How Magic, Spells, and Enchantments Might Work: Some Musings

The impetus for this piece arose when I had to work out how enchanting, magicka and things worked, that might satisfy what we see in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim simultaneously for a fiction project.

''Please note that all this is sheer conjecture founded in lack of sleep and scads of talking with two of my friends, Teh Coffee Zombie and StellarWind Elsydeon, who is also co-creator of most of the ideas presented here (60% at least). Special thanks are also due to /u/RottenDeadite and /u/MareloRyan for the ideas that sparked this, and /u/Sythirius for proofing and sanity checks.''

''Not sure how well all this works out. Anyway, forwards!''

______________________________________________________________________________________________

What is Magicka?
Idea the First: Magicka is a primal force derived from Aetherial origins, it is the fabric of Creation.

"All that we are is a result of what we have thought, it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts." This is all but literal in TES: What is creatia? Creatia is magicka in a different form. What is the casting of spells? Mathematics in the form of words designed to act on the creatia that is All. All things in Tamriel are founded in the Word Mathematical that underlies Aurbis. Thus the use of magicka by sapients, what we call spellcasting, operates by rearranging mundic creatia/matter according to a pattern set by the caster's mind and will.

There is also a certain linkage between magicka and souls, at least that bit of it that can be called the animus - in which one can be used as a power source for another. I'm working based off of the ideas of MareloRyan and RottenDeadite from here. Particularly:

''Stars are holes into Aetherius, or rather, funnels from Aetherius into Oblivion and Mundus. So if souls have their own mechanisms which funnel magicka from omnipresent sources (as well as AE that shape it), then they're the holes. They're literally stars. And attaching them to artifacts with a substitute AE (the spellform) is the basic mechanic of enchanting. ... Spells in general are just an AE telling stories about magicka, and the magicka falling in line.''

[NB: AE as mentioned here is not equivalent to the usual conception of the soul. AE is defined by MareloRyan as "Identity, self, selfhood, consciousness, ghost (when disembodied), story-shape, narrative-and-plot-and-narrator in one." Keep this in mind when you see AE talked about in this piece.]

I should here explain what I conjecture about souls in TES and what happens to souls after death on Nirn: I know that at least one person here has been going with the idea of souls not being one whole thing, but made up of parts. Personally I've been viewing the whole Dreamsleeve-rebirth thing as similar to the model of rebirth in Buddhism. Note I say rebirth rather than reincarnation: in Buddhism, rebirth is described as "the doctrine that the evolving consciousness" (Pali: samvattanika viññana, M.1.256)[11][12] or "stream of consciousness" (Pali: viññana sotam, D.3.105) [13] becomes one of the contributing causes for the arising of a new aggregation" that we recognise as consciousness. The new being that arises after the previous being passes away is not the same as its previous form, but the two (or rather, the infinitude of such) lives lived form a stream of consciousness (bhavanga-sota).

Hence on Nirn, I think of the AE as this result of the aggregative process; the animus, MareloRyan's "star-holes", is the seed around which AE gathers physical form to re-enter Mundus. I believe this view fits in well with ideas expressed by MareloRyan previously about Shezarrines as thought viruses: repeating patterns in the loose wilds of unbound dreaming consciousness that have sufficient force to make themselves return to Nirn again and again.

The Dreamsleeve and Rebirth
How does the Dreamsleeve work in this scenario? Perhaps a good way of thinking about it is as a holding place. The intermediate state between rebirth and death, somewhat like the Tibetan concept of bardo -- the liminal state that offers the unbound consciousness a direct insight into the state of reality. The bardo is not a tangible state, but on Nirn, metaphors are real; an object is also simultaneously an idea-concept. With the new information from ESO we have about the waters of Nirn being the repository of all memory, perhaps we finally have a concrete location of sorts for the Dreamsleeve we can point to, and say that 'it is there'. At one level, it is the substance denizens of Tamriel drink and which sustains them; on another level one might see it as the collective Memory of Nirn sustaining the AE of living things. On Nirn as it is here, water is the true staff of life.

If one reckons that identities, that AE coalesces out of the noise of information that is the Dreamsleeve, my question here has always been what drives that coalescence? Why should information clump together at all and not remain an undifferentiated mass? What drives the aggregatory process though?

From /u/purveyoropulchritude's post on the differences between love as is commonly thought of, and the Love as meant in the Sermons of Vivec:

The Role of Mara
This brings us, at last, to Mara. She is the goddess of love, and, per the above, a demon of cabbage soup and soap-suds. Her priests in Riften describe her domain thus:

"Mara's domain encompasses the emotions we strive the most to embrace: love, compassion, understanding."

