I will state the findings plainly and then explain them, rather than building to them — for the findings are striking enough that to withhold them while constructing an elaborate edifice of context would be to treat the reader as a subject to be managed rather than a colleague to be informed.
Every practitioner in the study showed measurable improvement in arcane sensitivity within the first month of Vitae proximity. Every one, without exception. The least improvement recorded at one month was four percent above baseline on the Veldrith Scale. The greatest was twenty-three percent. The average was twelve percent.
At six months, the average improvement was thirty-four percent above baseline. Three practitioners — all experienced, all with strong baseline scores — exceeded sixty percent improvement.
I pause here to ensure the significance of this is not lost. A thirty-four percent improvement in arcane sensitivity does not mean that a practitioner casts spells that are thirty-four percent stronger. The Veldrith Scale measures depth of connection to the ley line network — the practitioner's ability to sense, draw from, and interpret ley channels. A thirty-four percent improvement in this metric means something more fundamental: it means that the practitioner's relationship to the source of her power has changed in a way that affects everything she does with that power. It is not as though her tools have become thirty-four percent sharper. It is as though she has learned to use them in a way she did not know before.
The ley line connection depth measurements were the most dramatic of all. Here, the average improvement at six months was forty-seven percent above baseline. Two practitioners exceeded ninety percent.
And the subjective reports from practitioners were, if anything, more illuminating than the quantitative measurements. Common descriptions included the sense that ley lines had become louder, that their branching points were perceptible before the practitioner physically reached them, that casting felt like the recovery of a remembered skill rather than the exercise of a learned one. One practitioner — I will not name her here, as her subsequent career has made this finding politically complicated — reported that she could sense every practitioner on the continent drawing from the ley network simultaneously. She knew, she said, when they pulled hard and when they rested. She knew when someone died.
I did not anticipate this report. I do not know what to make of it. I have included it because it is what she said, and accuracy demands it.
