Portals

Portal creation is a well-guarded sorcery secret that’s very hard to figure out. Currently the only groups that know how to create portals through ritual sorcery are the High Library of Magic and the Merchant Enclave.
The current known way to make portals is limited to portals between Elsewhere and one other world. It’s also limited by the fact that while one end of the portal will be wherever the ritual is initially performed the other will be more or less random. This happens because the method used today takes advantage of Elsewhere’s spatial uniqueness and “rides” on the points where it intersects with other realities.
This severely limits one’s ability to target the portals properly. Generally the only parameters one can input amount to “right planet, right atmospheric level, not under or right above water and no extreme temperature”, beyond that the ritual becomes impossible hard to design.
To work around this limitation, they make the portal slightly unstable so it can be “nudged” to pick a new place to land on. This typically gives people 10 to 20 tries allowing the portal to land on the right side of the continent, once that’s picked it’s possible to move the portal a few miles to somewhere more convenient and than let it settle definitely.
Of course all these factors influenced how interworld travel affected (or failed to affect) Elsewhere’s development. Creating portals is more a game of dice than figuring out where you want to land. It meant that when Earth-born sorcerers started to find Elsewhere they were faced with the decision of either staying or risk an uncertain journey home. One can’t purposefully land a portal inside the enemy’s basis, but they have deniable plausibility if a portal lands on a country’s wilderness.
Portals can still be used as shortcuts but only in a patchy sort of way whereby luck one might find out that it’s faster to go through portals A, B, C and D than using conventional methods of interworld travel. Portals between Earth and Elsewhere are sometimes used to transport goods that way, usually illegally, but for most they are used to bringing things from Earth for the benefit of Elsewhere and Elan, neither consider the act illegal. Typically, people interested in making money from portals will create portal hubs of half a dozen portals which is a massive investment and heavily regulated by all involved worlds.
It is actually possible to develop better targeted portals, but it would require a better understanding of physics than any sorcerer currently has, in no small part because only Earth has sufficiently advanced technology to figure it out.

Discovery

Portal making was rediscovered by Daliaths on ancient ruins shortly after Elan started getting anexed.

Related Organizations

• The High Library of Magic
• The Merchant Enclave

Material Components

Requires a complex ritual circle, around 10m across and many expensive ingredients as well.