The curse of undeath is one that affects all creatures, but most notably Sengl. It manifests in a variety of ways, from keeping a dead body just barely functional when inhabited by an incomplete soul, to vampirism.
Zombie is the most common curse of undeath, and seems to happen to dead bodies randomly. The body must be intact and technically able to function, such as a death from old age, suffocation, fatigue etc. It’s thought that when that body’s soul departs, a different, incomplete soul or soul fragment can accidentally take its place, reviving the body while only restoring a partial consciousness. Thus all proper funeral rites, and common courtesy, is to make sure the dead body is destroyed such as through cremation.
Beheaded is a curse of undeath originating in decapitated bodies. Either or sometimes both the separated body and head begin to function separately from each other. While the bodies are completely harmless, and just stand around or aimlessly walk into walls, the heads gain the ability to float on the air and often join up with each other in swarms. The heads are usually docile and easily persuaded by foods commonly enjoyed by birds, but they can be ferocious when threatened or under some other influence.
While Sengl build and project their gods and devils into the world, only the Anhysbys know where these higher powers actually come from, and how they work. The true mechanisms behind the matter of the creation and the sustaining of a higher power are too complex for any who are not Anhysbys to understand, but the basic logic is below.
Ideas of faith and religion are constantly in a state of drift, divergence and change even on very small scales. Throughout history, billions of people have had very different ideas about higher powers, things like gods, devils, angels, demons, and other similar forces. While these ideas of faith are imagined by Sengl, they become real through the Leaves of Law.
Within the Leaves of Law, there is an infinite field where virtual particles constantly pop in and out of existence. This field is simply a consequence of the two laws of the universe, Is and Is Not, the two fundamental laws of Teyrnas Ochr and Tir Negythu. When a Sengl begins to diverge in their faith, whether it be a different idea about the same higher power(s) or a new higher power entirely or even the death of a higher power, multiple pathways open up in this field that the Sengl in Parth Perthynas may discover. When the Sengl follow this pathway, that virtual particle prolongs its existence and the other pathways cease to exist.
These virtual particles are retroactive facts, and influence the history, mythology, edicts, anathema etc. of a higher power(s) that make up faith. These facts are called retroactive because they start to exist in the past, present and future as if they had always existed in some way. These retroactive facts are able to bind with each other to form a collection of characters and their information associated with that faith. This is called a cluster. The particles within a cluster can combine with each other, and even annihilate each other back into non-existence. All this depends on how the associated faiths change over time in Parth Perthynas.
The particle’s change in behaviour over time can be thought of like how strings are shaped. They can deform, loop, tie themselves with other strings, and even be cut yet there is always a single path from one end to the other. This means that while the future is defined by the retroactive fact that begins to exist, it is not actually deterministic as there are infinite other factors in the field around it that can distort it, cut it short, or otherwise change it. In these cases, just as a string’s far end may shift when its near end is moved around, the “narrative past” may actually change to suit the new present or future.
The real material past does not change, nor do the minds of the followers of the faith, but the narrative has shifted to remain consistent within itself.
A bond magic is a type of magic that only functions under certain conditions, typically outside of the caster’s control.
A bond magic within the Revived Clovic churches that function between two Sengl who share the same crimes under Clovic law, be it Orthodox, Basic or Acidic.
An occult philosophy of magic that seeks to syncretise and reconcile most of the other dominant theories of magic, taking their common features and seeing how they fit together, finding their shared consistencies and patching out their inconsistencies. It also streamlines the language of magic, simplifying it into a common vernacular that most mages, even if they study some other theory of magic, will know. There are eight “schools” of magic under this theory, which focus on what the actual projected magic does in the world rather than its origin. It’s a sort of morphology of magic, so to speak. Almost all mages use this terminology when discussing their magic, even if they believe that it works differently. These schools of magic are the ones in Pathfinder normally, divination, evocation etc. The following theories were all developed in this framework.
