Once settlers spread beyond Elysira’s immediate influence, it became clear that magic was only tame nearby. Everywhere else, it surged, overreached, echoed, and occasionally did things no one asked for.
**”one of our members somehow electrocuted the dickens out of his trousers, we never did get an answer to what he was doing”**
The sensible response was invention. Artificers learned to build devices that could survive magic’s excesses—pressure housings, resonance frames, force coils, venting systems that hissed, rattled, and released surplus energy as heat, steam, or alarming noises. These machines do not create magic. They endure it.
Wild Mages objected loudly. To them, magic’s instability was not a flaw but proof they were more than just mere common folk. They argued that containment diluted power, that limits were lies, and that consequences were proof one was doing something important. Artificers replied that cities prefer not to explode.
This disagreement has never been resolved. Instead, it calcified into culture: regulated magic in settled regions, and wildly unstable casting near the Whispering Arcs, where the rules grow thin and magic remembers its bad habits. Fights broke out constantly between the two ideals sometimes resulting in some of the most gruesome deaths.