Let’s Talk About Magic!
Because it never hurts to refresh your memory every once in a while.
By Kim Martinez
Magic of Immunity
The rarest magic of all magic. Immunes disrupt the magic of others, making them impervious to it.
Magic of the Heart
- Empaths can read and impact the emotions of others.
- Healers—you guessed it!—heal living things.
Magic of the Mind
- Omnilinguals can read, understand, and speak all languages.
- Omnivisions have perfect vision, will never need glasses, and can see the unseeable—which ranges anywhere from the wind to the magic surrounding us.
- Instacognition lets Instacogs master any and all skills immediately after being told/shown/taught them.
- Clairvoyants can glimpse the future through sensory-triggered visions that come to them in dreams or flashes of sounds and images while wide awake.
- Telekinetics can move things with their minds.
Magic of the Body
- Concealers come in two varieties.
- Those who are Invisible are totally see-through.
- While those who can Camouflage perfectly mimic their surroundings to hide themselves.
- Strength & Durability is so self-explanatory even I feel a little condescending reminding you that S&Ds are significantly stronger and significantly less likely to get injured than the rest of us.
- Shifters and Modifiers can both change their bodies at will but differ in what they can change their body to.
- Form shifting is the ability to take on the properties of nonhuman things, both living and inanimate.
- Self-Modification is the ability to change your body into other bodies.
- This one can be tricky, so for clarification: a Shifter could turn into a table or a cat, but not your best friend Jill, and a Modifier could turn into a carbon copy of your sister, but not a chair or a bird.
Magic of the Exterior
- Elementals have the ability to control the elements. (Another pretty self-explanatory one but! Did you know Elementals are often more attuned to one element despite being able to manipulate them all?)
- Illusionists can create Illusions that range anywhere from unreal firework shows to meticulously detailed virtual realities full of characters you can interact with, but not touch—no one’s that good.
- Object Manipulation allows Manipulators (seriously, we couldn’t have come up with a better shorthand here?) to manipulate the form of inanimate objects.
Magic of Convenience
The most common magic of all. Convenience is a catchall for anything that falls outside the parameters of the Big Four and Immunity. What Convenients can do ranges anywhere from never losing anything (an actual convenience) to having contagious enthusiasm (a tiny fraction of Empathy) to always hearing birdsong (a truly useless and annoying ability I’ve only found appealing three times in my entire life).
Now, those are the six Categories and everything that falls under them, but there’s still one more thing for us to go over—the ever-elusive M4s who allegedly hit the jackpot and have magic from multiple Big Four categories. And look, I’m not saying they’re not real. I’m just saying having multiple Conveniences isn’t exactly common, having Big Four magic and a Convenience is downright rare, and Multiples with two Big Fours from the same category are almost entirely unheard of. So no, I’m not saying they’re fake; I’m just saying there are about as many reliable sources supporting an M4’s existence as there is of Bonds being real.
So, there you have it, babes! Hopefully you’ll remember it all this time, and if not—that’s what bookmarks are for.
stephanie hoyt 