Learning & Practice

by

Finley Vorden

If you’re considering the divine tongue as your path to power, let me describe what you’re in for.

Traditional apprenticeship remains the most common way to learn Sjōvneva. This charming arrangement typically consumes 3-7 years of your life, during which you’ll perform such magickal tasks as sweeping your master’s floors, organizing their esoteric library, and fetching tea at precisely the temperature that prevents them from noticing you exist. Your first year will involve no actual magick whatsoever, just endless lectures about divine pantheons delivered by someone who speaks exclusively in riddles and metaphors.

Only after you’ve selected a patron and established devotional practices will you begin learning actual incantations. This usually happens around year two, assuming you haven’t fled to pursue a less demanding career.

The whole ordeal culminates in a “first calling” ceremony: a public spectacle where you attempt an actual incantation before a crowd of judgy magickal practitioners.

Institutional Learning

For those who prefer standardized torment, magickal academies have sprung up in major cities.

The Cerulean Spire in Idemar is considered by many the most prestigious; a towering blue edifice where students walk around with the haunted expressions of people who haven’t slept properly in years. I sneaked in once posing as a visiting scholar. Their protective magick specialization means every doorway, window, and chamber pot is warded with increasingly creative alarm spells. I triggered two just trying to find the visitor’s washroom.

Rīōnne’s Breath Academy in northern Ārdmery takes a more elemental approach. Students there practice air manipulation in open-air pavilions perched atop treacherously high cliffs. “Motivation through fear of falling,” explained one instructor cheerfully. The constant windstorms mean everyone’s robes billow dramatically, a marketing technique I suspect they’ve designed intentionally.

The Temple-College of Illyāna in southern Bairora specializes in healing and transformation magick, which sounds lovely until you realize student practice sessions involve students intentionally self-inflicting minor injuries that need immediate tending. I witnessed firsthand a class of second-years comparing deliberately induced rashes, each trying to create the most impressively horrific skin condition for advanced students to cure. Academic competition takes many forms, but pustulent boils must surely rank among the least appealing.

These institutions typically demand 4-8 years of tuition payments.

Self-Teaching

Against all sensible advice, a great many intrepid (or suicidal) individuals attempt to teach themselves about Sjōvneva. Without guidance, these poor fools often misinterpret divine preferences with catastrophic results. A fisherman in eastern Ārdmery I once met decided Yāerōnās would appreciate water offerings poured directly onto his spell book. The resulting mold growth developed sentience and had to be negotiated with by local authorities.

Pronunciation errors especially can lead to particularly creative disasters. The difference between “Vozju” (air) and “Voz-jhu” (approximately “exploding air”) might seem subtle to the untrained ear, but becomes remarkably apparent when your market stall transforms into splinters. Worse still, incorrect invocations may attract attention from unintended divine entities, particularly those with mischievous or malevolent tendencies.

Divine Calling

Occasionally, some completely ordinary person with no magickal background whatsoever suddenly starts speaking in divine tongues and performing miracles. These “divinely called” individuals bypass normal learning entirely, receiving magickal knowledge directly through what one described to me as feeling like “having a library dropped into my brain from a great height.”

These sudden practitioners typically demonstrate remarkable power within their patron’s specific domain while remaining utterly incompetent in all others. A farmer's daughter called by Rāvehnswhenh near Chariot Hill could summon rain during the worst drought in recorded history but couldn't light a candle without conventional means. When I asked about this limitation, she shrugged and said, “Weather’s all She showed me. I assume the rest ain’t important.”

The divinely called tend toward zealotry that makes conventional devotees look positively casual. Established magickal institutions view these divine wild-tokens with the enthusiasm typically reserved for unexpected tax audits. “Unpredictable,” “unregulated,” and “unsettling” were terms I heard repeatedly from traditional practitioners.

Nevertheless, these divinely tapped individuals have historically driven major magickal innovations, typically by not knowing something was deemed impossible until after they’d already done it.