Fifth Mage Jesvial, to her new apprentice.

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First lesson. The first and most important feature of any true mage is an ability to sense mana. Just as a painter must be able to see, or a musician need to hear, and an acrobat requires balance, so too must a mage be capable of sensing magic. To attempt to cast anything complex without one is to attempt to paint a masterwork while blindfolded and wearing extraordinarily thick gloves, while drunk.

Now, it is entirely possible to learn to cast some basic spells without the personal ability to sense mana, of course. But I do not recommend this approach. You would require sheer stubbornness and an ungodly amount of practice for each spell, or be exclusively confined to visual spellcasting alone.

While it is true that practice and inherent visibility of spells are tools that even true mages must master, neither are genuinely sufficient to elevate one to the status of a true mage. Those who rely simply upon practice are incredibly inflexible with their effects and far, far too prone to interruption. They cannot adapt or improvise their magic, and while that may be sufficient for a smith or seer, whose lairs are carefully tended-to, who possess a routine that enables them to enact the rituals required for their jobs, the moment something doesn’t work perfectly for them they are incapable of recovering. If an ingot of bronze contains slightly too much copper, the smith’s artifice fails. Should the seer not be properly purified, their divination will go awry. If the cook breaks their knife, they must relearn their spell practically anew. If the warden ventures too far from home, their protections may fail. The healer who overslept will be incapable of plying their trade, and more besides.

Furthermore, the amount of purification rituals which they must enact, cleansing their every last tool and foci of all possible variation, ensures that they can never properly grow, or experiment, or, yes, fight. It is no accident I list no warriors among those who can simply manage to practice until they become a proficient mage. Relying upon blind practice will make it trivial to counter or disrupt your spells, oftentimes without even requiring magic to do so. There is no situation in which you should rely solely upon blind practice to cast spells. What might take another years to learn you will master in a day, once your senses have formed.

While visual-only spellcasting is certainly vital when learning how to cast any spell, particularly those beyond your affinity, you must be aware of its limitations and not mistake its commonality even among true mages as any kind of substitute for genuine arcanoception. After all, casting a visual spell can easily be twice as hard or even harder than the spell would normally require. This is ultimately due to the nature of a visualized spell simply being a customized magic-detection spell providing information relevant to the caster. You read the runes and may glean from that the status of your spell, and that informs you what adjustments you need to make your spell work. But of course, I won’t linger on what I assume you are already familiar with, I simply mention it to serve as a counterpoint to what a proper mana sense will bring you.

Simply possessing some form of mana sense brings the world alive in a way I cannot properly describe. Attempt to describe sight to a blind man, or explain to a deaf man how to hear, and you will understand. Even though most forms of arcanoception are tied to normal senses, it is true, the ability to directly sense the flows of magic is utterly exquisite. However, such descriptions are rarely sufficient to encourage others to seek the experience out, given the difficulty.

Now, some individuals do take a shortcut to mana sense in the casting of various mana-detection spells. While this can, once again, draw you closer to the use which a true mana sense can provide, it remains insufficient. Now, of all the methods I have described so far, this is the one which even true mages utilize the most. Senses are fallible, even magical ones, and spells that enable a mage to sense mana not of their own element, to better process detail at further range, or further back in time, that magnify details or filter out noise, all of these things are vital tools for a mage, and many go so far as to seek to develop their personal arcanoception to do so automatically.

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Hm? Ha! If you manage to find a mana-sight artifact, go right ahead! You won’t find one, though. And I’d still expect you to develop some other form of mana sense, just maybe not sight.

The first and most common means of developing mana sense is to tie it to one’s sense of sight. This carries with it the benefit of being the most generally useful form of arcanoception by default, providing very accurate location and composition data at a distance and with minimal effort. It is so common that mana sense is called mana sight as often as not, even when referring to other sensory ties. Furthermore, mana sight provides as much benefit to the sense of sight as the reverse. After all, mana is not blocked by many things which do block light, and basic illusions will frequently fail to account for their disruption to the surrounding Tapestry.

Next most-common is to tie it to hearing. Unlike with sight, it is far easier to be alerted to magic being worked in proximity, though it is of course less detailed than with sight. However, that does not mean it is imprecise. It is possible to glean very accurate information from the rhythm, tone, pitch, and more from the sounds perceived, and many mages describe it as almost natural to develop new spells with hearing-based arcanoception, as they develop their ability to hear complimentary sounds and can pick out what a given working is missing for an aimed effect.

More common among craftsmen is the sense of touch. While by far the most detailed and precise form of mana sense, it rather obviously carries the rather stringent limitation of being exceptionally close-ranged. While physically touching an object isn’t always required, it is exceptionally rare for any mages to feel more than a couple of feet beyond them, and even that is highly imprecise. The benefits are of course a truly unparalleled degree of perception for objects you are close enough to, and a natural advantage when spellweaving, being capable of feeling the threads of magic around you as a true extension of yourself.

Smell and taste is the final traditional sense to tie arcanoception to, and while all forms of mana sense are useful and have their place (and any form, even scent, is infinitely superior to not having it at all), I cannot recommend it for most mages. It carries a particular advantage in finding magic, as scent-based mana senses are on average the most sensitive to minuscule traces of forms of magic from truly spectacular distances, or at detecting small measures of a particular type of mana in a particularly chaotic thrum of magic, it has far too little detail in regards to the structure of that magic to be useful for the average mage. That said, there are some mages who have done excellent for themselves with scent-based mana sense, they are just overwhelmingly those whose specialty is not in making magic, but tracking and identifying its use.

Now, every so often someone tries to be clever, and decides to just plug their mana sense directly into their soul and gain it as a wholly new sense, disconnected from any of their others. I don’t personally advise this, though there are distinct advantages. While the specifics vary immensely between individuals, it usually results in something somewhere between hearing-based and touch-based arcanoception, where within a fairly wide range of the person they can very accurately detect magic, and with a moderate degree of precision. Some describe it as simply knowing where magic is, as though through a fleeting memory.

Unfortunately, it is also by far the most difficult form to master, as with no familiar sense associated with it, you must learn to process its input anew, and be wary of hallucinations the entire time. Learning to differentiate real from imagined is never easy. This process never takes less than months, with it more commonly taking years to decades to reach so much as a basic level of proficiency with it. Now, this does carry the benefit of being the most flexible to develop, and it is far easier to grow and overcome the limitations you encounter than those tied with other senses, but unless you are already immortal, I advise you begin with another sense.

Now, I suppose you expect me to tell you that once your mana sense is developed, you’re done? Hardly! A mage’s mana sense is their lifeblood. A proper mage should never cease developing their senses, and it is that very thing which in many ways defines the quality of a mage. In time, as I mentioned, you’ll want to tie automatic filters and processing into your arcanoception, but so too will you want to expand the number of ways you may sense mana. Each new sense can provide new information, after all, and information is always a mage’s true weapon.