Benedict Jacka

Houses in the United Kingdom are divided into three categories:  Great, Lesser, and minor.  Great Houses are those which possess a Well of class S or S+, Lesser Houses are those which possess a Well of class A+, and all other Houses are classed as minor.

While in the past the Great and Lesser Houses had various special privileges under the law, these were chipped away at over the centuries, and most of the remaining ones were effectively nullified by the Oakenshott ruling of 1927, which set the precedent that House membership did not grant any special status in criminal or civil proceedings.  Great and Lesser House status does still give the House the right to a seat on the Board, but corporations and private individuals with appropriate Well holdings also qualify for Board seats in exactly the same way.  Nowadays the only legal benefits unique to the Houses are extremely minor and antiquated ones, such the right to a certain term of address or being entitled to wear a particular item of clothing to Board meetings.

By the mid 20th century, it was commonly believed that the time of the British Houses was coming to an end, and that they would dwindle into insignificance.  While many Houses did indeed suffer this fate, others proved more adaptable, and successfully made use of their Wells, sigl traditions, and inherited wealth to carve out a niche for themselves in the modern world.  Most of the current Houses of the UK are weaker than they once were, and in absolute terms the fraction of the British economy that they control is small, but they command an amount of influence out of proportion to their size and a House surname still carries a good deal of social weight.

The Great Houses

At the time of writing, the Great Houses of the UK number eight:  Barrett-Lennard, Cawley, Chetwynd, De Haughton, Hawker, Meath, Reisinger, and Winterton.  There are currently nineteen S+ and S-class Wells officially registered in the United Kingdom, and these Great Houses collectively own just under half of them.

These Wells rarely change hands, and as such the number of Great Houses rarely rises or falls.  This is partly due to special UK regulations that restrict the sale and purchase of S+ and S-class Wells, and partly because the Great Houses are all fantastically wealthy – for a new Great House to rise, they’d have to buy an S-class Well from its existing owner, and said owners generally have little motivation to sell.  The last time that the count of Great Houses changed was in 2009, when House Egmont sold its Light S Well to LLV Holdings, relinquishing its Great House status in the process.  The roster has remained steady since then.

A brief overview of the current Great Houses can be found in Chapter #18.

The Lesser Houses

Lesser Houses are those Houses of the UK who own a Well of class A+.

A+ Wells in the UK are highly valued.  The legal restrictions on their sale are much less onerous than those on the sale of S-class ones, and while acquiring an A+ Well is still a difficult and expensive process, it’s a realistic goal for a sufficiently wealthy House, corporation, or individual.  Lesser House status also grants a seat on the Board, automatically making the holder a player in UK politics.  As a result, competition for these Wells is fierce.  A minor House will fight tooth and nail to own one, and a Lesser House won’t sell theirs unless utterly desperate.  It’s almost unheard of for a House to own more than one A+ Well, and very few corporations have succeeded in purchasing one (though not for lack of trying).

Unlike the Great Houses, Lesser Houses see a fair amount of turnover.  While some of the current Lesser Houses have held their place for more than a century, there have been just as many new arrivals who owe their places to a meteoric rise (often followed by an equally meteoric fall).

There are too many Lesser Houses to list in detail, but a few of the more notable ones are described in Chapter #19.

The Minor Houses

Any House whose most powerful Well is of A-class or below is considered a minor House.

There is no significant barrier preventing a family from declaring themselves a minor House.  In theory, anyone with a D-class Well in their back garden could draw themselves up a coat of arms and start calling themselves ‘House Something-or-other’ – they’d be laughed at, but they could do it.  In practice, though, most minor Houses are quite old, with family trees and ancestral holdings tracing back hundreds of years.  Often they end up outlasting Great and Lesser Houses vastly more wealthy than they are, simply because they aren’t notable enough to draw unfriendly attention.   

Minor Houses often have a strong connection to their family Wells and lands.  A typical minor House will have held land in a particular county for hundreds of years, and it’s not uncommon for them to have groundskeepers or Well tenders or shapers whose great-grandparents worked for the great-grandparents of the current Head of House.  It’s common for minor Houses who’ve recently made the jump to Lesser House status to place heavy emphasis on this family history, as if to remind everyone that they haven’t forgotten their origins.

But while most Minor Houses are old, many aren’t.  It’s surprisingly common for a new House to be founded by some locator or investment banker or car salesman who by some strange set of circumstances came into possession of a Well and decided to make a go of it.  Most of these new-born Houses disappear within a generation or two, but others take root and grow, and over time come to develop histories and traditions of their own.

