Where Mägo Power Actually Comes From

What Most People Think

The common belief, repeated in every cheap street pamphlet on the subject, is that a mägo's power is a personal reservoir. Will it hard enough, focus long enough, and the magic simply answers, drawn from somewhere inside the practitioner's own soul or spirit or whatever word the pamphlet prefers that week.
  It's a comforting idea. It's also, so far as every serious practitioner I've interviewed agrees, entirely backward.

What Actually Happens

Mägo power draws from the surrounding world, not from the practitioner's own reserves. A mägo working near strong natural sources, standing water, old growth forest, certain mineral deposits, draws easily and safely. A mägo working in a depleted place, or pushing far beyond what the local environment can actually supply, starts drawing from somewhere else instead.
  That somewhere else is the practitioner's own life-force, which was never meant to fuel spellwork in the first place, and doesn't regenerate the way people assume it should.
  This is precisely what happened to all three street performers I mentioned. Each one believed harder, focused longer, certain that enough personal will could substitute for an environment that simply didn't have enough left to give. Each one collapsed mid-performance. Two recovered, eventually, with lasting weakness that never fully lifted. One did not recover at all.
  I've interviewed enough trained mägos now to know this isn't obscure knowledge among practitioners themselves. Every properly trained one learns to read a location before working in it, the way a sailor learns to read weather. It's the untrained, the self-taught, and the ones performing for coin who keep believing the comforting version, because the comforting version is the one that lets you believe you're never in any real danger.
  You are. The world isn't obligated to keep giving just because you've decided to keep asking.
  I've started including this fact in every FieldScribe report that touches magic use, plainly stated, because I'd rather be the tiresome old chronicler who repeats himself than write one more entry about a fourth performer who believed a little harder than the world around him could actually afford.
  It isn't a comforting law, I'll grant the pamphlets that much. Nobody wants to hear that their own will only accounts for half the equation. But I'd rather hand you an uncomfortable truth you can actually survive than a comforting one that's already killed three people I personally interviewed.