The foundational principle of Sorceress practice: transformation is a perceptual event before it is a physical one. The lead that becomes gold is not chemically altered — the accurate perception of it is altered, and reality reorganizes itself around accurate perception. This sounds like idealism, but it operates more like engineering: the sorceress has learned to see what is actually present in any configuration, including the configurations that others have agreed to see as fixed, and her accurate seeing temporarily disrupts the consensus that was maintaining the false configuration.
The wheel that the sorceress turns is not the wheel of fortune in the popular sense — the arbitrary spin of chance delivering outcomes to passive recipients. It is closer to a governor in a mechanical system: the device that regulates the relationship between inputs and outputs, preventing runaway acceleration in either direction. A sorceress who has mastered the wheel does not generate outcomes but modulates the conditions under which outcomes are possible. She is working at a layer beneath events.
The price — and in the tradition, the price is non-negotiable and always real — is not suffering in the melodramatic sense. It is specifically the release of the world as it was before the working. Every genuine transformation produces a gap between the previous version of reality and the current one, and the sorceress is required to live in that gap rather than retroactively explaining it away. This is not punishment. It is epistemically required: to close the gap by pretending the transformation didn't cost anything would be to deny the evidence, and a sorceress who has learned to deny evidence has lost the only instrument she has.
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Not a historical person but the first instantiation of a principle. Every sorceress lineage traces to her, though none can agree on what she was or where she was.
Has been adjusting the wheel for sixty years. Looks much older than she is. Says the price was worth it every time, and seems to mean it.
Every sorceress of sufficient advancement develops a shadow — a second self who carries the cost of all previous workings. The shadow's company is mandatory and occasionally instructive.
