Memory Fuel: The Price of Magic

The unified debt model for casting, detailing somatic trauma and mnemonic decay.

Fuel Rule

Magic always incurs debt. At low output, debt is somatic—absorbed by blood vessels, muscles, and nerves. At sustained or high output, emotional-memory texture is permanently consumed.

Facts and practical skills remain intact. The feeling attached to memories fades first.

Debt Types

Somatic Debt (Immediate Body Cost)

Nosebleeds, violent tremors, sharp pain, blinding migraines
Vascular stress and sensory overload
Collapse risk under repeated combat casting

Mnemonic Debt (Accumulated Identity Cost)

Emotional flattening: You remember your childhood home, but staring at it evokes no warmth, only geometric recognition.
Relationship detachment: Loved ones become acquaintances whose names you remember but whose presence no longer registers as significant.
Identity narrowing: As emotional texture vanishes, the caster becomes rigid, driven by immediate objectives rather than human context.

Refuel Paths

Personal Burn: Finite, self-paid, highly lethal if abused.
Node Economy: Scalable, industrial, externalized onto human channelers.
Void-Ore Shortcut: Rapid gain through consciousness predation, leading to irreversible div transformation.