Quick summary of ialdae: It is a fairly general-purpose magic system, almost a meta-system because it can settle into different types of systems. This is why Sunshine-family worlds and Wellspring have the same type of magic, but it works very differently. Note that some headcanon or speculation may have leaked in here, although I tried to keep it out.
General characteristics:
An ialdaer has five attributes:
- Generation: How quickly the ialdaer can generate magic for various purposes.
- Storage: How much magic the ialdaer can hold onto at any given time.
- Handling: How quickly the ialdaer can use magic.
- Entanglement: How much the ialdaer’s use of magic affects the patterns of the world they’re in (to be discussed later).
- Perception: How well the ialdaer can see ialdae-related magic.
Somebody can grow in all five attributes by using ialdae, but I get the impression this doesn’t happen very much.
You can think of generation, storage, and handling as hoses connected to a tank of some sort. Generation is how quickly the tank is being filled, storage is the size of the tank, and handling is how quickly the tank is being emptied.
If somebody’s storage is full, and they are generating faster than they are using, the excess magic basically spreads out and permeates the world. I believe, but am not certain, that this is what holds the patterns.
Acquiring ialdae:
If one is around ialdae enough, one might become an ialdaer (and gain the five attributes above). This fails to happen to some people, and some people have such low numbers that they effectively aren’t ialdic. The traditional methods for acquiring ialdae are:
- Be a Matilda without otherwise having a native magic system. I get the impression that any Matilda in a world otherwise without magic will instead be an ialdaer.
- Be floated (other magic done to you also works).
- Be in a world with a lot of ialdae done in it, and just spontaneously pick it up.
I think this is somewhat pattern-dependent, because I never got the impression that one had to do anything special in Sunshine-family worlds to do magic, and that anybody could pick it up. The first could be explained by there being a lot of loose ialdae floating around from being generated but not stored; the second could not.
Patterns:
In Wellspring, ialdae is relatively nice. In Sunshine-family worlds, it is nasty. This is because it learns what to do it and how to do it from being used. It learns more from ialdaers with higher entanglements; Matildas have the highest entanglement ever seen. The patterns are mostly attached to the worlds, but an ialdaer going between worlds will still do their own ialdae about the same way they always do. This entangles with the other world; the Matildas had the idea of going through to Sunshine-family worlds and entangling them to be nicer.
