Wake (Magic)

[ scratch - needs cleanup ]

[ context - we were talking about petrification magic ]

Based on what Divra knows from the Arvid “flashback,” at some point it would become irreversible.

You can think of it sorta like this: A creature that has been "turned to stone" - this can't be a perfect 1:1 transmutation. The very fine structures (hair, organ details, etc.) are not preserved during this process. An animal petrified by magic is more like a very detailed statue, completely solid internally, and with some of the finest details smoothed away. Lots of information is lost in the process. If you were to turn that thing back into organic tissues, you'd just get a statue made of meat. The original creature would still be dead.

Instead, the way you un-petrify a creature is by reversing the spell that petrified the creature in the first place. This can be done by detecting the residue of the spell in the area of where it was cast and inverting it. What you are actually doing is destroying the statue and un-destroying the creature that got replaced by the statue.

(At least, this is the current state of academic theory on the subject)

Another way we might think of it is that the world is chopped up into a bunch of little chunks which each have a limited "undo" buffer, and once too many things have changed in a place, you run out of buffer and can't undo things that happened too long ago.

Oh sure it is, at least if you consider animal testing ethical, which the fine folks at the Araxian Academy of Arcane Sciences certainly do.

This effect varies quite a lot from place to place, and understanding why it works the way it does is still in its early days, but the current theory is that the difficulty of reversing a spell is proportional to the local mundane flux divided by the arcane flux - meaning, the more things have changed after the spell was cast, the harder it will be (eventually becoming impossible), but the more free aether in the area, the more "magical" a place is, the easier it is.

So a spell residue in some long-dark crypt situated on an aether stream can remain intact for many thousands of years, maybe indefinitely, while a spell residue in a city near the Arcanopause (like Aarnbreg) might only last a few hours before dissipating.

The actual word used for these residual magical effects is "wake", like the wake of a ship