A sigl won’t work without a bearer. 

The least-studied of the Five Limits, the Limit of Operation is often treated as more of an afterthought.  For the most part this is a reflection of the attitudes of drucrafters – drucrafters are typically very interested in how they can increase their own power, and as such have tended to focus on those limitations that most restrict that, such as Euler’s Limit and the Blood Limit.  The question of whether a sigl would work without them doesn’t usually strike them as terribly important.

However, the Limit of Operation does have major implications for the use of drucraft in many fields, particularly industry, exploration, and warfare.  The 20th century saw increasing use of automation, with humans being replaced by computers, robotic systems, and drones.  The Limit of Operation meant that such automation could not be replicated in the field of drucraft.  And since many of the things that drucraft could do couldn’t (and still can’t) be done any other way, this meant that in an age of increasing mechanisation, the profession of drucraft remained solidly human.

Reasons for the Limit of Operation

The Limit of Operation is an interesting one in that it reveals an important facet of how drucraft works.  After all, if one thinks about it, there’s no obvious reason why a sigl should require a wielder.  A fire will burn so long as it has fuel, an electric circuit will continue to work as long as it has electricity, and even the most sophisticated of machines can continue to run so long as they don’t break down or run out of power.  They do need oversight and maintenance, but in principle, there’s no reason that it should have to be a human hand shovelling the coal into the furnace, or a human mind troubleshooting the operating system of the computer that runs the factory.  It’s just that it’s usually more practical to do it that way.

So why doesn’t the same apply to drucraft?  Why can’t you put a sigl somewhere, and have it draw essentia on its own?

The short answer is that while it may not seem that way to a novice drucrafter, it turns out that living, conscious creatures are actually quite good at channelling and directing essentia.  Learning to sense and channel is hard, but with enough time and effort, it’s possible.  Getting an inanimate object to do it in your place isn’t.  The exact ways in which essentia interacts with consciousness are complex and still not fully understood but the short version is:  if you want a sigl to work, you need a conscious mind using it.

Implications of the Limit of Operation

The Limit of Operation has far-reaching implications for the drucraft world.  Much of human technological progress over the past two or three centuries has focused on the construction of mechanisms capable of independent action.  Such machines need maintenance and direction, but a good deal of their utility stems from the fact that they can function on their own power.

The Limit of Operation means that this doesn’t work for drucraft.  You can’t have sigl-powered automatons, and you can’t have the sigl equivalents of things like streetlights or cars or washing machines, and you can’t have the drucraft versions of things like ammunition or bombs, where the energy is stored up when the thing is created, ready to be released at the pull of a trigger or touch of a button.  If you want something to be done with drucraft, you need an actual human being there to do it for you.

This effectively puts a minimum floor on the cost of doing anything with drucraft.  Drucrafters are rare, and drucrafters with a specific type of sigl are rarer still, meaning that if you want ready access to a particular drucraft effect, you need to keep a drucrafter with the appropriate sigl on hand.  And if they’re there, they can’t be somewhere else.  This, over time, has caused drucraft presence and expertise to concentrate in small enclaves, while everyone else can easily go their entire lives without seeing drucraft being used, or in fact even knowing it exists at all.

Workarounds

Much like the Primal Limit, there is one area where the Limit of Operation doesn’t fully apply, and it’s pretty much exactly the same one.  You can’t make a torchlight sigl that works without a bearer, and you can’t make a mass-reduction sigl that works without a bearer, but it is possible to make a Primal sigl that works without a bearer . . . with some caveats.

Calling these items “sigls” is somewhat misleading.  They don’t have a kernel, they don’t contain personal essentia, and they can’t generally do the same things.  They’re very bad at direct effects, and if you want to manipulate light, or matter, or anything else in the physical world, they’re pretty much useless.

What these items are good for is redirecting essentia.  They can shape essentia currents over an area, causing it to gather in a certain location, or run along certain channels.  This process is slow, and as such these items are generally incorporated into parts of a building or landscape.  When used in such a way, they are referred to as wards.

The main use for wards is to protect and enhance a Well.  A properly designed warding arrangement can allow a permanent Well to replenish itself slightly faster when depleted, and make it less likely that the Well will be weakened from prolonged or excessive use.  It’s even possible to use this method to strengthen a Well over time, growing it incrementally year by year.  Raising a Well’s class in this manner is a very long-term project, one measured in decades if not generations, but it’s one of the only known ways to actually increase the power of sigls you can produce.

