What a soul already is, expressed without strain.
The rule
A soul ability is the innate, effortless manifestation of a person's soul: not a thing they do to their essence, but the shape their essence already has.
Because it costs no bending, it is stronger than the Alchemical equivalent of the same effect. See Alchemy.
The cost
None is established. That absence is itself notable in a saga this careful about cost, and it is what makes Alchemy's weakness legible: the innate is the baseline, and everything else is measured down from it.
Known abilities
The last row is the exception. The notes give Mira Doyle a Soul track and never say what it does, so her row is drawn from the chapters alone and carries the chapter that defines it.
| Person | Ability | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Elsie Tanner | wind, specialising in compression | hard ceiling of fourteen seconds |
| Yseult Marchant | Catalysis | raises potency and abundance of essence by touch, temporarily |
| Corin Ashby | Severance | cuts a connection within line of sight, including a person's link to their own essence |
| Dane Whitlock | Stillness | motion decays toward zero within a radius |
| Briar Colton | Foresight | sees through his own future self's eyes, about two minutes at most |
| Finn Jota | Fair Game | claps, and the ability chooses an outcome with no input from him |
| Mira Doyle | unnamed | hands an animal her own disposition toward whoever is in front of it (ch. 330) |
Finn's carries the cruellest limit in the set: it cannot be used unless the opponent genuinely considers him an opponent. Ch. 346 states that limit in the narration, which is the first time the chapters do rather than the notes: "He considered Finn an opponent. That was all Fair Game had ever needed."
The name has been on a chapter since ch. 312, which is titled "Fair Game" and closes on it. What ch. 346 adds is the narration using the name as the name of the thing, so the row above is no longer the plan's word carried across.
Being Unmarked
A person can have essence and no innate ability at all. Arthur Lyerm is one, and the word the world uses for it is a stigma rather than a description. See The Unmarked.
Ch. 252 offers a counter-theory: that such a person is not empty, and that what should have arrived on its own has to be built instead, through repeated failure against one specific force. The chapter presents it as a half-forgotten idea most scholars call superstition. See The built ability.
Abilities have hard limits, and somebody is trying to break one
Briar Colton's foresight, ch. 275, is the most precisely specified ability in the saga:
- never more than two minutes ahead
- sustainable for a handful of seconds at a time
- usable roughly once each hour
- and it leaves him "wrung out and shaking" when pushed to those edges
Over winter recess he builds a device out of copper wire, carved crystal lensing, and an essence conduit, intended to hold it "steady. Longer. Further."
He restates the specification himself in ch. 331, and adds what the academy makes of it:
BRR: it's one second. On a good day it's two minutes and I get one of those an hour. I've had it explained to me by three separate instructors that it's a curiosity.
One second is the working figure and two minutes is the ceiling, which is the opposite way round from how ch. 275 reads. The same chapter has him decide the verdict is not the academy's to give: four days of using one second at a time to put eleven numbers on paper is what he measures it against now. Nothing about the ability changed. See Briar Colton.
it was meant, in theory, to do something no scholar had ever successfully documented before.
Nothing else in the saga has attempted to extend an innate ability by external means. Alchemy bends a person's own essence; this proposes to bend the ability itself.
Catalysis
Yseult Marchant's ability, named in ch. 304, and the only one in the saga that acts on the power system itself rather than on the world.
YSE: Through physical contact, I can increase both the potency and the abundance of soul essence. In myself, in another person, or in an object. [...] Temporarily. It fades within an hour or so, and there are limits I haven't fully mapped.
Properties:
- Requires physical contact.
- Works on people, on herself, and on objects.
- Temporary, roughly an hour.
- Invisible, which she gives as the reason it is barely documented: "It doesn't do anything visible, which makes it deeply unimpressive to demonstrate."
Demonstrated effect: Briar's foresight, normally a few seconds and once an hour, holds for four minutes two hours after he had already spent it, and costs him no fatigue at all.
This is also why she can carry five Alchemical disciplines. Alchemy spends the practitioner's own essence; she can replenish it.
Storing essence
Ch. 304 has Briar and Yseult work out the design neither discipline could reach alone.
BRR: if the essence could be stored. If there were a way to accumulate it during the hours I'm not using my ability at all, when it's simply sitting unused inside me, and then release that accumulated store at the moment I actually need it- YSE: Then you'd be drawing on hours of stored capacity rather than whatever happens to be available in the moment.
BRR: Alchemy handles the essence manipulation. Storage, transfer, the actual mechanics of holding it stable. YSE: And your science handles the physical apparatus.
Briar's four failed prototypes were solving the wrong half:
YSE: You've got a finite amount, and you're building something to stretch what it does rather than increasing what you've got to work with. You've been solving the wrong side of the equation.
Abilities that are not controlled
Finn Jota's Fair Game is the one ability in the saga whose holder does not choose what it does. He calls an activation a roll, and until ch. 346 that was the only word the prose gave it.
He claps once. Something happens. Ch. 313 gives four consecutive results: both combatants disarmed, thirty years of borrowed unarmed mastery for twenty-two seconds, total blindness for both, and total paralysis of himself.
