Magic in Eldriloch

What it is. The aether is a dimension that binds reality together. Its components are tied together like a complex web of threads. A practitioner who learns to see the web can unhook a thread from one point and tie it to another, and the matter around it changes. The web always pushes back toward its natural shape, which is why lasting changes are hard and artifacts are precious.

What it can do. Move, shape, heat, freeze, light and hide matter and energy. Open space, close it, and fold it. Raise a wall, liquefy steel, throw a shockwave, bend light around a body, or read the patterns of the world well enough to predict what happens next.

What it can't do. The aether can't touch living tissue, minds or life force. It can turn a marble into a diamond but can't cure a sickness. It can burn a creature, crush it or hide from it, but it can't heal it, charm it, change its body or reach into its thoughts.

Who uses it. Aether magic is arcane magic.

• Aetherians work the web directly, with spell points. They need no fibrolite.
• Engineers store patterns in fibrolite devices anyone can trigger.
• Fleshgrafters prime patterns into graft sockets in living hosts.
• Entertainers learn a few aetheric stage tricks of light and sound.

Fibrolite. Engineers and fleshgrafters burn a fibrolite shard for every effect. Higher-level effects need larger shards. Aetherians need none.

What it is. Flux is the flow of life. Nobody fully understands how it works. Those who use it describe a feeling, like controlling a current, and they steer it by emotion and will more than by study. The Celestial Covenant teaches that flux flows from the gods to their chosen, and calls it a gift.

What it can do. Alter the flow of life. Flux excites cells into healing at unnatural speed, strengthens and quickens bodies, steadies or shakes the heart, and forms shields and bolts of raw life energy. It can sense living things, preserve them, and, at its height, call a soul back to its body before its pattern fades. Through Aostre it brings light and growth. Through Khareus it serves the hunter.

What it can't do. Flux can move matter, but not change it. It can make a shield that deflects an arrow, but it can't turn the arrow into a flower. It doesn't create objects, open portals, carry anyone across space, or work illusions. Those belong to the aether.

Who uses it. Flux magic is divine magic.

• Votaries are the Covenant's priests and healers.
• Wardens are its holy knights.
• Rangers draw flux through living things and are divine casters as normal. Eldriloch has no druids.

Only humans born with the gift can use flux. Runekar, malumtene, ashen and souldriven never can.

The Covenant's Restraint. The Covenant teaches that every god forbids using flux to harm. A Covenant-ordained votary or warden who casts a spell marked † (a forbidden spell) against a living creature, or uses a flux ability to deal damage, must make a Will save (DC 10 + the spell's level, or 15 for an ability) or lose access to flux until they atone through the atonement spell. The Covenant permits two exceptions, which never require the save:

• A warden's Flux Strike against heretics and abominations.
• Any flux user defending against an exspiratis or ashen in Manifestation.

Heretics. Some flux users have learned what the Covenant hides: flux needs no god. These heretics, who call themselves the Unbound, never make the Restraint save and can cast forbidden spells freely. There is no middle ground: every votary and warden is either Covenant or heretic. See the heretic votary and the heretic warden. In exchange, they have no patron deity, the Covenant considers them heretics, and the Wardens hunt them. Saying so aloud where a Warden can hear is the fastest way to meet one.

Aether and flux together. Using both magics on the same effect was banned after the Dark Sunder. A character with both arcane and divine spellcasting can't apply one to the other: no metamagic feats across the divide, and no item that combines them. That rule is part of why fleshgrafting is so hated.

Magic in Eldriloch needs no bat guano, no holy symbol and no pinch of powdered iron. Aether is worked by will and gesture, and flux by will and feeling. Spells keep their verbal (V) and somatic (S) components where the core rules have them: an aetherian pulling threads moves their hands, and a votary steadying a wound may murmur. Material components, foci and divine foci don't exist.

Fibrolite. The one exception is an aether spell whose core version needs a costly component, such as stoneskin or wish. An aether caster needs a fibrolite shard of the same value instead, consumed if the original was a material component and kept if it was a focus. Engineers and fleshgrafters burn a shard for every device and implant (see Fibrolite Shards).

Exhausting Flux. Flux never uses fibrolite. A flux spell whose core version needs a costly component, such as raise dead, leaves its caster exhausted instead.

Each spell description, under Flux Spells and Aether Spells, lists its components this way. Eschew Materials has no use in Eldriloch.

Eldriloch has no alignment. Nobody is born good or evil, and the continent's wars are fought over power, race and land, not morality. What magic does recognize is a creature's current: the kind of power that runs through it. Every creature and every magical effect has one of four currents.

• Flux: humans born with the gift, and flux spells and abilities. Votaries, wardens and gifted rangers carry the flux current.
• Aether: runekar and malumtene, aetherians of any race, and anything driven by aether stored in fibrolite: mechanoids, souldriven, engineers' devices and fleshgrafters' implants, and aether spells. A character with a working graft carries the aether current, whatever else they are.
• Exspiratis: the exspiratis and anything bound to one: ashen, skitz and exspiratis-bound weapons and their wielders.
• None: everyone and everything else, including humans without the gift and ordinary animals.

A creature with more than one current, such as a gifted human with a graft, counts as having each of them. Sense the flow and detect magic reveal a creature's current.

Spell lists in this chapter follow the Player's Handbook: spells are grouped by class and level, each with a short description. Source abbreviations follow each spell from outside the Player's Handbook:

• SC: Spell Compendium.
• ECS: Eberron Campaign Setting.
• EL: new to Eldriloch, described in New Spells.

A † marks a forbidden spell for Covenant flux users.

Spells from any 3.5 book can be added to these lists if they fit their magic: aether for matter, energy, light, sound and space, and flux for life, vitality, emotion and the soul. The Game Master decides cases at the edge.