The theory of essential qualities claims that magic is created from the manipulation of certain fundamental essences of the universe that make up all things, both in the physical and metaphysical spaces. This summary is more like a physics primer, because magic is of course derived from physics. This is not to say that essences and their qualations are magical, they are completely natural, it is only the manipulation of them by us in ways that defy the usual, natural laws of physics that is considered magic.
An essence is a fundamental quality of the universe that permeates or embodies a construct, which is a physical and metaphysical “thing” made up of a unique combination of essences in a certain orientation, proximity, and number. All “things” in the entire universe, both physical and metaphysical, are constructs.
The essence does some function to maintain a stable construct through “qualation”. Essences will always desire a stable configuration, but they are not typically particular about having a certain configuration. They could be anywhere, as long as they can make a stable construct. Loose essences are thought to be extremely rare or nonexistent, as no evidence or proof of them has ever been found. A hypothetical explanation for loose essences relies on the idea of a “non-construct” that is something that cannot possibly be conceived of. These loose essences, then, in between stable configurations, are called “anti-quality essences” because since they do not inhabit a stable configuration, they do not qualate anything, and thus have no qualities.
Qualation is a verb that describes the function of an essence in relation to its position and orientation in space and time. It is not just what the essence does in its construct, but where it does it, how many there are doing it, and where it is doing it in time relative to the rest of the construct. Instead of referring to all these things individually, which would get redundant, we just use the term “qualate” to describe all of it. This act of qualation is what gives all constructs, all "things", their qualities and properties.
Six different essences have been identified based on how they qualate. Those essences, and a simplified explanation of their
qualation are below.
1. Perfection - Qualates everything except itself. When manipulated, it produces Abjurations.
2. Harmony - Qualates all that is between itself and another essence. When manipulated, it produces Evocations.
3. Subtlety - Qualates everything in small amounts. When manipulated, it produces Transmutations.
4. Beauty - Qualates form (assembly of essences) and perception. When manipulated, it produces Illusions and Enchantments.
5. Philosophy - Qualates all matter and the spirit. When manipulated, it produces Conjurations and Necromancies.
6. Change - Qualates the past and the future. When manipulated, it produces Divinations.
The physical and metaphysical spaces come from the conflict of what is and is not. When a wizard casts a fireball, he is conjuring up an “is” from an “is not”. Something is now there that wasn't there before. Earlier theories (such as the outdated conservation genesis theory) claimed that fire must have come from some other equivalent instance of fire elsewhere in the physical world. That theory did not have a conception of the metaphysical, and could not deal with the contradictions of the theory, like that demonstrated through the Edric experiment, where arcana researchers led by Aelward Edric at the Academy of Agariko created a completely new material using alchemical techniques, a purposefully volatile material so that researchers could be sure that it could not already exist in nature. An expert in conjuration magic was given this material to copy. If conservation genesis theory was true, when the conjuration expert created a copy of this completely unique material (now called Edricium), the one existing piece of Edricium would instantaneously disappear, its matter being transferred to the conjurer’s creation. However, the conjurer was able to create an identical copy of the existing Edricium without the original piece disappearing. This showed that matter was not just transferred from somewhere else in the physical world, but was materialised from seemingly nothing. This was the first in many experiments that gave more and more evidence (although it had been speculated about for a long time, as we will see) for a metaphysical space outside of our world.
The details about the way that these essences are actually manipulated for the use of magic is still debated, but consensus is that there are four major factors that are needed (not necessarily all at once) to manipulate essences. That is somaticism, verbality, material conduity, and intentionality. A common analogy for magic, focusing on these factors, is of an actor. An actor wanting to deliver a good performance will need to gesticulate appropriately, project their voice clearly, use props and costumes for effect, and stay in-character. While an actor does not need to do all these things at once at full capacity, different scenes call for different priorities, so too does the mage not always need to speak or provide a material component to their spells. The exception to that is intentionality, the "in-character" part of the analogy. As far as we know, no one can cast a spell without intending to. Magical accidents happen of course, but they are the result of poor spell safety and/or unforeseen consequences rather than complete random happenings. The reason that mages are able to utilise these factors to manipulate essences is what is still relatively unknown, as we cannot directly observe essences, or the metaphysical space they inhabit. The leading hypothesis first thought up by Azral L. Pierro-Hector is that since we can directly manipulate our physical body, and every change in our physical body reflects onto our metaphysical form, we are able to use our form as a sort of tweezers to allow us to manipulate essences as they exist in metaphysical space, generating or copying new essences, manipulating existing essences for other uses or manipulating essences to influence perception in physical space. We know that certain movements of the body, certain words or phrases, certain materials to channel through and certain thoughts just seem to be able to manipulate our form in just the right way to allow for access. But we still do not know why it works.
