Nearly everything the Borderlands believes about practitioners is wrong, and it goes wrong in a homely direction, almost never a mythic one. Nobody there thinks practitioners are gods. They think they're hard to feed and impossible to lie to. One common belief does hold up when you check it, at least partly, and it's the one nobody expects.

What people actually get wrong

Most of what I found was ordinary practical misunderstanding.

That they can't be burned. It's widespread and entirely false, and fire-connected practitioners are the last people it applies to. They burn. I met one with the scars, and she was very clear on the point.

That they need less food. Also false, and in several cases the opposite is true. Channelling for hours is work, and the body treats it as work, so a Mastery practitioner at the end of a long day eats like a man who's been digging ditches.

That they can tell when you're lying. Some read a face very well, the way an experienced magistrate does, and one or two Sources lend themselves to noticing that a person is uncomfortable. Neither amounts to detecting lies, and neither survives a competent liar.

That they can't lie themselves. This one's my favourite, because I found where it came from. Saltmarch couriers are bound by a Code about the truth of what they carry, they take it enormously seriously, and over two or three centuries the idea has seeped out into general belief as something true of practitioners at large.

The iron beliefs

Two of these are widespread and both fall down.

That iron wards off the Deepening. There's no evidence for it. No Lorekeeper has verified it, and none of the accounts I've collected holds up. In three districts I visited, people carry iron nails against it, and I didn't tell them otherwise.

That iron curses whoever hoards it. Equally unverified, though I'd note the belief is commonest in districts where somebody once got very rich very fast.

What iron really does is cut a practitioner off from their Source for as long as they're touching it. Smiths and pickers all know it as working knowledge, and it appears in no treatise anywhere, because nobody who writes treatises has thought to ask them.

The rhyme

Children in the Borderlands count out with a rhyme that runs through the six Sources in order. I collected it in three villages, with local variations in the middle and the same ending every time.

There's a seventh line.

Seven for the one that came back wrong.

The adults disagree about whether it means anything. About half told me it was nonsense put in for the rhythm, which is a perfectly good explanation for plenty of rhymes. The other half went quiet.

I have no interpretation to offer. Children sing it in districts hundreds of miles apart, in the same words, at the end of a list of six.

The one that half survives

"They always know each other on sight."

Everyone says it, and I assumed it was folklore. It turns out to be the only common belief in this chapter that holds up when you check it, though only partway.

From Intent upward, practitioners do pick each other out across a room, reliably and without being told. Nobody is taught it, and it seems to follow plainly from what they are. Someone joined to a source plane can tell when they're looking at another one, the way you can tell a lit room from a dark one without stopping to think.

At Awakening it's another matter. Someone that new hasn't the strength to give much away, or the skill to notice much in anyone else. When two of them do spot each other it's mostly from how a person carries themselves, the way an old soldier can pick out another in a crowded taproom, and it can easily be wrong. I wouldn't call it impossible at that stage, but I wouldn't count on it either.

So the folk belief was mostly right. The Lorekeeper tradition waved it away for two centuries, and I haven't yet seen anyone in that tradition admit the mistake.

Why I collected all this

A place that believes practitioners can't be burned has none living in it. A place that believes they can't lie has met a Saltmarch courier and nobody else. The shape of what a district gets wrong tells you exactly how far it is from the nearest practitioner, and I've come to trust that more than the licensing registers.

I also like the nail. Three districts quietly carrying iron against a thing they'll almost certainly never meet, in the entirely mistaken belief that it would help. If the Deepening ever did come to one of those parishes, the one person in the district with a piece of iron in their pocket would be the only one able to do anything at all, for a reason none of them has ever heard of.