I want to talk about magic in Ylhwtnůṙ here (also I'm trying out using y/w instead of ai/ao and I'm not sure I like it but that's besides the point)

Background: there are 12 Aspects and associated with each is a type of magic and a natural domain. They are:

- Iron: the Aspect of matter.
- Silver: the Aspect of weight and reality.
- Gold: the Aspect of time.
- Red: the Aspect of life and fire.
- Blue: the Aspect of flow.
- Green: the Aspect of dynamism and unpredictability.
- Grey: the Aspect of earth and stone.
- Purple: the Aspect of strength, will, and overcoming challenges, but also those challenges themselves.
- White: the Aspect of death, and things which are not.
- Glass: the Aspect of law and order.
- Black: the Aspect of knowledge, wisdom, and secrets.
- Spirit: the Maker's Shadow, not so much an Aspect like the others as it is the lens through which the Formless Maker experiences and interacts with the world it created.

I think that the magic in the world will be separated roughly into active and passive forms.

Passive magic flows naturally sort of beneath the world, although not literally underground, just not really in the main level of reality. The specific details of how it moves, the speed and amount and aspect and so on, determine the fine details of magical effects. But naturally, most magic flows from sources to sinks in an open circuit (the sources and sinks are not actually within the world, they're non-corporeal gateways into other realms within the greater Expanse, so they are more or less permanent. Those other realms aren't actually at all like the physical plane so you can't travel to them in any meaningful way.) and is usually aspected like that which it flows through, so magic flowing along currents/winds is Blue, while magic flowing through the land is Grey.

Through the air, the flows are unstable, but there's not much magic in a given space, so the rapid changes mostly just interact with weather, while through water they're much more stable and thus rivers and ocean currents are quite stable, while in stone they're almost inviolable and sort of just flow from weaker earth to stronger bedrock and eventually out through the bottom of the world. Volcanoes are sources of Grey and Red magic, and coal veins are static concentrations of Red magic.

All living things are a sort of Red-aspected eddy current (with small inclusions of other colors, like Black, the color of wisdom and knowledge, and Purple, the color of will and strength) that sustain themselves by pulling other magic (usually Blue and Red, some White as well) through them and expelling it largely as White magic (the color of dead things). Note that this isn't really describing a soul, it's more describing bodies themselves. I haven't really worked out souls yet.

White magic rarely lingers, and is usually quickly recycled into Red, Grey, and Blue magic, while some of it just floats away above the roof of the world and is lost to the Expanse.

Very few natural phenomena contain enough Glass or Spirit magic to be usable, but Glass magic does flow through machines. Iron, Gold, and Silver magic move the slowest, and are dispersed throughout the entire world in a way that doesn't so much *do* anything as it *is* everything.

Green magic is extremely volatile, and basically does as it wants to. Its chaotic movements give the world the essential unpredictability that separates real life from games and from stories.

The most powerful source of magic in the entire world is a beam of Spirit magic that comes down from the sky in an intense beam of light so bright it can be seen for hundreds of miles and so hot it makes a massive area around it uninhabitable. The beam is aimed directly at the World Seed, a mountain of pure diamond to which the entire world is anchored, that focuses the beam through itself and radiates it outward in all directions. The World Seed is surrounded by a massive forest of crystalline trees, which further refocus and color the magic flowing through them, turning it from Spirit into Iron, Silver, Grey, Blue, Red, and the other types, mostly in order of amount. Outside of the emerald forest, there is very little Spirit magic left, but it is created within temples.

Thus is the natural state of the world. But long ago the Aspects gifted mortals with some of their power and those same mortals now use that might to rule the land. Magic that can be weilded is active magic, and it comes in all the same colors as passive magic. Active magic is required to change the way in which magic passively flows.

Red magic straddles the line between active and passive, never quite being entirely one or the other. It is always changing the world around it, sometimes in very large ways, but it is always rather self-contained and the changes it makes are mostly consistent.

Blue magic can be used actively to alter the way other magic flows in the long term and over large areas, giving rise to very stable but somewhat subtle effects. For instance, it may be used to force the winds to always be calm, the rain to come regularly, or walls to be unnaturally sturdy, or it can do the opposite of any of those things.

Grey magic, in its active form, is quite different from its passive form, and in fact looks very like Red magic. It animates a kind of being known as Sůṙjafia and enables them to perform certain types of ritual spells.