Metaphysically, she is linked to the Dawn:

''"We are devoted to the goddess who gave mortals the gift of love, that they might have a hint of eternity." "To love is to know the true nature of the gods." "Not all can hear the broadest echoes of deepest Dawn." "The Dawn surely opens upon you."''

I believe that all of these elements are manifestations of one thing: the metaphysical impulse of disparate elements to perpetually approach one another. Understanding is our approach of another's thought; that is Mara; that is love. As this force of attraction or impulse of approach, Mara reminds mortals of the Dawn, when gods and mortals were conjoined in transcendental intimacy. She is half the mechanism of the kalpic cycle: Mara's love pulls the world back toward Dawn, where it is inevitably sundered once more to begin a new kalpa.

And from the Mythic Dawn Commentaries, Vol. I:

"Greetings, novitiate, and know first a reassurance: Mankar Camoran was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic. We mortals leave the dreaming-sleeve of birth the same, unmantled save for the symbiosis with our mothers, thus to practice and thus to rapprochement, until finally we might through new eyes leave our hearths without need or fear that she remains behind. In this moment we destroy her forever and enter the demesne of Lord Dagon.”

My thought here is that it's because of the principle Mara embodies. The Mother Goddess of Nirn symbolises the feminine principle, the bounty of the wet earth. In her association with Nir of the 'Anuad', the female principle of the cosmos that gave birth to creation, she is the meeting ground between opposing dualities, hence why she is married to either of or both Akatosh and Lorkhan in so many Tamrielic pantheons. She is the manifestation of the impetus to live, to create -- to aggregate. The new protonymic AE emerges out of the waters of Memory through her embrace, the impulse to come together that creates a distinct AE that is embodied at the moment of conception.

And now, if you've stuck through this part, we now return you to our scheduled broadcast.

Spells and Enchantments: What is an enchantment, and how does it relate to the Aurbis and its Framework?
If creatia-magicka is the 1s and 0s of the universe then AE, be it part of a mortal soul, shaped creation or artificial spell construct of the enchanter, shapes it into meaning. One could also see magicka as the energy-flow-soundform behind the music of the Aurbis and creatia as the notes that give it shape, which leads us into the main theme of this piece.

Base Assumption: My current thinking is that spell casting requires a sort of altered state: focus of the will, setting constraints on the magicka and then expelling it to create the desired effect. For most if not all magicians, getting into such a state probably requires aids to focus the will, be it verbal, mental visualizations, or kinesthetic: think Naruto's handseals for jutsus, or Harry Potter's wand motions, mantras and incantations. An enchanted item would theoretically negate those requirements for such a state. Enchantments on items are created when the soul, or at least the soul's energy that forms and powers the enchantment is frozen in the pattern of that specific enchantment. Think of it as a very specific melody, frozen as sheet music, if we go by the Mundus as Music approach. So the enchanted object acts as a pattern: an amplifier for magick bent to the mage's will, channeling that potential in a preset way.

Be warned, here's where I start really making even more shit up than I already have, LOL.

So I've thought about it, and I've come to the tentative conclusion that there can be no such thing as a truly constant effect enchantment: a waterwalking ring doesn't float, after all, and chameleon suits aren't always invisible.

What, then, happens inside the enchanted item when it's not being actively used?

Conjecture

Here's what I think the soul-energy used in the enchanting process is doing: You need a soul to power the object, say a ring, in this case. The soul becomes the spell. An enchanted item is enchanted using a soul, tuned with a specific instruction or definitions, through the use of say, "sheet music". Part of it forms the "sheet music", the instructions defining the spell pattern, and the rest of it keeps that instruction set... written, in place.

A spell is a complicated construct; enchanting even more so. An enchantment is thus composed in several parts: one tells a spell what it is, another what it's supposed to do; then it's got bits to keep it in place in/on the object, and then another bit to draw in magical energy and keep it going... So in effect, quite a fair bit of the soul used in the enchantment is used in defining all that: the spell's boundaries, keeping it in place and making the spell-pattern permanently bound in the enchanted object: you're changing its very makeup, its place in the Aurbic song, which requires an expenditure of energy.

Now MareloRyan's idea about weapon enchants and why they wear out is this:

''Though apparently more projecting spellforms, such as those that go on weapons, degrade and scab over the hole, lessening its ability to funnel magicka. Recharging is fusing a new hole into the system.''

