Adept

From Ardesia

Adepts, variously called witches, mages, and wizards, are practitioners of magic. Before the Interdict Arcænum witches were found in all parts of the world, but were still not a commonplace sight. Most were solitary practitioners, associating with their peers rarely to share knowledge and discuss happenings in the world relevant to witches.

[edit] Wizards' marks

The magic that a wizard channels leaves its mark, eventually manifesting as stigmata. The mark is always related to the magic used, so that a mage who often works protective magic might manifest a mark in the form of scaled skin, bony plates, or sometime similar. A seer might acquire blindness, or a halo of barely-audible whispers. Similarly a mage that works elemental magic will take on the characteristics of that element, with perpetually moving wind-blown hair, scorched skin, a gravelly voice, gills, leaves sprouting from knuckles, or deathly-cold hands.

The marks may be hidden by illusion, but the potential consequences are rarely risked. Illusion magic leaves its own marks, but when used to conceal a wizard's mark the vulnerability to illusion-manifested marks increases by an order of magnitude. A witch seeking to disguise a forked tongue by illusion may quickly become a constantly-shifting mass of flickering limbs, or may disappear entirely.

[edit] Iron

Working with magic makes an arcanus permanently vulnerable to the touch of iron. Iron shackles will rob a witch of power, and will further weaken the limbs so bound. An iron blade inflicts terrible and painful wounds on a wizard.

Counter-intuitively, iron will take stronger enchantments than other base metals. Iron thus magically-aligned does not have the usual detrimental effects on the mage. Some have suggested that the natural state of iron is wild and destroys the ordered flows of arcane energy that is bound with the wizard's lifeblood, but that this chaotic raw state makes it particularly malleable to magical forces.