How magic pervades Kuithne

From Kuithne

Essence is a highly responsive and visible force of nature on Kuithne. Almost all beings have a connection to it and manipulate it to varying degrees. The key here is that it is suspectible only to the influence of living beings. This manifests in a number of ways:

The land

The land takes on characteristics according to its past and present inhabitants. This shapes geography, how magic works, and subtly how things work in general. Essence respond to the collective force of beings.

The people

Although wizards who devote themselves purely to the mastery of essence do exist, everybody can to some degree manipulate it. In fact, pretty much everything is a potential channel to manipulate essence provided it is refined enough. Hence master warriors learn how intuitively accomplish magical feats to amplify their skills the more refined their mastery gets, master smiths learn how to imbue their items with magical properties by masterful craftmanship and so forth. There are schools of training in how to harness the latent magical potential of virtually any discipline. The key here is refinement and mastery - completely ordinary people generally do not manifest much aptitude except to perform minor shticks.

Animals

Animals, unlike most intelligent beings, tend to manifest their magical potential genetically, hence their magical traits are more uniform to race. It seems intelligence naturally diversies the mind in ways for greater diversities of magical manifestation but also potentially more shallow manifestation.

Items

The same way the land can take on attributes of its past and present inhabitants, items can take on attributes from their past and present owners, usually relative to their power.

Words

The secret behind the mastery of wizards was the ancient discovery that words seem to have a particular mystic resonance to essence. It is as if there exist some realm of true words (the same way it is posited by some today that numbers truly exist and are not just mental constructs) in which everything is somehow represented by wordings somehow. People can find out their own true names to attain mystic atunement to the essence (so can others to control them), people with great power and influence on the world can find their names taking on power of their simply by being invoked and so forth.

The gods

Another way to harness the essense is by divine empowerment. Although it is the same basic force used, divine empowermentis a way for the gods to attune their followers to the essence in particular ways to serve their purpose. It is by some considered a shortcut to power, but also a restrictive due to its submissive nature to the gods. By others, it is considered merely another discipline for harnessing magical potential among many others.