Encyclopædia Botannica [f2u]
himbocore
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All the components of the known world are discrete, linear, measurable and clear - if a scholar was ever a god, they might have designed it like this.
These are the four schools of magic available to us humans, dominant species of the material plane, symbolically placed in a diamond shape from top-left to bottom-right:
On top is the school of Energy, because things affected by it has a tendency to float up. It includes most of the traditional elemental magic dreamed up in the distant past, but is characterized by fire magic (mages of this school are often called pyromancers even if they don't use fire: otherwise vibromancers).
Next, on left, is the school of Space, the volume taken up by things and not outer space. Despite the grand scope, it's a relatively safe and widely utilized school of magic - rerouting, shortening, lengthening and blocking off paths and pockets of space. Volumancers are widely sought after for making all sorts of gadgets more efficient.
Right next to it is the school of Order. It draws on the power of things in a meaningful arrangement or state: memories, clues and information stored in a multitude of ways. This is by far the most arcane and revered type of magic and seems to gravitate patient and talented mages. Its position on the right side of the diamond is supposedly why 'right' means 'correct'.
On the bottom is the school of Matter dealing with all things bound by gravity. It can't quite create matter out of thin air, but it gets damn close. Consistamancers generally specialize in one type of material, and train up a frightening amount of control over it - dismantling it into a fine mist with the flick of a hand, shaping it into impossibly delicate structures.
Let us imagine that we brought together competent, creative mages of all four schools:
Oh, hello there. That's Coil, Ypsilanti, Professor Heikilore, and Mae.
We'll ask them all to light this plank on fire.
It's very straight-forward for an energy mage. He can simply make the particles of the wood vibrate so fiercely with energy that it catches on fire.
While very hard, a space mage could quarantine and contract the air around it fast enough to raise the temperature. (It's not necessary to make stupid poses like Ypsilanti here.)
I'm not sure how an order mage would do it. Some of them will probably just pick up a twig and tell it to spin until a fire lights, but if the plank was ever lit before they might be able to revert it back to the burning state.
Oops.
Might have overdone it a little.
A material mage could create a thin sheet of something more flammable on top and scratch it, like a match. It's not too hard to make a film of mundane, simple material in the boundary of two objects (air and wood, in this case).
Humans can be many combinations of body, soul and spirit. Body belongs to the material plane, soul belongs to the order/information plane, and spirit belongs to the spirit plane.
Most common are soul-body fusions, common enough that there's no real name for it. Some people's souls are attached less strongly to their bodies, though -
These cases are called 'ethereals', which not only sounds cool but also means you're a little more likely to develop magic abilities.
When someone dies and gets buried, their soul decays in sync with their corpse, until both dissipate and join the raw material pool of the respective planes.
However, with some slow or unusual deaths, the body decays faster than the soul and the soul is stuck roaming the material plane because it can't decay any more unless it enters the order plane.
This happens to ethereals more often, what with the bond between their bodies and souls being weaker already.
But they are more likely to stay sane and maybe even find another body whereas unethereals usually end up being zombies, poltergeists and such thanks to the worse damage done to their souls prior to release.
Souls who managed to stay sane until they've found a body are called 'doll's or 'poppet's (poppets usually implying dolls who decided to stay with their dollmaker witches instead of returning to their previous lives).
Occasionally there are people with all body, soul and spirit fused together, often called 'spirited souls' regardless of body status. They have an inclination for energy/elemental magic talent, as well as a likelyhood of being more physically resilient.
The rarest of cases is people born with only a body. They're not in any way less human than the others, but there's a lot of stigma suggesting such - the fact that common animals do not have souls and that this was traditionally used as a convenient excuse to moralize hunting doesn't help at all.
There are no soulless body-spirit fusions - anything from the spirit plane cannot interact with the material without a soul to bridge it as far as we know.
There are spirits who don't have a body who hitch rides on soul-bodies.
Those are titled demons after the evil fae in the folktales of old, as they have no real way of obtaining consent before they come over and are generally ignorant to such things as goodwill and order.
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