The Anti-Magic Aura is a zone in Vala where all magic stops working. Only its effect is known; its form, location and cause are not.
| Type | Magical phenomenon |
| Spanish entry | Aura Anti-Magia |
Description
It has no described boundary or sign of entry; it is noticed only because things stop working. It was announced as a warning before a place a company was about to enter, but that place is not recorded. Teachers in Caldero rarely name it.
Effects
The prohibition is total:
- No one can cast spells inside.
- Magic items lose their magical properties.
- No one can teleport, “not even the magician”.
- Enchanted weapons become common iron, and enchanted protection (“cloaks of protection”) loses its power.
No way to bypass it is recorded.
Context
In Vala magic is the system of power: it brought advances comparable to “the industrial revolution” and supports an economy of enchanted objects (with a precedent in the gnomish factory of Lower Caldero), travel by portals and long-distance communication by the magic of Caurofon. Caldero teaches it at the official Blue Water Academy and in the private towers of noble houses. The aura negates all this locally.
Magic comes in two kinds, charismatic and intellectual, and is recorded failing: spells with accidents, the magic tower “full of a kind of… shadow?” and “quite broken”, and the religious idea of magic as deceit “Loki-style”. The aura belongs with these failures; no fact links it to the broken tower or the gnomish factory.
Open questions
- Where it is, whether there are several, how large it is, and whether its edge can be crossed unknowingly.
- Its cause (artifact, creature, ruin or natural law), and whether it is permanent or can be created, moved or switched off.
- Whether it affects charismatic and intellectual magic alike, and Caurofon’s magic and the Veil.
- Whether enchanted objects are permanently damaged or only dormant.
- Who in the world knows of it, and whether it is avoided, exploited or inhabited.