Elemental Quell
Ethereal Quell
Coquellian magic stems from quell, which are the six forces of nature, the building blocks from which all matter exists. Coquellian cosmology understands quell as a sort of current that runs through all matter. It does not create or make the matter in the same way that flour and water make dough or atoms make a molecule, but rather it holds everything together, gives everything the ability to exist, to interact, to be.
Metaphysics of quell
There are six total quell, and each quell is inherent in everything in existence. For instance, there is Life-magic in a decaying body and Fire-magic in a river, despite what appearances or logic may suggest. Even in the most arid desert, a true practitioner of eś-magic could fill a cup with water.
Manifestations
Each quell has what is known as a Manifestation. The Manifestation is, quite simply, the purest chunk of quell in the outside world. Consequently, the Manifestations are rather logical: the Manifestation of eś is water, of iś is air, of aś is dirt. Perhaps less obvious are the two ethereal quell, whose manifestations can be any living (for oś) or any dead (for yś) thing.
Each quell also has something known as its Prime Manifestation. This is the purest manifestation of each element, and they are localized to the sites of each quell's altar on its respective island. The elemental Prime Manifestations are the Three Mountains of Aś, the Five Waves of Eś, the Four Winds of Iś, and the Six Plumes of Uś. The ethereal Prime Manifestations are the Sole Decay of Yś and the Two Souls of Oś.
Quell and human manipulation
Touched and Untouched
Quell, as understood by the majority of Coquellians, is not a sentient being. That is, it is not something to be worshiped, it is not a god or gods. It simply is. Despite this understanding, perhaps because of the apparent randomness with which people can and cannot manipulate quell, the Coquellians have mythologized quell, attributing the random patterns of manipulation to the choice of quell itself. Being chosen to manipulate quell has become known as being Touched. Those who never attain the ability to manipulate a single quell are known as the Untouched.
Being Touched
Being Touched by more than one quell is possible, though it has grown increasingly rare in the modern Coquels. No individual has ever attuned to both ethereal quell, and being Touched by one of the ethereal quell severely limits the chances of another quell's Touching. Nevertheless, the average number of quell per person is two, with some people touching as many as four. In cases where a single individual has been Touched by more than one quell, only one quell will appear at a time, so the individual will go through a repeated process of showing signs and attuning, rather than showing signs for multiple quell at the same time.
Fingerprints
Touched individuals begin to show the signs of Touching early in life, known as Fingerprints, usually by the time they are thirteen. Fingerprints can take many different forms, although they almost always involves some sort of uncontrolled, though minor, manipulation of quell. This manipulation is limited to the manifestation of whichever quell has done the Touching. That is, no Fingerprint will involve creating water out of thin air or fire far beneath the earth's surface. Common forms include the following:
- Attraction: The manifestation will appear to jump from its place of rest to the Touched individual. This can be quite dangerous, for those Touched by Fire-magic.
- Repulsion: The exact opposite of attraction, the manifestation will appear to jump away from an individual. For those who are Touched by Air-magic, this may prove fatal via suffocation.
- Decay: For those Touched by Death-magic, the usual sign is advanced decay of nearby corpses, either plant or animal. In extreme cases, Touched individuals will cause living beings in the process of dying will finish the process at alarming rates. The dying beings affected are usually limited to plants and small animals.
- Bloom: The exact opposite of decay, this sign will cause nearby living beings to grow at extraordinary speeds. In extreme cases, this sign may bring back organisms from the brink of death.
Early Fingerprints, except in certain situations (such as Fire-magic attraction or Air-magic repulsion), are relatively innocuous. In extreme cases, though, Touched individuals have been known to channel too much quell, leading to quell-exhaustion, which is generally reserved to people who have already attuned.
The Attuning
Fingerprints, until the Touched has attuned, will not continue forever. Usually within a year, if the Touched has not attuned, they will disappear entirely, and the person will no longer be Touched by that quell, having given up the ability to master it. In rare situations, though, the Fingerprints refuse to leave, growing steadily stronger until one of two results is met: attuning or death. In either case, Touched individuals go almost at once to the respective Altar, because they neither want to lose their control over quell nor die. For reasons unknown, the Altars are the only places in the Coquels where individuals can learn to control quell, known as attuning. The actual process of attuning is a two-part process: days of meditation, followed by a Trial of Communion.
Meditation
Meditation involves, perhaps obviously, meditating, always in the presence of the quell's manifestation, often physically touching it. Meditation is a peculiarly individualized process, and there is no real guidance, short of two very important, almost sacred rules: there is only to be one person in each meditation room at a time and the person meditating must be nude. Explanation, particularly for the meditation part of this process, fails: there is no real indication of how a person knows he or she has successfully completed the meditation. Nevertheless, the individual almost always knows when he or she is ready for the trial.
Trial of Communion
The trial is the same for every individual attuning to a specific quell, though the trials vary by quell. There are similarities, though: the trials always become a sort of head-to-head competition between the Touched and the quell itself, via its Prime Manifestation. The trial for eś, for instance, involves submersion in the Five Waves. The Touched must manipulate quell to allow himself to survive and, ultimately, to push the waters away, allowing him to emerge attuned. The trials for the other five quell are similar.
