Deoric is the language of absolute power. A statement spoken in true Deoric can tear the world apart, given a speaker with the knowledge to compose it and the capacity to bear what wielding it costs. It is the titans' native tongue, the command-language Azus's first creations used to give reality its form. The spoken language is nearly dead now. Its written form survives in the runes of handmagic and in the forbidden rituals that the few who still know the words continue to perform.
Handmagic
The amount of power required to channel Deoric is immense, let alone wield it in a purposeful way. It is only through the strengthening of the astral and malstaric threads, the bindings between one's soul, spirit, and shadow, that one can hope to channel the power necessary to use Deoric.
Handmagic runes are tattooed on the back of one's hands using titan blood (or ground titan bone mixed into a paste). The hands serve a dual purpose: they are the extremities through which the runes are articulated, since specific hand movements activate specific runes, and their distance from the spirit's core in the chest provides the leverage needed to control the flow of cosmic power.
With stronger threads, one's hands can bear more runes. However, inscribing too many runs the risk of snapping one's threads entirely, killing the owner instantly as their soul, spirit, and shadow fly apart.
The threads can be worked as well as strengthened. Mending a frayed astral thread, reknitting the soul-binding through the Ethereal overlay, is what soul-healers do; severing or twisting a malstaric thread through the Nethereal overlay is what necromancers do. Both are Deoric. Azus fixed the soul-binding when he ordered death, settling how soul, spirit, and shadow hold together, and the threads answer to the command-language that authored them. Reshaping them is that language's own work, and like any Deoric working it is paid for in life.
Why Handmagic Strains the Threads
The astral and malstaric threads were designed to carry essence inward: soul-energy from Aurus down through the Ethereal Plane, shadow-energy from Nydus up through the Nethereal Plane, both sustaining the spirit at their center. They are feeding tubes, not power cables.
Handmagic reverses the flow. When you activate a rune, you pull cosmic power outward through both threads simultaneously, demanding that reality reshape itself according to the command inscribed on your skin. The threads must carry traffic in both directions at once, a stress they were never meant to bear.
Titan blood acts as a buffer. Because titans were cosmic beings, their blood resonates with the frequencies of Aurus and Nydus in ways mortal blood cannot. It holds Deoric charge without disintegrating, creating stable anchor points for the runes. But "stable" is relative. Every activation stresses both threads at that anchor point. Multiple runes mean multiple stress points, and eventually any single activation can cascade into total thread failure.
Ritual Magic
Ritual magic is magic performed using Deoric speech, powered by blood sacrifice. Anything is possible with ritual magic so long as you know the words and have a suitable amount of life sacrificed. Rules for ritual magic are described in below the Spells section.
One standing application of ritual binding is planar summoning. To call a creature across the planar boundary and hold it to service, a summoner inscribes a command-structure in titan-blood paste, a binding circle that states in absolute Deoric terms what the called thing is and must do. A creature can refuse a request; it cannot refuse a true statement of its own nature spoken in the language reality was built from. The School of Summoning teaches this as a formal discipline, and its binding work carries the ordinary Deoric price: blood sacrifice for the calling, and thread-strain on the summoner who holds the circle.
Recording Deoric Text
Deoric can be inscribed on stone, bone, and other materials, and the titans did so freely across ancient Alaria. But only titan-material inks hold the Deoric charge without decay: inscriptions on stone and organic media slowly lose potency as the medium weathers, and over the millions of years since the titans left, most such inscriptions have crumbled to illegibility or vanished entirely. The surviving corpus is fragmentary; what mortals know of Deoric was painstakingly reconstructed by scholars, foremost among them the Vyanoweir, from scattered ruins and partial glyphs.
The most dangerous thing a fluent reconstructor ever attempted was to write Deoric into a leyline seam, rather than onto an object, where the Elemental Planes press close to the world. A seam is a permanent feature of the world, a standing place where the planes already touch it, fixed where a titan-stone inscription would weather and crumble; that permanence is what tempts anyone who wants to fix a leyline and bind it. But a seam is a living thing, which is why the attempt is heresy. The Vyanoweir who tried it on a seam of time tore that seam open in the disaster called the Torn Hour, and the Plains of Oblivion mark the place. No one has repeated the experiment and lived to record the method.
