Grey Magic is a mixture of spiritual and physical magic. It is practiced primarily in Okuna, but outsiders can learn to wield it too.
Physical-Leaning Grey Magic
In Okuna, physical Grey Magic is practiced by mixing sand and blood to create a special kind of rich, red clay. Clay vessels made in this fashion can trap undead, reducing them to ash and ectoplasm. They can also serve as phylacteries to store and regenerate simple souls.
Okunan shamans can also create powerful clay relics, hexes, and even explosive spells that can be thrown to shatter on impact. Some specialize in healing ailments of the body. Various combinations of water, blood, or other liquids linked to life with sand, silt, or salt form the cornerstone of powerful Okunan rituals and spells.
Spiritual-Leaning Grey Magic
Another use of Grey Magic is spiritual. Okunan shamans are highly intelligent, introspective spiritualists. They can tap into the balance of “grey” in their own souls and the souls of others. The edge of conscious and subconscious is like a river into one’s soul, and Okunan shamans know how to sail it.
They can project their own “spirit face”, or coerce one from others — an awesome, shining embodiment of self that is unchanging from a person’s birth to death. This spirit face cannot lie. It is the essence of a person made real; their authentic self. When Okunan shamans venture into the spiritworld, their entire persona becomes a floating spirit face.
Uses of Grey Magic
Okunan shamans use their connection to souls for many purposes:
Consulting Ancestors: Speaking to the souls of the dead is possible, provided those souls still rest in the Afterlife or somewhere else contactable, and are willing to commune with the shaman.
Spirit Talking: Shamans can become a conduit for the dead to relay messages for brief periods.
Binding Undead: Shamans can take command of undead souls and spirits.
Soulsharing: Bonding two souls together is possible.
Ghostwalking: Shamans can “astral project” an image of themselves elsewhere. Typically, this is limited to places they have a very strong connection to that contains some part of their essence (like their home).
Dreamseeing: Viewing the subconscious and interpreting its messages is a simple feat most shamans can perform.
Reincarnation: Their unique experiences and knowledge about souls, death, and undeath allows most Okunan shamans to resurrect the dead in new bodies. Transferring a soul to a new vessel is a method of reincarnating an ancestor, though this is frowned upon and should happen “naturally”*.
Canopic Preservation: Souls of the dead can be preserved in canopic jars with a "tether" to their physical self -- a mummified heart, brain, liver, or other organ. Souls preserved in this matter can be used for many purposes, including reincarnation or even as bargaining currency (in the case of powerful beast souls)
Okunan shamans can use their knowledge of Grey Magic to perform more rudimentary effects like casting fireballs or healing injuries.
*Reincarnating in Ilisara is a simple affair. Souls go to an Afterlife, and are eventually recycled into newborn children who require a soul. These children retain no memories of their past lives. Okunans who force reincarnation often encounter strange circumstances and effects. Few people in Okunan society who claim to have perfect memories of an ancestor are truthfully reincarnations, and instead have visited a shaman to work grey magic in secret.
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