The magic lore

Long post incoming. I wanted to write this down also for myself as a future reference. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them below, and I will answer them in the next Q&A post ^^

The next lore post is going to be about spirits, so I didn't write much about them in this one. You can still ask questions about them now, and I will write down the answers in the spirit lore post next time 👀

How does magic work?

Magic in this world works like an amplifier of thought. If you have a very concetrated thought that you learn how to direct in an effective manner, you can cast magic. Anyone can do it who is determined enough. It doesn’t need fancy magic schools, but it sure helps to get formal training on what you can and cannot do, and how to cast spells safely and effectively. Priests learn this for years. Some are better at it than others.

Scrolls and magical incantations work as a guide to help focus the priest’s thoughts, so while they read or chant, they learn to think only about what they are trying to achieve. Any stray thought will result in either a weaker spell or a complete failure.

Magical elements

Every person has a certain aspect of nature that they are more drawn to than others. Zaia for example is attracted to electricity because it’s conductive, it can travel to several targets without having to cast more spells, it reaches far, and it does great damage. Their magic is very effective when one is cornered or surrounded by enemies, but Zaia is also old and experienced enough to direct it in subtle and delicate ways.

People who have found their natural affinity are stronger casters, but not everyone has one. Most priests are sort of rounded-out.

Spirit magic vs Human magic

Spirit magic is much stronger and much more volatile than human magic. A strong spirit’s magic can equal to almost five strong human casters. Spirits however are a lot more restricted in what they can and cannot do. They can’t move around freely, and they always depend on human summoners to call them back from the Duat and give them a purpose. Their magic is always securely tied to a magical aspect (such as damaging electricity in Zaia’s case, or cooling winds in Ebo’s). They are unable to do anything outside of their expertise.

Human magic is weaker but a lot more rounded out. However, it’s usually limited by their belief in their chosen patron god and their own physical limitations, such as their ability to concentrate, their memory, their willpower, etc.

Spirit magic is also a lot more innate and raw. Priests need a lot of concentration and practice to do spells safely. Spirits don’t need that, it comes naturally to them, but they are still limited by their own mind’s potential and who they were while they were still alive. In a magical sense, people are not exactly equal. Their magical strength is always determined by their own willpower, drive, understanding, and critical thinking, and this applies to spirits as well.

The importance of gods in the magical field

Technically, the gods serve little to no purpose in magic casting but most people don’t realize that. Priests, by chosing a patron god, unintentionally limit their own magic in exchange for a more concentrated focus, thus earning a higher potential but a much narrower horizon over what they can do. So in this sense, the gods work like a giant pool of energy, made up of specific thoughts.

The gods are representatives of certain types of magic, and not the other way around, although people generally don’t know that. Priests in Egypt think that you are attracted to certain types of magic because of the god who represents it, but that’s not true. They are attracted to it because that’s the type of energy that resonates best with their own core and personality. The god is only the face that the people put there to make it easier to rationalize the whole process.

For example, Mut is a protector goddess. Those who worship her as their patron goddess, won’t be able to cast strong attack spells because the thought itself would feel wrong to them, because they are followers of Mut by faith. And when doubt starts to seep in, the willpower and concentration will suffer, thus resulting in little to no magic.

That’s why people can generally do only one type of magic and suck at others. They could do more, if they learned how. But that would require for them to understand how the magic works in the first place, dissociate it from the gods, learn about physics and biology, and that’s just too advanced for this age.

The price of casting magic

Like I wrote before, one needs strong concentration and focus to be able to cast anything. Magic also needs to feed from something, otherwise, it will quickly dissipate. Most often, this source of energy is the priest’s own lifeforce. During stronger spells, priests can get tired very quickly, and if they overdo it and won’t give themselves time to rest, they can even die. For this reason, priests usually use different objects to help them cast stronger spells. Crystals can work as a very good resonator and a sort of ‘battery’ for a spell, but the environment itself also contains massive amounts of energies, think of for example winds, storms, heat, and even the people living around them who all feed into the gods’ belief, thus, keeping a massive pool of energy across the land.

As an alternative magic booster, priests can also use someone else’s life force, for example an animal’s. That animal is usually slaughtered in a ritual, and then cooked for the temple’s inhabitants.

Limitations

All magic is limited by the laws of nature. It cannot be created from nothing, and if it doesn’t have anything to feed from, it will dissipate. Even though most of the energy to cast a spell comes from the environment itself, priests still work as the antenna of the spell. It has to go through them, and during the process, the brain is under immense strain. If one does too many or too strong spells, they will get tired, faint, go into a coma, or even die.

Dead things cannot be animated by magic, or at least not for an extended amount of time. Thus, the dead cannot be brought back into a physical body, only as a spirit.

In this era, magis is also very much limited by the people’s understanding of the world. Magic can always go only as far as the knowledge behind it. In Egypt, the sciences are pretty advanced. They know a lot about anatomy, astronomy, and nature, but their knowledge never reaches to the cellular level, so for example they don’t know how the human body heals itself, they only know that it does. What they don’t know, they explain through the gods, but that’s not sufficient enough knowledge to use it in magical casting.

This is why it happens that magic is pretty limited compared to its possible potential. Healing, for example, mostly works on a surface level. They cannot heal deep wounds, inner bleeding, and they cannot do surgery with it. They cannot heal diseases either through magic, mostly because they don’t know what’s causing them – they can only heal the symptoms. Doctor’s practices are a lot more advanced in this regard, mostly from trial and error, but magic doesn’t work like that, because to cast an advanced spell, you need to know exactly what you are doing, where, and why, otherwise you might kill the patient or not achieve anything at all.