FNN: That's what it does. I knew that when I used it. Everybody knows that's what it does, it's the whole point of the thing, you don't get to keep rolling and only ever like the answers.
So the effects are wide-ranging, temporary, affect both parties or neither, and are as likely to ruin the user as to help. He had used it once in his life before that match.
The limit, twice
Ch. 312 says it as a theme, in the bracket that closes the chapter Finn's first clap ends:
[ There is a particular danger in taking someone seriously. It is, for certain people, the only permission they were ever waiting for. ]
Ch. 346 says it as a rule, at a card table with no fight in it, and puts the moment of it on the page. Two hours into a night of winning, the men across the table stop dismissing him:
It meant they had started playing against him. It meant, in the precise and particular way his soul had been built to care about, that he now counted.
So the ability can be felt arriving. The holder knows when he becomes usable, which is a strange thing to know about yourself and is the closest the saga comes to letting somebody feel their own condition for existing.
The one roll that landed
Ch. 313 gives four rolls and the best of them is twenty-two seconds long. Ch. 346 gives one, and it turns every card on the table face up, which is the only outcome that could have won the hand. The chapter makes nothing of the luck. What it spends its attention on is that he chose the moment, having promised himself after ch. 313 that he would only roll again "when there was genuinely nothing else, when his hand was truly forced".
A copied ability stays tethered to the soul that made it
Ch. 139 states this as a rule and then uses it as a weapon.
The hooded figure copies Alexander's obsidian and fire perfectly, down to a flaw: "the slight imperfection where training had reset the pattern wrong". It then fights him with his own techniques.
Grabbing its wrist, he feels something in the space behind his ribs:
The core of self that powers drew from. The thing that made his obsidian his, his fire his - not because he'd mastered techniques, but because they resonated with who he was.
And the rule:
The figure had copied his abilities. But abilities weren't just techniques. They were extensions of self, tethered to the soul that wielded them.
And you couldn't copy a soul.
The copied obsidian then cracks, and the chapter is specific that the damage is not impact:
Not from outside force. From inside. From tension of being pulled in two directions - toward the figure wearing it, and toward Alexander whose soul had forged it.
Three things follow.
- An ability is not a technique. Mastery is not ownership. The tether survives theft.
- Contact restores the pull. Alexander cannot reach his suppressed power at distance, but can feel it "trying to flow back to source" while touching the thing wearing it.
- It explains Johann's copies. Ch. 135 calls them "fragments of you, pieces of your consciousness carved off and given temporary form", and says he feels each one die. Same tether, seen from the copier's side.
The closing bracket rates the imitation and is the only opinion the saga offers on it: "Johanns' was way better."
Abilities that act on other abilities
Two of the four strongest students at Solmere have one, which the saga does not comment on.
Catalysis adds essence, by contact.
Severance, Corin Ashby's, takes it away. Not by draining it. By cutting the person off from their own supply.
YSE: It was that the place I reach into was no longer connected to me. [...] I reached for my own essence and found that I could not find myself. (ch. 318)
Lasts about four seconds in the one measured case. Triggered by two whispered words nobody hears (ch. 319).
Dane Whitlock's, unnamed, acts on motion rather than essence: a gradient field that takes momentum, out to about thirty feet, collapsible into absolute stasis at visible cost.
COR: He stops things. That's the whole of it.
An ability that persuades nothing and commands nothing
Mira Doyle's has no name. Ch. 328 shows it working on a wounded arachnid twenty feet across. Ch. 330 is where she defines it, to seven people at a table, and the definition is narrower than the demonstration made it look.
MRA: It doesn't have a name. Not one I've been given, anyway. It works on animals and it only works on animals, and what it does is not what people assume when I describe it, so I'd like to describe it properly rather than have it be more impressive than it is. (ch. 330)
MRA: I can't command anything. I can't make a creature do a thing it doesn't want. What I can do is hand it my own disposition toward whoever's standing in front of it. It will be as friendly to a stranger as I am. That's the whole of it. I didn't tell that spider to lie down. I made the room stop being something it had to defend. (ch. 330)
So it has three properties and every one of them is a limit.
- Animals only. The one hard boundary, and the saga states it before it is ever tested against a person.
- It carries her disposition, not her instruction. The creature's behaviour toward a third party becomes hers toward that third party. A hostile holder would get a hostile animal.
- It cannot overrule the creature. "I can't make a creature do a thing it doesn't want." It removes a reason to fight rather than the ability to.
It is the only ability in the saga whose ceiling is the holder's own character. Catalysis works the same in anybody's hands, Severance cuts whoever it is aimed at, and the roll does not care who claps. This one is worth exactly what its holder is worth to a stranger, which is why it reads as small and is not.
It costs her the ability to stand afterwards (ch. 328), and she had used it on birds, a fox and a dog before she used it on something that could kill her.
Ordinary abilities
Bevan, the groundskeeper, has "a bit of resilience to cold". It is the smallest ability the saga names, and the only one whose holder has made peace with it.
BVN: A gift not amounting to much isn't the same as a life not amounting to much.