitter. Primal Magic grows sluggish or twisted. A Druid who has broken a pact with a grove may find only cold stillness where once there was a welcoming rush.
Not all who touch the Worldstream do so gently. The crafters of Artifice have learned to feel for places where its surface runs close to the world—nodes of emotion, belief, or history—and to hook those eddies into their works. A relic blade forged on the same anvil for generations, a city’s bell that has tolled for centuries, a song sung in every tavern from coast to coast: all of these sit where the Worldstream brushes the surface, and so they are easier to weave power through.
To the Worldstream, however, there is a difference between being heard and being harvested.
Those who walk the Primal paths insist that the Worldstream is the world’s own soul and must be treated as such. Strip too much from it, they say—bind too many spirits, bottle too many blessings, twist too many echoes into weapons—and the river will thin, leaving only dust and ghosts behind.
Whether that is truth or superstition, every great age of Duskfall has its stories of places where the land stopped answering.
The Magi of the towers may argue that the Worldstream is simply a lower branch of some grander, cosmic flow. Priests may claim it is the runoff of divine miracles. Spirit-talkers may swear it is older than gods and Titans alike.
The Worldstream does not argue. It only takes, returns, and remembers.
If the Worldstream is the world’s own breath, then the Rift is its open wound.
There are places in Duskfall where the sky is wrong. Where light bends in ways it should not. Where sound arrives a moment before it is made. Where a person can stand and feel, with a certainty that sets their teeth on edge, that this is where the world ends.
The Rift is not one single tear—at least, not as mortals understand it. Some speak of a great original wound from which all other cracks, scars, and thin places spread. Others insist that every Rift is a separate hole punched in the skin of reality by Titans, gods, or older things still. Whatever its origin, where the Rift touches the world, another sea of essence presses in.
Those who can feel such things say that this essence is not like the Worldstream. It is colder and brighter, or hotter and emptier, depending on who you ask. It does not circle, it presses. It has no memory of trees or blood or stone. It smells, in the mind, of distance.
Left to itself, this Transcendent essence would scour worlds clean. But around the wounds of the Rift, something else has formed—or been laid down, or left behind.
The Magi call it the Tapestry.
The Tapestry is not cloth, nor web, nor literal thread. It is the name given to a vast pattern of lines and junctions that seems to hang in and around the Rift, invisible to all but those trained or cursed to sense it. To an Arcane mind, it appears as:
Some describe it this way: the Rift is a breach in the dam, and the Tapestry is the stonework someone left behind to keep the flood from destroying everything at once.
Who laid that stonework is a question that could start a war.
The oldest writings of the Order of Magi contradict each other:
What they agree on is this: to Pull Arcane power is to seize a hold on the Tapestry and drag Transcendent essence along its lines. Sorcerers are born with fingers that can feel those threads. Wizards train their minds to see the pattern and memorize safe pathways through it. Both risk being dragged the other way.
The Tapestry is unforgiving. A line plucked too hard can snap back. A knot worried at the wrong angle can unravel, creating wild surges and tears. Spells miscast near strong Rifts have been known to rewrite the pattern, leaving entire regions where magic no longer behaves as it should—or where it behaves far too much.
Not all who touch the Tapestry do so as carefully as the Magi.
Some Divine patrons seem to ignore it, pouring their power straight through, indifferent to mortal safeguards. Some Warlock patrons claw at it, tearing shortcuts and back doors that their Pact-Bound servants exploit. There are whispered accounts of cults that do nothing but worship the Tapestry itself, convinced it is the true god behind all others.
Most folk never hear the word. They see a bolt of fire leap from a hand, a gate tear open in the air, a person rise into the sky on invisible force, and they say: “Wizardry.” They do not know that somewhere, behind the skin of the world, a line has been plucked, another knot tightened, and the unseen pattern of the Tapestry has shifted by a hair’s breadth.
A hair, in such matters, is sometimes enough.
Give a Magus long enough to think about anything and they will try to put it in a diagram.
After centuries of argument, one such diagram has become common in learned circles: a simple grid, no more impressive than a tavern table scratched with a knife. Yet on that grid—so they claim—every spell, blessing, and curse in Duskfall can find its place.
The grid begins with two questions.
The first: Is this essence Claimed or Gifted?
