The Nature of Magic
Magic is cheating. Magic effectively is attempting to defy, bend, break, or outright ignore the laws of nature and physics that most creatures have no choice but to obey and do so in your favor and to your advantage. But those who would gain magic's boon? Must also pay magic's price. Magic has its own rules and requirements, its cause and effects, and its exchange rates apart from, and separate from those natural laws most creatures understand, and many individuals, seemingly at random, are granted access to this power, this second set of rules. Some, by bloodline, or pact by their family are simply born with the gift, yet most others never awaken this power in themselves - most with the ability never even try out of fear, superstition, or simple ignorance. But once you learn to use it? It becomes incredibly difficult to stop. The elder races, with their long lives often spent trying to understand the mystic forces around them are often significantly more adept at magic than mortal men and women.
Those without the gift, sometimes find ways to gain it, entering into pacts with supernatural creatures for pieces of power, a change of fate, or access to the natural (or unnatural) ley lines of magic. Binding one's soul, their eternal aspect in servitude to a silent god or supernatural entity, a blood-pact, an oath of vengeance on an ancestral sword, a memory, a kiss of true love, the ritual offering of one's virginity beneath the summer moon.. or some other spiritual currency that can not easily be reproduced. Paladins and divine spellcasters offer their souls to gods and receive spectacular powers. Warlocks make pacts with other-supernatural entities; be they fey-creatures, daemons, or genies from beyond. But for those who do not themselves, wish to pay an often terrible price to access the power of their soul.. there are, of course, ways to cheat this price as well.. but as with anything magical or supernatural, someone always has to pay.
Black magic is the means of causing someone else to pay this price for you (not even necessarily unwillingly).. through coercion, force, or cooperative ritual. Immortality through vampirism, blood-magic, or demonic power through souls and harming or twisting another creature's immortal aspect are still other examples. The Dark Arts often include many (but not all) forms of necromancy and many forms of selfish magic that involve manipulation of souls, the mind or life-energy to provide even temporary access to more power than one's own body and spirit can harness innately.
Even when one is a natural sorcerer magic is cheating nature. Magic is costly, even when used properly - and is especially dangerous even to the wielder when used poorly. In the age of heroes, there were great works and spells of terrifying power and scope; but most of these were lost in antiquity, and while the faint traces that survive into our age are mostly among the remaining elves who are the final, living witnesses to such works of the past: spells, once great constructs of living metal, elemental spirits who cooperated with mortal creatures.. elven warriors known as blade-singers who wielded both blade and spell in unison against the enemies of goodly creatures and arch-magi who could conjure storms, or call great, flaming stones from the sky to shatter entire formations of men or a fortress wall in a single, decisive strike.
The secrets of such arts are either long lost, or long hidden - humans attempting to reproduce such magics while sometimes successful often pay a terrible, terrible price: aging years in a day, or immolating themselves as they attempt to control powers that mortal men were never meant to touch. Well-learned humans naturally gifted with access to power often study for years to control even the simplest of magics safely; pursing the arcane and ritual arts in exclusive schools beneath the eye of strict and wizened masters of sorcery; either human, half-elven or more rarely - directly from elven magi themselves.
The history of magic stretches back to the time before modern interpretations of High Magic, where beings known as The First did battle with each other in a vortex of disordered elements, vying for supremacy over the primordial matter that would eventually become The World of Orben itself. Though no historical records exist, and few beings save Ranator survive from that period of incalculable length that existed before The First Ordering of Time and Space.
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The rules of magic, physics, and spirituality have changed numerous times since those ancient times before the coming of even Dragons, but what remains is largely given to us by scholars questioning cryptic entities to which time has little meaning; contrary and oppositional histories that have been passed down from fiends, celestials, elemental genies and their immortal otherworldly ilk when mortals bargained with them.
While High Magic such as was once practiced by Dragon God-Kings and High-elven sorcerer lords sculpted the land in antiquity; allowing the creation of entirely new species, creating armies of servile magical automatons, granting powerful wishes or even calling great comets from the sky to crush the fortifications of entire armies under ice and rubble: The reality is that the age of heroes is long passed - the rules of magic have changed, multiple times, even within recorded history.
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While some remnants of these ancient wonders and the results of such high magics remain among us; still functioning automatons such as intelligent Nimblewrights, the cursed race of Tieflings, powerful artifacts and even the deathly Salt Marshes in the heart of Aer Arnad; attempting to call a meteor out of the sky to crush an enemy castle is incredibly likely to burn even the most experienced elven Arch-Magos to cinders and few scholars have firm explanation or even correlations for this beyond the rise of human populations and mass human magical illiteracy throughout the world - and this steady change in the laws of magic has been happening even in the lifetimes of living high elven mages.
Some scholars of Aer Arnad have theorized that magic has recently been or has always been democratized among living creatures, of which superstitious human serfs ignorant in the ways and means of magic now possess a vast majority of Orben's population.. and perhaps? It is their superstitions and unprecedented historical ignorance that now dictate the laws of our shared world and usher in this slowly growing dark age of magic.
Regardless, those who attempt to closely follow - let alone bend or break - the laws of magic often suffer at least minor corrupting effects; extremes can include irreversible rapid aging, spontaneous combustion, or other often spectacular self-destructive effects. While these 'prices' can sometimes be countered or redirected to others (ritual sacrifice, the draining of powerful artifacts, daemonic assistance and other forms of 'black magic'), these effects are almost always eventually deadly to mortal humans.
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While the untrained can, through trial and error learn the rules and limitations of magic; Without a map or manuals to guide one's talents along accepted, safer paths, such hedge-mages often have to go off-roading. The cost such self-taught magi pay and continue to pay is considerable; elves often say of untrained hedge-mages and tribal sorcerers that 'they burn the wick at both ends' aging nearly twice as fast as common men as the unfiltered, wild magic burns through them body and soul.
The irony being that their spells are often so raw and simplistic that a more trained sorcerer can casually dispel them.. but to the layman observer their wild, primal displays of magic may be quite impressive and self-taught hedge-magi may as well be angry elemental demi-gods reborn from the age of legend, burning twice as bright, but half as long before expiring as wildly misunderstood folk-heroes themselves.