Obviously, there is a certain amount of danger involved in the trials. The quell, however, seem to have various safeguards in place, including varying degrees of difficulty in the trial, presumably based on the Touched's natural, intrinsic abilities, and the ability to abort the trial itself. On rare occasions, however, the quell will not abort the trial, and the Touched will die during it. The body is never found.
After Attuning
Attuning, basically, flips the scenario, so that the Touched, now known as a practitioner, touches the quell, rather than vice versa. The practitioner will have no more Fingerprints, since he or she has taken control from quell. At this point, the practitioner will begin his education, which takes several years to complete. He will learn various ways to use his new abilities, in addition to learning his limits.
Sight
One of the first things a practitioner learns is how to See, which involves nothing more than training yourself always to see the quell present in everything. For human eyes, quell takes the form of colored pinpricks, often compared to stars. Those who learn to See have an extremely complicated double-vision, so that they see reality as anyone else sees it but also the quell superimposed over reality without actually blurring or blocking it.
Quell-exhaustion
If a practitioner tries to touch too much quell, he or she will suffer from quell-exhaustion. As expected, there are varying degrees of this, depending on how far the practitioner overshot his limit. Symptoms range from fatigue to fainting to death.
Quell practice
Channeling vs. centering
The manipulation of quell must be channeled; that is, for the quell-effect to be active, the practitioner must concentrate on the task at hand. If he loses concentration, the quell-effect ceases. For instance, for a quelloś-practitioner to irrigate a field, he must actively concentrate on the quell in the air above the field; as long as he does this, the quell will draw the water out of the air, resulting in a sort of manufactured rain. When he stops concentrating, the rain stops, too.
This need to channel greatly limited the early practitioners of quell. Ultimately, this is a user limitation, not a tool limitation: that is, if a practitioner could concentrate on several tasks at once, all the tasks will successfully occur simultaneously. This, however, is difficult, so most practitioners were able to perform only one task at a time. Further, channeling quell is tiring, and the longer one channels the quicker one exhausts oneself. Complex tasks often required hundreds of practitioners to accomplish.
Several decades after the discovery of Death-magic, the art of centering was discovered. Centering involves the channeling of quell through another object to accomplish the tasks. The effect is a more or less permanent quell-effect, as long as the centered object, called the container, remains intact. So, if the quelloś-practitioner mentioned two paragraphs ago were to center his irrigation effects on the field, the rain would never cease, even when the practitioner left the field or went to bed or performed quell-work on some other island.
Centering does have its limitations, though. Centering quell is extremely difficult, much harder than simple channeling. Consequently, fewer people can do it. Containers, too, lose the ability to retain the quell over time, so effects that are to be permanent — like the floating cities of Zebelli — need to be renewed when the container begins to lose its centering power, and this loss can prove dangerous, particularly in situations like the floating cities of Zebelli. Different materials are able to retain a centering for longer periods of time. Furthermore, certain materials center certain types of quell better than others, so a large part of the art of centering involves a correct determination of the best material to use as a container.
Catalysis
Untouched are able to become Catalysts for practitioners. Catalysis is the process by which a practitioner's abilities are greatly enhanced through physical contact with his or her Catalyst. This enhancement can come in the form of quantity (amount of quell the practitioner can touch before exhaustion) or quality (what the practitioner can do with his usual amount of quell). For instance, Practitioner A may be able to irrigate a field by himself for ten minutes, but with Catalyst A, he can irrigate for an hour. Another example is Practitioner B, who can incinerate a 2x2 square on his own but can burn up a 4x4 square with his Catalyst.
Catalysts suffer quell-exhaustion much quicker than practitioners, however, and just like practitioners who over-exert themselves, Catalysts can die from too much quell flowing through them. This poses quite the problem for practitioners, who cannot know the limits of their Catalysts in the same way that they know their own. Because of this danger, Catalysis is not something that occurs on the fly, or between strangers. Practitioners and their Catalysts must undergo rigorous, in-depth training with each other before using their bond in any sort of real setting. Ergo, the relationship between a practitioner and Catalyst is often thought to be the most intimate, close relationship possible in Coquellian society.
Catalysis is a very dangerous thing, and it can be used for evil. It is one of the main reasons for Bellimar II's early success in the Great War: he freely Catalyzed people, often to the point of their deaths, and encouraged his commanders to do the same. In the later years, punishment for rebellious acts was death by Catalysis.
Life-expectancies
Although the exact reasoning is not yet understood, quell has the effect of extending the life expectancy of its practitioners. This is accomplished primarily through a retardation of the aging process: quell-practitioners' late-70s are comparable to non-practitioners' late-40s. This age-retardation does not begin, of course, until quell begins to be manipulated, which starts at puberty, so the first ten to fifteen years of life are aged similarly by both the practitioner and the non-practitioner. In the end, those who practice quell can expect to live for 125 and 150 years, between fifty and seventy years longer than non-practitioners (80-100). The average life expectancy for the quell-practitioner is 127 years, although it differs slightly depending on which quell are practiced. (Oś and Yś have the highest, with 131, and Uś has the lowest, with 124.)
