For some of the thoughts behind this topic, please see the Avishraa Tirades.

Span magic is by far the rarest of the eight types of magic to be found among the Chosen, and consists of the ability to manipulate space and time. Users of Span magic are referred to in the Citadel as oracles.

Span magic involves the ability to see through both time and space, and to manipulate the fabric of the latter; it is not possible to directly act upon or travel to a time beyond one's own (though see below). The abilities available to a skilled oracle, however, are quite terrifying enough, enabling her to gather immense understanding of the world, to discern threats large and small, to travel over vast distances, and to exert disturbing effects upon the arrangement of matter.

Whether as a statistical artifact of their extreme rarity or something inherent to their nature, there has never been a case in which an oracle is known to have an additional type of magic; every oracle has been solely an oracle.

Span magic is, aside from its rarity, mysterious even by the standards of the Chosen; while all other magic types are seated within indentifiable parts of the body, Span is not.

The ability to see through time is the one that nearly every oracle develops first, and for many it is the only one they ever develop. “Sight” is a loose term; the ability does not, in the strictest sense, involve directly perceiving visual images of things not in the present, but instead supplies knowledge of things that were/will be there to be sensed, which the mind reconstructs as mental “sketches” of sensory input - sights, sounds, smells, and so on.

Precognition, the ability to see into the future, is the most instinctive, to the point that it usually first manifests as “visions” or dreams over which a young oracle has no control. These usually regard particular events related the oracle themselves, or places or people important to them, all subjects of which precognitive visions come easiest, but as time goes on they begin to learn consciously direct their ability.

Oracles will also move on from being able to see isolated events to chains of them, from cause to effect. It should be noted that the future is (normally) not fixed; possible futures radiate outward, the most likely ones prominent and overshadowing the less likely ones, and prudent oracles become adept at examining different timelines and where they diverge. The further forward in time one looks, the more that most possibilities become equally possible and difficult to distinguish; the effect can be likened to a landscape being increasingly lost to atmospheric haze in the distance.

Precognition is at its most useful when used to examine generalities, or situations with historical inertia, where even a large number of variables have difficulty overcoming broad trends. Nonetheless, it can be 'focused' on smaller groups, even individual people, and often still with decent results with regard to short-term futures. An oracle in combat might or might not be able to predict the course of an entire battle, but would prove a frustratingly difficult foe to personally hit or evade. It should also be noted that having one particular 'anchor' for focus - whether a person, a place, or a thing that currently exists - requires less effort for the oracle than a broad sweep of events.

Postcognition, the ability to see into the past, is less instinctive but, once discovered, in some ways easier to master. Because the past has already happened, it is (normally) fixed; the tapestry of events is already woven, and one simply has to follow the threads. Oracles cannot read minds, but can gain considerable insight about a person and their motivations from the patterns of their past behavior, especially since nothing a subject did is hidden from them. While in theory there is no limit to how far back an oracle can look, like precognition, postcognition requires the least effort to use when one has an 'anchor'; viewing the past of a living person is easier than viewing that of a dead one, or a civilization or a particular era.

This poses practical limits on how far back or in how much detail an oracle can see before wearing out, and as a result few oracles have gone beyond the reach of history, not attempting to verify the myths and legends they were raised to believe about the origins of the world. As for the rest, there is so much past, much of it so different than the world with which the oracles are familiar, that many of them never quite grasp the truths of earlier periods, and are often upset - or upset others - when they do. (Takma evolutionary history, in particular - both the bare fact of its existence and its content - is often disturbing to those who realize that it happened.) Nonetheless, much historical information that would be otherwise lost is known and recorded in the Citadel, particularly due to the postcognitive efforts of the oracle Ecruss.

In cases where an oracle has a strong emotional rapport with another sentient being, the latter can share the Oracle's pre- and postcognitive visions; this requires them to be physically touching. As the focus of the oracle's sight is not always entirely under conscious control, the non-oracle member of the pair may see things that the oracle did not mean to show them; should the oracle wish to maintain privacy over certain topics that she cannot avoid focusing on, efforts to do so may over time destroy the rapport that makes the sharing possible at all.

