Imbuement Perpetuum

Imbuement Perpetuum is the Human translation of ‘Permanent Magic’

Imbuement Perpetuum is the counterpart of Iron Light. Magical feats accomplished without the usage of Iron light. They are more powerful, valuable, and harder to utilize. Their name comes from their elusive, mysterious and permanent nature. It is often simplified to “Imbuement” by the public.

Encapsulating how any Imbuement Perpetuum is utilized is nearly impossible as there does not seem to be any sort of limit of methods. Some techniques are:

• Magesmithing - A practice involving the use of magical metals and expert smithing to produce magical tools and weapons. This has a very wide cultural significance in the stories of Zol, specifically amongst Dwarves.
• Grand Alchemy - A practice involving the use of rare substances combined in very specific ways to produce reality bending chemicals and materials
• Meridian Craftsmanship - A practice similar to Magical Blacksmithing that spans a wider range of techniques. A craftsperson who utilizes great skills along with rare magical materials. This could be leather work, fletching, luthiery, or even sewing.
• Grand Arcana - The utilization of Arcana to create, highly complex, specialized spells to modify mundane objects to make them permanently magical. This is bar none one of the most difficult skills one can obtain. To implement it, one must be able to utilize Iszertion and understand its complex nuances.
• Ascendance - Accomplished by leveraging the will of Observance or Viridescence. The practice of calling upon a higher power to make a mundane object more powerful. This can be done through prayer, sacrifice, ritual, or trade with this greater power. In most cases this is done with the power of Observance, but there are records of some individuals utilizing the power of nature itself for this effect.

For a mortal to harness grand forces, it involves understanding the complexities of the Magic being used, as well as the material you are trying to make the magic permanent within. It is exceedingly difficult to put magic permanently into something that is not magical. To overcome this barrier, most techniques utilize materials that are already magic. The outliers being Grand Arcana and Ascendance. These creations take serious time and effort. However sometimes spectacular anomalies can suddenly infuse an object with magic without an individuals intervention.

Many uses of magic can cause an object to become temporarily emboldened by magic. This is done by altering the Nodes that make up an object and, for lack of a better term, convincing them posses properties that they do not naturally posses. However, Nodes are known for being quite stubborn. One can convince a node that it is has new prominent properties while quieting its others for a time, but nodes have a sort of memory of their natural state. They will always entropically tend back to this state, unless this memory is removed.

Artificers will overcome this hurdle in one of two ways:

• Circumvention - by utilizing materials that are already magical, one can be sure the end product will be magical. However it becomes an issue of magical in what way. One cannot simply make a dagger out of Mythril and expect it to be able to pierce the hide of great Dragons. It takes great craftsmanship and dedication to be able to make an object with the desired properties. The more skilled the craftsman, the more accurately they can approximate the desired effect. The crafts that use Circumvention are:
  • Magical Blacksmithing
  • Grand Alchemy
  • Peak Craftsmanship
• Annulation - the act of removing the memory held within Nodes and assigning them new properties simultaneously. This allows Artificers to utilize any material, even mundane, to create powerful objects with exact properties. This is extremely difficult to achieve and highly dangerous. The memory removal of Nodes needs to be fully comprehensive as if anything remains the Enchantment won’t be permanent, or may fail outright. Then the infusing with new memory needs to not only include the new properties, but aspects of the original object, lest the object become unstable. A unstable object may cease to exist, or become something unexpected and dangerous. On top of this, these modifications need to happen simultaneously. If any of these steps fail the result could be catastrophic. When not aided by greater powers, complex objects require these Annulations to happen in stages, each feature being added one after the other. The crafts that use Annulation are:
  • Grand Arcana
    • The most notable form of Imbuement Perpetuum as it is the only method where what is created can be exactly what the craftsman seeks, assuming production is successful.
  • Ascendance
    • Ascendance is very rare and is not know to include the same dangers and complexities as Grand Arcana. This is because the actual Annulation is being performed by a much more powerful being than even a highly skilled Artificers.
    • The greater being may not create the object to the requester’s specifications as they may impose their own will.