Mana burn

Mana burn is the wasting that takes a mage who was never taught to cast properly. The power goes through the body and consumes it, and no cure was ever discovered.

The Arcane Congress trains against it. Standardized schooling, sanctioned universities and a credential to practice under are the machinery, and this is a good part of what the machinery is for: the Congress was founded after a run of disasters among gnome communities that had no agreed way of teaching magic at all.

The Word Does Two Jobs

It is not Magiauredo, and the two should not be run together, though people run them together constantly.

Gwenivere Velmont calls her own affliction mana burn. She is not wrong in the way she means it. The Congress is an Amultan-founded body speaking one tongue, Amulta’s healers speak another, and the phrase that passes between them is a third language’s approximation of both. What the Congress files under mana burn is the wasting described above, a matter of training. What a healer means by it is nearer to the magic is eating her, which is a description of a symptom and covers several diseases that have nothing else in common.

So when Mikhail turned over what Gwenivere had said about the purpling mark on her arm, mana burn was the only name his learning could reach, and it did not fit. Both of them were using the term correctly. They were not using the same term (S1E09). Weeks later, in a Loshev tavern, the company argued the Mól ruins together with the Idiran curses and with mana burn, on the hope that a magical civilization might have left a cure to one or the other behind it (S1E13). Nothing has come of that hope.