Now I don't quite like that proposition, not without a bit more expansion. Why should the hole degrade for projective spellforms?

My explanation is thus: the reason enchantments wear out over time is because of the equivalent of the law of entropy as applied to magicka: you exerted force/persuasion when you made the enchantment, telling a different story about the object, to change an object to do something it didn't originally do. However a ring wants to stay a plain ring, not an enchanted ring, and the Aurbis tends to like it that way too. So when we say an enchanted object has run out of charge, what we're actually measuring is the number of times you can use the thing before it "reverts" to its natural state. Each use of the ring consumes the power behind the enchantment's fabric: wears down the physical changes of the instruction set, so to speak. So a recharge is essentially renewing the instruction set. Think of it as striking a tuning fork, which then vibrates. Over time the tuning fork stops vibrating, and you have to hit it-- provide it with more energy in the form of kinetic energy -- to keep it vibrating.

I've also been reading this, which says:

''Personally, I'm thinking that the gem acts as a storage pod. When the energy releases from it into the weapon (probably by some kind of spell or maybe just by something imprinted into the table itself) it breaks down. As to how they can be used to recharge: most swords and daggers have a pommel, usually ornate, that one could theoretically use as an interface. My guess is that the enchantments all contain a kind of inherent enchantment (kind of like the ones on armour that's completely passive) and thus doesn't lose charge that preforms the same function as the table on a much lesser scale.''

So, to put this bluntly: some form of spell transduces the 'soul' or energy to the weapon and the enchantment in question is used as a 'lattice' to crystallize the effect into the weapon alongside a passive, lesser enchantment centered on allowing further transduction. The further transduction allows a soul-gem connected to the weapon in one way or another (I'd guess pressed somewhere to it, blade, pommel, crossguard, etc). Since the soul gem is first taking in, then holding, and finally releasing a massive amount of energy all at once, it simply can't take it and breaks apart into dust after use.

I think the idea in that post does fit with my thoughts on the process.

Speculation #1: You do use the soul's energy/magicka in the enchanting process, but the process of enchanting itself draws on your magicka-- tapping in and drawing off a certain amount of your own reserves that is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy in the soul you used, hence different enchantment strengths. That bit probably needs refinement; it could as easily be the equivalent parts to the amount of leftover soul energy after the process of enchanting is done. Or perhaps the power for constant effect enchantments are drawn off the person's own magicka reserves -- a very tiny drain, so small that it's negligible, and weapons' on-cast enchants require more than that to have effect in the physical realm of Mundane reality, so they can wear down.

Speculation #2 (which is sort of related but possibly conflicting with earlier ideas set out under Speculation #1):

Armour and jewellery anchored enchantments take very well to certain spells -- those that affect the wearer only like shields, wards, resistances, nighteye etc. The solid ordered characteristics of the materials and construct helps anchor the enchantment so well, they can be made constant effects, and last insanely long with only minimal magicka input since the draw is negligible, and renews itself every time the wearer puts them on/triggers the effect?

I like to think that my explanation, using the idea of inherent entropy would slot in here nicely: I would posit that artificial AE is not as efficient/capable of using the charge effectively as a naturally formed/created AE would be. Perhaps impressing AE unnatural to a thing requires more energy, and it doesn't take as well.

Can a non-living object have an AE in any form? I'm not sure, however how this view would work with weapon enchantments and why there are no "constant effect" enchants possible on them. Maybe, because all things originally came from the manifold subgradiency of the Ehlnofey/et'Ada, all things have a measure of AE and the greater conflict between a thing's natural AE and the impressed AE of the spellform, less actual power stored-directed towards the spell, hence it runs out of juice faster. Hence defensive, passive enchantments on things like jewellery last nearly forever because the AE impressed works well with the existing AE of the thing, e.g. a ring. This is again assuming that an AE is sort of the essence/awareness/identity/what have you of a living - or pseudoliving - thing. Note that soul != AE. AE must be-- conscious? Capable of volitional thought at the least, they can be attached to them and they get -detached- once the individual dies, with the animus going back to Aetherius for recycling via Dreamsleeve.