How the priest MC’s (and other priests’) sensing ability works

The sensing ability is sort of a sixth sense. It’s different from every other senses (touch, taste, sight, etc). It’s basically an echo inside the brain about the happenings and beings around you. (If you ever saw Star Wars, it kinda works like the Force). It’s not always strongly present, so that’s why it happens that the priest!MC still sometimes gets surprised by spirits appearing and disappearing, but when one concentrates on the sense, they can turn it on easily. It lets them feel the other’s presense, general mood, their aura and their current intentions.

During deep meditations, it also lets the practicioner have an out of body experience where their mind can travel to different places. This is very exhausting and confusing however, so most things experienced during a meditation are up to interpretation. If one is experienced and doing an especially deep meditation practice, they could also see glimpses of the past and future.

Priests usually use different mind-altering drugs, such as opium, mushrooms, and other herbs, the same as in shamanic practices around the world, to help them achieve this altered mindfulness during these meditative sessions. This practice however takes a lot of experience to get it right safely, so it’s only allowed for the priestly class in Egypt.

This sensing ability is present in everyone but most often it gets forgotten at the end of early childhood. Babies have it and most animals too. It can be trained by meditation and different exercises, and by practicing magic, but this takes years of experience, so other MCs will not get it during this story even if you choose magic as your main element during the whole game.

The priest!MC’s sensing ability is on a moderate level. It could be trained further. Hudjefa’s senses are a little bit sharper, but not by much. Petmes’s sensing ability is the most advanced.

Could magic extend lifespans?

Yes. There are a few people in the story who are older than they look because the magic boosts the cell regeneration in their body, ergo, their body doesn’t age, or ages slower. But one has to be extremely knowledgeable in biology to know what to manipulate in the body and how, to do something like that on purpose. Currently, there is only one person in Egypt who can do that intentionally, and that’s Petmes.

This works actually a bit like a healing spell. A very specific, constant healing spell. When priests heal, they have to know what’s causing the pain to be able to heal it. Most of the time, that’s pretty straightforward. So for example if one has a mild stomach ache, they know that something bad is causing pain in that area, and they concentrate on disbanding that bad spot of energy. Or when someone is bleeding, they know that it’s because the skin was split, so they concentrate their magic on the skin to fuse it back together. This works on a surface level, but they usually just treat the symptom, not the cause, so, again, they cannot heal complex diseases.

Egyptians in general don’t know much about aging. Their medicine is not advanced enough to know why people age because they don’t know the human body on a cellular level.

Could magic bring back the dead?

Yes, as a spirit.

In a biological sense however, it’s possible, but very unlikely. The body needs a brain to function and when death occurs, the brain cells start to die. So if someone is extremely knowledgeable about how the human body works, and they know how to concentrate magic in a certain way, and could get their hands on a body that only very recently died (we’re talking less than an hour), and the body is in a condition that it could technically still function if the brain is intact (because they died, let’s say, from a heart attack), and the soul of the deceased person is still around, then they could do it. But this is such an unlikely scenario that it simply doesn’t happen.

Lots of priests have tried this, but most people don’t know about these laws of nature. They just simply fail and they think it was because their faith wasn’t strong enough.

An easier solution to that would be to put a soul into another, live body, by forcefully ejecting the already existing soul there and replacing it with another one. That process however is very traumatic for both the ejected and the inserted souls. Both of them could go insane during the process and that would have severe consequences.

Lots of priests have tried this too. The consequences were severe. There are now official laws banning it, although some secret cults still try from time to time. It’s never a good idea.

Could magic work as a love potion?

Maybe, for a short period of time, if you try to manipulate the other person’s thoughts, but this both would require an extreme, constant concentration on the spell, and you to be stronger willed than the person of your interest.

An easier solution would be to simply make the other person a little bit more open to your own energies and let them make up their own mind about you. This can be done by taking them on a meditation, or simply talking to them lol.

How magical contracts work

Magical contracts usually need a spirit to bind them through their own raw magic. Humans can do contracts too, but those will usually become void after a while because it would need the person’s constant seeping of energy to keep them alive. Stronger priests can do this, or the contract can also be bound to a magical object, like a crystal, to feed it. If the crystal gets destroyed however, the contract becomes void, so people tend to avoid this for safety reasons.

The magical contract that the MC signed with Narmer and Qenna feeds from Qenna’s and Zaia’s magic. As long as they are alive, the contract is valid, unless they cancel it for you.

The contracts are always bound with the person’s blood that represents their life-force. A signature or fingerprint can also work for smaller contracts, because then it becomes a symbol of your own being, and you attach it willingly to the will of the contract. These contracts are usually much weaker and the magic in them doesn’t last long.

Regional differences in magical casting and abilities

Magic, in its theory, works exactly the same way everywhere, because it always works through will and intentions. In Egypt, magis is extremely strong and easily accessible at the moment, compared to other parts of the planet, thanks to Petmes’s crystals.

Egypt, however, is not the only strong magical focus point.

There are hotspots in many places because of the presence of certain people. Petmes’s crystals are amplifying the magic and keeping it reliable and docile, but there are other artifacts like that, scattered throughout Earth.

There are magical hotspots for example in Greece, Central Africa, the area that will be modern Israel, Siberia, Japan, India, South Australia, and a few other, smaller ones across the planet. There are also two giant storm points, where magic is extremely unstable. One in Central America, and one between Japan and Australia, East of the Philippines. These are the places where crystals exploded in the past.

In general, magic has pretty similar effects everywhere, it’s just the people who give it a different flavor by naming it after their own gods and coming up with different ways to direct their spells.

If a strong priest from Egypt would go to a place where magic isn’t as reliable or strong, the priest, for a little while, would be able to cast their normal spells, but their magical ability would degrade over time to the level of their surroundings.