The World

Seven seats. Seven colours: Gold, White, Black, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green. In the Cradle they are known by colour only. Whatever else they were once called has been lost.

Magic doesn't create. It borrows. A mage doesn't make fire; they ask the world to remember heat. Every stone has been warm. Every drop of water has been ice. The discipline is to remember, never to imagine: imagine, and the world shrugs; remember, and it answers. Called memories rise out of the ground as glass spheres the size of a fist. You don't choose them. You call, and what comes, comes. And a careless spell is never free.

A mage is attuned to the world's memory. A Bearer is attuned to the body's. Everything a body has carried, survived and done, it remembers, and a Bearer returns to it: strength, senses sharp enough to feel a spell coming, wounds that close in hours. Bearers pay for it in their own years.

The everyday guard of Vell Ardour. They use Bearing, but they are not its masters.

Twelve gates, twelve High Wardens, sworn to the ground rather than to a king, because kings end and ground mostly doesn't. The masters of Bearing.

Things that come from the cracks between what was and what's coming. They fray at the edges. Some move under the earth. People who have met one call it a forgetting.

Aptitude is a leaning toward a colour. Sponsorship is a colour choosing you, and the old word for the chosen is Beloved. Scholars spent centuries looking for a better word and never found one.

The Tethered are bound to the land: they cast with it, not on it, and weaken as it sickens. The Veiled are old, and remember an age nobody else does. Few remain.

There are four in the world. Most casters take whatever the ground offers. A High Mage asks for one memory, and the ground gives nothing else.