A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #22: Light Essentia

Light is the first and most widely studied of the branches of drucraft, and is generally considered the easiest to learn.  New drucrafters are often given weak Light sigls to practise on, and a basic ‘torch’ Light projection sigl is the traditional journeyman project for any shaper wishing to prove themselves capable of crafting their own sigls.

Capabilities

Light drucraft grants control over the electromagnetic spectrum:  visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, radio, microwaves, X-rays, and gamma rays.  The creation of magnetic fields and electrical currents also fall within its remit.  Sub-categories of Light drucraft include:

• Projection:  Creating electromagnetic radiation out of essentia.  The essentia is turned into light or other rays:  to anyone watching, it appears to have been created out of nowhere.  At a basic level this produces ‘torch’ or ‘flash’ effects:  at a more advanced level, this can be used to project rays of a specific frequency or as a building block of duplication.

• Negation:  The reverse of projection – converting electromagnetic radiation into essentia, making it seemingly disappear.  Used in darkness and concealment effects, as well as for any other situation where having radiation strike a sigl’s bearer might be considered undesirable.

• Manipulation:  Alteration of electromagnetic radiation.  This typically takes the form of bending its rays (causing them to focus on a target, or curve around it) or shifting its frequency (making visible light invisible, or vice versa).  Much more difficult than projection or negation, but also much more versatile.

• Duplication:  Duplication combines negation and projection to copy radiation approaching the sigl, negate it, and reproduce it with a different vector.  This allows the bearer to make an image vanish, while reproducing the same (or another) image in its place.  The very best stealth and concealment sigls usually rely on duplication, but the image must be created at a very high level of fidelity to be convincing, which requires a high-grade sigl.

• Magnetism:  Creation of magnetic fields.  Magnetic sigls were once popular, but nowadays have fallen out of favour since modern technology can for the most part produce magnetic fields far more cheaply and easily than a sigl.

• Electrical:  Similarly to projection, this converts essentia into an electrical current.  Considered more useful than magnetism, due to several niche effects, but still suffers from the magnitude problem (see below).

Strengths and Weaknesses

Light is far and away the best of the branches for stealth – both concealing, and revealing.  Most invisibility sigls use Light drucraft to work, as do most counter-invisibility ones.  As a general rule, if you want to produce any effect involving sight – either making people see things better, or worse – Light is the go-to branch.  Since sight is the most important human sense, this makes Light sigls highly valuable.

However, if you want to do something not based around senses – if you don’t care about seeing or hiding something, but just want to change it – then Light essentia is not much use.  Light drucraft is very bad at producing crude physical effects like breaking or reshaping things, for the simple reason that the absolute amount of energy delivered by Light drucraft is very low.  This is referred to among Light drucrafters as the ‘magnitude problem’.  A Motion sigl and a Light sigl can both directly deliver energy to a target, one by a kinetic blow and the other by a beam of focused light.  The total amount of energy delivered by the kinetic blow, however, would be far larger.  In fact, unless the Light sigl was unusually powerful or unless someone happened to be looking right at the beam, the total amount of energy it would deliver would be so low that no-one would even notice.  This makes destructive Light sigls (like lasers) unpopular – making them powerful enough to do anything useful is incredibly expensive, so why bother?

Despite this, Light is and continues to be one of the most in-demand branches for military applications.  Being able to stop enemies from seeing you (while being able to reliably and simultaneously see them) is an enormous advantage in combat, and as such almost all modern armies make heavy use of Light sigls for their elite and hard-to-replace units.  Invisibility and vision sigls are also highly popular among private individuals who for whatever reason consider themselves to be in need of personal protection.

Associations

Light essentia is traditionally associated with science and mathematics, aesthetics, the intellect, nature, perception, and concealment.  Its associated celestial body is Venus.

Distribution

The strongest countries for Light essentia are the United Kingdom and Germany, and the most powerful Light Wells have traditionally been found there.  Other countries with unusually strong Light resources are Switzerland, France, Italy, and Iran.