sythyry | Cley

For Monsters Only: "What Is Cley?"

Cley is the currency of magic on the World Tree. A cley is a purely magical object (viz., it is wholly immaterial, and can only be percieved by magic sense) in the form of a key ending in a spray of possibilities.

Primes get a supply of cley each day at dawn, by a sort of universal magical tide. (Well, I daresay Rhedwy gets hers at midnight, but that's wicked and unusual.) Most people get, oh, half a dozen or so -- the exact number varies a bit from day to day. People who use their magic more extensively learn to get more -- I get, oh, fifteen or sixteen, more or less. My ~mother~ probably gets twice that.

You lose all of the previous day's cley when you get the new day's, of course. So most mages get up a bit before dawn and cast spells to avoid wasting the cley that is about to get lost. This goes badly with debauchery, of course.

Most spells take one cley to cast. Spontaneous magic takes up to three. Feather casting lets you cheat the gods (most of the time) and cast weak spells without cley. Enchantment piles masses and masses of stuff, including cley, into a poor hapless innocent physical object until it sort of ferments, I guess you might say, and starts getting its own magic.

You can get more cley during the day, by meditating (I meditate in a fire for better effect), but that's slow and only gives a couple. Or you can share cley with someone else, but that's inefficient (about half of the cley you share gets lost) and requires a close embrace. Oh, sometimes you find cley in fruit or something -- I never have -- or get IOUs from gods or such as that.