common knowledge · a primer

Of the Bleeding

There is one truth every practitioner learns before any spell: the world is dying.

Magic was not always rare. In the age before the Hollowfall it moved through the world the way wind moves through a forest — everywhere, constant, unremarkable. Children played with small workings the way children today play with stones. Whole trades depended on currents no living mortal has ever felt.

That world is gone. Since the day the wound opened, the native magic of the world has been draining out through it, and something else has been seeping in to take its place. The drain is not a metaphor. Spells that took an hour now take a day. Practitioners who cast freely in their youth grow weaker each year. Whole regions where magic once pooled have gone silent and grey.

The eastern archives keep the most careful measurements, and they are not optimistic. By their oldest reckoning, the world holds less than a third of the magic it held before the fall.

Here is the cruel arithmetic: every faction’s casting deepens the loss, every power knows it, and no power stops — because stopping means losing the war that is happening now. The North burns its hoarded light to hold its walls. The South pulls more of the wrong current in with every working. The East hoards and studies and spends only what it must. The West wrings what it can from stolen pages, and writes strict laws about the rest.

Ask a scholar what happens when the last of it is gone, and you will learn a great deal about how scholars change the subject.