Holding III, Medicine.
Confirmed in every generation aboard, Year 1 to Year 400. Cause unknown. The physicians’ standing summary, rewritten eleven times and never changed in substance.
Every one of us can do two things and can only do one at a time.
On the Astral, and on any Material plane: you fly. The ray is gone.
On any plane that is neither: you have the ray. Flight is gone.
The swap is instant and total. You do not choose it and you cannot resist it. It answers to the kind of plane you are standing on, not to you, and nobody on record has ever had both at once.
Our physicians have watched this in every generation since the founding and confirmed it in every case they examined. Why it happens, we do not know. If you find an entry anywhere that explains it, that entry is speculation and is marked as such.
The third eye
The third eye never changes. It reads how the energies around you are aligned, it is what you navigate the Astral with, and it has worked on every plane any of us has ever stood on.
Because it is the one constant, our rites treat it as where a person actually is, rather than as one sense among several.
How long we live
On solid ground, a body ages about two hundred years.
In the Astral, a body does not age at all. Time passes as it always does. You simply do not wear.
So anyone with Astral travel piles up experience without piling up years on the body, and most of us are centuries older than we look.
Children are the exception. Conception and carrying need a Material ground, without substitute. A family that means to grow has to arrange for it. That requirement, and not sentiment, is the main reason this Enclave keeps up relations with settled peoples.
If you meet Remnari who have only ever had one
Entered Year 239 by Sefa Anthek Tidemark, physician. Never amended.
A group of us settled a long time on one kind of plane will only ever show the capability that plane allows. They may have nobody living who has done the other one.
They are not a different people. Same body, different ground.
Two things follow, and neither is a guess.
They will believe the missing ability is not theirs. Nobody alive has done it, nobody can teach it, and there is no reason for them to think it possible. What they will have instead is a doctrine built around the one thing they can do.
It comes back the moment the ground changes. Whole, at once, with no warning and no easing in. There is no partial state. Whatever they are doing on the day their ground changes kind, they will be doing it with the wrong ability in their hands.
Recorded as a caution for any physician receiving travellers from a population we do not know. No such population is known to exist.
Instruction added later, undated. If one is found: establish which capability they have before you treat anyone. Then tell them three things. The missing ability is theirs. It returns whole and without warning if their ground changes kind. And they will have nobody alive who knows how to use it when it does.
That last one is what they will not believe. Get it said early.