It's Just Sornieth Nevada

Tell me about the Shade!! I want to know how people incorporate the Shade/Shade-touched entities into their lore! I've always been so curious because it's such a major part of the site but we know so little about it canonically.

the shade "eats" magic. ok for context magic in my lore is essentially a programmable medium; magic can be given/can pick up properties which dictates what it is capable of (i.e. fire magic). the leylines are a series of metaphysical "currents" of shade along which magic flows. the shade strips magic of its 'programmed' properties and returns undifferentiated magic which can then be re-programmed by creatures or natural forces or whatever.

animals' 'souls' and cognition here are magic-based. i do not know the exact mechanism, i just know that conscious thought in sornieth evolved using magic as a basis. therefore all animals' conscious minds can persist in, and depend on, their internal magic.

since the shade wipes magic clean this is why it is so dangerous to dragons. it does eat your soul! just in a different way.

the shade often takes on the properties of the magic it has recently 'eaten'. usually this means nothing because the shade is constantly cycling a ton of magic at any given time so it's just a big jumble of contradictory properties. if you are able to isolate a specific bit of shade and feed it only specific magic you can get a specific bit of shade 'echoing' that magic's original properties.

this sounds like magic with extra steps, but this fact can be used to reverse what shade does by passing undifferentiated/'weakly programmed' magic through and having it pick up the echoes held in the shade, if that makes sense.

this also means you can technically replicate souls (do not do this it is going so bad for the guys trying to do this) !

also this means that heavily shade-touched creatures are empty bodies puppeted by the shade-echo of what they once were