Before the Web existed, before a god could reach through a medium, before the malenvar had been to Nova (maybe), the inhabitants of Nova mostly used a series of energy wells called ley lines to do magic. Ley lines are a hypothesis in a lot of magical study today, and they exist in mythological stories about the history of magic, but very few people in the present day really believe they exist. This is just because they’ve been untouched for so long that even species that were around on Nova when they were in active use have forgotten about them, and the one species who used them regularly are extinct.
Nova’s original inhabitants used ley lines to work their magic, drawing on the magical power inherent in their world to make things happen. All of their major constructions that remain on the planet are built on ley lines, which connects them to each other, or at least presumably used to before they all fell into disuse and disrepair. The magical spells inscribed in the world’s ziggurats are all powered by ley line magic, which is why nobody on present-day Nova has been able to power, replicate or indeed even recognize them as magical. For the ziggurat builders (I’m going to keep calling them this because calling them the “original Novans” feels weird when dragons, werewolves, centaurs, merpeople, kraken etc are all also native to Nova and they’re not extinct), ley lines were a metaphysical map of their world, tying magic and geography together.
The power that allows for ley line fonts across the universe is leakage from the Right Hand of Creation’s sealing. Because it’s a cosmic force and we live in the cosmos it co-created, its power was always going to be too big to properly fit inside the universe it created. Wellsprings of the Right Hand’s power exist across the universe, mostly not doing much except for when people figure out how to use them, like the ziggurat builders obviously did. This is probably why the power of ley lines can be used to do things like alter foundational laws of the universe and shift reality to suit the user. It’s probably also why the Right Hand keeps getting reincarnated on Nova, though I don’t think Earth had any ley lines, so why it was there for so long I’m not sure.
Like all sources of magic, a ley line is fundamentally a font of energy. They are entirely geographical and related to certain worlds, not certain entities or historical events. The total number of worlds that have ley lines on them is unknown, at least according to a database I broke into on the moon, which I think is because the scanners that the Escever and their friends have aren’t able to pick up the energy type unless it’s in active use. For a ley line to be in active use, a people who know about them and know how to use them need to live on the world, and as far as I can tell, the ziggurat builders are the only ones who knew how to use them. Other species knew about them, most especially the elves, who later told the gods how to build the Web by anchoring it to Nova’s ley line network.
I don’t really understand the Escever magic called thermodynamics, but they use that to explain why the presence of ley lines (which they call Alpha Zones and which they don’t know exist on Nova) creates the presence of other types of magic. They don’t call it magic, they call it energy, which was confusing because they call a lot of things energy and it makes it hard to figure out what they’re going on about most of the time. But that’s a different problem. It’s a known fact that the presence of ley lines on a world can make other types of magic more likely, which is probably why most of Nova’s species have some form of magic inherent to them, even if almost none of them use ley lines (merpeople’s magic draws on ley lines indirectly, but they’re not aware of this in the modern period).
The major source of ambiguity here is whether or not spirits and ley lines are connected. Basically nothing is known about spirits (yet), but they do seem to operate on the same plane, metaphysically speaking. The Escever not knowing that Nova has ley lines means that the spirits must not be using them. Spirits have their own sets of rules that are very rigid, which is very in keeping with how something that primarily draws power from the Right Hand of Creation’s power would theoretically behave, but honestly this part is just speculation.
One really curious thing about ley lines is that no malenvar can interact with them, but angels are repelled by them, whereas demons just can’t use them. I can’t really say why this is because whatever difference exists between higher angels and demons is entirely semantic, but the malenvar are from a realm where the rules are different and semantics might make the universe, so whatever the difference is, it’s obviously important enough to give them different types of access to things. The Left Hand of Creation isn’t sealed as powerfully and so it’s less likely that its power is leaking into the universe through something like ley lines, but maybe if it were sealed better there would be some ley lines that angels could touch without getting hurt? Hard to say.
I wish I knew more about ley lines, but I don’t. Only a few people on Nova know much about them and the angel who primarily works on them is hard to get a hold of for people who don’t live in Three Hills. The best way to find out more about ley lines would be to go to another world that has some on it and see what’s similar and what’s different, I guess.
From “What the Fuck Is up with This World?” a journal by Tegan Spark, SC 3777.
How Best to Use a Sword 