The Magic of Anieth - The Magical Mind

Most people are fond of saying, "the interesting part comes from the male." This is a way of saying that the mental abilities of magic are inherited from the father and the shape from the mother. However, what it really means is that the variety of those talents is vast, whereas the shape is generally just what the mother had. A father may have one set of talents, but pass on to his children other talents that had lain dormant for many generations. Thus seers would not show up in every generation with regularity, but seem to skip around in a population of seers.

Rule One: the father of the changer can have very diluted powers and still sire a child who has full-on abilities. We've seen in families related to queens (an thus to shapeshifting men) that sometimes the other children of queens will inherit some magical abilities. It is not very common for anyone to have powerful skills, but it is not uncommon for whole families to share telepathic abilities of more or less or foretelling abilities of more or less, and etc. Please see our article on the queens for more elaboration.

Rule Two: the child will not have abilities that are not within the father's family. Seeing the future does not run across all the Clans. A list below will tell you which abilities run in which Clans.

Rule Three: if the child is a half-breed, especially of an Animal shaper, the child is usually insane. I do not know of a case in which this was not true outside of the royal lines. However, even among royalty, some of the relatives of queens have tried to bear half-breed children and have failed to have them reach maturity with any kind of sanity. This seems to be more often the case with men. Men seem much more vulnerable to inheriting a magical mind that is psychotic. We think that it is connected to the male genes, just as women seem to have much less control over shaping than men do. The only two half-breed Trees were both men. The rule seems to be like parent/like child vulnerability.

The Red labels indicate that the Clan has a powerful form of this kind of magic. Here is what we mean by the different abilities.

Foretelling: precognition, seeing the future, seeing someone else's future.
Telepathy: reading minds, putting thoughts into others' minds, altering another's mind with images and feelings, influencing with voices and feelings the minds of others.
Energy Transference: hurling energy as a form of fire/lightning/shock wave, moving energy through a person or through plants and the earth, water or wood or stone, heating things, cooling things, changing states of things and other energy, reading energy.
Healing Hands: affecting changes for good (or ill) in another through the movement of energy, or lymph or poisons, etc., in the body. Also used on plants and in herbalism to affect state changes to make some salves and etc. more powerful and effective.
Charm: a common magic used by most Animals and some Trees, involving the ability to attract or repel, to force other's to do one's bidding or to enspell people to do what they might not do normally.
Clairvoyance: reading auras, knowing things at a distance, sensing at a distance, knowing an outcome based, not on the future, but placement of elements of the present.

Some of the Clans have magic particular to them, like the Yew who have the ability to induce sleep or dreams or even to kill with a paralysis; or the Birch who have the ability to sense danger, or exaggerated sensory ability in animals like the Wolf People being able to do things that look like clairvoyance through smell. As Queen Morga, I found that I had many abilities of the lynx, a heightened sense of hearing, touch, and the ability to see in the dark. Susan says that, as Queen Cuadhe, she was able to sense things through animals like the identity of a person unseen through the smells and sounds of a herd of horses.

At a later date, we intend to write much more about the different abilities in separate articles.