Editing Quest:Heir of the Arends (section)

==Schools of Magic==
[[Image:ArendMagicSchools.png|300px|thumb|right|The eight schools of magic and their relationships from ''Fundamentals of the Arcane''.]]

There are eight acknowledged schools of magic and at least one secret school.

* Occultism: Magic dealing with the beings of the Shadow. Includes the knowledge of summoning wraiths, spirits, ghosts.

* Mysticism: Magic dealing with the Shadow itself, using the reflections of the world like thoughts, emotions, or dreams as your main tools. Willpower is essential here.

* Shamanism: Magic dealing with animals either mundane or magical and living spirits of nature. 

* Elementalism: Magic dealing with the four elements (earth, wind, water, and fire) and the inanimate spirits of nature. Characterized by bold, broad strokes. 

* Essentialism: The magic of dealing with perceptions, illusions, and seemings/glamours. A powerful school, and versatile, made all the more so since so many mages seem to forget that while fragile, many of the things it creates can be real and dangerous indeed. Characterized by smooth, delicate curves.

* Materialism: Magic dealing with the material world and aspects of it, broadly encompassing states, attributes, and the "Metaphysicals" such as the concept or purpose that defines an object. A knife, for example, can have materialist spellforms on it to enhance the purpose of the knife "to cut" or "to separate" so that even without an edge it will easily slice through virtually any normal object. Characterized by geometric patterns.

* Arcanism: Magic dealing with Power and the various things inherent to the magical condition -- like Sight, or the natural ability of an Other to transition between the Shadow and the World. More theoretical than the other schools, and a good foundation for any magic. Arcanism is the physics to the other schools' engineering.

* Sapienscy: Not a type of magic per-se, though still studied as such. Sapienscy deals with the power of the human collective. "The spell-smashing sledgehammer, the spirit-annihilating inferno that is the collective will of humanity."  People who disbelieve in magic reduce the power of nearby spells, proportional to their will. It can render magic totally ineffective.

* Infernalism/Demonology/Diabolism: A hidden school of magic that deals with the beings and world outside our reality (literally called the Outside); it is concerned with summonings, pacts, and contracts. Dangerous and powerful. None but the patriarch of the Arends may know of it on pain of death. After Wolfgang I's extremely successful hunting of wild mages in the 1400-1500s, demonology was outlawed in all mention by the European patriarchs, by mutual agreement, and all texts were given to Wolfgang I who kept them instead of destroying them. Characterized by sharp, angular, contorted, intertwined designs that are difficult to perceive or reason about. Diabolist designs exude wrongness, but Richard is capable of understanding them innately.

''Fundamentals of the Arcane'' states that "shamanism is akin to elementalism and colludes more easily with it, but is opposed by mysticism. Likewise, occultism and mysticism work more easily together than other types, but is opposed by elementalism. Materialism and essentialism stand opposed to each other, two halves of the same coin, and despite working somewhat better with schools more in tune with their thesis… they cannot truly be said to work especially well with anything. Arcanism, though, is distinct, as the greatest and oldest of the schools should be. Opposing none, and in turn being opposed by none. The reader should bear this in mind. If anything, its opposite would be sapiency -- arcanism being the study of the mythic, sapiency being the denial of it."