"On the Flow of Magic" by Alkan-Bisut, Doctor of Magical Studies
"Magic flows over the land much like water in a bog. Everywhere is thinly veiled by Magic, manifesting by means of subtle phenomena of varied nature. Some attribute these Manifestations, as the mage-scholars of the Institution for the Divulgation of Magic call them, to moth-fairies, gnoums, and elves; creatures spontaneously Manifest rarely, and cases of spontaneous biogenesis have gone enirely unrecorded.
In some places, Magic pools and clumps toghether. These places are called Fonts, and often form around sources of natural magic, like the burial sites of sorcerers, the corpses of dragons or the Before-People's sacrificial shrines.
- The first sign of the formation of a Font is proliferating vegetation. Fruit trees of various kinds grow even without the needed water and soil quality. The density of plants makes freshly formed Ponds hard to navigate. The vegetation is often appropriate to the climate of the region: a Pond in the middle of a stark desert will be composed of cacti, while a Pond in a thick mire will be draped in vines and algae.
- The vegetation then start to dig into the terrain, forming it into bizarre shapes and configurations. These tend to be symmetrical and geometric in nature, and be radially symmetric around what is causing the Font's formation.
- A Font that rests undisturbed for enough time (my colleagues speculate this time is around 3.500 years, but it remains to be ascertained) will start to develop what the folk of adventuring cirles call Dungeons, in order to protect their core. These spontaneously produce traps that look to be handcrafted by skilled mechanics, although are entirely organic (we managed to observe the formation of a fortunately exposed trap over the course of five years). Monsters naturally seem to be attracted to Fonts in this stage; we speculate that it is because of an odor imperceptibe to the human senses.
For the purposes of observing this natural phenomenon unadultered, I recommend that students of the Institution who wish to observe a Font do not touch what they find, and do not get spotted by the monsters within."
by Alkan-Bisut, Doctor of Magical Studies at the Institution for the Divulgation of Magic