A widely accepted theory taxonomises the major life forms of Seth thusly, by the makeup of their tissues or equivalent; Sapients are 100% mundane, 0% magic. Gods, conversely, are 50% either way, and monsters are 25% magic.

Spirits, then, beings of a strange kind of sapience, of riddles, habits, and dispositions, are the least mundane, at 75% magic. 

This gives them a certain ease of movement and state. They can disappear and reappear at will, manifesting in a body that can be seen and touched, but will never age and has no need for nature’s fare. 

Similarly to but more acutely than their godly cousins, spirits need not fear the mutational effects of magic. They can cast a wide array of spells, learn more, and even formulate new magics with relative ease(?).

With a majority magical body, however, come magical bodily requirements. Although each spirit is fundamentally individual, they generally fall into types according to body plan and correlating ‘dietary’ requirements. 

Spirits gain sustenance not dissimilarly to gods, through acknowledgment. However, it is not enough merely to know the name of a spirit. Actions must be taken in their direct benefit, offerings must be made, in the correct mode and by sapient hands. 

This is not to say that spirits are all tyrants. An offering can be as small and insignificant as a handful of seeds, just as it can be as valuable as a life, or gold. There is little rhyme or reason to a spirit’s appetite beyond puddles of loose association. Magic loathes the mundane, and cultivates the arbitrary.

One key adaptation spirits have developed is that they can entreat for these offerings from Sapients and gods alike, giving them a high versatility of niche. 

What they can offer in turn is up to them. A spirit is born with a certain cache or arsenal of magical tools and skills, according to their manifest type, which can be honed, but not added to. One that is universal, however, is mastery of those which can be called curses and blessings, particularly pertaining to sense, and it is common for spirits to offer an uplifted sensory suite or awareness of magic, not unlike how the Sapients can share something of their cognition with beasts through (primal

magic). 

The onus on the spirit, then, is to present themselves as useful enough to the entreated to warrant the price of their desired offering. This labour can take nearly any form, whether it be manual, administrative, artisan, sordid, musical, martial, medicinal, and so on.

However, a spirit cannot choose the nature of their desire, their appetite. If their invoice is too costly against their services rendered, they will  of course receive no payment, no offering, and they will starve and die. 

Luckily, spirits can vastly reduce their energy expenditure by recusing themselves from materiality. In this state they are immobile, semi-conscious, and cannot make confident observations of the world around them. Nevertheless, they maintain enough self-possession to make something of thinking, and most will use this time to assess and plot out how they will make their play. Time, however, becomes hard to keep track of, and it is not entirely uncommon for a spirit to burst back into the material, their pitch perfectly formulated, a day away from starvation, only to find that their top lead has died, along with their kin, their hall, and anyone who would have any demand for that which they are able to give. 

When a spirit is successful, however, they can enjoy a life of complete abundance, as they need little more than what they so desperately need. 

Another handicap against the spirits’ modus is that since it is the act of offering that charges the offering itself with sustenance, they cannot just steal their preferred, but they can be stolen from. The entreated can simply refuse to pay, even if the spirit upheld their end of the bargain. If this happens, recourse is entirely at the spirit’s behest. There is no overseeing body that adjudicates transactions. 

They can become furious, pleading, react however they like, but they simply cannot force an offering. 

That said, vengefulness tends to give spirits focus and clarity, and defrauding those who have a surplus of time and access to magic comes with a high risk of lethality.

One sure way for a spirit to insure themselves against starvation is through a formal, magical process of contracting, where another, Sapient or god, makes an oath that they will serve as they are served in return, or else incur punitive measures stated therein. 

Contracts are absolute, essentially a kind of curse, and once agreed upon, take active and immediate effect, no matter how much wriggling is attempted- as it often is.

As with everything, contracts have their limits. The magnitude of the contract’s terms is elevated beyond the spirit’s usual magical limits, but if pushed further still, will destroy the spirit upon signage. 

Successful spirits, then, draw up contracts that are sustainable without being meagre, and intimidating without being apocalyptic. 

Contracts are not entirely in the spirits’ favour, however. The entreated contractee is free to negotiate, and the spirit alike is subject to punishment in cases of a breach, often more severe than their counterparts (increasing the severity of their own punishment increases the limits of the contractee’s in turn, so if a spirit os willing to bet on themselves, they can sharpen the contract as much as they like). One spirit may contract several entreated, and one entreated may contract several spirits, but contracts themselves are always individual, peer-to-peer. 

It may go without saying, but spirits cannot contract one another.

This is not all that a spirit can achieve through the entreated. A major limit in the lives of spirits is their ability to travel. Mirroring the domains of the gods, spirits have a specific territory in which they can move freely, in and out of the mundane at will. However, this territory cannot be expanded nor moved, and is measured out from the point of the spirit’s birth into the material world. 

As such, the spirit is stuck at home. That is, unless they can entreat the aid of one who is versed in the magic of ‘spirit bottles’.

Spirit bottle is a catch-all term for an object, usually small but potentially large, that functions through various complex magical arrangements as a portable home for a spirit. It does not necessarily have to be a bottle, only anything that is not alive and can be understood as having an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’. For instance a tooth, a locket, a folded page or scroll, a preserved stomach, a casket, these are all possible spirit bottles. It can, however, for the sake of clarity, also be a bottle.

Once the bottle has been assigned to a spirit, it is from the bottle that their range is now measured. How freely the spirit may exit and enter the bottle is up to the one who made it, and it is possible to trap spirits against their will by fooling them into a bottle.

A spirit in a bottle, then, is bound, but not necessarily enslaved. Contracts still play, and bottles easily find their way into terms and clauses.

Even so, a bottle can only be carried by one other than its occupant, and no other spirit at that. A spirit has a better chance moving a mountain than a bottle, and thus far there are no proven cases of any spirits moving any mountains, despite what some may claim.

A final quirk of spirit bottles is that they can be decorated on the inside. The pseudo, magical space ‘inside’ manifests according to the conceptual profile of the container, but can be populated with other objects from without. 

For instance, many spirits, keen to pass the time and expand their knowledge, seek to curate personal libraries. In aid of this, they will request shelves and books, which, when offered, disappear from the material and appear in that interior bottle-space. 

An object that undergoes this treatment can be considered destroyed, as it cannot be extracted back out of the bottle. However, as long as the bottle is intact, it will remain in the exact state it was in at the time it was absorbed. Since bottles persist after both their creator and occupants’ death, they can become extremely valuable repositories of information. Bottles are generally hard to destroy, but if done so successfully, all inside, including the occupant, are erased permanently.

This is not the only way to kill a spirit; sufficient damage to their material body will force them into adjournment, and they will not be able to return until the body has had time to recover. 

The dead can also appear as spirits, in a fashion separate to the Necromantic methods or those monstrous mutations which seize corpses, and follow the same general rules as any other, although they will have invariably have picked up some eccentricities of personality in between the mundane and the magical, sometimes to the point that those who knew them in life will doubt or reject them outright.