Magic (Kyralia series)

This article covers the magic system that appears in the books by Australian writer Trudi Canavan that takes place in her Kyralia universe.

Basic theory
All living things contain a store of life energy, including humans. Some humans have a larger store of life energy than other people. Such people are potential magicians. A magician is someone who has managed to form a mental connection between their mind and their store of life energy. Such a person exhibit telepathic abilities and the ability to shape their excess life energy to different uses, which is the phenomenon known as magic.

All living things also exhibit a form of natural barrier around their physical shape as a consequence of their life energy. This natural barrier prevents magicians from applying magic inside of it; this means, for example, that a magician cannot extend their influence into a persons body and crush their heart by turning magic into physical force. The exception is the magic techniques known as Healing, which requires skin to skin contact. The barrier is strongest in people and animals, somewhat weaker in plants, and almost negligible in micro-organisms. The barrier disappears upon death.

The mental connection between mind and life energy, the awakening of one's magic abilities, might happen in two ways. Some people have such strong potential that they naturally manifest magic by accident in a moment of emotional stress. Some call them naturals. The second way is for an established magician to help a potential magician to unlock their magic ability through mental exercises. Once the connection has been established, the new magician must learn the skill of Control, which means that they have to be in full control of their magic at all times, even unconsciously, to keep any magic from leaking during emotional moments. Failure to learn Control, whether from lack of guidance or mental deficiencies, will unavoidably lead to death, often a violent death from uncontrolled release of energy.

The most common use of magic is for a magician to reshape some of their excess life energy into mechanical force, heat or light, applied in different ways depending on the magicians goal. These lead to applications like the movement of objects, light globes and illusions. Life energy might also be used as-is for certain tasks of magic.

Applications
Applications of magic tend to be passed on from teacher to student, most commonly through telepathic lessons, so what a magician can do reflects how knowledgeable their teacher(s) were. It is possible to discover applications by oneself, but it can be exceedingly dangerous to try something no one has done before.

Strikes
Most magicians learn how to perform strikes, essentially propelled projectiles of different energy types created through their magic. Examples include forcestrikes, stunstrikes, heatstrikes and mindstrikes.

Shields
Magicians can extend their natural barrier into different surrounding shapes that can take on additional properties. This might be to offer increased protection against either physical attacks or magical attacks. Another way to use a shield is to make it heat-isolating, keeping outside temperatures out and preserving temperatures inside the shield.

Levitation
Some magicians can master a form of levitation.

Light
Magicians can project lights. One such use of magic is to create something called a globe light, a sphere of light whose position the magician can manipulate to place it where it is useful.

Illusions
Magicians can create visual illusions based upon their visual thoughts. Presumably, this works through a more complex application of projecting light.

Healing
Some magicians have learned the complex skill of magical healing. The skill includes using other forms of magic for medical work, like telekinesis for setting bones, but mostly refers to applying unshaped life energy directly to a person in order to speed up the healing process of their body. Healing can only be done while in direct skin contact with the patient. Strictly speaking, healing seems to speed up a patients healing through accelerated cell division, which might cause accelerated dehydration and consumption of nutrients that the healing might not be able to compensate for. The skill of healing can paradoxically be used to cause harm to a person by giving the magician the ability to directly influence their organs.

Higher Magic a.k.a. Black Magic
The magic potential of a person is inborn and cannot be changed. When they awaken their abilities, a magician's effective strength lies in how much of their potential they manage to gain control over, a process that may take years of study and practice. Still, at some point, a magician reaches the limits of their potential.

Higher Magic is in itself a technique of increasing one's store of magic beyond their natural limit. A magician who knows the secret behind Higher Magic can absorb the life energy of other living beings and then store it inside themselves. Since this process can be repeated with any number of living beings, a magician could achieve great stores of energy to be used to fuel their magic techniques. A magician with Higher Magic can regulate how much they take from each living being, with the possibility of draining all of the life energy in the being, which would kill it. Because of the possible sinister uses such magic could be used for, especially regarding people, some in-world cultures use the term Black Magic for Higher Magic.

Most magicians are taught to visualize their magic as something that exists deep inside of them, like a enormous globe of light. The secret of Higher Magic lies in abandoning such visualizations and achieve a mental state where the magician is aware that their magic is in reality indistinguishable from their body, which allow for them to realize how they can store life energy they have amassed from other beings than themselves. Many magician who learned the secret of Higher Magic expressed afterward how surprisingly simple the secret of this potentially dangerous technique was.

The natural barrier of a living being prevents a magician from touching their store of life energy, just as it prevents the appearance of magic effects inside their bodies. By breaking the outer layer of the organism, for example cutting a laceration in a person's skin, the natural barrier also receives a break, through which a higher magician can absorb life energy. In the case of a person or animal, cutting a bleeding wound allows the magician to come in direct contact with the target's blood stream, through which they can absorb life energy from any point of the body that the blood is in contact with, which is essentially every part of the body.

When higher magic is being used on a person or animal to absorb their life energy, it induces a deep sensation of lethargy in the target that may make them incapable of acting even if their life is in danger. It is possible to train to resist this sensation, but would require that someone repeatedly use higher magic on them without lethal outcome.

Higher magic can be used on any living organism, not just people or animals. Plants have a weaker natural barrier than people or animals and are thus easier to break, but the weaker natural barrier is a consequence of the plants lesser store of life energy, which also makes plants less useful for higher magic. Because microorganisms have such a negligible natural barrier, nothing really protects them against higher magic, and a higher magician can directly absorb life energy from them. Just as their natural barrier, the life energy of microorganisms is negligible, even with a swarm of them, and not useful for amassing life energy, though the possibility of draining all the life energy out of microorganisms allows for effective sterilization, such as that of a collection of water.