Riyati’s Magic System
Today’s guest blog is brought to us by the amazing Kai Zeal!
The second book in her Riyati series, Riyati Rivals, is releasing on May 15, 2025. Are you interested in magical girl deconstructions? Low fantasy? Dark fantasy? Queer rep? Themes of identity and forging your own path through life?
(I’m going to assume since you are here in my blog the answer to at least some of those is “yes” haha).
Then you should be checking out this series!
The following is an excerpt taking place between chapters in Riyati Rivals, this exchange takes place between Kylie, one of Riyati’s major characters, and Siani, who is Kylie four years from the future and currently shares a body with Kylie. Here, they are reviewing over one of the many facets of Riyati’s magic system.
Kylie | Rae Residence
September 23
I took a deep breath. Once upon a time, my weekends had at most been filled with catching up on homework and sleep; I’d watched whatever was popular on a handful of tv channels, just normal teenager things.
It was a completely different reality than what I now experienced, shut away in my bedroom. Last March, I’d had “Act” — what it’s called when a mage begins active mana generation instead of just passive generation like all humans had. I found out that I had other selves inside me, past incarnations and somehow myself from the future. The reincarnation of a princess of a destroyed magic kingdom.
Even if I’d seen proof — had said “original incarnation” in my head for months earlier in the year — , I still struggled to believe the last part. It was only my future self — “Sia” as I called her, something to differentiate us — left now.
And now, I sat in my room on my office chair, grimacing at the blank notebook on my desk. Sia instructed me in magic, so much of my time preoccupied by these extra-curricular studies that only myself and a few others knew even existed. Today’s lesson was the equivalent of a test, and I preferred my AP teachers to Sia’s grading, I’d long since learned.
“Go ahead,” she said, her voice echoing through my mind, a voice no one else could hear. It was another of the benefits — and often, detriments — of body sharing.
I swallowed, turning the notebook landscape. Which one would I forget this time? There were too many branches of magic, a little specification here or there that really doesn’t seem like it should’ve mattered. To start with, there were two broad categories: non-elemental and elemental magic. Everything fell under these two branches, one way or another; I wrote both of them at the very top of the page, far away from each other. And then, under the elemental branch, there was basic manipulation — where a mage could control the element they aligned with, like myself for air and water, and could summon their weapon — , offensive spells, and defensive spells. Elemental magic wasn’t actually that bad to categorize. Things were distinct: attack, defend, or use elemental alignment somehow.
The non-elemental branch, however, was where my nightmares began.
Sia didn’t make a comment as I hesitated while my hand moved to the far other side of the page from the elemental branches, but I felt anxious nonetheless. Last time, I forgot mana transferring was categorized under the restorative branch and instead had written it under the transformative branch. Given this chart easily took me ten minutes to write out — which was quite speedy compared to the half hour or more it used to take me — , I didn’t want to keep writing this thing the rest of the day. Therefore, I resolved to not make the same mistake twice. I wrote down “restorative” under the non-elemental branch, following it with “healing” and “mana transferring” under the “restorative” heading. One down, five to go. The easiest one under non-elemental was blood magic; outside of using blood somehow and being rather frowned upon ethically, I didn’t know much about it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know more. Spells basically always used mana, and blood was the most concentrated form of mana, or that’s what I assumed the connection was. Sia actually hadn’t ever said, thinking about it. Regardless, right then, I wasn’t expected to add anything under blood magic and that made it nice and simple for this test I was locked into taking.
Next were the “twin” sub-branches of cleansing and ailment: ailments were similar to offensive spells but lacked any elemental affiliation and often caused some type of disruption to how a biological organism functioned — spells involving poisons were under the ailment branch, as a practical example I wasn’t thrilled to have personal experience handling. Comparatively, the cleansing sub-branch restored natural functioning, such as removing said poisons.
I hated I had a fidget as my pointer finger tapped the pencil I wrote with. What was next? I’d covered all of the elemental branch, and then restorative, cleansing, ailment, and blood magic sub-branches. That meant there were two left, and then their sub-branches.
Oh!
