Theanoan School
“Essence is the Equation, and Creation but a glimpse of its purity”.
Theanoan Sorcery
Some say that, beyond the practical counting of ledgers, the deeper complexities of mathematics were brought into Creation by Devon, Daric, and the other masters of the Devonian School of Sorcery. From practical counting were born theoretical concepts, zeros and algebra, complex formulae upon which were built theories as to the laws of Essence and the financial instruments of First Age Creation Preserving Trade Patterns. After their founder’s betrayal and vanishing, the Devonians under Daric continued to view their mathematics as a tool, applied to Creation in order to understand it, but one of Devon’s most acclaimed students, Theano, saw it far differently. The search for the truth of Essence and Creation, in Theano’s eyes, was not by looking at Creation though mathematics… where Devon and Daric thought they were glimpsing Creation’s truths through math, Theano thought those truths were originating in the math itself.
Much like the Devonians and Kinetropic sorcerers, Theanoan sorcery and spellcraft takes place through rigorous study and theory, but the Theanoans do not pay any heed to practical experimentation. It is the theoretical and the abstract that occupies their time, students delving deeper and deeper as they exchange proofs over paradoxes that can never occur and numbers that can never be, studying the auspicious numerals and inauspicious sums bubbling from each others’ calculations. Where they touch upon Creation, it is to calculate things that are into pure numbers that are of use in their equations, and it is such calculations that produce their sorcery.
The spells of Theanoan are often strange, but they are always predictable: their methods do not allow for the chaotic or the variable, reducing effects to a mere ‘roll of the dice’. Theanoan sorcerers calculate their numbers to produce exact results (though, to a Theanoan, ‘zero’ and ‘infinite’ are as exact as ‘one’ or ‘five’).
The Theanoan School has faded from Creation since its zenith in the Golden Age, though it persists amongst a small number of practitioners due to the continued work of spirits and Sidereal Exalted sorcerers working within Department 137, a sapphire pagoda located in the central courtyard of Yu-Shan’s Forbidding Manse of Ivy.