In the upper left, where power is Claimed and Transcendent, they write Arcane.
There lie the Pullers: Sorcerers born with Tapestry-sense, Wizards who claw understanding from ink and sleepless nights. Their art is to seize foreign fire from the Tapestry and force it into mortal shapes.
In the lower left, where power is Claimed and Immanent, they write Artifice.
There lie Weavers: Artificers and Bards who take hold of the world’s own echoes—in steel, stone, song, story—and knot them into tools, wards, and performances. Their magic is cut from the Worldstream’s surface and sewn into new cloth.
In the upper right, where power is Gifted and Otherworldly, they write Divine.
Here dwell those who are chosen: Clerics, Paladins, prophets whose strength is pushed into them by distant powers. They do not own their miracles; they borrow them, under watchful eyes.
In the lower right, where power is Gifted and Immanent, they write Primal.
Here walk the stewards of the world: Druids, Rangers, and spirit-talkers who are answered by the Worldstream itself. Forests lend them their wrath, rivers their patience, beasts their teeth—so long as they remain in good standing.
Arcane and Artifice share the left-hand column. Both deal in Claimed power, both are met with suspicion by those who mistrust anyone bold enough to take. Divine and Primal share the right-hand column. Both depend upon Gifted power, on relationships that can sour, on promises and taboos and oaths that can be broken.
Likewise, the top row—Arcane and Divine—are cousins of a sort, both touching what lies beyond the world. The lower row—Artifice and Primal—are bound to what is within it.
You will rarely hear anyone in a tavern speak this way. For most, all left-hand magic is simply “Wizard stuff,” no matter how gently it treats the land, and all right-hand magic is “holy work,” whether the power answers to a Titan, a tree, or an ancestor’s shade. As for the Pact-Bound, they are shoved uneasily from one box to another as their patrons are guessed at, denounced, or revealed.
The grid is not truth. It is a tool: a way for those who study power to try and understand why some magics may coexist and others tear at each other’s roots. Like all tools, it can be wrong, and like all diagrams, it shatters on contact with the oldest and strangest things that walk Duskfall.
Still, if you mean to live long among spellcasters, it helps to know which corner of the box they are believed to stand in—and whether they stand there by their own hand, or by someone else’s gift.
One lies within the world, coiling through root and river, blood and breath—a slow, circling current that remembers every life it has ever touched. The other lies beyond the world, pressing in through wounds in the sky and cracks in the firmament, a vast unseen pressure that minds were never meant to hold.
Those who walk the old paths call the first the Worldstream.
Those who study the Rift speak in hushed tones of the second, and the Tapestry that shapes it.
Every spell, miracle, blessing, and curse in Duskfall touches one or both of these seas. Some do so gently, asking permission. Others hammer on them like a blacksmith on hot iron. A few—the pacts of Warlocks, the works of Titans—seem to tear at both at once.
To understand magic, one must first understand the waters it stirs.
The Worldstream
Life Beneath All ThingsBeneath the soil and stone of Duskfall, beneath oceans and deserts, beneath the foundations of cities and the roots of mountains, there is a river that no mortal eye can see. Those who feel it call it the Worldstream.
The Worldstream is the circling breath of the world. Every living thing drinks from it—plant and beast, mortal and monster, even spirits fashioned from memory and dream. When a creature dies, the last warmth in its blood, the last flicker of its thoughts, the weight of all it has done and felt, flows back into this hidden river. When new life stirs—a seed cracks, a child draws breath, a fledgling spirit wakes in a deep wood—it is the Worldstream that rises to fill it.
To most, this is only a poet’s tale. But to those attuned to it, the Worldstream is as real as rain.
Druids speak of standing in quiet places and feeling it lapping at their ankles, though their feet rest on solid ground. Rangers on long patrols talk of a pulse in the land that quickens near battlefields and old ruins, and slows in untouched glades. Some bards claim that at the height of a performance—when an entire hall breathes as one—the Worldstream swells around them, drawn to the shared emotion like tide to the moon.
The Worldstream is not a single smooth current. It is a braided river of memories and instincts:
- Under ancient forests, it runs thick with growth, patience, and green hunger.
- Beneath old battlefields, it stirs with fear, rage, and the echo of steel on bone.
