Bone Magic

“So, ow, so you pull aspects of creatures from their bones?”

“Just so,” said Bormann.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"

Bone Magic allows the caster to tap into a creature's attributes by burning its bones. The available attributes mostly correspond to the game layer attributes marked on Juniper's character sheet, plus a few unique abilities from some rare creatures. These attributes can be temporarily granted to the mage themselves, or to a target they touch. Skilled bone mages can pull more from a bone, and gain access to additional attributes to tap from.

The third empire requires bone mages operating in its borders to be licensed by theAthenaeum of Bone and Flesh.

## Abilities

All bone magic spells involve 'tapping' an attribute or set of attributes in a bone. For the duration of the tap, the target gains a bonus to its corresponding attribute. This process of tapping drains the bone, rendering it unusable in further bone magic attempts. Bones outside of a living creature burn, and those inside are rendered mostly nonfunctional.

Bones are a valuable commodity in Aerb, and are farmed. Bone mages generally use bones from dead creatures, but in a pinch a bone mage can burn their own bones or the bones of another living creature, although they presumably still require direct contact with the bone itself in the latter case.

The effectiveness of a tap is determined by a combination of the bone mage's skill, the stats of the creature the bone came from, and the similarity of the bone to the area of the target that's being buffed. Bone mages can control the rate at which they tap- pulling harder can yield greater short term increases, but a slow and steady pull maximizes the total output.

### Stat Taps

As almost all bone magic spells are stat taps of some variety or another, only those that are somehow interesting will be noted here. There appears to be a tap for every sub-and-super-stat, plus luck.

#### Physical Tapping

Physical Tapping pulls all three physical stats from the bone, but is less efficient for any specific stat than the corresponding single-stat tap. Physical Tapping is also easier to perform than a more targeted tap. Physical tapping can be used to heal the target due to the fact that it pulls endurance. This is the most common application of bone magic, and the most common form of healing on Aerb.[*citation needed*]

#### Endurance Tapping

Endurance Tapping can be used to heal the target (as increasing endurance increases the target's natural rate of healing) in addition to the more obvious benefits. However, it isn't infallible, since it only accelerates natural endurance. Like most forms of healing magic, it cannot create magical materials (e.g. bones, blood) from nothing, and it pulls from the soul's template of the body (meaning old or otherwise soul-deep injuries cannot be healed.)[*citation needed*] The rapid healing of bone magic struggles to deal with infection or disease, although they do have some limited ability to "burn out" diseases by boosting natural healing and hoping for the best.

#### Knowledge Tapping

Knowledge Tapping probably needs to be done with the skull, and can grant access to the target's memories. This is made much less useful due to the fact that taps are temporary, and the memories will fade immediately after the bone is sucked dry.

#### Luck Tapping

Luck Tapping can only be performed with the bones of a creature that had a nonzero luck score. Practically speaking, this means it can only be used with the bones of elves or elf hybrids.

Anglecynn maintains a secret strategic reserve of elf bones for this purpose.

### Special Power Taps

Some creatures have special powers that aren't based on game layer stats that can still be accessed via Bone Magic.

#### Unicorn Bones

Tapping the special power in a unicorn bone grants a bone mage the ability to loop time in a manner similar to the unicorn itself.

#### Momenagerie Bones

Tapping the special power in a bone from the Momenagerie makes the mage briefly undetectable via an antimemetic effect.

## Bone Magic in the Game Layer

Bone Magic's primary stat is KNO.

Bone Magic grants access to additional taps at level 10 and 30, and Juniper learns how to tap mental stats at level 21. There are presumably additional taps at for social stats and luck at levels 40 and 50, too.

## Known Practitioners

* Bormann is a licensed bone mage who operates as a healer in the Barren Jewel
* Juniper Smith is an unlicensed bone mage
* Tova was a bone mage operating as a healer for Fireteam Blackheart

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "A lackluster bone mage pulls less from a bone than a superb one"
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 “It’s possible for a sufficiently skilled bone mage to draw luck from bones,” said Amaryllis. “Luck is a property possessed almost exclusively by elves, so the kingdom has been covertly collecting their bones for quite a long time.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 39: "Strategic Reserves"
3. ↑ “Are there people who train outside the athenaeum?”

“It’s illegal under imperial law,” said Bormann with a grin.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
4. ↑ Tova was still working on Carter, holding a bone in one hand until it smoked while touching his bare flesh with her other hand.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 13: "Time Out"
5. ↑ "The bones become more brittle after the fact, and the marrow within them doesn’t function as it should, which can lead to problems of the blood like anemia, fever, risk of infections, or things like that."
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 27: "Fears"
6. ↑ “There are specialized farms that perform the procedure on their animals, empowering the others, which are then shipped to people like me once the animal has been brought to slaughter.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 27: "Fears"
7. ↑ I sucked power from my ribs one by one, tapping each of them for speed, and the burst of movement I got from them was intoxicating.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 25: "Rocket Man"
8. ↑ I tried to find his soul by first burning through one of my bones to heal him, and then burning through one of his bones.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 74: "The Mouth of a Long River"
9. ↑ "The chief aspect of healing is vitality, so for that we select from resilient creatures. In this case, the Eastern carrier gull, and more specifically, his ribs, which will correspond to your torso, and his leg bones, which will correspond to your leg..."
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
10. ↑ I tried to stick to teasing the power out of the bones as slow as possible, which gave an even smaller effect but over a longer period of time, which I suppose was meant to be a net gain in healing.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 19: "Montage!"
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 It wasn’t until I hit level 10 that I unlocked the ability to pull specifically endurance from the bone, rather than just all physical stats, and that helped me to speed up the healing process.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 19: "Montage!"
12. ↑ “Vitality is the most widely useful, because the effects fade as soon as the bone has had its essence pulled from it. With vitality, the concentrated healing remains."
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
13. ↑ There were no signs of infection, at least so far as I could tell, which was the biggest risk for a treatment like this, since bone magic didn’t handle infection or disease very well. - Chapter 127: Full House
14. ↑ And neither blood nor bone magic can cure the rat rot anyway, so it’s better if we go for the place that has an emphasis on healing that’s not within the realm of its titular magic, right?” (I had tried with bone magic, just for the sake of it, but it hadn’t worked; diseases were, as stated, outside the wheelhouse for the two most common healing magics.) - Chapter 37: Paths
15. ↑ “Fifty thousand tcher for your wounds, half that if you tell me more so I can make an assessment. And if rat rot is a disease, I don’t know what it would take for me to burn it out of you. It would be a good way for me to line my pockets, if I was the sort of healer who liked to string people along.” - Chapter 16: Kindly Bones
16. ↑ “Bone mages sucking the memories out of a person’s skull, that sort of thing?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
17. ↑ "it needs to be written down or dictated quickly before it fades, which creates its own problems"
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
18. ↑ Level 30 was either social attributes, luck, or special powers like the one I could already sense was lodged in the unicorn bones.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 119: "Depths"
19. ↑ See the fight scene in The Critical Path
20. ↑ I tried antimemetics in the second loop, using a bone from one of the Momenagerie to get that effect
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 193: "Coda I"
21. ↑ Skill increased: Bone Magic lvl 12! (Skill capped at triple the value of primary stat KNO.)
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 19: "Montage!"
22. ↑ As predicted, it was the ability granted to me by level 30 Bone Magic
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 133: "The Critical Path"
23. ↑ Juniper learns mental taps, and then mentions that he's capped on bone magic, at 21. Doe or Doe Not, There is no Try