Wyre

The Wyre is a natural force present throughout Vareth.

It predates dragons, mortal peoples, recorded history, and every known magical tradition. Magic does not create the Wyre. Magical practice works by interacting with a force that already exists in the world.

The Wyre has no intrinsic visible color.

Colors associated with spells, runes, magical materials, or other effects come from the form the magic takes, the materials involved, or the method used to shape it.

Presence

The Wyre is present throughout the natural world, but not at equal strength everywhere.

Some regions contain unusually strong concentrations, while others are comparatively weak. These differences can occur across broad landscapes or within much smaller areas.

Mountains, forests, coastlines, underground systems, settlements, ruins, and other environments can all contain areas of differing Wyre strength. A location does not need to appear unusual physically to possess a strong concentration.

Starfall Reach is notably Wyre-rich, but it is neither the source nor the center of the Wyre.

Concentrations can also change over time.

Living Beings

Living beings exist within the Wyre whether or not they are capable of deliberately using magic.

The ability to sense or manipulate it varies greatly between individuals and peoples. Training can refine an existing aptitude, but instruction alone does not make every person equally capable of every form of magic.

Different magical traditions have developed different ways of perceiving, directing, binding, or channeling the Wyre.

These differences are methods of interacting with the same underlying force rather than evidence of separate forms of Wyre.

Magic

Magic occurs when the Wyre is deliberately shaped to produce an effect.

The method determines what can be accomplished.

A shaman, stormweaver, tidecaller, bloodwaker, druid, necromancer, arcane mage, runecrafter, artificer, and practitioner of sacred magic may all work through the Wyre while using fundamentally different techniques, limitations, tools, and traditions.

No single magical discipline represents the Wyre in its entirety.

Knowledge in one discipline does not automatically provide mastery of another.

Place and Conditions

Magic is affected by the environment in which it is performed.

A strong local concentration of the Wyre can make some workings easier or more powerful, while weaker conditions can limit what a practitioner can accomplish.

The physical environment matters as well. Traditions that work through existing natural conditions remain dependent on those conditions. A tidecaller requires water to shape. A stormweaver works through the atmosphere rather than producing weather without regard for surrounding conditions.

The Wyre therefore does not remove the physical world from magic. In many disciplines, the physical world determines what magic has available to work with.

Materials

Some natural materials interact with the Wyre more strongly or predictably than others.

Metals, gems, minerals, organic substances, and other materials can conduct, retain, resist, focus, or respond to magical workings in different ways.

These properties are important to practices such as runecrafting, artifice, alchemy, magical craftsmanship, and the construction of wards and enchanted objects.

The material itself does not necessarily produce magic. Its value may instead lie in how reliably it interacts with the Wyre when used by a practitioner.

Concentration and Disturbance

Strong magical activity can temporarily disturb the local behavior of the Wyre.

Repeated or unusually powerful workings may leave an area easier to detect magically, unstable for further work, or otherwise altered for a time.

Such disturbances are not uniform. Their severity and duration depend on the magic performed, the surrounding environment, the materials involved, and the strength of the local Wyre.

The Wyre itself is not permanently consumed by ordinary magical use.

Study of the Wyre

No people or magical tradition possesses a complete understanding of the Wyre.

Different societies have developed competing explanations for what it is, why it exists, and how it behaves.

Practical knowledge is considerably more reliable than attempts to explain its ultimate origin.

A practitioner may know precisely how to produce a repeatable magical effect without knowing why the Wyre exists at all.