The Four Currents of Power

There are many stories in Duskfall about where magic comes from.
  Ask a village priest and they will tell you that all wonder flows from the grace of the gods and Titans, poured into the world like rain. Ask a hedge-witch of the old groves and they will say the land itself remembers, and that memory is power. Ask a Magus in their tower and they will unroll diagrams and arguments and speak of things beyond the sky, of rends in reality and patterns only they can see.
  Most folk simply say “it is magic” and leave it at that.
  But the learned of Duskfall, those who devote their lives to the study of such things—Magi, theologians, spirit-talkers, artificers and a few unfortunate Warlocks—have stumbled on a rare point of agreement. They say that all magic, no matter how it is dressed in rite or song, comes down to how essence moves.
  Essence is the unseen breath beneath all things: the spark of thought, the warmth of life, the weight of meaning in a story, the terrible pressure at the heart of a storm. Most cannot feel it. A few are born with the senses to notice its flow. Fewer still learn to shape it.
  Those few describe magic with two simple questions:

1. Is this power Claimed or Gifted? Does the caster take the essence by effort, design, and risk…or does it come of its own accord, offered freely along a bond or in answer to a call?
2. Is this power Beyond the world, or Of the world? Does it rise from Transcendent realms—the Rift, the hidden Elsewhere, the courts of gods and Titans…or is it drawn from Immanent currents, the life and memory that flow through Duskfall itself?

From these two questions, the scholars draw a simple grid and place every working they know upon it. Four corners, four ways the world’s power moves:

• Claimed, Transcendent – force wrested from the unseen Tapestry that hangs about the Rift.
• Claimed, Immanent – power taken from the Worldstream’s echoes in matter, craft, and story.
• Gifted, Otherworldly – miracles pushed into mortal hands by distant patrons.
• Gifted, Immanent – blessings drawn from the world’s own living soul, when it chooses to share.

Most people of Duskfall will never hear these terms. To them there is only “wizard’s fire,” “holy light,” “the old ways,” and the quiet dread that comes with anyone who can speak to forces unseen. But beneath their stories and superstitions, the same currents run: threads in the Tapestry, tides in the Worldstream, and the hands that reach for both.
  What follows is the best attempt of the age to describe these currents. It is not complete. It is certainly not agreed upon. But if you would walk Duskfall with your eyes open—if you would bargain, beg, or steal power and live long enough to regret it—then you must understand the four currents of magic and the ways they shape the world.