Temancy

Temancy, also called weather magic, is the practice of using magic to predict and affect the weather. Practitioners are called temancers, weather witches, weather mages, or meteorology mages. Because weather magic is complex, almost all temancers are also spiromancers. Temancy was invented in Ju, and most of the cutting edge work is still happening there.

## History

The field of temancy was founded by Hwangbo Yeol-jeong in 245 PS when they realized the importance of water vapor in creating weather. They designed three field-defining runes:

* Su-jeung, which measures the humidity in the air
* Ondo, which measures the temperature of a segment of air
* Giab, which measures atmospheric pressure

Initially, Hwangbo's research went unnoticed. They lived on the outskirts of Ju and their family did not have many connections to other institutes of learning or the government. Their single student, a blind commoner named Ryuk Min recruited from a nearby farm, dutifully carried on their legacy and eventually inherited their estate. Over time, she refined Hwangbo's methods, creating Yecheug, the first all-in-one weather predicting rune. She planted it every evening and cast one every morning. The original Yecheug took a shocking two decans to grow.

Ryuk eventually recruited a few followers, all blind or with low vision, to carry on her work. They lived on the Hwangbo estate, which remained the heart of temancy for the next one hundred fifty years. The future of temancy lies in rune self-cycling, which would allow runes to compare their predictions to the actual weather and improve themselves over time.

## Floating Pointers

Pointers are shapes or symbols that indicate an external object for a rune to act upon. Because runes exist only in the spiral, it is tricky to portray physical concepts, such as *that person right there*, without using pointers. Generally, pointers are drawn, tattooed, or painted onto a person or object as an indicator. However, this means they cannot be used on gases or liquids or on anything out of reach of the mage or a nimble assistant. The data that drives temancy improvements is often incredibly difficult to point to.

Wife-husband-and-spouse powerhouse triad Ditya Ma, Hügelai Hsia, and Kwok Min-seo created the first floating pointers in 89 PS while staying in a remote Aleyan village. They had intended to take temperature, pressure, and humidity measures hourly on a hike up Ghiri as an experiment. When Hügelai suffered from severe altitude sickness, they stopped their trek and sheltered in place during a storm, during which time, the three devised a system to allow pointers to float. Their rudimentary system relied on the fact that humans breathe air, and humans can have pointers drawn on their bodies. A healer, Ditya knew how to pinpoint a human's lungs in a script and Hügelai and Kwok created the rune that tracked an exhaled breath of air out of the human body and into the sky. This allowed them to get long-distance measurements of atmospheric conditions.

Modern floating pointers rely on balloons or other flying objects to get a controlled gradient of data on an ascent. Some temancers also use proxies, which do not need to be drawn at all, but pinpointing invisible objects, such as pockets of air, is still an unpredictable art.