Caster Hierarchy
Magic is common enough to support villages and states but greatness is brutally scarce. Aurelion separates folk practitioners, trained casters, named Mages, near-mythic Wizards and divine vessels by both capability and population.
Most Magic Is Small
Aurelion's caster hierarchy exists to prevent the setting from treating every spell-user as a battlefield wizard. The first level consists of herbalists, shamans, wise-folk and other local practitioners. They support villages, burials, clan rites and daily survival. The source estimates roughly one such practitioner for every three to four hundred inhabitants - on the order of a quarter-million across the wider world. Their individual power is modest, but civilization would notice immediately if they disappeared because they form the magical infrastructure of ordinary life.
The second level contains trained witches, seers, elemental workers and comparable professional casters. They are estimated at roughly one per five to ten thousand inhabitants, tens of thousands across Aurelion. This is the population from which guilds, temples, academies and state services are staffed. Third-rank Mages are different in kind as much as degree: perhaps one per million people, only several dozen alive at a time. They live long enough and act at sufficient scale to become named historical figures. If a chronicle calls someone a Mage in the strong technical sense, the title is supposed to mean that history has begun bending around an individual.
Fourth-rank Wizards are rarer still - perhaps three to five living in the current age. Their workings are described as true wonders because they are individual, indivisible and difficult or impossible to reproduce as ordinary technique. Fifth rank is divine magic: S and S+ vessels whose power is not merely a spell set but the nature of the entity carrying it. The source expects perhaps one or two such vessels in an age, and even those may burn out quickly because the body is hosting a current larger than ordinary personhood.
Rank alone does not explain a caster. The source separates four qualities: mana reserve, knowledge, talent for complex weaving, and might - the number of workings that can be sustained at once. These can be badly asymmetric. A scholar may understand a structure he lacks the strength to weave; another caster may possess enormous reserve and only crude technique. This is why higher casters are not simply larger batteries. The strongest can use low-rank magic almost intuitively, maintaining shields, auras and simple summons with negligible relative cost while reserving attention for the one operation that makes them historical.