For functional use, such as handmagic runes and ritual inscriptions, only titan blood or bone paste holds the charge. It is magically draining to write, because the text is so powerful. Writing a rune or simple command takes about an hour to complete, and causes you to lose 10 hitpoints. You regain hitpoints lost in this way at a rate of 1 hitpoint each week.
Once Deoric text is read by someone other than the author, the text disintegrates into ash. For this reason, along with the reasons above, any book of Deoric text is incredibly valuable.
This self-disintegration applies to actively charged Deoric text, not to ancient titan inscriptions, which are inert historical artifacts rather than live workings.
Deoric, Daemons, & Celestia
Deoric is the titans' native tongue, the language Azus's first creations used to give form and command to reality. What mortals practice today is a reconstruction, assembled from the fragments the titans left behind.
Deoric is practiced most by the daemons of Celestia, who command it at depths no living mortal reaches. That command is not the work of ages spent studying after death. A daemon's grammar is mostly fixed at the moment it dies; once in Celestia it can only polish, slowly and by accident, watching rituals performed in its name through the Psywinds. The real lead is what each daemon carried across. The oldest of them gave entire mortal lifetimes to the language, and the very oldest died as long as two hundred thousand years ago, in the early Golden Age. What set them apart was not fresh stone: every mortal who ever studied Deoric read inscriptions already millions of years old, and the titan stone the oldest daemon learned from is only some two hundred thousand years less worn than the same stone today. What they had instead was the Vyanoweir reconstructed corpus, studied whole before the libraries burned, together with inscriptions and sources that have since been lost outright. None of that survives in the living tradition. It lives on only in the daemons who learned it while it could still be learned.
None of this makes daemons the source of the language. The grammar mortals hold was rebuilt by mortals: the Vyanoweir tradition was the first to cross from reciting fixed phrases into composing new ones, and every scholar who commands generative Deoric stands on that work. What a daemon offers is refinement. The grammar itself is a mortal inheritance, carried from teacher to student on the Material Plane.
The Celestia Paradox
Deoric does not function on Celestia. The plane is saturated with Ezz, the same substance that gave it form, and this Ezzic interference disrupts the absolute commands of Deoric speech. A daemon standing in Celestia cannot simply speak Deoric words and reshape reality as a mortal could on the Material Plane.
Yet daemons are the greatest Deoric practitioners in existence. How?
Projection Across the Boundary
Daemons cannot cast Deoric within Celestia, but they can reach across the boundary to a worshipper on the Material Plane. This is how daemons grant miracles, and it works only when the worshipper already holds enough grammar to begin a working:
- A worshipper on the Material Plane performs a ritual, providing the blood sacrifice and beginning a working in Deoric they already know how to compose
- The daemon perceives this through the Psywinds and answers along the same current, projecting its corrections and extensions back through the Psywinds in near-real time to supply the structure a mortal hand cannot complete on its own
- The Deoric magic takes effect on the Material Plane, where it functions normally
The Psywinds carry the prayer up and the correction back; the channel runs both ways for as long as the ritual stays live. The worshipper supplies the body, the sacrifice, and a working already underway. The daemon supplies reach and refinement: the structural depth to make a clumsy invocation precise, and the one place where the magic can actually fire. What a daemon cannot do is teach a mortal who knows nothing. Guidance reshapes a working in progress; it does not put the first grammar in a worshipper's head. That a mortal gets only from the mortal tradition: a teacher who has crossed into composing novel Deoric, or the inert texts the Vyanoweir left behind.
This is why daemon worship requires active followers. A daemon who loses all worshippers loses any way to act on the Material Plane through Deoric, trapped in Celestia, rich in knowledge and unable to spend it, slowly fading as their name is forgotten.
Game mechanics
Handmagic — Flavors of Handmagic
Handmagic comes in two main varieties—unique abilities, and skill buffs. Both strain the threads, though skill buffs are generally simpler and cheaper, as the enhancement is usually a less complicated rune.
For players of Heart Rush, strengthening one's threads takes the form of gaining XP and spending it on handmagic talents.