- Beneath cities, it becomes tangled—crowded with fleeting thoughts, half-remembered prayers, and the residue of countless small griefs and joys.
Sometimes the answer is a roaring flood: lightning at a raised hand, roots surging up through stone, flesh shifting to claw and fur. Sometimes the answer is a whisper: a guiding breeze, a sense of where water lies, a single stubborn flower blooming in frost.
And sometimes, the answer is silence.
For the Worldstream remembers. It remembers forests burned for war, rivers choked with the dead, and cities that feed upon the land without giving anything back. In such places, the current may run thin and bitter. Primal Magic grows sluggish or twisted. A Druid who has broken a pact with a grove may find only cold stillness where once there was a welcoming rush.
Not all who touch the Worldstream do so gently. The crafters of Artifice have learned to feel for places where its surface runs close to the world—nodes of emotion, belief, or history—and to hook those eddies into their works. A relic blade forged on the same anvil for generations, a city’s bell that has tolled for centuries, a song sung in every tavern from coast to coast: all of these sit where the Worldstream brushes the surface, and so they are easier to weave power through.
To the Worldstream, however, there is a difference between being heard and being harvested.
Those who walk the Primal paths insist that the Worldstream is the world’s own soul and must be treated as such. Strip too much from it, they say—bind too many spirits, bottle too many blessings, twist too many echoes into weapons—and the river will thin, leaving only dust and ghosts behind.
Whether that is truth or superstition, every great age of Duskfall has its stories of places where the land stopped answering.
The Magi of the towers may argue that the Worldstream is simply a lower branch of some grander, cosmic flow. Priests may claim it is the runoff of divine miracles. Spirit-talkers may swear it is older than gods and Titans alike.
The Worldstream does not argue. It only takes, returns, and remembers.
The Rift and The Tapestry
Power Beyond KnowingIf the Worldstream is the world’s own breath, then the Rift is its open wound.
There are places in Duskfall where the sky is wrong. Where light bends in ways it should not. Where sound arrives a moment before it is made. Where a person can stand and feel, with a certainty that sets their teeth on edge, that this is where the world ends.
The Rift is not one single tear—at least, not as mortals understand it. Some speak of a great original wound from which all other cracks, scars, and thin places spread. Others insist that every Rift is a separate hole punched in the skin of reality by Titans, gods, or older things still. Whatever its origin, where the Rift touches the world, another sea of essence presses in.
Those who can feel such things say that this essence is not like the Worldstream. It is colder and brighter, or hotter and emptier, depending on who you ask. It does not circle, it presses. It has no memory of trees or blood or stone. It smells, in the mind, of distance.
Left to itself, this Transcendent essence would scour worlds clean. But around the wounds of the Rift, something else has formed—or been laid down, or left behind.
The Magi call it the Tapestry.
The Tapestry is not cloth, nor web, nor literal thread. It is the name given to a vast pattern of lines and junctions that seems to hang in and around the Rift, invisible to all but those trained or cursed to sense it. To an Arcane mind, it appears as:
- Lines of pressure that can be plucked like harp strings.
- Geometric paths that energy insists on following.
- Knots where power slows and pools, like eddies in a storm.
Some describe it this way: the Rift is a breach in the dam, and the Tapestry is the stonework someone left behind to keep the flood from destroying everything at once.
Who laid that stonework is a question that could start a war.
The oldest writings of the Order of Magi contradict each other:
- One school insists the Tapestry is natural law, simply how reality defends itself. Wherever a Rift opens, the Tapestry condenses around it, like scar tissue around a wound.
- Another claims the Titans wove the Tapestry deliberately, binding loose power into strict patterns so that mortals could touch it without being unmade.
- A third, quieter faction suggests the Tapestry is not of this world at all—that it is the frayed edge of some other, greater work, jutting through when realities scrape against one another.
What they agree on is this: to Pull Arcane power is to seize a hold on the Tapestry and drag Transcendent essence along its lines. Sorcerers are born with fingers that can feel those threads. Wizards train their minds to see the pattern and memorize safe pathways through it. Both risk being dragged the other way.