There are virtually infinite constructs. Any possible stable combination of essences in any combination of orientations, proximity, and relative time to each other. Any “thing” that could possibly exist, on any scale, is a construct. That includes the entire universe itself (whether it be infinite or finite), a mega-construct made up of every possible combination of qualations.
From the very earliest days of Sengl philosophy, we have wondered what the most basic building block of reality was. For the time before common-use magic was discovered (in its primal form, the tradition of which continues today with the druids) metaphysics was not a highly explored concept, relegated mostly to religions and stories rather than being used in a practical way every day. A widely accepted idea was that everything was made up of physical, invisible, fundamental building blocks called átomos. Later, the discovery of corpuscles (the physical matter that makes up the cells in plants, animals and fungi, and what minerals are considered a homogenous block of) made scholars attempt to observe what those were made of. This was the breaking point for átomism. While corpuscles could be studied, their affinities and connections studied exhaustively (through much trial and error and necessitated the development of the field of zosimistry), there was no way that we could look deeper. There seemed to be a real wall, a lower limit of what we could physically observe, everything past this wall being in what we know now is the metaphysical space. But at the time, corpuscles were then considered fundamental, even with their many many varieties. Still this did not satisfy many, who insisted that the fundamental makeup of the universe must be simpler, less variable, more predictable and logical than even the patterns of corpuscles. They speculated that this wall was not really a limit, but just a barrier between the physical and the metaphysical, which could not be passed because we are physical objects. Think of it this way. The barrier is a 0 on a number line, and we, as positive numbers, cannot appear on the negative side of the number line unless something about us is fundamentally changed, we would have to be negative. Yet, even being a positive number, that negative number that is a mirror version of us still exists. This isn’t a literal mirror version of us in some alternate reality, though. There is obvious asymmetry between these two spaces, unlike a number line. The two spaces do not influence each other in the same way. However, what defines the properties (qualities!) of a physical object depends on something in the metaphysical realm. There is an invisible fundamental building block of the universe, but whatever it is, it lies on the other side of the barrier. We cannot observe it, measure it, know it, only see its consequences on our side. That changed only a few centuries ago when Nile Aurife Khmi hypothesised that since minerals are solid blocks of identical corpuscles in exact patterns, that we can then use their relative stillness (the corpuscles making up living cells are tumultuous and difficult to study) to make assumptions about the behaviour of their smaller building blocks (Khmi coins the name essence in his dissertation). He turned out to be correct, identifying certain distinct “qualities” about salt minerals. Khmi defined the six essences based on repeated experimentation on how the salt reacted to specific physical stimuli such as magnetic fields, changing the way the salt functioned and thus must have changed the way its fundamental building blocks were qualating the salt construct. Essences become much, much harder to isolate for more complex constructs, but the same principles are known to apply. Even further, Khmi also proved that one could create a diagram of a construct’s essences, representing them as circles with a point on a graph with axes representing relative proximity and time from an anchor point at (0,0).
Yes, but it would be incredibly difficult. Nothing but minerals, consisting of a single stable configuration of essences, have been drawn out. Many do not see the utility of creating these diagrams at all, claiming that it is based on far too many assumptions about how essences work in the metaphysical space, and that it is pushing our own biases of having only physical perception onto a space that does not conform to the same rules of distance and time.