✦Animus Magic - Is A Gift That Allows One To Transform Energy And Animate Inanimate Objects✦

✦Animus magic - is a gift that allows one to transform energy and animate inanimate objects✦

No one knows exactly how the first animus magic users appeared, but they originated from the IceWings and later spread throughout Pyrrhia.

The nature of animus magic is little studied, but it is known for certain that when enchanting an object, the animus breathes life into it, losing some of their power in the process. The enchanted item is strengthened and begins to possess some properties of a living organism; it emits heat or cold, depending on the dragon who enchanted it, and can understand speech. If an item is enchanted to respond to a specific command, with enough patience, it can be retrained to respond to another. However, enchanted items are extremely stubborn and often not very clever, taking many words literally.

✦Animus magic users must be incredibly cautious with the use of their magic, as overly powerful spells can simply kill them✦

Although animus magic users can create something new using magic, they prefer to enchant already finished items since growing things is an extremely time and energy-consuming process.

IceWing animus magic users preferred to create gifts entirely with their claws, infusing them with magic during the creation process and literally putting their soul into them. As a result, artifacts made by IceWings and their followers possess extraordinary strength and greater intelligence.

An animus who has expended their power can replenish it both naturally (by eating well and resting) and artificially. Artificial replenishment is achieved by killing and extracting energy from other living beings. Some believe that it is also necessary to eat the victim’s heart, but this is not essential.

Artificial replenishment is beneficial because through it you gain more magical power than is possible to acquire naturally due to the limitations of the animus’s body. The legend that an animus loses their soul when using magic is mostly based on cases where they descended into mass killings to obtain energy for more powerful spells.

The most striking example of such an animus is Darkstalker, a dragon who, for almost all 17 years of his life, killed random IceWings in pursuit of immortality. When his friends learned about the nature of his power, they were horrified and killed him.

Not all animus magic users are serial killers; most prefer a more civilized method - sacrificing animals. Interestingly, scavengers have quite high energy value due to their sentience, but dragons have yet to discover this. They lean toward the belief that the amount of energy is proportional to the size of the creature.

Animus magic users rarely engage in enchanting living beings because it is an incredibly difficult and often messy process, the first step of which is to completely break the creature being enchanted. Both dragons and animals have their own will, which in normal situations will always resist the animus’s will. Enchanting these creatures turns into a constant struggle with continuous depletion of both moral and magical strength.

An average animus can barely handle an animal, let alone another dragon (or scavenger). Although powerful animus magic users can temporarily subdue a victim, they prefer to avoid it out of a very reasonable fear of losing all their power in the process.

If a dragon does want to subdue another sentient being, they will need patience and a lack of squeamishness. The creature being enchanted is driven mad, broken, and stripped of its own will, turning into an empty vessel that can later be filled with magic.

Some animus magic users follow the IceWing method. They take a dragonet or any other creature they want to enchant (the younger, the better) and raise it in complete obedience, infusing it with magic during the training process, making the dragonets stronger and faster-growing than their peers. This method is the most successful if an animus wants to subdue the will of a living creature.