#i think game mechanics can be related to or describe canon but i firmly don't think they inherently ARE canon so

[kradogsrats]

I saw you reblogged a post involving Claudia using snap magic. Do you think that it is connected to deep magic?

Maybe! There are a lot of things we don't know that would clarify it, like when exactly Claudia started doing dark magic. My money for that is on after Kpp'Ar disappears and Lissa leaves, just because I think it's overall unlikely that even Kpp'Ar would be letting a six-year-old start up dark magic, considering that it's implied Viren was like... probably somewhere in the 16-20 range. Previously I had thought Viren started closer to 11-13, so it would be unusual but not completely unreasonable for Claudia to be carefully taught simple spells at like... five, or whatever. Knowing now that casting your first dark magic spell, no matter how minor, is universally going to be a dangerous and traumatizing experience... ehhhhhhhhh personally I think she did it without supervision as a way of acting out, and who's going to stop her, after the fact?

But yeah, as described in the post in question by @its-leethee, what we previously have been told about dark magic without reagents or incantations is that having done a some amount of dark magic allows you to perform simple, low-power spell effects (seen with Viren and Claudia, and described in ToX) and sense both dark and primal magic (described in ToX).

Mechanically in ToX, a character needs to be carrying some level of corrupted stress to use these "parlor trick" spells, and some level of corrupted trauma to sense magic (at least in a useful way). It's hard to say how much corrupted stress a six-year-old Claudia might be carrying around, but we do know she's been attempting a fair amount of dark magic spells and failing at them, which is technically how you gain corrupted stress. That being said, it feels really weird and off to be like "okay, you've done exactly one spell and it gave you corrupted stress, you can now light candles with your fingers." Like, Callum would technically be able to do it, it that case, and that just seems wrong. (Though he's never tried, so who knows.) But it's definitely possible that snap magic is just describing this dark magic effect, and Kpp'Ar was like "let's maybe not tell the small child that it's actually a side perk of something that can literally kill you." Like the equivalent of panicking and saying "Sears catalog" when a kid asks you where babies come from and you haven't prepared an age-appropriate explanation.

ANYWAY, as alternative speculation: we've seen Callum gain understanding of two different arcana after doing dark magic. I clearly remember the writers saying that doing dark magic is not required to gain an arcanum, but going through his first-time-user subconscious trip definitely seems to help Callum gain a deeper understanding of himself that winds up being the last piece of understanding the Sky arcanum. So if deep magic is something innate to everyone, tied to blood or life or whatever, it's possible that doing dark magic cracks open the door to it just a little, and thereby also makes grasping an arcanum just a tiny bit easier. I personally think it's important that after Callum spends so much time with the Sky primal stone, he draws a connection between how it felt to use it and how the lightning strikes "feel" to some sense he didn't have, before—he's developed some kind of internal connection that energy, possibly to magic, but not fully to the Sky arcanum.

Like ultimately "magic" is "channeling some kind of power into a desired effect by force of will." The description of "innate" dark magic spells in ToX compares them to the "day-to-day" spells of primal rune mages, in the sense that you wouldn't make a dark mage character or a Sun mage character roll to light a candle, but it wouldn't surprise me if a Sun mage could light a candle with a look or touch instead of having to draw out a whole rune and speak draconic. Would that would be drawing small amounts of primal magic through their arcanum or accessing deep magic? Hmmmm.

So yeah, I think it would be cool if it was, if only because of the definite sense that Kpp'Ar knows a lot more than he may have previously let on to Viren, but ultimately evidence-wise I think at the moment it could go either way.