My impression is that each technique shares some core principles that might be common to all schools of magic, and the key difference comes from how each culture approaches those shared ideas.
Uncanny speed and dexterity.
Through weeks of reflection, you learn your body better than you’d ever thought you could know it—every joint and sinew, all named and described in detail by your teacher. You learn to discern the teloi of speed and precision in that dense interplay of physical purposes.
Plektasts and other biological Theurges might work the same in principle, while also violating countless Seracca taboos along the way. Cerlota describes the Seracca “auto-Plektoi” – that’s what their philosophy of magic looks like when projected onto Hegemonic ideology, even though Plektosis is utterly anathema to the Seracca way of life.
Maybe an entry-level Theurge could learn to strengthen their own body in a fight, but why would they? They can just learn to fly, and harden their robes, or break their enemy with blood magic itself. Something has already gone terribly wrong by the time a Theurge is in a fistfight.
Likewise, the apparent lack of flying Seracca wouldn’t be a lack of ability or even necessarily knowledge, but instead a difference in cultural priorities. Like how they don’t live in cities anymore.
Sharpened senses, especially smell.
M’kyar has you spend countless hours contemplating the functions of your senses—and not merely the ones with a visible sense organ, but your sense of balance, of location in space, of the passing of time. “These are the precious treasures we share with other spirits in animal form; and even an udud may learn to temporarily enhance their senses to the level of the beasts.”
Cerlota tells us about certain Theurges with dangerously sharp senses: Thaïs’s disciples among the Kryptasts, who “can hear what is whispered behind the thickest of walls”. That’s not so different from what we can do with sharpened senses in Irduin. Turns out Bernete was onto something.
But the context is entirely different. The same or similar enough magic takes on two distinct meanings after passing through the lens of two cultures.
I doubt our protagonists will be limited to just the one school of magic, or rather school of thought about magic. It’ll be a Theurgic education like no other, already exposed to both Hegemonic and Seracca philosophies, and also the unbridled runaway magic of the Xaos-storms, and all done while a fugitive from the law.
I haven’t come up with a good idea for this either, but it did make me notice something blindingly clear and possibly coincidental. I might be late in seeing it, but it’s surprisingly neat.
Maurs Stonewright being a crucial character in Stormwright, where the imagery of stone withstanding a storm is established, first with the boulder-egg we shelter in at the beginning of the story, and again with the black stone towers outside Vigil. Not to mention that Maurs is, like many Xaos-landers, maimed and forced to adapt to his new circumstances: in his case, by a stone, not a storm.
If we really stretch the imagination, those stone structures can be seen as a tough nut to crack, sheltering the metaphorical seeds of new life (living people in a Storm-ravaged land) within: like an acorn, which will survive even if the oak (the Chesnery, Maurs’s inn) is cut down (by the rebel Oakfell?) or burned or whatever happens to martyrs, then caught in a storm and scattered to seed new chesnaies in new lands.
So I guess what I mean to say is that Tamran Innkeep is a stonewright and an acorn.
Speaking of our chosen band lead, now that we’re meeting them face-to-face, there’s an opportunity here for some spicy teasing, with respect to
Elery and Yebben are both possible appointees to run the Whendward Band in our absence (and separately I wonder if you’d have been more restrictive in hindsight about who’d accept leadership if offered). Which means we get a chance to meet them again, as peers and near-equals at this point (they’ve led the rebellion for longer than we did) – which means a chance to take a second look at them and start to wonder…
I doubt anything would come of it while we’re still separated in Irduin, but it could plant the seed of romance in a reader’s head. Choosing Elery or especially Yebben to lead the rebellion is already a sign that a reader might be interested in seeing more of them narratively, which might mean a higher propensity towards choosing them as ROs given the chance. It’d be a fitting time to start setting that up, with all the spicy drama that comes from pining after someone who’s trying to keep you both safe by keeping you far, far away.
