Magic Schools

Attunement

Approximately 25% of the population is born with magical attunement. Every attuned individual is attuned to exactly one school — the attunement is present from birth, identified in childhood, and cannot be changed, suppressed, or expanded. A person attuned to Arcane will never develop Elemental ability, regardless of training, proximity to practitioners of another school, or node exposure. This is a hard constraint at Layer 1; no story can depict otherwise without a formal canon deviation.

The identification of children occurs through standard institutional processes — each of the three major institutions maintains its own identification protocol, and the timing and nature of identification varies by region, culture, and node proximity. In high-node-density areas, attunement manifests earlier and more visibly.

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The Six Schools

Five schools are formally recognized by at least one major institution. One — Psionic — is actively suppressed. Each school is associated with a moon, a deity, a manipulation vector, a cost type, and a terminal degradation state that defines what happens when a practitioner pushes past sustainable limits.

Arcane

Arcane practitioners alter the structural properties of matter and recorded information. Ambient abilities include overlay (seeing the structural properties of objects), documentation (creating persistent structural records), and recording (capturing and replaying events with structural fidelity). The cost — temporal dissociation — manifests as difficulty maintaining sequential time perception. At low tiers, this presents as minor memory fragmentation; at Guru tier, advanced practitioners may experience time as non-linear. The Accord is the primary institutional body for Arcane practitioners.

Elemental

Elemental practitioners amplify and redirect physical forces across four subdisciplines: fire, water, earth, and air. The manipulation is not creation — an Elemental practitioner cannot conjure fire from nothing, but can dramatically amplify and direct existing thermal energy. The cost is physical: Elemental use draws on the practitioner's own physical reserves at rates that increase with tier. At Master and Guru tier, the cost signature includes cardiovascular strain and bone density loss over time. The Crown has significant Elemental representation in its military forces.

Divine Restoration

Divine Restoration practitioners reverse entropy in biological systems — healing wounds, reversing disease states, restoring function to damaged organs. The manipulation vector is genuinely entropic reversal, not merely accelerated natural healing. The cost is literal: each healing event reduces the practitioner's remaining lifespan. The exchange rate varies with the severity of what is being reversed and the practitioner's tier. Boons, wards, and chants are the three primary discipline categories. The Reverie has the deepest institutional investment in Divine Restoration training.

Divine Necrotic

Divine Necrotic practitioners transfer boundary states — they can communicate with the recently dead (bone reading), conduct forensic investigation through communion with residual presence, detect boundary states in the living and recently dead (boundary detection), and sense accumulated presence in spaces. The cost — self-boundary erosion — means practitioners gradually lose the sharp distinction between their own boundary and the boundaries they work with. Advanced practitioners exist in a state of partial permeability that is not quite living and not quite dead. The Accord maintains a forensic division heavily staffed by Necrotic practitioners.

Nature

Nature practitioners reroute life-force between organisms and between organisms and their environment. Somatic reading (assessing the life-force state of a biological system), channel building (creating pathways for life-force flow), attunement (aligning a practitioner's flow with an environment), and felwarrow compound preparation are the primary disciplines. Nature is the only school with a documented 60% stabilization ceiling at normal node output — practitioners cannot stabilize more than 60% of a target system's life-force deficit under standard conditions. This ceiling drifts upward above 7.0 node output. The Reverie trains most Nature practitioners.

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Psionic Suppression and the Eruwendi Contradiction

Psionic attunement is real. Approximately the same proportion of the population carries it as carries any other attunement. The Psionic school — associated with the moon Orrivane and the deity Eruwendi — manipulates consciousness directly: sweep (broad perceptual scanning of multiple minds), broadcast (projecting content into multiple minds simultaneously), reframing (altering how a specific mind interprets a specific experience), clone projection (projecting a false sensory image of the practitioner into another's perception).

Psionic practitioners are not recognized by any of the three major institutions. They are not trained, registered, or legitimized. In most jurisdictions they are actively sought, and in many they are eliminated. The suppression is institutional, not cosmological — Psionic attunement itself is a Layer 1 fact like any other school. The institutions chose to suppress it, and the suppression has persisted long enough to become structural.

The Eruwendi Contradiction is the documented internal inconsistency in the official institutional position: all three institutions invoke Eruwendi's name in administrative oaths and ceremonial contexts, acknowledging the deity's existence, while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of the school associated with that same deity. Contributors writing institutional characters should be aware of this contradiction — it is available as a source of dramatic irony, ideological conflict, and character-level cognitive dissonance.

The cost of Psionic use — cognitive instability — presents differently than other schools' costs because the cost domain is the same as the manipulation domain. A Psionic practitioner who uses the school aggressively is paying with the same faculty they are using. Terminal degradation is irreversible identity dissolution: the practitioner loses coherent selfhood.

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Classes and Guilds

Each school has a set of recognized classes and associated guilds that determine institutional role, training pipeline, and social position. Classes are defined by the combination of school, tier, and primary discipline. A Novice Elemental water specialist and a Novice Elemental fire specialist have different guild affiliations and different institutional access, even at the same tier.

Guild membership is not equivalent to institutional affiliation — the three major institutions (Accord, Crown, Reverie) each have relationships with multiple guilds across multiple schools. A guild that is formally under the Crown's authority may still train practitioners who work within Reverie-administered territories. The guild and the institution are distinct layers of social organization.

Unregistered practitioners — those who have attunement but no guild affiliation, whether through choice, circumstance, or Psionic school membership — occupy a legally and socially ambiguous position that varies significantly by state and culture.

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School Perception

Each school perceives the same environment differently. An Arcane practitioner sees structural properties. An Elemental practitioner feels force vectors. A Nature practitioner reads life-force flows. A Necrotic practitioner perceives boundary states and accumulated presence. This is not merely a flavor difference — it is a constraint on POV instrumentation in the Story Spine Validator. A POV character's school attunement defines what they can perceive directly versus what they must infer. A Nature practitioner cannot see the structural alteration an Arcane practitioner just performed; they can only see its effect on the organic matter in the area.