Many Drucraft Houses in Britain have family legends claiming that their family Wells were grown in just such a way, and some have records of Well strength dating back to the Middle Ages.  While such stories are often exaggerated, it does seem likely that many of the most powerful Wells throughout the world owe their existence to exactly this kind of slow, patient work done over hundreds of years.

You can’t change a sigl after it’s made. 

The Limit of Creation states that sigls can not be modified or redesigned.  Once they’re created, that’s it – if you want them to do something different, you have to get a new sigl.

Although this restriction might seem uncontroversial, it has been the focus of quite intensive study.  In fact, the Limit of Creation is probably the second-most-heavily researched of all of the five, outmatched only by the Blood Limit.  This is unsurprising, as the two are closely related.

The Sunk Cost of Sigls

A sigl represents an enormous amount of time and resources.  This is particularly extreme once you go up the ranks;  while D-class sigls are relatively cheap, a single A-rank sigl costs millions.  Of course, for those wealthy enough to afford it, that can actually be quite a good investment – while a high-grade, professionally made solid sigl comes at a fantastic cost, it’s a one-time cost.  Since such a sigl can be expected to last for its wielder’s entire lifetime, in practice the benefits it gives, spread out over thirty or forty years, can easily outweigh its price tag.  But what about afterwards?

Inevitably, sigls outlast their wielders.  Sometimes the wielder dies from old age.  Sometimes they perish unexpectedly, from accident or illness.  And sometimes they’re relieved of their sigl involuntarily.  However it happens, those who inherit the wielder’s property (legally or otherwise) are left with a sigl – potentially a very valuable sigl – that they can’t use.  An incredible amount of value and power, right there in the palm of one’s hand, yet totally inaccessible.  It’s intensely frustrating, and quite naturally, drucrafters have spent enormous amounts of time and effort trying to solve it.

Unfortunately, solving it is easier said than done.

Difficulties in Modification

The first problem with modifying a sigl is that shaping a sigl is less like assembling a machine, and more like sculpting a piece of pottery, where the clay can be easily moulded when wet, but becomes hard and rigid once fired.  In the same way, essentia can be freely sculpted while in its natural state, but becomes hard and unyielding once transformed into aurum.  Modifying a sigl thus requires the targeted section (and only the targeted section) to be first transformed into free essentia, then altered, and then turned back into aurum again.

While doing any of these three things on their own is not particularly difficult, doing them together, in order, and without damaging the rest of the sigl in the process, is very, very hard.  What makes the problem worse is that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, sigls have three layers:  the shell, the outer core, and the kernel . . . and the part of a sigl that drucrafters generally care most about is the kernel.  This means that before you can start on any modifications, you have to get through the sigl’s shell and outer core first, and you have to do so without doing irreparable damage to the sigl along the way.  This is so difficult as to be, in many cases, functionally impossible.

Workarounds

Despite all these problems, the twentieth century saw a vast amount of research poured into circumventing the Limit of Creation.  The prospect of taking the same A-class or S-class sigl and using it over and over again was simply too tempting to resist.  Finding a practical solution to the problem would effectively nullify the Blood Limit and break the drucraft economy wide open.

Although many avenues were explored, the most promising one, and the one upon which research eventually came to focus, was “modular sigls”.  The idea was to design a sigl with a removable kernel, where the kernel could be extracted and replaced.  Thus, by “swapping out” kernels, the same sigl could be used by different people.

Modular sigls worked.  Their development caused great excitement in the drucraft community, and many predicted that they would become the new industry standard.  However, more than fifty years on, this has not happened.  In fact, modular sigls have almost entirely fallen out of production, for several reasons.

First, the modular approach required various compromises in the sigl’s design.  Since the kernel couldn’t be fully integrated with the body, much of the sigl had to be built in a less efficient manner.  Second, despite their best efforts, the researchers into modular sigls were never able to make them as stable as solid ones.  The “sealed sphere” design for sigls is the standard for a reason – it’s exceptionally durable.  Modular sigls thus had a shorter lifespan than traditional ones, negating much of the benefit to building them in the first place.

But the biggest reason for the failure of modular sigls was that they were never a true workaround.  You can’t convert a standard sigl into a modular one – for it to work, the sigl has to be created as a modular sigl in the first place.  This means accepting substandard performance in exchange for the (not at all guaranteed) possibility that someone else will be able to use the sigl in the future.  Unsurprisingly, most drucrafters were unwilling to make this tradeoff.