The Tapestry is unforgiving. A line plucked too hard can snap back. A knot worried at the wrong angle can unravel, creating wild surges and tears. Spells miscast near strong Rifts have been known to rewrite the pattern, leaving entire regions where magic no longer behaves as it should—or where it behaves far too much.
Not all who touch the Tapestry do so as carefully as the Magi.
Some Divine patrons seem to ignore it, pouring their power straight through, indifferent to mortal safeguards. Some Warlock patrons claw at it, tearing shortcuts and back doors that their Pact-Bound servants exploit. There are whispered accounts of cults that do nothing but worship the Tapestry itself, convinced it is the true god behind all others.
Most folk never hear the word. They see a bolt of fire leap from a hand, a gate tear open in the air, a person rise into the sky on invisible force, and they say: “Wizardry.” They do not know that somewhere, behind the skin of the world, a line has been plucked, another knot tightened, and the unseen pattern of the Tapestry has shifted by a hair’s breadth.
A hair, in such matters, is sometimes enough.
The Scholar's Grid
Four Ways Power MovesGive a Magus long enough to think about anything and they will try to put it in a diagram.
After centuries of argument, one such diagram has become common in learned circles: a simple grid, no more impressive than a tavern table scratched with a knife. Yet on that grid—so they claim—every spell, blessing, and curse in Duskfall can find its place.
The grid begins with two questions.
The first: Is this essence Claimed or Gifted?
- Claimed power is taken. It answers to effort, knowledge, talent, tools. Those who wield it must reach for it—grip the Tapestry, hook a current in the Worldstream, seize on meaning and reshape it.
- Gifted power is offered. It flows along bonds of trust, worship, pact, or sympathy. Those who wield it must be trusted by something greater or deeper than themselves.
- Transcendent power comes from outside Duskfall’s natural cycle—from the Rift, from higher realms, from Thrones that look down on the world like a toy. It feels cold or blinding or vast in ways that have nothing to do with wind and stone.
- Immanent power belongs to Duskfall itself. It rises from the Worldstream and its echoes in matter, memory, and story. It smells of earth after rain, salt on the wind, iron and ink and blood.
In the upper left, where power is Claimed and Transcendent, they write Arcane.
There lie the Pullers: Sorcerers born with Tapestry-sense, Wizards who claw understanding from ink and sleepless nights. Their art is to seize foreign fire from the Tapestry and force it into mortal shapes.
In the lower left, where power is Claimed and Immanent, they write Artifice.
There lie Weavers: Artificers and Bards who take hold of the world’s own echoes—in steel, stone, song, story—and knot them into tools, wards, and performances. Their magic is cut from the Worldstream’s surface and sewn into new cloth.
In the upper right, where power is Gifted and Otherworldly, they write Divine.
Here dwell those who are chosen: Clerics, Paladins, prophets whose strength is pushed into them by distant powers. They do not own their miracles; they borrow them, under watchful eyes.
In the lower right, where power is Gifted and Immanent, they write Primal.
Here walk the stewards of the world: Druids, Rangers, and spirit-talkers who are answered by the Worldstream itself. Forests lend them their wrath, rivers their patience, beasts their teeth—so long as they remain in good standing.
Arcane and Artifice share the left-hand column. Both deal in Claimed power, both are met with suspicion by those who mistrust anyone bold enough to take. Divine and Primal share the right-hand column. Both depend upon Gifted power, on relationships that can sour, on promises and taboos and oaths that can be broken.
Likewise, the top row—Arcane and Divine—are cousins of a sort, both touching what lies beyond the world. The lower row—Artifice and Primal—are bound to what is within it.
You will rarely hear anyone in a tavern speak this way. For most, all left-hand magic is simply “Wizard stuff,” no matter how gently it treats the land, and all right-hand magic is “holy work,” whether the power answers to a Titan, a tree, or an ancestor’s shade. As for the Pact-Bound, they are shoved uneasily from one box to another as their patrons are guessed at, denounced, or revealed.
The grid is not truth. It is a tool: a way for those who study power to try and understand why some magics may coexist and others tear at each other’s roots. Like all tools, it can be wrong, and like all diagrams, it shatters on contact with the oldest and strangest things that walk Duskfall.
Still, if you mean to live long among spellcasters, it helps to know which corner of the box they are believed to stand in—and whether they stand there by their own hand, or by someone else’s gift.
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