There's times you really want to justify your magic system

 After X thousand years, the ancient engineers, who operate on a rather slower rate with respect to time, find their way into the meditations, ritual psychodelia, dreams, olfactory halucinations, and other unconventional cognitions of some set of the the Sorqite Quick: mammalian humans and beaked reptiloid shén, hexapodal ssû and decapodal hlÿs, wingèd hlaaka...

The communications are not in the form of language or intelligible visions; the engineers did not make the effort to learn Quick semantic patterns; they did not want relations, or to be regarded as superior beings, or infernal ones, far less to be understood as yet another intelligent species sharing one small world. Concepts such as telepathy, revelation, mental domination, and demonic possession were now widespread among surface cultures, but few contactees interpreted their experiences as contact with other minds, as many of the new religions and wonder workers claimed. 

[i guess i don’t need to explain what it was like, point is the engineers tried to guide surface Sorqites in reaching out with their awareness and perceiving the extraplanar medium and the forces acting with it.]

Over several generations, a sufficient mass of Sorqites learned to attend to these phenomena, sense their consistency, understand how they conform to thought, and begin to control the medium enough to channel currents into effects in this world. 

The results were not hard to describe as magic, nor practitioners as magicians.

The effect on Sorq was shocking. Greater than splitting boulders and protecting onlookers from the shards with an invisible shield; more meaningful than levitation and illusion, farsight, uncanny speed, strong crops and clean healing wounds, magicians had the power of insight into the terrors and perplexities of the cults. The new religions, by now old and redoubtable, had innumerable practices by which the initiate experienced the outer planes, and countless doctrines to account for the undeniable alien vistas not so much glimpsed as freebased in a cult setting. It’s freaky, so obey me and my temple-kingdom!

The magicians, however, demonstrated that the outer planes were rule-bound and mostly predictable in their interactions with our world. The temples and ritual chambers of the cults and mysteries functioned not because of the sacrality of the space and the authority of the priests, but because expectations of the behavior of the medium bent it to their gathering, and the unyielding walls of carved chambers acted as another, firm and unvarying structure of this universes topography.

Writing this now, rather than in the rush of articulation last night, is rather slow going. I will try to say it more simply.

The medium responds to consciousness, and to the sophont’s ability to envision the universe in some resolution and direct our little model of it to do what we imagine. Spaces where we interact with the medium become part of the constraints; perceiving a continuum from another cosmos is hard work, but made easier with visual cues like the shape of a ritual chamber, the colors, symbols, lines and grooves in the interior surfaces corresponding to the form we want the medium to take and the behavior of the flux of currents that the medium brings to our world. A magical operation shapes the planar medium into a stable configuration, currents moving through the new structure and entering our cosmos as… power, light, movement, stability, cognitive and emotional effects, changes to the body, changes to perception. The magicians put something of themselves into the operation, and the spell will remain stable in keeping with the oomph of the operators. The ritual space contains and reinforces the spell’s existence as something in our universe; and the best chambers are in the underworld because the lithosphere itself has a complexity of structure that the outer planar medium responds to.

All this, and the engineers began to let Sorqites into the secret of other powers: the engines within the core once moved the world between stars, and can do so again; the starfaring ancestors of all Sorqites were, in fact, intensely curious how its orbit continually shifted with respect to changes in energy flux from the surface of Bale, an evolving star, an orange giant whose expansion was only the trend, with frequent periods of dust occluding light output and enormous coronal mass ejections; and yet there was a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, and a ecosphere with organisms from at least five separate planets.

The great planetary wings of Sorq do not spread as easily as the whim of one magician, but an entire temple academy working in tandem, and desiring results such as the protection of an entire city and region from Bale’s harsh rays, find forces moving from beneath the underworld, and without the tricksy rigamorole of bending the medium to the effect while accounting for the coefficient of obduracy in the relevant currents… 

Coming next in Part III, moving through the underworld for Buffs and Level-Ups; You, Too, are a Stable Topology onto which alien physics may be tricked into making you stronger, faster, sneakier; or perhaps infuse you with memories and character traits not your own; or, indeed, gradually transfigure your mind and body into a monster of power.

Do you want to get liches? Because that’s how you get litches!