As such, modular sigls fell out of favour, and are nowadays only used as curiosities or for certain very specific purposes.

Starting Afresh

The final “workaround” to the Limit of Creation is simply to remake the entire sigl from scratch.  You sublimate the sigl into free essentia, then use that essentia to make a new sigl – essentially the same process that shapers use to create a sigl out of pre-existing aurum.  However, this is subject to the same inefficiencies as creating a sigl from aurum, and in any case is basically the equivalent of melting something down for raw materials.  Most people would consider this “destroying”, rather than “changing”.

You can’t use someone else’s sigl. 

More than any of the other four, the Blood Limit shapes the drucraft economy.  It is the primary reason that sigls are so expensive.

Just like the gemstones they resemble, sigls can last a very long time.  They’re short-lived in geological terms – aurum naturally sublimates into free essentia, and if left for long enough, a sigl or a lump of aurum will wisp away into nothingness.  However, ‘long enough’ on a human timescale is a very long time indeed, and a solid sigl can easily last for thousands of years.

This raises an obvious question – why isn’t the world filled with sigls?  Nowadays the vast majority of sigls are threaded rather than solid, with exponentially shorter lifespans, but even if only five percent of the ones made each year were solid ones, that’s still an enormous number that would only continue to accumulate century after century.  So why are they in such short supply?

The simple answer is that a sigl made for one person won’t generally work for another.   There are indeed vast numbers of sigls in the world, sitting in museums and bank vaults and private collections – it’s just that the vast majority of them can’t be used, since they were made for wielders who are now long dead.  Thus, while the absolute lifespan of a sigl can be measured in thousands of years, its practical lifespan is, in generational terms, very short.

Anatomy of a Sigl

Sigls are comprised of three layers.  The outer layer, known as the shell, is an ablative and largely inert coating designed to protect the sigl from erosion and damage.  The middle layer is referred to as the body or outer core, and comprises the majority of the sigl’s mass.  However, it is the inner core, otherwise known as the kernel, that is the reason that the Blood Limit works the way it does, because a small but critical fraction of the kernel is made up of the wielder’s personal essentia.

Shaping a sigl with someone’s personal essentia is something like forging a lock with a human key.  It’s the only reason that sigls work at all.  Making a sigl without any personal essentia just produces an inert lump of aurum, and trying to use a sigl whose personal essentia doesn’t match yours is impossible.

This means that if you want a sigl, you can’t buy one second hand.  You have to either make one yourself, using your own personal essentia to shape the kernel, or have a professional shaper take a sample of your personal essentia to make one for you.  Most people pick the second option.

The result of this is that the drucraft economy doesn’t work like the markets for manufactured goods such as jewellery or furniture, where the products can (in theory) be maintained indefinitely.  Instead, it follows a cycle where new sigls are created, remain in circulation for a finite time, then disappear.

Workarounds

The Blood Limit is probably the most extensively studied of all of the Five Limits, and the workarounds to it are well-understood.

The simplest workaround is to have the shaper, when they create the sigl’s kernel, mix in someone else’s personal essentia with their own.  Creating such ‘mixed sigls’ is inherently more complex than creating a pure one, but the techniques for doing so have been exhaustively practised over the centuries and the procedure is now quite routine.  However, you don’t get something for nothing:  the more of someone else’s personal essentia there is in a kernel, the weaker the sigl will be when you try to use it yourself.  This method is thus less of a true workaround and more of a compromise.

The second (and more famous) method is to use a sigl belonging to someone whose personal essentia is sufficiently similar to yours.  This generally requires the sigl’s creator to be a blood relative, the closer the better.  In this way sigls can be passed down from parent to child, or from sibling to sibling.

This method is not infallible.  The closer a blood relation two people share, the more similar their personal essentia tends to be, but there’s still variation.  Parent to child or brother to sister almost always works, but it’s not a guarantee, and as the relationship becomes more distant, the chance of the sigl working drops like a rock – two ‘steps’ in the family tree is usually the realistic maximum.  And this assumes a pure sigl, rather than a mixed one.  If the sigl was shaped by someone else, the  personal essentia in the sigl is effectively diluted twice over, reducing the viability even further.

