The World
The Long Dusk
Count the ravens. If you can count them, you’re safe. If they’re beyond counting... pray.
The world is fading. Not in fire or cataclysm, but the way a candle gutters before it dies. Each generation inherits a world a little dimmer than the last, and calls it normal. The elders speak of brighter days. The children don't believe them.
Cities crumble. Empires are memories wearing the skins of institutions. The church bells still ring on schedule, though few come to listen. What remains are scavengers, survivors and the desperate; and the ravens, who watch everything.
Magic
Every spell is a wound
Magic works. Nobody agrees why. Priests proclaim it the grace of their god; hedge witches swear by their dark patrons; scholars fill whole libraries with its rules, yet cannot say what lies beneath them. On one thing they all agree: every spell tears at something. Most call it the Veil.
Whatever its source, anyone can follow the right instructions and produce an effect: the farmer's wife, the street orphan, the merchant's third son.
Some spells are prayers. Some are screams. The Veil does not care which.
The Count
You are being watched
Every spell a mage casts thins the mage as well. It feels like a headache, a pressure behind the eyes, the certainty of being watched. Mages call it being Counted.
And the Veil remembers. Cut it in the same place twice and it parts more easily, so the more you cast, the cheaper your magic comes. Until it doesn't: push your Count far enough and the Veil ruptures around you, with catastrophic results.
The blood remembers what the mind forgets. Cut the same vein twice and the Veil parts easier - that's not skill, that's scar tissue in reality. You've worn a groove in the world, and things travel grooves.
Grimoires
Copied by hand, corrected in the margins
Spells pass down in grimoires: the instructions for a spell, copied and recopied for generations. Every copy risks an error, and a wrong line costs the one who casts it.
Some books carry notes in an unknown hand - corrections, warnings, refusals to explain. Scholars call their writers the Margin. Nobody agrees on who they are, how the writings appear, or whether they are anyone at all.
The closed loop is correct. I know it looks open. I know the smudge suggests open. Use the closed loop, if you value your bones.
Houses
Scions fall; the house remains
In the long dusk, people hold on to names. A house might be a family, a cult, a circle of scholars - whatever outlasts the people in it. Its scions fight in its name, and its chronicle remembers what they did.
A scion who falls comes back. Somewhere else, a little later, but back. Whether it is quite the same person is a question houses learn not to ask.
There are no good people left. Only people who haven't been tested yet.
The dusk is long. Make a name in it.
Registering founds your house, with a grimoire of starter spells, so your first scion can fight at once.