Magic/Restrictions

There are certain things magic is simply incapable of doing, and others which it could do, but which are outside of the realm of practicality, for any reason. This page documents these restrictions.

Mind Reading

Minds are so hugely complex that it is simply impossible for anyone to comprehend another mind as complex as their own. Your internal perception of your own mind is heavily curated for such an internal perspective; an external perspective is forced to see the whole mind at once. The vast majority of the contents of a mind are subconscious processes and memories, which are almost impossible to make sense of in raw form and usually not relevant.

This is not a theoretical restriction, but rather one of complexity. A prospective mind-reader can read much simpler minds than their own, with some difficulty, but on such scales as to rarely be useful. A human can understand the whole mind of an ant or worm, and get the gist of a mouse's emotional state, but a bird is far beyond a human. An elder Doṙjaoso, a species known for adeptness at telepathy, can comprehend the mind of a cat, and roughly understand that of a Human. The massive fungoid consciousness of the far north known as Kaṙdkagu is known to not only be entirely able to understand, but even to manipulate in subtle ways, the minds of humans who come near it.

What is not out of scope for magic, is targeted illusions and picking up on the highest level of thoughts—those which have already been cast into language. Targeted illusions allow one to give the impression of speaking within one's mind, and those who are trained in the art can see that people not specifically trained not to do so actually broadcast their thoughts relatively clearly in the form of subvocalizations—the unconscious movements of the mouth that are produced while thinking, and particularly while reading. (There is a trait which denotes a lack of subvocalization through either training or happenstance.) Those who do not subvocalize, including all Sůṙjafia, are almost impossible for mortals to mind-read for the reasons discussed above.

Resurrection

A fundamental truth of Ailhaotnůṙ is that one cannot step back from the Threshold, and that once crossed, there is no return. Depending on circumstance, a dead being's soul will depart permanently exactly one day after death. A Death which destroys or severs an anchor accelerates it to just an hour or two, and the complete destruction of a body accelerates it to mere minutes. Near-death experiences cause a soul to travel part of the way, and then to stop, but not return; this will also shorten the time their soul lingers after their death.

Thus, if one has been dead for more than a day, resurrecting them is categorically impossible, and any animation of such a corpse is purely necromancy, not resurrection.