Dante wrote:
Is it feasible that powerful Eldritch spellcasters don't seem affected by "the wasting disease" because they get more cautious and selective about when they use their magic? Going around casting Witchlight 24/7 might bring on the bodily harm faster than casting one Tier IV spell once a week.
If Eric Gorman is right that Elder magic doesn't cause "the wasting disease", that certainly explains why long-lived elorii and ssanu aren't effected by it--though they, too, might learn to be more judicious about their use of magic.
I have a theory about arcane vs. Divine magic. People talk like they are the same source of magic (the legos left over from creation of the big lego universe), but I don't think this is true. Why? A few things:
1. Church lore seems to indicate that for arcane magic to be learned by humans, it had to be stolen not once, but twice. First Sarish and Cadic stole it from Illiir, and then a human had to steal it from Sarish. Why was magic such a secret?
2. Souls have power. We've seen repeated cases of people using souls to power spells, to do amazing things, and I suspect that shaving a hair of power off each soul that returns to the Cauldron is what powers the gods (at least partially) and diving spells.
3. 3,000 years in the future, if Menatas had won, the "background radiation" of magic was almost gone, i.e. the spare legos had all been used up. And that appeared important to the end times coming.
Now, maybe this wouldn't happen naturally in that amount of time without the voiceless ones doing whatever they were doing, but I think that the more arcane casters use these legos, the closer they come to using them up. Clearly this may be like just taking a drop from an ocean, but from a immortal's perspective, even little drops might add up if you are trying to keep the world running FOREVER. So the gods had a reason to keep humanity away from arcane magic, but if used responsibly (like to fight the Umor and the VO) it could be worth the risk of giving it to humanity. Divine magic, on the other hand, you could look at as being powered by the power of Ectropy. A new soul comes into the world at power level 1, and as it grows and matures and learns it reaches a higher power level. If that soul reaches a certain level of power, and in a useful configuration, the gods keep it (yeah afterlife!) to use in the battle against Entropy (not exactly paradise guys). But if not, the life energy over power level 1 gets shaved off the top of the soul, and it goes back into the cauldron. What do the gods do with the extra soul energy? Don't know. Depends how the universe works. Might use the extra to create more souls so the population can increase, might use it to power divine spells, might use it to be gods themselves- but the point is, this power doesn't use up the cosmic legos. Heck, the gods might even use it to replenish the cosmic legos to keep us from reaching zero energy. But it can be used safely, without bringing the universe closer to a zero energy state - like using a renewable energy source vs. oil.
Actually the using souls as a power base makes me think of the gods stealing each others "essence" except on a much smaller scale. There might be something to this.