Still, even with its drawbacks, the ability to pass sigls down to the next generation is incredibly powerful.  Even if you can’t get more than two generations worth of use out of a sigl before it becomes useless, that still represents an enormous advantage over anyone who uses a sigl for only one.  The concept of inherited wealth takes on a whole new meaning when children can inherit not only a house and money from their parents, but magical powers as well.  This is a major reason for why the equivalents of Drucraft Houses developed independently in so many places around the world . . . and even in countries with no House traditions (or in ones where such practices are specifically banned) family-run corporations and political and financial dynasties fill the same role, passing down their wealth in exactly the same way.

You can’t use drucraft without a sigl.

If Euler’s Limit covers the creation of sigls, the Primal Limit covers why sigls are important.  Simply put, no sigls means no drucraft.

New drucrafters generally find the Primal Limit the most confusing of the five.  After all, the three disciplines – sensing, channelling, and shaping – are the foundation of drucraft, and you obviously can use all three of those without a sigl.  If you couldn’t, it would create a chicken-and-egg situation – if you can’t use drucraft without a sigl, where do the sigls come from in the first place?

This confusion can be resolved by drawing a distinction between foundational drucraft and practical drucraft.

Foundational and Practical Drucraft

Foundational drucraft covers the fundamental skills necessary to become a drucrafter, which mostly (but not entirely) consists of the three disciplines:  sensing, channelling, and shaping.  They give the ability to detect and manipulate essentia, to understand and operate sigls, and to create sigls for the use of oneself or another.  Although these skills are what differentiate a drucrafter from a non-drucrafter, they are not, in and of themselves, very useful.  Without sigls, the study of drucraft would be considered a rather niche and esoteric field of little applicability.

Practical drucraft covers the working effects that drucrafters with access to sigls can produce.  These are the things that people think of when they hear “drucraft” or “magic”:  flight, invisibility, superhuman strength and endurance, the manipulation of space and time.  They are the “finished product” of the art.

When the Primal Limit states that drucraft cannot be used without a sigl, it is referring to practical drucraft.  Technically speaking, as long as you restrict yourself to foundational drucraft, you can use drucraft without a sigl just fine.  It’s just that it’s not much use.  And since most drucrafters want to be able to do things of use, then “you can’t use drucraft without a sigl” is, for practical purposes, almost always true.

Workarounds

The one big exception to the Primal Limit is in the name.  Primal drucraft, for whatever reason, can be performed without a sigl . . . though note that just because something can be done, that doesn’t mean it can be done in a way that’s effective or useful.

The question of why Primal effects don’t require a sigl is one that has interested drucraft researchers for some time . . . after all, if they could figure it out for Primal effects, it might be possible to find out a way to use the other branches without a sigl, too.  At the moment, the generally accepted theory is that the Primal branch can be used without a sigl because Primal essentia is pure and undifferentiated;  drucrafters can use it because the skills to use Primal essentia overlap significantly with those required to manipulate their personal essentia via channelling or shaping.  Beyond this, opinion diverges:  some argue that Primal effects are inherently different to the other branches, and thus using effects from the other branches is impossible.  Adherents to this theory sometimes go on to argue that, because of this, Primal drucraft shouldn’t be considered a “real” branch of drucraft, in the same way that “white” shouldn’t be considered a real colour, and that there should be only five branches, not six.  This is a minority view, however.

Others who have studied the subject believe that the difference between Primal drucraft and the other five branches is a matter of complexity, not anything fundamental, and that theoretically, a drucrafter with a strong enough affinity and sufficient training should be able to use, say, a Light or Matter effect without a sigl.  However, just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean that it can be done in practice, and it’s worth noting that, as far as is currently known, all attempts to accomplish this particular goal have failed.

Primal Drucraft:  Assisted vs Unassisted

Primal drucraft is thus the only branch of drucraft where the same effect can be performed both with a sigl, and without.  Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest benefit to using a Primal sigl is amplification;  a drucrafter using a Primal sigl can output vastly more power than one producing the same effect unaided.  Using a sigl is also much easier;  while creating a Primal effect unaided requires a solid fundamental grasp of the spell, any minimally competent channeller can use a basic sigl without any real understanding of how it works.

However, working through a sigl also comes with a cost in terms of fine control and feedback.  No sigl, however well-crafted, can match the sensitivity of a drucrafter’s personal essentia, in the same way that no tool is ever quite a substitute for a human hand.  As such, in areas where precision and delicacy are a priority, such as anything involving Wells, many drucrafters still prefer to work without a sigl where possible . . . though many don’t have the skill to do so in the first place.