Aura is a connection to somewhere else, and everything a practitioner does is drawn through it, rather than out of some store inside them. There are six known Sources. A practitioner grows in two ways, by gathering strength and by being reshaped by whatever they're joined to, and the reshaping is what counts. Iron interrupts the connection, which is why it can kill them.

The correction everyone needs first

Nearly everyone I've talked to outside the Houses pictures a practitioner as a person with power inside them, like a full jug. Once you drop that picture, a surprising number of puzzling things stop being puzzling.

A practitioner is marked with glimmers, which are openings, and each one connects them to a plane of primordial energy. Whatever comes through belongs to that plane and was never stored in the person at all. The nearest I can get to it is a door with somebody else's weather on the far side.

That's why an exhausted practitioner can still sometimes manage something extraordinary, and a well-rested one can fumble something easy. There's no level in a connection to run low.

The six Sources

Six planes are known, and each practitioner is joined to one of them.

Fire is heat, passion and consumption. Fire practitioners are seldom moderate about anything, and their work tends to finish whatever it starts.

Water is flow, memory and depth. They remember things other people are allowed to forget, and they'll take on someone else's trouble without being asked.

Earth is stability, endurance and patience. You can't hurry them, and you can't argue them out of a position either, even a wrong one.

Air is movement, freedom and breath. They move on, and they're usually honest enough to tell you so beforehand.

Light is revelation, clarity and truth. Things become visible around them, including things nobody wanted seen.

Darkness is potential, mystery and rest. They're at ease with what's unresolved, and they sleep better than the rest of us.

A Source shapes more than what a practitioner can do. Over the years it shapes what they're like as a person, and every House I've asked agrees on that, though they argue about whether it counts as a cost.

The ladder

There are four names, in order. I'd be wary of calling them levels, because each one is a different kind of relationship with the Source rather than a larger helping of the one before.

Awakening is where the connection opens. Power arrives without control, in amounts nobody chose. Most practitioners in the dominion are at Awakening and stay there all their lives, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Intent is where the scattered glimmers come together and control becomes reliable. It's the point at which being a practitioner stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you do.

Mastery is where the connection reaches into the source plane itself and deeper parts of it open up. It costs something. Every practitioner at Mastery I've met has arranged their life around their Source, never the other way round.

Presence is where the opening is fully wide and stays that way, so they radiate all the time and can't stop.

At Presence you can't hide what you are. Animals leave the room and lesser practitioners feel you from across it. No technique in the dominion will cover it up, and I once watched a Presence-tier practitioner apologise to a stranger for the effect of having simply walked in. Everyone who has it will tell you it's as much a burden as an advantage.

What is past Presence

Something, though I know very little about it.

The Houses all talk as though the ladder goes on, and their own histories need it to. Hollowglass has a word for it they won't define, Ironvale trains as though it's there, and when I've asked all five I've been given five careful non-answers, all the same shape.

I've never met anyone past Presence, or anyone who has, and I won't write down rumours, because I've seen what happens to a document once it starts doing that. The ladder goes further, and that's all I can tell you.

Growth

Both kinds of growth happen, and people argue over which one matters.

A practitioner does build up over time. Capacity grows and stamina grows, and someone at Mastery can simply get more done in an afternoon than they could at Intent. Anyone who tells you it's all spiritual has never watched one of them work a long day.

The building up is the less interesting half, though, and it isn't what separates the tiers. What really changes is the shape of the connection, which gets restructured. Someone at Mastery is joined to their Source in a different way from someone at Intent, and what opens up for them was never locked behind a quantity in the first place.

Vaulin puts it as a root that goes deeper and finds different water, instead of simply growing bigger. That's the clearest way anyone has put it to me.

The one outside the six

Twice now I've met a practitioner whose Source wasn't one of the six.

Both times I asked straight out and got a straight answer. Neither was Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light or Darkness, nor any variation on them, and neither person was confused about it. Both had lived with it for years. One had spent a long time looking for someone who could tell them what it was, and had given up.

I couldn't place either of them. I understood too little of what I was told to write it down without inventing something.

So there are six recognised, and there are at least two others, and those two facts sit side by side in my notes without settling. Someone better trained than me ought to go and ask properly.

Iron

Iron interrupts the connection outright. For as long as a practitioner is touching worked iron, they're an ordinary person, and raw iron is worse and harder to predict.

That's how iron can kill them, and it's why the rarest metal in the Heartlands is also the most strategically important thing in it. There's a chapter on it later, and I'd read it before you handle any.