Benedict Jacka

The third, last, and hardest of the drucraft disciplines, shaping is also the rarest.  Channellers aren’t exactly common, but they’re not that hard to find;  learning to channel is slow and difficult, but anybody who works at it long enough and hard enough can become a channeller eventually, and at the higher ranks of Houses and drucraft corporations, basically everyone can channel.  Shaping is a totally different story.

There are two reasons that shapers are so rare.  First, going from channelling to shaping requires a drucrafter to pick up a new skill;  the ability to manipulate and work with free essentia.  “Free essentia” is just the drucraft term for regular essentia – the kind that isn’t attuned to anyone, but is floating around in the air or resting in Wells.  A drucrafter can attune it by taking it into their body, but shaping even the weakest of sigls requires vastly more essentia than any living creature’s body could possibly hold.  This means that the only way to shape a sigl is to learn to use free essentia . . . which is a problem, since directly controlling essentia that hasn’t been attuned to you is impossible.

The way shapers get around this problem is to use indirect control instead.  They learn to use their personal essentia to set up currents, causing the free essentia to be drawn in and concentrated.  Shapers sometimes describe this as ‘painting’, where the shaper’s personal essentia is the paintbrush, or as a ‘whirlpool’, where the free essentia is visualised as a vortex, or even as ‘birds following a leader’ or ‘flock of sheep and a sheepdog’.  The fact that they have to come up with such weird metaphors to explain it is a hint as to the inherent difficulty of the task.  Most channellers find it mind-bendingly impossible at first, and it doesn’t help that most drucrafters are rather bad at sensing, having skipped those parts of the drucraft curriculum to get to that part where they can use magic as quickly as possible.  A drucrafter can get away with this as long as they stick to basic channelling – if all you’re ever planning to do is use not-too-complicated sigls that other people have made for you, then an understanding of your own personal essentia is all you really need.  But it’s woefully inadequate for shaping.

Assuming that a channeller can get past this first hurdle, the next step is to learn to shape an essentia construct.  A construct is basically a blueprint for a sigl, created out of thin strands of essentia, and if you can make a construct for a sigl, you can make the sigl . . . in theory.  In practice it’s quite a lot more difficult than that, partly because making an actual sigl is much more stressful and demanding on one’s shaping skills, and partly because it’s actually quite difficult to know whether you’ve made the construct correctly.  Analysing an essentia construct requires very good sensing skills, so it’s easy to create a construct with a giant flaw that you’re totally unaware of until you try to shape it for real.  This is where a good teacher is enormously helpful – a shaping tutor can analyse a student’s essentia construct and identify such flaws, speeding up the process massively.

Once a would-be shaper has learnt to manipulate free essentia, and can reliably make an essentia construct, the next step is to scale things up.  At this point, paths split.  The “traditional” approach is for a shaper to continue to practise with constructs, making them larger and denser, until they start to work directly with Wells.  This process, however, is quite slow and demanding, and in recent decades it has become more and more common for shapers to focus on training with limiters instead.  Limiters greatly simplify the shaping process by offloading most of the hard work onto the drucrafter who created the limiter.  It does mean that you can’t make a sigl without having the right limiter, but nowadays most Houses and virtually all corporations use this method exclusively, considering the loss in flexibility an acceptable trade-off for the reduced cost and difficulty of training the shaper in the first place.

But even with the limiter method, these costs and difficulties are not small.  The unfortunate fact is that no matter how much they train and practise, every shaper fails their first real shaping attempt.  Most fail their second, third, fourth, and fifth attempts, too.  And this is a problem, because shaping a sigl requires Wells, and Wells cost money.  The easiest way to learn to shape sigls is to practise on a powerful, stable, permanent Well, with a lot of time to try things out and make mistakes . . . but the sort of people who own such Wells are very unlikely indeed to be happy about some newbie messing with them, particularly since it’s entirely possible to damage a Well if you misuse it badly enough.  The most likely way a novice shaper is going to get access to such a Well is if it’s one that their family (or sponsor) owns already.

All of this is a long way of saying that learning to become a shaper is typically very expensive;  training a shaper has a high up-front cost, and someone is going to have to pay it.  Typically that someone is going to be a sponsoring organisation, whether a House or a corporation.  It’s possible to learn shaping without the backing of such an organisation . . . it’s just significantly harder.

In the eyes of most, channelling is the point at which one becomes a ‘real’ drucrafter. Someone who can only sense is technically a drucrafter, but they’ll never get much respect until they learn to channel as well.

At its core, channelling is just mastery over personal essentia. All living creatures have a personal essentia reserve – the essentia that drifts naturally into their body and attunes to them. This essentia is very limited, but it constantly replenishes itself as more flows in. Attuned essentia has a connection to the person it is attuned to – it can be used to activate sigls, and, with practice, can be controlled.

Learning to control one’s personal essentia is a slow process, but it’s not as hard as sensing. Once a drucrafter has learnt to feel their own personal essentia the toughest part has already been done – they still need to learn to direct it, but the fact that they can get feedback on their efforts and see/sense/feel when something is and isn’t working makes the process much, much easier than it would be if they had to fumble blindly. It’s much like learning how to use a muscle – it takes a long time, but ultimately it’s just a matter of practice, and just as a baby eventually learns to use their hands to grasp and manipulate things, a drucrafter eventually learns to move and control their own personal essentia, clumsily at first but with greater and greater confidence and dexterity the more they practise.

Being able to control one’s personal essentia is necessary for drucrafting because most sigls don’t work on their own. A minority of sigls, known as continuous sigls, activate automatically simply by being worn on the body – they will naturally pull in personal essentia and keep on pulling in more and more of it until they hit their limit. However, this is an extremely crude and mindless way of activating a sigl, and carries significant drawbacks. A sigl can’t think, and has no way of knowing when it’s the “right” time to activate itself, which means continuous sigls will keep on trying to work no matter the situation. Sometimes this is simply annoying, such as a light sigl shining in broad daylight, and sometimes it’s actively harmful, such as a strength sigl amplifying your muscles when you’re trying to do something delicate. On very rare occasions it can even be actively dangerous – draining your personal essentia too far for too long has various negative health effects, particularly if a drucrafter is already sick or injured. In addition to this, many drucraft effects require far too much fine control to work as a continuous sigl – as a rule, anything more complicated than “on or off” is not going to be a good choice for continuous operation.

For these reasons, most sigls are designed instead to work on a trigger. Triggered sigls stay inert until a matching flow of personal essentia is channelled through them, at which point they activate. The essentia flow works as an on/off switch – supplying essentia turns it on, cutting off the flow turns it off. Many sigls also are designed to work with varying levels of power – these sigls, sometimes called “variable sigls”, allow a channeller to achieve a very easy level of control over the sigls’s power by increasing or decreasing the essentia flow.

Many sigls, however, require much more complex inputs than simply increasing or reducing the power. Effects such as optical cloaks, spatial manipulation, jump and flight spells, or healing all require quite precise and varied inputs from the drucrafter – the sigls are typically designed so as to accept slightly different types of essentia, channelled in different ways. Mastering these sorts of sigls requires both broad channelling skill (to reach a certain level of finesse and precision with essentia flows in general) and also specialised knowledge of the sigl in question (which typically can only be achieved with practice). While a competent channeller can figure out how to use a basic triggered or variable sigl in a matter of minutes, the more complex sigls can require weeks or even months to achieve any real mastery.

There is no real cap on the level of skill that can be attained with channelling, and for those who decide to devote themselves to it, mastering it is a lifetime’s journey. This, however, is very rare – the vast majority of channellers learn as much as they need to operate the sigls they have, then stop.