Let us begin with what we know, and proceed from there to what we do not.
We know that the ley lines of Aethermark converge upon the Vitae rift. This is not a theory. It is the documented finding of the Ur-Empire's Ley Line Atlas, completed at Year 1700 CC by a team of thirty-seven mage-cartographers working across a period of twenty years, verified by independent measurement no fewer than six times in the centuries since. Every ley line on this continent, without exception, leads back to the Thornwood. Every ley line leads, ultimately, to the rift.
We know, further, that arcane practitioners draw their power from the ley lines. This is not merely theoretical consensus — it is the foundational premise upon which the entirety of formal arcane education in both Quelavar and Thessavar rests. The practitioner does not generate power from within herself. She draws it from without, from the ley channels that run beneath her feet and above her head, through the techniques she has spent years developing to make herself a better conduit for what was already there.
The question I asked myself, in the thirty-eighth year of my career, upon reviewing the anomalous field measurements of a young research assistant who had spent three weeks near the Vitae rift and returned to her institution with casting scores measurably higher than those she had carried on departure, was this: if practitioners draw their power from ley lines, and all ley lines originate at the Vitae rift, what would it mean for a practitioner to spend extended time at the origin point of the network from which she draws?
It is, in retrospect, a simple question. The simplicity of a question is no guarantee of the simplicity of its answer. What I found required fourteen years to verify, and I will confess that I did not anticipate what the verification would produce.
