"To understand this world is to understand the Eight.
To fear it… is to remember the Ninth."
— High Archmage Lyron Vareth, The Last Sanction
The Eightfold World
Magic, in its earliest days, was wild.
Unbound, raw, and treacherously alive, it tore through the skies and soil, threading itself into beasts, storms, even memory itself. It had no law, no morality—only intent, and too often, chaos.
Then came the Binding.
The First Mages—names lost or erased—did not create magic, but they shaped it. From the raw essence of the world, they drew forth eight foundational forces and gave them form.
These became known as the Eight Sigils:
Pyra — Flame, Destruction, Memory through Fire
Aere — Wind, Movement, Perception, and Speed
Terran — Earth, Endurance, Foundation, and Strength
Virel — Water, Change, Emotion, Hunger
Lumen — Light, Clarity, Truth, and Revelation
Umbra — Shadow, Concealment, Fear, and Illusion
Vitae — Life, Growth, Healing, and Vital Breath
Spiralis — Time, Death, Cycles, and Entropy
Together, these sigils formed the Arcane Circle, a perfect symmetry designed to balance the world. Every licensed mage was trained in one or two sigils. Masters could channel up to three—but never beyond.
To wield more was to shatter balance.
To create a new sigil was to court oblivion.
The Mage Orders and the Circle of Rule
At the center of all magical governance stands the Circle of Twelve, an elite conclave of Archmages—each chosen from the most gifted practitioners of the Eight. Their responsibility is clear: to maintain balance, preserve control, and prevent magical escalation.
From their floating citadel, the Spire of Concordance, they dictate the law. Their reach extends into every city, every academy, and every known leyline. They are judge, jury, and enforcer.
Beneath them, the world is divided into Orders, academies dedicated to training licensed mages:
The Collegium Arcanum, where young mages begin their path.
The Sanctum of Inquiry, where magical anomalies are studied—or erased.
The Watchtowers, autonomous units of field agents, tasked with containing threats to the Circle's power.
And above all these, there is one unspoken commandment:
No sigil may rise beyond the Eight.
A Society of Tiers
Magic determines status. Those born with high resonance to a sigil are tested at age five and sorted accordingly. Families with legacy resonance are elevated, while those without fade into common labor or servitude.
Mages are nobility.
The higher one ascends through the Orders, the more access they gain to knowledge, longevity spells, and protective wards. At the highest tiers, some live for centuries.
But no one speaks of the cost.
Or the purges that maintain the system's order.
The Ninth Sigil: Myth or Memory?
To speak of a Ninth Sigil is blasphemy.
A criminal offense.
And yet, fragments remain—buried in forgotten scrolls, woven into the dreams of oracles, muttered by the dying.
They say the Ninth is not a force of creation, but correction. Not a tool, but a reflection—a mirror held to the world's lies.
Some claim it was once the First Sigil—abandoned because it gave too much to those it touched.
Others say it was never a sigil at all, but a flaw in the Circle's design. A natural answer to a magical imbalance, like a wound trying to close itself.
Whatever the truth, the Circle has erased all written traces of it.
But the world remembers.
In the tremble of fire that does not burn.
In the stillness where time forgets to move.
In the eyes of a girl who does not know what she is—
Only what she's becoming.