It was the one that got me last time: transformative. The reason I’d assumed mana transferring fell under it was because it had so many sub-branches: transforming physical matter from something to something else, like changing hair color, was how the overall branch worked. The tricky part was that sub branches under transformative all involved the technical details of how said change occurred. If it was a structural change, it was considered a physical alteration, whereas if it was an optical illusion instead of a structural change — however that worked, I had no idea — , it was considered “miraging.” Then there was teleportation, itself a shift of matter somehow. And finally, there was replica creation, where something was replicated — like Sia had done for my absorption device I now wore as a ring.
The last sub-branch under non-elemental, and on my chart I grudgingly filled out, involved auras. That much I knew. Aura sight was the ability to perceive auras, something all mages could do to varying degrees, and from there, a further sub-branch was aura reading — actively reading information and characteristics of auras — and its counterpart, aura blocking, which tuned out all aura sensing; the latter was something I still worked on very actively because there was nothing like trying to sleep at night and having lights shine that you could perceive regardless of if you actually wanted to see them. Usually, Sia handled that still, but sometimes she thought I needed extra exposure, and I really wished she didn’t decide that at midnight on school nights.
But now, I’d ran into a different problem: what was left? I hesitated, knowing I’d still not identified what this sub-branch that aura sight was under was named, and there was at least one other further sub-branch under it as well. There was no hiding that I’d forgotten this last bit: Sia saw everything I saw, including me not writing things down right then. It was hard to hide from the evaluator when you shared a body with her.
Huffing, I bit on my tongue. “Fine…”
She chuckled, taking control of my body. This meant in half an hour, I was about to rewrite this whole thing again. Just what I wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon doing. As she had control of my body, I experienced the removal that came from the sensation, still feeling the sensation of holding the pencil, though my senses of touch, taste, and smell were all removed compared to normal. I still saw through my own eyes as she wrote the part I’d missed on the page: “scanning.”
I mentally kicked myself for missing that since I knew it, but I couldn’t pretend to have remembered before she wrote it down somehow. Yet again, the whole body sharing thing got in the way.
The other sub-branch parallel to aura sight was magipoten scanning, which actively measured an individual’s magipoten — mana potential, or for the actual portmanteau, magic potential. “You want to take it from here?” She hadn’t written anything besides the header branch of “scanning” down at this point, still leaving the rest of the sub branch and its sub branches blank.
Apparently I didn’t get the choice, her pushing me back in control of my body. I wrote out “max estimated scan” — a spell to estimate an individual’s estimated max magipoten — and then its sister spell, “current scan,” which was similarly obviously named for being a spell that checked an individual’s current magipoten.
“I almost had it.”
“Mm. But ‘almost’ isn’t going to cut it if you use modifiers for an ailment spell on a transformative, for example. You’ll wind up with a cocktail you wished ended in your death.”
Sia was as inspiring as ever. Still, I also unfortunately knew she wasn’t wrong, so instead I took a deep breath, knowing this cycle would repeat once I’d had a short break. These were all things I needed to know, and going by Sia, would end up understanding entirely too well in the years to come.
These were, after all, the rules I was bound to now as a mage.
If you want to learn more about Kai or her series, be sure to check out her website!
The Riyati series is a deconstruction of the magical girl genre, and is a new adult/adult contemporary, low dark fantasy series that seeks to explore themes of identity, legacy, the greater good, and finding your own path in life. The series includes multiple first person perspectives and multiple queer characters (currently including demisexual/romantic and lesbian representation with more to come in future books), set in the modern day United States.
The series can be found most places books are sold. While Riyati Rivals is on preorder, Kai is offering a special pre-order bundle (both books for the price of one) on Itch.io.
To keep up with Kai, her stories, her news, and her cats, signup for her newsletter and get the Riyati Origins prequel novella for free!
About Kai Zeal:
Kai Zeal got her start writing fanfiction as a child, creating an awareness of tropes, characterization, and the importance of retellings. From there, she refined her analytical skills both in academia and through fandom with critical analysis of media to gain a better understanding of how the parts of a work come together to form its whole.
She has degrees in psychology, writing, higher education administration, and is pursuing a PhD with a research focus on critical disability studies through a queer lens. In her free time, she’s a lifelong gamer, particularly of JRPGs, many of which have shaped her storytelling strategies and love of media.
You can find Kai on:
Website | Campfire | Bluesky | Itch.io
You can also sign up for her newsletter below:
