Sha's Gift

Sha's Gift refers to the Four Talents some people posses and was given to humanity by the goddess Sha a long time ago to help restore the peace in a war-ridden land.

The Gift
When exactly or how the Gift was bestowed upon mankind is unknown, but the generally accepted theory is that the goddess Sha descended from her realm onto Arcanium, on an island called Sha's Summit, where she reached into the ground with her hands and let her power flood into the hearth of the earth, letting it reach to the highest peaks and deepest caverns.

The power seeped into the dirt, the trees, the animals and eventually humans. Some twenty years after Sha's descend, the first manifestations of her power began to appear. People with extraordinary powers and abilities began to use Sha's Gift, not fully knowing what it was.

Founding of the Order
At first, mankind was afraid of these powers for they did not understand it. The ones gifted where often hunted down and disposed off, in fear of what they might be able to do.

Seven of those who were gifted were extremely potent. They had the ability to use a total of tree kinds of power which they called Talents and named themselves the Sons of Sha, in honour of the goddess who had granted them their abilities. They gathered more and more Talented around them and sailed to an island in the middle of the Great Crossing where they build the grandest city ever to be made by men; Eresath.

To protect those with Talents, they founded the Order; a society where those gifted could learn, train and control their power.

Years passed and bit by bit, the trust in the Order from the outside world grew. More often than not, kings and queens called for their aid whenever a dispute rose in their lands. Trained members of the Order found their way to courts and army staffs. Over the centuries, it would become tradition for nobles and rulers to have members from the Order by their side, advising them.

The Four Talents
The Four Talents are the manifestation of Sha's power in mankind. They come in four different types. Which type a human possesses is completely random and follows no rules. The largest portion of Talented, around ninety-eight percent, are able to use only one Talent. A smaller amount, no more than two percent, are capable of using two Talents at the same time and carry the title Dovra'Sha, meaning Close Servant of Sha. A mere selected few are gifted with three Talents and are called the Sons of Sha. In total, there have been no more than twenty in a period of over one thousand and five-hundred years.

The nature of Enhancement
Enhancement is the ability to enhance ones body beyond human limitations by using the inborn power in ones own body. The possessor of this Talent is able to move faster, see clearer, hear sharper... In theory, the limit to which one can push his body is non-existent and is purely dependant on the person's own pure strength and willpower. Notable is that women seem to be able to enhance their body much further in comparison with their pure state of being, pure in the meaning of non-enhanced.

Enhancers in the realm
The Enhancers take prominent places as battle commanders and training officers. They excel in combat in every way possible and are deadly once unleashed without restraints. But, following the peaceful way of the Order, they will only engage in combat if all other options have failed. Enhancement is also the most common of Talents with over a thousand Enhancers currently trained and on duty.

First Enhancer
The First Enhancer is the chosen leader of the entirety of Enhancers in the realm. His duties consist of counselling other Enhancers who hold positions at important places, guiding newly arrived students who are to start the training of Enhancer and aiding the Order in maintaining peace across the realm. From time to time, the First Enhancer will also be present at Testings and aid the Son organizing them.

Currently, Sherell Smokehair, a farmer's daughter from Mothblade, hold the position of First Enhancer after succeeding Rey Domer in the year 1503.

The nature of Sealing
The most studied and misunderstood Talent is without a doubt Sealing. Whereas Enhancement uses the power from ones own body and Healing from another's, Sealers use the power from the world around them. They gather it from the earth beneath their feet and the air seemingly empty above them. It comes from the water in rivers, lakes and seas and from the trees in the vast forests. By forming words in their mind, Sealers can bend the power into something they can use for the purpose they intent as long as they point their dominant hand towards the location they want the seal to appear.

For example, when a Sealer would form the words Light and Attachment, it would form a light-emitting floating orb that would follow the Sealer everywhere before it is disposed off. When the Sealer would only use the word Light, the orb would still appear, but it would be stationary. If the Sealer was to only use Attachment, nothing would happen since there is nothing that requires any attachment. The size and amount of light emitted by the orb is dependant on the amount of strength and will the Sealer puts behind his words. Their are legends of powerful men and women creating orbs so strong they could blind anyone looking at them, but if those tales are true there will be no records of it in the Order's library.

Sealers in the realm
Unlike Enhancers, who are almost always easy to recognise by their gear and attitude, Sealers are much harder to spot. There are those who hold high positions at courts and army staffs, but more than one works from the shadows, trying to maintain the peace by careful manipulation and forgery. In order to satisfy and ensure nobles and commanders, the Order selects certain Sealers to work openly at their high positions while others infiltrate unnoticed.

It occurs that a Sealer goes rogue, stealing and committing crime for their own personal gain without getting caught. This fact has made Sealers something to fear in the eyes of the common folk. They believe, and there are some truths in their beliefs, that Sealers are able to transport themselves from one place to the other in the blink of an eye and can kill a man with just the gesture of their hand.

