Reclamation
Reclamation is the practice of gathering dull — spent, no-longer-usable — pneuma and returning it to use.
It is a practice, not a trait. Anyone can learn it, train it and get good at it. Celaborans are the people who live entirely on it, which makes them its most practised users rather than its only ones.
What dull pneuma is
By Pneuma's Law II, shaping always costs: some pneuma is spent every time it is bound into a medium, released from one, or annihilated against an enemy medium. What Attrition takes is not destroyed. It goes dull and settles into the ground where it was spent, so battlefields, ruins and long-worked sites are thick with it.
Land that is heavily spent and never reclaimed goes sour. Land beyond that is void: nothing living draws anything from it.
Reclamation is the described way dull pneuma returns to use.
Progression
Reclamation is trained by doing it, and a practitioner can become known for it the way a smith can.
Whether it grows on an axis of its own is unsettled. Dull pneuma is neither pure nor bound to a medium, so the affinity described in Law III — which grows by spending a medium — does not obviously apply to it. An axis of its own would keep reclamation from competing with the elemental specialisation a caster is already investing in.
What can be reclaimed
Land
Somewhere abandoned and taken back is somewhere reclaimed. Groves grow thickest where a lot has happened, because that is where the spent pneuma is.
A proposal, not yet built: a place's capacity to support life drains as it is hunted out, and is restored by a ritual performed on the spot, the restorer paying a little of their own pneuma to gather back what was scattered. An area could then be hunted out, be seen to be hunted out, and be brought back.
Equipment (proposed)
Everything in this section is proposed.
Law I separates two things a piece of matter can do with pneuma. Pneuma merely lodged in matter is charged — inert, and safe to carry, store and trade. Pneuma circulating through a vessel is alive: "fill a vessel and it wakes; drain it and it goes still."
Read against equipment, that makes an imbued weapon briefly alive for as long as its charge lasts — a soul in the sword, held only while it is filled. Law I also fixes how much of a soul: "more pneuma in a simple vessel makes it stronger, not cleverer." A sword is a simple vessel, so a woken blade is dim. It wants and it pulls; it does not converse.
Two different numbers follow, and they belong to two different practices:
| What it is | Whose work | How it moves | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quality | How good a vessel the piece is — how well its structure circulates | The smith's | Only upward, and only by reworking the piece |
| Wear | How well it is holding its charge now | The reclaimer's | Down through use, back up through reclamation |
Because the two practices reach different things, repair cannot raise quality: a reclaimer restores charge and never touches structure. A piece whose structure can no longer hold what is poured into it is finished for good.
A weapon filled with the same medium over and over may take on an affinity for it, by the same rule that grows a practitioner's. That would make a long-carried blade cheaper to fill with what it has always carried — a named sword arrived at by use rather than by authoring.
Conservation
Whether reclamation returns what was scattered — a world with a closed total — or the land simply refills, and reclamation only hurries it, is undecided. Nothing yet described depends on the answer.
Open questions
- Whether reclamation is one practice applied to every vessel — land, gear, sour ground — or several separate ones. One would make the person who restores a hunting ground the same person who services a blade.
- Whether Celaborans reclaim in some way others cannot, or are simply the most practised at a common skill.
- Whether the practice grows on its own axis or through affinity.
- Conservation or minting, as above.
- Whether anything is beyond reclaiming — whether void is permanent, and whether a spent piece of gear has a true end.
- The dull-pneuma model this whole practice rests on is itself not settled.