Introducing Zeer’s Magic System
And why nobody there even thinks of it as magic.
Alright, today’s the day. We’re doing it.
We’re talking about the magic system!
Except it isn’t magic on Zeer. Not really. Is it?
When you set out to build a fantasy world, your wandering mind is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to stick in some magic. Because…you know…magic is fun. Forces we don’t exactly have or understand in our world can come alive on paper (or on a screen). Be it chosen heroes with gifts bestowed by gods, or exotic forces that exist next to but outside of nature, bending the rules of reality with dramatic effect.
These are great. I love them. I’ve been consuming fantasy media for what feels like my whole life (or at least since I can remember). But sometimes, if I ask too many questions and forget to suspend my disbelief, the magic starts to feel…juxtaposed. Like an extra layer of varnish added to a painting to give it more razzle dazzle, but it doesn’t really integrate with the rest of the picture. It’s been manufactured for narrative purpose, but isn’t actually seamlessly a part of the world in which it is occurring.
There are a lot of good and bad reasons for this phenomenon, and I am not here today to criticize it, just to point it out as a very real thing that happens. That I’ve noticed, and that I imagine you have noticed at some point as well.
That’s not what I wanted for Zeer.
On Zeer, the powers and abilities that we here on the outside would dub mystical, arcane, and fantastic are merely ordinary. They’re just a part of life; a layer of reality as integrated into operating as lungs are in biology, or molecules are in chemistry. And as such, Zeerans don’t call it magic. They don’t really have any particularly reverent or special terms for it. I mean, they do have words for these abilities, just like we have words for ear, eye, nose, and mouth.
The one race that does have true systematic terminology for Zeer’s “magic system” are the gnomes; the most empirical civilization anywhere on the six planes. They call them Talents. Curiously, they’re also the only sapient race that does not have talents, which is part of the reason they threw themselves into science and technology so hard. And since I am a sucker for specificity, I’m going to use gnomish terminology pretty much any time I am referring to something Zeeran that explicitly doesn’t exist here on Earth.
That aside. Let’s hop into the basics of these Talents.
Two Poles and an Interface
Aside from Zeer’s six Planes, the hexaverse’s cosmology consists of two fundamental domains.
The first is Body, aka the physical domain. This layer is comprised of matter, mass, force, structure. Biological life is rooted in the Body domain.
The second is Spirit, aka the energetic Domain. This layer is what underlies and animates the physical. It’s both the energetic blueprints or architecture for the form and function that everything in Body takes, as well as what fuels its action.
And then there is Mind. This layer isn’t really a domain of its own. It’s the interface between Body and Spirit. It emerges when one or both domains comprise sufficient complexity to generate awareness of self and the world around them, even if that awareness is rudimentary.
Every talent is aligned to one of these three layers. And the frequency distribution of these alignments relates to an organism’s level of cognition. For the purposes of building Zeer, I use a spectrum from non-sentient to sentient to sapient. Non-sentient meaning organisms that really don’t have a concept of self, or any complex thought processes. With sufficient complexity, life advances to the sentient state, exhibiting some degree of self-awareness and an ability to make choices. And at the “top” you have sapience, which is reserved for the actual races of Zeer. The Body/Mind/Spirit progression maps onto biological life accordingly. There is more non-sentient life than sentient life. There is more sentient life than sapient life. So in terms of distribution, non-sentient biological organisms only have access to Body talents; sentient organisms have access to both Body and Mind talents; sapient organisms have access to all three Body, Mind, and Spirit talent alignments.
It is worth noting that Zeer also has an “energetic tree of life,” for which the distribution works in reverse, Spirit > Mind > Body. But that is a conversation for another day.
Six Frequencies
If you have read any of my previous articles, then you are already familiar with the next part. The 6 Primary Elements. Don’t specifically think about them as “fire the burny stuff” or “water the wet liquid.” But rather the frequencies that are doing the quantum folding that result in everything in the universe. These frequencies exist inside of every organism, every place, every rock, every star. They are the primordial forces that combine in precise degrees to make everything that exists exist.
However, sometimes, or someplace, one of the six elements becomes more present than the others. We call this affinity. The most obvious examples are the six planes themselves. There is more Dark energy on the Dark Plane, more Earth energy on the Earth Plane, etc. The other main (and deeply integrated) examples are the energetic seasons, Zeer’s star’s energetic pulses that oscillate up and down through different bandwidths. During a Fire season, the Fire frequency is most dominant. During the Light season, that frequency is most dominant.
And talents are how the concentrations of these frequencies are expressed in living beings. Same six elements all the way up. Same six elements all the way down.
Inward and Outward
The third component to this system are the expressions. This determines if a talent is acting outwards on the world, or if it is acting inwards on the self. Someone with an outwardly expressed talent works through their elemental resonance to manipulate external reality as they might with an extra hand. Outward talents are an extension of self. Someone with an inwardly expressed talent becomes more like that elemental frequency, achieving states of being that ordinary biology alone can not achieve.
For example, the Body/Water/Outward talent is called Flow. Someone born with this talent is able to extend their will beyond the confines of their body and act upon the world through liquids (usually H2O). For an easy visualization picture “water bending”, but with stricter limitations, no insane power scaling, and none of that ice stuff. The Body/Water/Inward talent is called Flux. Someone born with this talent is able to stretch, bend, and contort their body beyond what its biological parameters would allow, becoming more like water.
Same alignment, same affinity, but very different way of interacting with the world.
Thirty-Six Base Talents
Three alignments times six affinities times two expressions gives you a grand total of 36 base talents. It is the periodic table of arcane biology, with its own internal logic of symmetrical relationships, reinforcing combinations, impossibilities, and emergent properties.
These are the 36 fundamental forces that makes up the gears of the hexaverse; that keep everything ticking along. They’re not spells. The talents aren’t granted by anybody (actually its more of an astrology system). And there is no infinite power scaling. There’s a cap to what you can do with your talent. Just like there is a cap to what you can do with your hands. Or how fast you can run with your legs. And its so deeply integrated into Zeer’s evolution that to Zeerans it isn’t perceived as magic at all…mostly…
Magic is about perception. If I whipped out my phone on Zeer and started playing music, that would 100% be perceived by them as magic (except maybe the gnomes, they might immediately be suspicious that it’s tech). So perhaps a fantasy world’s magic doesn’t have to be about how sparkly it is, or how powerful, or even what it costs to use it. Maybe it’s enough to be humbly integrated into the very bones of a world to create lives and stories where wonder emerges naturally.