Dark Magic

Dark Magic has a unique scent for both magic and non-magic users. To non-magic users, dark magic has a rotten, tar-like scent and is heavy in the air as if trying to walk through water with your feet weighed down by chains. To those who are familiar with magic, especially for those with an affinity to celestial magic, the scent is foul and unmistakable to any who come near it. When a magic user comes near even traces of dark magic, it both smells and feels instinctively wrong. Dark magic itself is so foul it taints your soul itself and it can take lifetimes for that stain to be purified. If too much dark magic is consumed, one can turn into a demon. There is also the case of a pregnant mother being near dark magic without realizing besides just the odor and the child being born as a demon.

The scent of dark magic is also used to track down practitioners of dark magic and their lairs. While demons were formerly persecuted for their association with dark magic, only those who actively use dark magic are hunted since the only way to use dark magic is by using sacrifices. There is also a group of these heretics that try to bring dark magic directly from what they believe is the source, The Black. The Black is sealed in another dimension and houses abominations warped by dark magic.

The God of the Sun, The Radiant King, who leads the Order of the Sunkeepers actively hunts down any practitioners and is able to do so by the scent of their magic. For those sensitive to the scent or trained to know it, such as The Radiant King, he can easily catch even the most minute whiff of dark magic from over a mile away. His sensitivity is in part of he himself being a half-demon.