Arcanists

The **Arcanists** (*Romaji*: **Ākanisuto**; *Kana*: **アーカニスト**) were a group of spellcasters from the North which once worked alongside the Vikings for the good of the Three Worlds. After the cataclysm of the blue sun which destroyed all of the Northern Soul Society the very few surviving Arcanists were utterly unable to reform and all that remains from them is the towers and dungeons they hid themselves in.

## ***Abilities, Techniques, Equipment***

### *Codex*

The **Codex** (*Romaji*: **Kōdekkusu**; *Kana*: **コデックス**) was the single most important item to an Arcanist, and the equivalent of the Shinigami's Zanpakuto, however unlike a Zanpakuto a Codex was not unlocked but rather made from scratch. A **Codex** was nothing more than a tough book written on with **Mahōno Reishi** (魔法の霊子, Magical Spiritual Particles) based ink, which exploited the "spiritual conductivity" of magical reishi to shape and mold spiritual energies and pressures applied to it into a kido like effect. By connecting strings of runes, schemes, charts, drawings and other things one could make the energies transform and be changed each time they passed through a new letter allowing one to cast spells in a kido organ like fashion.

All Codexes possessed an **Index** which was nothing more than a page, or equivalent, containing all known standardized **Arcane Runes**, and which served as the Arcanists' primary mean of invention and study. The index provided all the building blocks for an arcanist to craft a spell from, and once a spell was found to be useful it could be written down in another page to be called upon later instantly and effortlessly by simply passing the energies through that string of arcane runes in succession. Those who knew of om would endow the pages with drawings, cyphers, extra useless runes and even name the spells themselves to endow them with om in whichever way they could.

While typically a codex was a book there was no actual limitation to the design of a codex, simply that it could have ink applied onto it. Once before there were many Arcanists who enjoyed sets of cards, scrolls and some even decorated their own bodies with the ink. Though while a codex was personalized by the person who made them they could be used by anyone, as such they were often armed with traps and other automatic spells fueled by the constant energy of reimyaku or uraryoku around them.

While most people aware of the Arcanists Arcane Runes often think of them as the same as those of the Dwarves they are very distinct, a dwarf rune enacts a spell effect in its entirety by passing energy through it while an arcane rune only performs one transformation of the energy or pressure passing through it. This key distinction allows the Arcane Runes to be used with far more versatility than a dwarven rune.

## *Arcana*

Arcana was the name the arcanists gave to their form of spellcasting, it was inflexible in comparison to other forms of spellcasting but they made up for it by having so many spells in reserve that they could answer nearly any problem on a dime and having so many unique spells made by themselves that they were impossible to fully counter.

### **Grand Arcana**

A Grand Arcana was the name of the ultimate spells the Arcanists made, they would often take up hundreds of pages of code to write out and a codex could typically only handle one and still have space left for every other spell. The complexity of a Grand Arcana was of such a degree that they typically involved multiple sub spells that were cast within it as smaller steps to the eventual end result.

Because of the sheer scale and complexity a Grand Arcana could have some Arcanists would write them on structures instead of portable objects, binding the Grand Arcana's effect to only being usable in that location but being usable by anyone who got it. Most Grand Arcana exist still in this form as security systems within the Arcanists towers and dungeons powered only by the ambient reimyaku energies of the realms they exist within.