The Palimpsest Process

Really meant to write this dream down much earlier but this week has been absolutely mad. Here goes my best remembrance though…

For as long as anyone remembers, nobles of magical bloodlines ruled the world, but in recent centuries their powers began to slowly fade. More and more, many were even born with anemic powers or no magical ability at all; something that was completely unheard of in the past. Even more disturbingly, seemingly non-noble people were beginning to manifest raw, untrained magical abilities with growing frequency. At first this last phenomena was dismissed as the occasional illegitimate offspring of one of the noble lines, but mounting investigation by the houses quietly revealed that this is not the case.

Desperate to maintain power through their traditional magical heritage, the noble houses delved deeply and darkly for a solution… and they found one. All around the realms, those gifted with magical abilities began to disappear. Shortly afterwards, the triumphant return of their magic was celebrated by the noble houses.

The Palimpsest Process

The ability to manipulate magic is a blank canvas upon which the human soul is inscribed from birth and throughout the invididual’s life. With each moment and experience, the pattern of a human soul is naturally inscribed on this fabric in ever more complex patterns, written in a script few can perceive and fewer still can interpret. But the noble houses with their long intimate relationship with magic, knew this. It was always believed this inscription was an indelible law of magic, but in their recent studies, they learned this is not the case.

Mystically scrapping away these inscriptions leaves the magically-capable soul nearly blank, the perfect surface for inscribing the soul of a noble scions. Sometimes shadows of the former script remain, though, almost undetectable but occasionally “showing through” in the form of uncharacteristic quirks and memories in the new “owner”. For this reason, and the decades of additional life to be gained from the process, the youngest and most inexperienced magically gifted persons are the most coveted.