The Sealers do not officially have a First Sealer since they mostly work behind the scenes and having someone like a First Sealer would make it easier for others to discover their plans and intentions.

The nature of Healing
The Talent called Healing is quite self-explanatory. Men and women who possess this Talent are able to heal the sick and wounded as far as bringing them back from the verge of death. Healers use the inborn, but non-manifested, power inside every man and woman to heal them. This process will drain the patient quite a bit and it requires time to recovers from the process of Healing. The worse the wound or sickness, the longer the recovery takes and the more it requires from the patient. How exactly Healing works is still somewhat of a mystery, but it is generally accepted that Healers use the power to restore wounds to their prior state and are even able to bring back lost limbs. When it comes to sickness, the Healer will let the power flow through the entire body and purify any source of disease by embedding it with the power.

There is one thing Healers can not heal; diseases of the mind. Schizophrenia, amnesia, phobias... have no way of being healed.

Healers in the realm
All throughout the realm, in every major city, a Hall of Healers has been built where a delegation of assigned Healers live and provide costless healing to anyone who asks for it. Every Hall has his own First Healer who answers only to the Council and has absolute authority in the Hall, although that authority is seldom used due to the peaceful nature of Healers.

Of all four Talents, the Healers are most accepted into society.

The nature of Wiser
The Talent of Wiser is the odd one out of all four and is sometimes not even considered a Talent, but only training of the mind. Those who say so however, are ignorant; Wiser is probably the hardest Talent to control and takes an immense amount of willpower to use. Wisers use the power all around them: the power in their own body, the power from others, from rock and air, from water and tree. They gather all the power from the realm and use it to learn what was and what is. There is a reason the history books describe Wisers as The ones who know all that was and all that is.

They study the patterns in the power they gather and try to read it to their best abilities. That way, they can learn what happened to the man who's bones they found in an alleyway, they can learn what way a bird travelled before it landed on the balcony of their study room...

Wisers in the realm
There are few Wisers in the realm at present, no more than thirty-five are currently alive. Even rarer than the Dovra'Sha, they are highly respected in the Order and the realm in general. Most of them spend their days in Eresath, gathering the power from all over the kingdoms to learn and write down. The youngest among them, and the most adventurous, travel across the lands to learn directly from the source.

The nobles and common folk do not know much about the Wisers. What they do know is that a Wiser's judgement is final and there is no way of contesting it. But since most Wisers choose to remain in Eresath, their judgement is seldom heard in trials and matters of justice.

Laws of Talents
The Laws of Talents have been set in the year 104 after years of experimenting and are absolute much like the laws of physics. The Laws limit the way Talented can use their power in quite some way. The reason behind the laws are unknown, they exist and that is enough.

First Law - The power does not work on one who has manifested his own power.
This first law is the greatest restriction of them all. It states that no man or woman who can use the power can use it on someone else.

Basically, this means that a Healer can not heal anyone who possesses a Talent. When an Enhancer, Sealer, Healer or Wiser gets wounded, there is no way a Healer can aid that person. To counter this, a separate training was founded in Eresath where people without Talents could learn the ways of healing with herbs and other resources.

For Sealers, this means they can not affect other Talented with their seals. When a Sealer attempts to perform a seal of instant unconsciousness on a person with a Talent, it will not work. This only counts for seals directly aimed at the person.

When it comes to Wisers, they are unable to study and read patterns of manifested power.

Enhancers are least affected by this law since they rely on their own body in combat.

Second Law - The limitations of ones Talent is as high as the Talented's strength and willpower.
The weakest of Sealers can create a light-emitting orb the size of their hand for only a few seconds, the strongest can maintain that light for over a year. It all depends on the Talented himself. These limitations can be raised through training and years of practice.

The same goes for the other Talents. As long as the person's own body can handle the power used, there are no limits.

Third Law - The amount of Talents one possesses is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes to master the Talents.
Simply put, the more Talents one has, the faster training goes and the quicker one becomes a master of his Talent.

The training of an Enhancer can take up to ten years whereas a Dovra'Sha with one of his Talents being Enhancement can do it in three years. Sons of Sha can do it even faster, the fastest ever being Eathen Wolfgard, who completed the training for Enhancement, Healing and Wiser in a mere six months.

Fourth Law - The manifestation of ones power depends on the base strength of ones power.
If someone has a very strong potential to become a Talented, the power will manifest itself at a younger age, the youngest ever being Eathen Wolfgard, who entered the Order at age sixteen in the year 805.

The age of manifestation for one with average strength lays around the age of twenty-three.

Fifth Law - A Sealer can only form one seal at one moment in time.
It is impossible for Sealers to form more than one seal at the same time.