The Edict
Effect
The Edict is nearly limitless in potential. The mad scholars who made it imbued it with so much magic that it is capable of performing truly terrifying things. There genuinely does not seem to be a limit on what you can do. You're drawing on the power of the Dream and thus there is no end to the Verve you can conjure into the world. Divine power at your fingertips.
Instead the limitations come from the side effects. Those who made the language were no Gods. They looked for simplicity and power, they did not care for potential dangers.
Other magical practitioners tend to have to take extra steps to reach their goals. Such as summon fire with the goal of harming someone. Or summon wind to move an object. The Edict is much more raw than this. You can simply wish for someone to be dead, wish for an object to move, wish for something exist or something to simply be there.
Manifestation
Its frightening, speaking the Edict. Your body has some sort of visceral reaction to it - it hates what you are doing. To others it looks wrong, smells rotten. Rotten like the butchery of something beautiful.
Speakers also often carry souls with them - as protection, and well these souls often tend to break under the strain of performing the magic. The sensation of a soul breaking is truly disgusting. In every way possible it seems like the most painful process one can undergo, and everyone can sense it.
Source
Before Godfall people used to pray. They would pray to God and it would grant them their greatest wishes. This was how magic worked. When people prayed their perception was transported to another plane - a reality where only God and souls existed. This is The Dream. It is where people who dream go.
After Godfall the Dream began deteriorating. What was once a divine realm filled with echoing reverie and hope became a husk of its former self. Much of Gods soul, which once existed here in its entirety, was ripped into the material plane. Souls stopped circulating, most people no longer have a soul nowadays and thus they do not dream anymore. Those who do dream are often haunted with nonsensical visions of a world gone mad.
Still, the Dream is full of potential power and it is this power that the Edict draws upon.
Discovery
Greywoot scholars had been studying the fey for decades. Learning about them and their magic. The breakthrough happened years into the war. A guild of scholars, fanatics and madmen, banded together to take the next steps forward for human magic. Their maddened minds, drunk on Ichor, began to understand the world on a terrifyingly fundamental level. One day they came across the corpse of a particularly powerful Fey mage. There was magic in its bones. They feasted on it, downed every last drop of its cadaver - bone, ichor, verve, flesh and all. With the soul of God coursing through their veins they finally understood it.
They created a language. They took whatever Verve they had inside them and in a mad gamble imbued the very words of the language with magic. They created the Edict. A vernacular so powerful that it was capable dragging Verve out of the dream and into the material. Summoning something, from nothing. Just like God did.
And just like God did, they died. The process was far too taxing. Yet the Edict lives on.
Although it is not necessary, a soul is a much recommended component of the Edict. Without it you probably won't get a single word out without going insane or getting eaten by the Mad King first.
The Edict was made too greedily. The mages who created it did not care for safety or sanity they simply wanted power. Thus, it is incredibly destructive. Self-destructive too. It can make you lose your mind or expose you to the Dream world. The most common threat is getting taken by the Mad King. Speakers tend to use souls as sacrifices to circumvent all of these problems but, well, there are only so many souls in the world. The Edict is restricted not in ability, but in price. What are you willing to pay for your power?
Greywoot Mage condemning a Konsearnan soldier to death.
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