Anomalies in time can be caused when one oracle looking forward comes in contact with another oracle looking back. Because, under certain circumstances, each is visible to the other, they are capable of communicating, allowing the future oracle to attempt to change the past by influencing their counterpart there, or for the past oracle to find their future being required to contain the events surrounding their future counterpart.

Certain modes of nonlinear travel can also stymie an oracle's ability to see them through time. The most common situation involves those traveling by linking book; oracles cannot see into the future of other worlds, so that someone who links to a different one goes beyond the range of the oracle's sight; nothing is seen of them between the time they link away and the time they link back. However, once such an individual returns, the oracle can see their past, so that someone avoiding an oracle in this way must keep avoiding them thereafter if they intend their activities to remain hidden.

In a somewhat related situation, an individual who will, in the future, be removed from the material universe entirely - as with those who visit the Planes of Order or Chaos - is completely invisible to prescience. The oracle can see them in the past, and certainly their current physical presence, but the futures the oracle sees proceed as if the affected individual were simply erased from existence. For the oracle, this is a disturbing experience; physically encountering someone whose timeline abruptly stops at the ever-changing present is much like a human seeing a ghost.

This tends to cause mismatches between what the oracle sees happening and what actually happens - and this, plus the constant “updating” of futures to reflect what the affected person has recently done in the past, can be extremely disconcerting. The effect ends once the individual returns to the physical universe permanently; they become visible in the future once again. (Should an oracle subsequently attempt to read the individual's past, the period in which they were gone cannot be processed, since the individual was not then subject to time as we know it. The result is usually headache and confusion.)

Oracles are capable of seeing in space as well as time, watching events far from their own bodies. This can happen over considerable distance, up to several thousands of kilometers depending on the power of the oracle. While seemingly not as intuitive to an oracle as the act of seeing through time, the experience of this form of perception is very similar.

Aside from allowing them to gather considerable knowledge of parts of the world they have never visited, the mastery of remote viewing is a vital ingredient for the effective use of portals and teleportation, as it allows the oracle to determine the correct destination and whether there are any obstacles there.

The ability of oracles to cause anomalies in space is their primary means of using their magic to affect the physical world. More specifically, what is done is to cause two regions of space that are physically separated to become adjacent, to cause two regions of space of equal shape and size to switch places with each other, or to cause discontinuities between regions of space that are physically touching.

The first of these options results in what is termed a portal, usually manifesting as what appears to be a two-dimensional hole, often edged with violet light, with the intended destination visible through it. Any matter or energy traveling along a path that will take it through the hole may pass through. When made large enough, the portal is usually an oracle's preferred method of conveying people quickly from one place to another, in that although it requires either the subject to move through it or the portal to be moved around the subject, it requires less concentration and causes less disturbance than the switching-places method. It is, however, important that those traveling through the portal do not touch the edges; an object that intersects an edge such that part of it moves through the portal and part of it does not will effectively be cut in two, and this will happen regardless of its material properties (the glow around the edge results from the destruction of air molecules encountering this effect).

Faster, but considerably more effort, is the power to switch regions of space with each other. This can also be used to transport people from one place to another (usually referred to as teleportation), and is especially effective in emergencies, but without very careful shaping of the area to be transported (defaulting to a sphere centered on the caster if no shaping is attempted) it will also result in the transposing of whatever ground the travelers might be standing on. In a fashion similar to the portal, anything bisected by the edge of the volume being switched will be cut in two; the portion outside will be left behind. It is, therefore, especially important that one's limbs, tail, and other protruding body parts be kept close.

