Sapience is the name given to a selection of evolutionary traits that afford organisms what we refer to as ‘self-awareness’ and ‘sophisticated communication’. 

We are sapient, the reader and the author, and it is upon the backs of our sapience that statements such as ‘we are sapient’ can be understood. 

Not only us, but our friends and family, everyone we meet, and everyone we see and haven’t seen, are sapient. 

Many animals in our own world also display sapient traits, one or more of those behaviours we hold so dear to ourselves, often excelling in their respective fields. 

On Seth, then, a similar, if not indistinguishable, form of sapience has evolved no less than seven times, once on each of its pre-Congregation continents, known as ‘homelands’ or, more broadly ‘firmaments’. 

These Sapients, as they will be referred to collectively and indeed as they refer to themselves, for the most part display features familiar to us; an upright, bipedal posture, tactile, dextrous appendages, and complex spoken and bodily communication, as well as essentially similar cognitive function. These traits, combined, offer a certain ease of inter-species transmission, despite their disparate evolutionary histories. 

The sapience found on Seth, however, maintains one particular trait alien to our own; it is the singular precondition for the use of magic, and as such how it is most often understood and enforced:

Anything that can use magic is sapient, anything sapient can use magic. 

Asides from the Sapients invoked so far, whose base biology is entirely physical or mundane, sapience is also displayed by two other lifeforms: gods and spirits (not counting here those sapient among monsters, as ‘monster’ is not a taxonomic group so much as an infection), both of whom use magic freely and are not bound by the same rules as their fleshy counterparts in any arena. 

Suffice to say, the inner and outer lives of the Sapients and sapients on Seth are as varied as our own, and rather than attempt to distill this vastness of experience into some minimised definition here, the endeavour shall be to demonstrate their myriad qualities going forward.