Thus, via enchanting a detached animus can be used to imbue an inanimate object with its own AE - or quasi-AE since it's not aware, as much as it's a living pattern of magic. Consider Dwemer Automatons that are literally given "purpose" by soul gems: although their energy is drawn by mechanical means, it somehow doesn't seem to deplete the gems. But destroy the soulgem or remove it, and the automaton deactivates. So it seems that the initial programming, so to speak is done in a similar manner to what we've posited earlier about how enchantment works: Using a soul as an energy source to impress a specific pattern upon an inanimate object with the soul essentially BECOMING the pattern. The soul becoming the pattern would suggest that it [enchantment] never really "goes away" since you don't need to re-enchant an item, just charge it.

Enchanting across Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and an attempt to reconcile the differences from a historical lore perspective
As part of that larger project I'm working on, I needed a system that would explain how enchanting methods were so different between Morrowind to Oblivion and really different in Skyrim, and the banal explanation of different methods in different provinces wasn't going to cut it.

I started talking this over with StellarWind. The conjectural explanation we came up with over several days of discussion was this: there are probably different possible approaches to Enchanting. Convergent pathways which lead to similar results.

Consider Fourth Era enchanting and the possible creations, and their effective similarities to Third Era methods and their results as an example of... convergent evolution? Two different ways to tackle the same problem leading to superficial resemblences. From there: what if the Morrowind/Oblivion way was the one that was really well known for a long time, but the fall of the Mages Guild, and the infighting between the Synod and College of Whispers stunting the spread of magickal knowledge in Imperial controlled territory made it so that knowledge of the specifics was lost or obscured? The in game enchanting primer in Skyrim said that the Arcane University brought enchanting to levels of subtlety the current mages couldn't replicate, after all.

In such an environment, maybe a new way of enchanting was discovered that might be more...well, modular? durable? energetically feasible? In this case, instead of changing the fundamental nature of an object, the mage imposes a pattern on it that sort of hovers on it as a layer. So when you recharge an enchanted item, you recharge the pattern, not the object; and releasing the pattern from the object requires a great deal of energy that may come from... the flux that holds the object together, or some such.

In short -- Third-Era Enchanting allowed an enchanter - or a user of an enchantment altar - to change the basic nature/identity of an object, 'rename' it, if you will and redefining its pattern, like Earthsea wizards, or Patryn rune magic, or Young Wizards name magics. The object and its spell pattern are one. Identify the true name of an object, change the object's name, change its fundamental essence. We've seen this happen with daedric nymics, in a way. That process probably required a lot of energy and willpower and concentration, and that's why it was nigh fucking impossible in Morrowind (unless you paid mages who were VERY VERY VERY SPECIALIZED). The altars of the Arcane University made the process much less demanding but of course, that knowledge kind of fell the fuck apart over time as the mage guild broke up and shit went sideways.

Shh, it's a pretty story. Let me enjoy it for a while.

Enchanting mechanics, the meta-ish nitty-gritty
What one might wonder about next, following from the earlier proposals of magickal patterns and AE and such, is whether impressing a pattern upon an object groups it as Pattern + Object or renames the Object to Object With Pattern.

Does the pattern itself have its own identity, which is imposed upon the object ... or does, say, the Steel Longsword stop existing as a Steel Longsword, and becomes a Steel Longsword of Motherfucking Fire at its most fundamental level (as it would in-game - an enchanted object gets its own new formID); and from the point of the enchantment it is a single, undisputed, unbreakable part of the object which cannot be separated from the object without destroying the object?

Morrowind and Oblivion enchanting seems to work this way. Note that Skyrim returns slightly to the Morrowind idea of having Enchantment actually dependant on the user's skill, in a sense; whereas in Oblivion the whole thing is powered entirely by the altars and all that matters is the size of the soul used. Enchanting in Oblivion is basically really really simplistic. Have battery and blueprints will enchant.

However it seems to me from a lore perspective, you'd really have to know how a certain spell worked before you could enchant it into an object. While I'd imagine you have to know the spell pattern inside out apparently, Oblivion treats spells as very modular -- damned gameplay decisions sometimes -- there is a rather limited number of patterns, they get fairly basic but once you acquire a spell with that effect you have the effect available for things. A spell seems to be composed of a basic effect and a few variables. So if Skyrim's enchanting treats things as spell pattern + object, Oblivion's system could be seen as essence of spell effect + object. You can create more interesting, more powerful - or more economical spells, subject to your understanding of the concepts behind the magic. If you wanted a healing effect, you'd have to really understand the nature of the healing spell's pattern; likewise for a fire spell you'd need to understand the essence of fire, but the basic patterns aren't that hard to figure out, and then combine that with set limits into a receptacle: essence of healing; or essence of fire, or essence of whatever, add in a huge ass soul if you want it to bulldoze everything in its way.

