Supernatural Power Data Files: Holy Magic

Supernatural Power Data Files: Holy Magic

Power Details: Holy magic is one of three supernatural power types that seem to come from the ‘life’ within all living things. The other two are curse magic, and (though this theory is contested strongly) our own psychic abilities.

            Holy magic has, primarily, the ability to oppose other supernatural powers of any kind. This is performed by two main groups of people – firstly, ‘clerics’, who are capable of performing blasts of holy energy that will harm any unnatural beings or objects, and also of imbuing holy power into weapons, equipment, and even places; and secondly ‘paladins’, who utilise ancient imbued armour and weapons to fight them more directly.

            Clerics develop their power through true, unshakeable faith in ‘good’ – often through one religion or other, but always with the understanding that all religions are merely paths to the same righteous way of life. Some are completely irreligious, and merely stand against anything beyond the norm that would threaten humanity.

            The holy blasts clerics are able to perform, or weapons imbued with holy magic, cause great destruction to any magic they come in contact with. This includes cursed undead as their curse is imparted upon their very flesh, necromantic undead for similar reasons, manifesting ghosts, elementals, and also elemental or necromantic mages who have imbued magic into themselves (as well as their stores of such energy). There are also instances of some special psychic entities that have warped their own bodies being affected.

            The armour and weapons paladins wield are imbued with great amounts of holy magic, and were created up until the early nineteenth century by great teams of clerics (see the History and Theories section below). These sets of armour and arms are able to choose those of pure heart through some mechanism (believed to be similar to methods used by some of the curses) to take them up should their owner fall in battle, or become too old to fight on.

            Imbued with great magical power, the paladin armour is stronger and lighter (at least, for the paladins) than any other. It also imbues the paladin with impossible strength and speed. Combined with their holy weapons, paladins were for a very long time an almost impossible to deal with threat for most undead and even prepared necromancers.

            Unfortunately, this changed with the advent of cannons, and became worse with the development of modern firearms. Though still more threatening than any other human, many paladins have been slain and their armour destroyed (a difficult task, and often the armour is able to – somehow – escape).

History and Theories: Holy magic has been around for at least as long as – if not longer than – curse magic. The two share a large amount of early history – clerics and paladins hunted down many of the curse-smiths and their creations, having deemed them ‘unholy’. As the curse-smiths (and, seemingly, the ability to perform curses) faded, the holy orders moved on to hunting down the creations of the curse-smiths; vampires and lycanthropes.

            As other forms of undead emerged – ghouls and zombies – their mission expanded to include hunting down these beings and those who created them. Unlike the elemental societies, the holy orders had no traitors – they were able to endure fighting with the necromancer cults. However, without much knowledge of each other, neither side was truly able to engage in more than skirmishes, leading to both surviving through to the modern day.

            Beginning in the mid eighteenth century, however, holy magic began to ‘fade’. Fewer people were able to become clerics, and worse, at the start of the nineteenth century even the greatest of clerics could no longer create armour for paladins. By the beginning of the twentieth, it was not even possible for the greatest clerics to repair armour that already existed – and some of the armours seemed to be failing without any cause. Despite not being engaged in any great fights, to this day the holy orders have been shrinking – so much so that there are barely two hundred clerics, and only a dozen paladins left in the world.

            Though their members are often religious, only rarely are holy orders only members of a single faith. Most are made up of many different (and not just Abrahamic) faiths united in the common goal of protecting humanity from the unnatural. This unity between people of different faiths seems to be important to the potential of holy magic – those too zealous or intolerant in their beliefs have never been able to walk the path of a cleric. Some have suggested that this is part of the reason holy magic is fading, combined with its complete opposite – the decline of faith in general.

            We have strong reasons to believe (but no means of proving) that holy and curse magic both originate from the same source – the ‘life’ within each of us. We are unsure how such abilities can be so different from one another, but we believe that it may simply be the belief of many living beings that causes both to be possible (and potentially our own abilities).