Green and Purple magic, however, are a thing unto themselves. They can cause dramatic changes in the flows of magic about them, and recolor or redirect the flow of entire rivers of it. However, precise manipulation is nearly impossible and so these alterations are unstable and quickly decay before eventually being washed away entirely. 

There is not much interesting to say about the active forms of the other aspects of magic, so I will summarize them here. Iron magic is used to solidify other types to create enchanted objects; Glass, Gold, Black, and White may be used to manipulate luck, project the senses, and to discover (or hide) secrets or lost knowledge; while Spirit and Silver magic in their active forms can perform minor miracles such as walking on water or temporarily making things incorporeal, but no grand large-scale or long-term effects.

This was all spurred by me thinking about how one might create an anti-magic field in Ylhwtnůṙ. My idea is to use Blue magic (or Red or Grey, perhaps) to create a powerful sink underground, which pulls all magic nearby into itself and burns it into heat and light. This would essentially be a miniature star, and it could be taken advantage of to provide heating and (with the use of fiber optics, which I'm not certain would exist in setting but maybe they could be made with magical means) light for a small city.

These might actually be a standard feature in large enough settlements to afford the training of enough people to create and sustain the spellwork for them because of said practical benefits, as well as the fact that they make offensive magic much harder to perform because they siphon all magic in a large area toward themselves. They would have an effect on the local area, shifting the course of rivers and causing somewhat strange winds, but any storm that passed directly overhead would actually have its magic siphoned away and it would rapidly dissipate.

The magical siphon so created would also be usable as a power source for further rituals, facillitating even more public works. These would be so common that I think they deserve a name, so I will call them "City Hearts". 



maṙfanne, "city-heart".

City-hearts are a unique feature of most large settlements in Ailhaotnůṙ, which rely on the specific nature of magic in it. They serve both civic and military purposes, but the military purpose is original.

The circumstances which surround them are thus: magical energy has both passive and active states. Passive magic flows through all things and its interactions to some extent define the way the world works. Active magic warps and alters the shape, speed, and aspect of passive magic around it, and can be used to create effects its wielder finds advantageous. If there is not much passive magic around, or if the currents it is in are particularly strong, much more active magic is needed to achieve a given effect.

So, a particularly common ritual is to create a magical furnace that consumes large amounts of passive magic and converts it into heat and light, as well as focusing it into conduits for further tapping, to enable yet more uses. Thus, a city large enough to have a sizable population of ritualists can control the magical field surrounding itself, concentrating available magic in controlled locations, such as spell-towers, alchemical labs, and automata workshops.

City-hearts are conventionally built underground, beneath keeps or similarly defensible locations, and flumes are constructed which bring cool air from the surface to the heart and hot air to the city, where it can be used for various puposes. Close enough to the heart, the air coming from such vents is hot enough to bake or boil water with, but farther out it is only suitable for interior heating.

City-hearts represent a major change in the flow of magic through an area, and thus have some wide-ranging effects, but, while they may be somewhat inconvenient, are not enough to dissuade their use, and in some cases are beneficial. The strong magical currents warp the flow of nearby rivers, which can cause initial flooding but after some years new channels will form and the rivers will stabilize, and a permanent low-pressure region is created in the air above the city, which causes constant mild-to-moderate winds to blow into the city from all directions, but this isn't too bad because it means that the air in the city is much fresher than it would be otherwise. Nearby storms are drawn toward the city, but once over top of it, their intensity is siphoned away, delivering at the most a heavy but brief shower.

The heart chamber itself is rather like a kiln, and is conventionally surrounded by a thick masonry wall with observation windows fashioned from very thick, dark crystals or obsidian, with a small complex surrounding it for the use of the dozen or so ritualists charged with maintaining the heart.

City-hearts are sometimes employed in places that aren't cities, like major religious sites, but they take at least an Earth year to set up, counting both conventional and magical labor, so they are only practical for permanent settlements. However, they may not be built too close to each other, or the larger City-heart will starve the smaller one, disrupting it, despite any efforts of the ritualists maintaining it. If they are close to the same strength, then both will be weakened, and may even die.

…wow, that was a lot of worldbuilding. And this is the condensed version! My first description was far longer. I could have given a smaller description, but that wouldn't have been able to convey the degree of cultural significance that they have.

https://conlang.lianamir.com/2018/03/the-dailies-march-16/