Hence a constant effect enchantment's magnitude depends exclusively on the soul gem used: a grand soul would produce a much more powerful, say, feather effect than a petty soul, and for effects like waterwalking, waterbreathing and night eye, as effects that are either ON or OFF, remain unaffected by the magnitude of the soul being used. Your personal skill when enchanting a thing doesn't really come into play in Oblivion's Cyrodiilic Mages Guild, save for the breadth of your knowledge, unlike in Morrowind where you don't have the altars to power you up or in Skyrim where the magnitude of the spell depends on both the soul gem you use AND your skill. Perhaps one might argue that enchanters in the era of Oblivion were encouraged to be more breadth-focused than depth focused by the system engendered by the use of the Arcane Enchanters?

Skyrim's enchanting method is rather different from Morrowind and Oblivion's: you destroy an enchanted object with the effect wanted to learn the pattern, correct? Instead of renaming the object at the fundamental level, you bind it to a set magical pattern with its own identity. Like drawing something on somewhere with a marker, as opposed to tattooing it. Think FMA alchemical circles in chalk and not engraved with 2 feet of steel. So your steel sword, in essence, is still a steel sword. it is simply Steel Sword + Fire rather than Fiery Steel Sword. The pattern isn't fused into the object on a basic level and therefore can be extracted from the object and committed to memory. Using Skyrim's enchantment altars, you can disenchant objects and, while the OBJECT is destroyed, its PATTERN is kept, and that's the way you get enchantment effects in the game, and some objects cannot be disenchanted. Here the question is how exactly would you - or the altar for that matter - be able to tell where the object's original pattern ends and the modified pattern begins...

I believe this is where the Skyrim requirement that you must learn the enchantment effect you want to use comes into play: The mage is basically studying the specific pattern for a set effect. However, as in the real world, you can't shove energy into an object without changing it -- and the object will eventually want to change back, in a sense. Remember entropy? Applying a pattern to an object would require a fair deal of energy so eventually it will "run out of charge" put into the enchantment. Again, see my thoughts on magical entropy.

Now what happens when you disenchant something in Skyrim? My friend's idea was this: You try to break the pattern away when disenchanting an object, upon which you'll get a large scale energy release which invariably leads to the destruction of the object. StellarWind imagined that since maintaining the pattern is desirable rather than the object, the energy expenditure incurred by separating the pattern from the object will have to come from the object - or what holds it together. Their guess was that it would mean that the energy release came from the destruction/loosening of the identity/pattern/the glue that holds it together as a SWORD as opposed to a soup of metal atom-equivalents. As they put it: "you only want the pattern that says fire, no one gives a shit as to whether it's a sword or a club that lights people on fire, otherwise you'll probably end up with a Club of Sharpness +5 and a small fireball".

I personally had this thought: If we consider an enchantment as a careful layering of magick on the object in a specific pattern, introducing a probe of magical energy to learn the lay of the pattern being studied probably makes for some instability, since it's likely that reading the enchantment's pattern by inserting magicka foreign to the object itself causes the equilibrium between pattern + object to be thrown off -- which then causes an energy release destroying the object. Thus it's crucial to actually concentrate on maintaining the pattern during the examination and committing it to memory and understanding, rather than worrying about the object, which gets destroyed in the backlash.

So going by the idea that Skyrim enchantments are basically a web overlaid on the object and held in place with more magic, it might explain why you can only have 2 enchants on the one item at most: too many things in the web may make it explosive, less powerful due to energetic distribution concerns across a larger web, or something of the kind, which probably imbalances the whole structure.The mage's skill at enchanting determines how well the web is affixed to the enchanted object, designed and what not, which affects the amount of bang you get for your buck. If you're a shit enchanter, you need more power to counteract whatever loss of power you incurred with your inefficient spell design.

But Oblivion-style enchanting -- where's the difference? It seems in Oblivion the altars are highly automated, to an extent: they do all the work for you, and all you need to do is set the altars/tell the altar how big the effect should be and how long it lasts, and the effect itself, of course. I'm not sure how the altars work, but they would seem to take your personal enchanting skill out of the equation. You just need to be familiar with the basic patterns of the thing. We know Oblivion's enchanting works like Morrowind Enchanting - the spell effects are derived from spells the caster knows, the magnitude can be played with but is mostly drawn from the size of the gem used for enchanting, and the process theoretically involves Renaming An Object at the fundamental level -- which is really fucking hard to do on your own, explaining why enchanting is kind of a crapshoot in Morrowind. Oblivion's altars somehow makes it much more effective. Incidentally -- this might also explain why you can launder stolen items by enchanting them in Oblivion: the enchanted item is fundamentally different now from the item you stole.

