(cw slavery)
Preindustrial enslaved mages. Three groups separated by a forked river. One is a mageocracy, one enslaves mages (pretty horribly), one doesn’t do either but is very xenophobic.
Outsiders born there could potentially be mages. Glad to be a setting or send visitors. Could use intervention. Homeworld of Aye and Genea.
People
River sparks has no native sentient life (it has animals.) It currently has three groups of people, all of whom got there from other worlds. These groups are separated by a forked river.
Tscher
(Aye is from here.)
First to arrive. Currently a mageocracy. In Sovereign Crossing their mages are also called the mages of the marble towers. Mages in more concentrated locations do in fact often live in tower (as groups, not individually).
Born mages are taken from their families at birth or shortly after and raised with the mages (generally by servants).
Mages most commonly occupy themselves with hedonist-like activities, though occasionally do provide various services for the humans under their rule.
Sovereign Crossing
(Genea is from here.)
Second to arrive. Mostly self-governing towns surrounded by farmland. They are republics in the more ancient-world style and take this pretty seriously.
Sovereign Crossing enslaves its mages. The general belief is that mages are actually demons who replace their mothers’ children in the womb. Mages of a town and its surrounding farms are raised and kept in mages’ compounds, from which they are taken out to work (strengthening walls and roads, making crops grow better, healing, etc). They are tortured a lot. Mages who are noticed to be of higher power levels are killed in childhood. The people who guard mages are called Helas.
Among non-mages there is a class division most strongly between primarily hand-to-mouth poor (mostly field-workers) and landowners, craftspeople, merchants, and other such townspeople.
Families are matrilineal and matrilocal. They organize in a clan-like structure in which children are raised by their mother, their mother’s sisters and brothers, and the previous generation which follows a similar pattern. Marriage is not a thing but relationships can be long-term and connections are sometimes made through children. A family that does not have sufficient girls in a generation may seek to adopt some.
Kashjar
Last to arrive. They have equality among mages and non-mages. They have some internal conflict with pretty established rules. They are incredibly xenophobic, scryward very strongly, and don’t let anyone else in.
Magic
River sparks has a native thing called mage sparks. They are not quite/exactly life forms and are not sentient, though they have things that can be loosely termed as ‘preferences’. They kind of spontaneously appear. Mage sparks on their own do not last very long. As such, they often try to attach to things. These things then become magical in some way.
Mages
Humans to whom a mage spark attaches in the womb become mages. Mage sparks do not like slow development, and as such speed up that of a mage. Mage pregnancies are accelerated, and mages fully mature in about six years and do not appear to age very much after that (they do still have an about regular lifespan).
Mages come in various power levels. Stronger mages can do more with any given mage ability, work longer, etc. Weaker mages can’t do some things at all, though mages can also get together for joint workings that are more than they could do individually.
Due to the mage spark mages have a healing factor, which also makes them harder to kill. Stronger mages are progressively harder to kill. The weakest of mages can be killed by something instantly fatal. The strongest of mages, with the available technology, are most dependably killed through resource deprivation (basically starvation). Mage sparks die if their host dies, and do not want to. This leads to mages unable to be suicidal, though they can still kill themselves for instrumental reasons.
Mage sparks like to have things happening and do not like to be alone, which translates over to their mages. However, mages also have a much lower tendency than humans to get bored by something happening repeatedly, as long as they found it interesting to begin with.
Some things mages can do include teleportation, scrying, affecting objects, healing, and shields and wards. There is a difference between doing instant things and doing more long term things which involve anchoring magic, usually in magic symbols. Mages can do minor mind-affecting things if they can get someone’s subconsciousness to cooperate. They can, for instance, go unnoticed this way. They can also put someone in a trance and do somewhat stronger mind-control, though it requires keeping the person in the trance the whole time and what they can do is limited to things in the trance. Some things they can do involve asking questions that will generally get true answers and causing the performance of physical actions. (Tscher mages sometimes take sex slaves like this.) People can train to resist the trances.
Mages are vulnerable to salt water, which burns them, and to a thing called blood-iron, which can be used to contain or keep away their power. The stronger a mage, the more containing them requires – below a level, manacles or bars will do it, while a mage of Aye’s power has to be literally air-tight sealed in a fully blood-iron coffin.
Other
Mage sparks can also attach to animals. Sometimes this drives the animals insane. These then rampage around, throw magic blasts, and are attracted to human presence. This is the main reason for Sovereign Crossing’s walls. These are called Beasts.
While this is currently known only in Kashjar, mage sparks can also attach to non-alive things (trees, large rocks, large pieces of ore, etc). These things can acquire magical properties and can sometimes be worked while continuing to have such.
The world also has a few other ways for non-mages to get magical things. Blood-iron is in fact an instance of such. This is also not currently known outside of Kashjar, and not near fully explored there either.
(Mages have some natural knowledge/sense of magical things having to do with them, but not magical things in general, which is how this happened.)
Look, Stuff 