An interesting variation of this technique is one in which the two volumes of space are, instead of being switched, caused to blend. A very delicate use of Span magic only known to have been practiced by Dlyss, this allows an oracle to effectively be mostly in one place but also partially somewhere else. This allows the oracle to communicate with others over very long distances, without actually fully being there, and at a much longer range than complete teleportation, though it comes at the cost of the caster being vulnerable to attack if too much of themselves is near an enemy (or, if something goes wrong, having one's atoms dispersed in a highly disadvantageous fashion). Done properly, the oracle will appear to others as a relatively faint, transparent image with a tinny voice.

The creation of discontinuities without connections has no value in transportation or communication, but as it behaves in exactly the same fashion as the edge of a portal or teleportation field, it has considerable utility in that it can sever pieces of matter from each other without resistance. No blade an oracle could possibly wield would have a better edge than a blade that is, in essence, a scalpel for cutting reality itself, and it can shear through weapon, armor, and flesh equally effortlessly.

Any use of an oracle's spatial manipulation powers against a living being is both extremely difficult to defend against and extremely likely to be deadly.

The most complicated form of Span magic is the creation of “pocket realms”: the extension of a bubble of spacetime outside the bounds of the universe. The resulting construct, once sealed off from the bulk of spacetime, is a self-contained mini-universe, extremely limited in extent, both space and time. A person placed in one will see endless copies of themselves extending in all directions, mimicking their every move, and will have an available span of time of up to several seconds; when the time runs out, it will restart at the point the person entered the pocket realm, and may play out differently in each iteration.

An oracle can use this ability to securely, and relatively humanely, imprison someone they do not wish to kill: there is no conventional way for a non-oracle to escape; the prisoner's subjective experience of the pocket realm, while extremely strange, will last no more than a few seconds; and, from the point of view of the “real” universe, the imprisonment can last as long as desired. Usually the only way to be released is through the goodwill of an oracle who is capable of the feat.

An oracle can also make use of it as a kind of personal escape pod, or a crude form of one-way time travel, by placing themselves inside and sealing themselves in. The experience is much the same as for a non-oracle, except that an oracle can return themselves to the universe; however, the time and place of return is only loosely under their control, and about all that can be guaranteed from an attempt to come back to their starting point is a reappearance someplace on the same continent and within a lifetime or two in the future of when they left.

Something around one out of every hundred thousand Chosen are oracles; given the low number of Chosen, the appearance of an oracle is effectively a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Oracles can be extremely powerful, but the nature of their abilities means that, while they have a high survival rate out in the world because they can often see and avoid imminent danger, they also have a particularly high chance of developing mental disorders. Like other Chosen, their powers begin to manifest at about one cycle of age - five or six years old - and before learning to steer their precognition, or to develop a wider sense of the future, what they most commonly see are visions of likely futures in which they, or those close to them, get hurt. As a result, oracles tend to have traumatic childhoods even if raised in a relatively safe and loving environment. This is probably the basis of legends associating oracles with extreme eccentricity or madness.

There is a tendency among the more functional oracles to become embroiled in various schemes to alter the future, whether to achieve or avoid something specific. These attempts often turn out more successfully than one would expect, but, depending on how desperate the scheme was to start with, not necessarily successful overall. (Those oracles who have a stronger sense of futility tend to retire from the world in one way or another.)

There have been a grand total of six oracles to appear in the entire history of the Citadel (though there have been more in the world as a whole); while each of them have been considered individually important, their rarity and individuality makes it difficult to assign any kind of socioeconomic generalizations. The nature of their powers, and the fact that the first of the six oracles was the one who led the Chosen to found the Citadel in the first place, has given subsequent oracles there an aura of spiritual authority and hidden knowledge, but not all of them have accepted the mantle, and indeed some of them have been reluctant to advise anyone of anything.

The sixth and current example, Dlyss, has used her precognition to attain wealth and political influence in the Citadel, acting as a consultant for the Citadel Council and for others from many walks of life. Her firm belief in a particular divinely-appointed destiny for the Chosen has led her to very much embrace the role of a prophet and dogmatist, and she has allowed and quietly encouraged a movement to form around her.