###### The First Seal *"All magic comes at a price."* Regarded as the primary law and danger of [[Magic]], any action that draws upon the powers of [[Creation]] comes at the price of life. Every tradition must contend with this truth one way or another, whether the caster draws from their own vitality or, in some cases, upon the vitality of others. While there are ways of making this transference of life more efficient and less noticeable, it is universally true that the greater the effect, the greater the cost. This is also sometimes referred to as "the unbreakable law" of magic, as no known tradition whether extant or extinguished, has ever violated it. ###### The Second Seal *"Magic can neither create nor destroy, only transform."* While many non-practitioners would dispute this law based on the surface appearance of magic, such as a mage conjuring a fireball from thin air, it is customarily viewed as complementary to the First Seal by practitioners. After all, any accessing of Creation requires the consumption of vital essence, which suggests that what appears to the layperson as conjuring from nothing is truly transformation from one form of energy to another. Additionally, magic does not destroy the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos, though it may rearrange or redistribute them in various ways: for example, melting an iron door even to the point of vaporization still leaves the particles that made it up, which may again be reconstituted into something else. ###### The Third Seal *"Magic and Sorcery are diametrically opposed. Where one exists, the other cannot."* This Seal derives directly from the origin point of magic, Creation, which is fundamentally in conflict with [[Void]] and the power that derives from it, [[Sorcery]]. The two cannot coexist for any period, as they destroy each other by their very nature. This is even reflected in the orthodoxies of the opposing powers, each side labeling the other as demonic or heretical. Whatever the original circumstances that birthed both elements of existence, the two are irreconcilable and those who follow either path are denied the other. ###### The Fourth Seal *"Magic cannot restore the dead to life."* While the first three seals are generally seen as constant in the universe across time, it is the Fourth Seal which has been most actively debated. There is never a shortage of people willing to try to prove the exception to rule, but the fact that remains that while magic can preserve the dying or reanimate a corpse, it seems unable to restore the soul of a dead person back to even a perfectly reconstructed body. The reasons for this are widely debated and most traditions have their own pet theories. Whatever the case, there have been no substantive examples of contact with the spirits of the dead or true resurrection, despite a great deal of fears to the contrary.