Magic

Magic in this world rests on a single principle: reality prefers lower-energy states. The world will reshape itself to avoid costly corrections. Change, discontinuity, shock — these are expensive. The world avoids them when it can.

That avoidance is what makes magic possible. Different groups engage with this principle in different ways. See magic users for how wizards, religious practitioners, sorcerers, and spiritual practitioners each operate within it.

Magic can be stored. It can be held in objects (relic types) or accumulated by those who know how. Patterns that have been stable long enough — rites, agreements, institutions — are easier for the world to maintain than to break. The fabric of reality can be shaped, stressed, and rearranged, but the cost of doing so is real.

The World’s Behaviour

The world does not think in the way living things do. It follows rules of cost, not intent. It estimates those costs imperfectly. When presented with alternatives, it tends toward the option that demands less energy to sustain — but it favours short-term savings over long-term ones. Shutting something down may be cheaper in the aggregate, yet if the immediate cost of stopping it is high, the world keeps it going. Replica relics are a clear case: every use has a cost, but shutting them down now would incur large discontinuity — the sudden failure of something that has worked for generations. So the world maintains them, even though over the long term it would save energy to stop. Many seemingly strange behaviours reduce to this.

Invalid states trigger correction. A bend in the fabric, a tear, a stacked or overlapping layer — these are unstable. The world auto-corrects toward a valid state, merging, flattening, or resolving the contradiction. The Lapse fully resolved in this way.

Load-bearing patterns persist. Anything that has been running long enough, and whose immediate shutdown would cost more than letting it continue, is maintained. A miracle upheld by centuries of belief, a relic used reliably by generations of sorcerers, even an unnatural system like necromancy in a densely conflicted graveyard — shutting them down now would cause more discontinuity than allowing them to run.

What counts as costly. Reduces down to change. Large change is more costly than a smaller change. Wizards can offset cost by expending magic. Massive stockpiles of magic allow you to do what the world would not normally tolerate.