Soma

Soma is the world's matter. Everything is made of it — ground, sea, flame, wind, tools, bodies. It holds no life of its own; pneuma is what animates it. The two are the world's dual: pneuma is energy and soma is matter, pneuma is mind and soma is body. A creature's pneuma is its power and its soma is its health.

Soma carries the elements, and it is a physical quantity: gathered, split, recombined, traded and spent.

Kinds

Soma comes in four kinds: fire, air, water and earth. These are the elements. Everything in the world is one kind of soma or a blend of several, and every kind is stuff in its own right — a handful of fire soma is a thing in a bag.

The four somas on a square. Each edge joins two that share a quality — a temperature (hot or cold) or a moisture (wet or dry); the diagonals share none.

The four somas stand in fixed relation to one another:

• Allies — two somas that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every soma has two allies.
• Enemies — two somas that share no quality (diagonal). Every soma has exactly one enemy.

These relations belong to the soma. Pneuma bound in it is only along for the ride.

The Two Laws

Law I — Persistence. Soma is never destroyed, only rearranged. Mining, smithing, cooking, building and every other craft take soma in one arrangement and leave it in another. A ruin is soma that lost its arrangement and kept its substance. Energy dissipates (Attrition); matter persists.

Law II — Vessel. A vessel is soma arranged to carry a current of pneuma. Fill it and it lives (Vitality). What a vessel can do is decided by its arrangement: the same pneuma glows in a stone and thinks in a person because the stone and the person are different arrangements of soma.

Alchemy

Alchemy is the craft of soma: splitting a thing into the somas it is made of, and recombining somas into new things. Splitting is how most soma is won — a salamander's body into fire soma, a stone into earth. What two somas do when recombined depends on their relation:

Somas combining	Relation	Reaction	Result
Share a quality	Allies	Synergy	Hold together as a hybrid
Share none	Enemies	Dissonance	React: fly apart and release the pneuma bound in both

Hybrids are what allied somas make together. The hybrid follows the quality the two share:

Allies	Shared quality	Hybrid
Fire + Air	Hot	Lightning
Fire + Earth	Dry	Magma
Water + Air	Wet	Mist, ice
Water + Earth	Cold	Mud

Dissonance is violent. The two somas persist (Law I) but cannot hold together, and whatever pneuma was bound in either comes free at once — into the nearest vessel if one is there, dull into the ground if not (see Spent pneuma).

Sources

• Elemental sites. Wherever a soma is concentrated — a river, a burning fire, a rocky mountain — that soma can be gathered. The same sites hold bound pneuma; absorbing it is on the Pneuma page.
• Creatures. A slain creature's body is soma in its blend (see Composition). Alchemy splits it into what it was made of.
• Splitting. Anything at all can be split into its somas; the yield is the blend the thing was made of.

Casting

An elemental working has a body of soma. A fireball is fire soma flung by pneuma: the caster supplies the soma, the cast consumes it, and the soma goes where the working goes — rearranged into the effect, never destroyed (Law I). Pure workings and physical abilities have no soma cost; what they spend is on the Pneuma page.

The body

Composition

Every body is a blend of the four somas, fixed by its kind. A salamander is mostly fire soma; a fish is mostly water. The blend decides resistance: typed damage lands hard on a body with little of that element in it and lightly on a body with much. A body's blend is set for life.

Health

A body's health is its soma — how much there is, and how densely it is knit.

• Amount is set by size. A giant is made of more soma than a person and has more to break.
• Density is set by a life. Damage loosens the knit. A body whose soma has been loosened all the way can no longer carry a current, and the vessel breaks.

Health is amount times density. Growing tougher means growing denser: a veteran and a novice are the same size, and the veteran's soma is knit far tighter.

Tempering

Density grows from damage taken and recovered from. It is its own track, answering to nothing on the Pneuma page: a practitioner with a vast baseline is no tougher for it, and a fighter who has never cast is no less.

Healing

Re-knitting loosened soma takes matter. Food is soma, and eating supplies what the body needs to close its wounds. Healing consumables are soma's counterpart to a phial: matter to rebuild, where a phial is energy to spend.

Death

Death is the vessel breaking. The body's soma is all still there (Law I), but it no longer holds an arrangement that carries a current, and the pneuma leaves it as the Pneuma page describes. Running the pneuma pool dry is exhaustion; only a broken vessel kills.

Open questions

• Origin. Where the world's soma came from is unsettled.
• Numbers. Blend proportions, resistance strength, the density curve and the soma cost of a working are all undecided.
• Spent soma. Whether the soma a cast consumes can be recovered from where it lands, or is scattered for good, is unsettled.
• Affinity and soma. Whether affinity thins the soma a working consumes is unsettled (see Pneuma).