Mages, non-mages and spellcasting: some final thoughts
So anyway, the other thing I'm thinking of in this scenario: Magicka is drawn into living beings through the mechanism suggested by MareloRyan, by means of the animus, gathering creatia-magicka that forms the physical form and is the energy used in magical feats. It permeates and sustains the living tissues of a being. Just as blood and lymph circulate in the cardiovascular-lymphatic systems, I suggest that magicka also travels in the body, much as some Eastern disciplines have the body's qi flowing along certain meridians which can then be manipulated via exercise or direct stimulus. Disruption in these energetic paths may have unusual effects on attempts at magicka use, possibly generating physical effects as well such as pain or other sensations, and potentially a mechanism for how the Silence spell worked in Oblivion.

Hence in spellcasting and enchanting, a mage needs to be able to manipulate the magicka pools within themselves as well as external sources, but mostly internal, and that doing so requires a lot of theoretical knowledge, practice and focus. My theory is that internal magicka is used to direct external sources/application: sound good? What this means is that mages need a great amount of fine control over their magicka. I shall here advance the idea that many enchanted items, including the entire subset of "on cast" enchanted items, require a jolt of magicka to activate. Suppose you put on a ring with the on cast effect of "Summon Ancestral Ghost". The enchantment is already there, of course. To prime it, you feed a burst of magicka into it, triggering the spell. Most enchanted items, those with not particularly strong enchantments don't need huge amounts. Any mage with simple control can exert the equivalent amount of effort flicking a switch would be for us in expelling that needed magicka-- virtually negligible.

At this point we have to consider non-mages, who while not necessarily knowing how to tap into magicka, are seen using enchanted weapons and/or items easily. Everyone has magicka, not everyone can consciously tap into it; but everyone's got access to it or potentially could have. Note that enchanted weapons generally produce effects mostly on cast. Could it be that the point of the enchantment on enchanted weaponry is that you didn't need a huge amount of fine control to get it to work, and in fact the on-cast enchantment on the weapon is made to draw on your magicka almost subconsciously? Mages, who can control and sense their magicka and how it flows will know when an enchanted object makes a draw on their magicka pool; your common variety bandit toting some enchanted sword he found wouldn't. Maybe all that's needed is intent to trigger, and the enchanted item does the rest. This also fits in with the idea introduced in Feyfolken, wherein Vanus Galerion is said to have wanted to make magic and enchanting more accessible to everyone. If we're talking a defensive enchantment, which is more or less constant effect like chameleon or invisibility once triggered: all I can suggest is that it probably takes more work? You'd have to want to turn the effect on.

Star signs: I'm not sure how I'd handle the case of the Atronach born, who can't generate their own magicka internally but can absorb it fine from external sources, and can use enchanted items even when out of magicka. My thought on the situation is that you are never really absolutely out of magicka, unless you're dead: you need magicka to keep living, so only long-dead things haven't got any: I think that's possible given that all sentients started off as descendants of 'ada, who are pretty much creatia-magicka constructs of a high order, and of course sunlight and starlight is basically Aetherial energy arriving via Magnus' and the Magna-Ge's exit points.

Vampires and undead: Vampires and the undead capable of casting spells (liches) and ghostly spirits still have AE even if they are no longer what we would consider living. Hence they can still shape magicka to cast spells; I speculate that ghosts' spellcasting abilities are limited by their nature as magically created and bound imprints on the fabric of the Aurbis -- they have the animus left over, but it's not anchored in a living body. As for how vampires and undead liches can still gather magicka -- maybe there's a change in the animus, in the case of vampires? I was thinking that vampirism perhaps doesn't remove the animus, it just changes it -- the kind of magicka a vampire's body runs on is just that bit changed from mortal baseline -- like if humans' cell respiration worked using say a copper ion rather than an iron one, basically haemoglobin vs haemocyanin. The AE, that is consciousness of course does not change.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

''Well, that's it. If you've stuck with me -- well, us actually -- all through this long and dry discussion, give yourself a pat on the back, and kick back with a glass of cold milk and a dozen chocolate chip cookies; you've earned it. Eagerly awaiting any bouquets and/or brickbats in the comments.''