Editing Acrozatarim/Appendix 2 (section)

==Wielders of Immanence - Divine Power==

Mortals who serve as vessels for divine power do exist.  Some are powerful figures amongst the clergy of the Younger Gods.  Some are wanderers outside of any religious hierarchy.  Some are seen as heretics or dissidents or dangerous iconoclasts.  What they all share is an intense and traumatic experience of suffering.

The gods do not, it appears, deliver the power to wield immanence to the hands of mortals based on a particular adherence to their codes or status in their church.  Even the highest of priests cannot 'learn' to become a wielder of divine magic.  Rather, the inherent capability to wield such magic is accessed by trauma or suffering - and the experience has to meet certain, unknown parameters.  There is no definite, reliable path to divine magic.  A priest of Immar who suffers a near-death experience while travelling, suffering immense privation and driven to the edge of their capacity to survive, might emerge with the beginnings of the divine spark with them, made holy by the sacred nature of what they have undergone.  Yet many more Immarites who die on the road benefit from no such revelation.  The vast bulk of clergy will never know the touch of immanence.

As a result, divine power emerges more or less at random amongst the faithful.  Some churches welcome the blessed into the highest ranks immediately; others stick to more rigid structures where simply manifesting the spark does not award rank, and may even attract suspicion from high priests who guard their influence carefully.  Wielders of the divine are always considered valuable, however, as warriors and agents of the faith; their talent is best actively used rather than left fallow.

A few churches are known to offer the faithful terrible and demanding tribulations in an attempt to directly find those worthy of the divine spark and forcibly stoke the holy flame within them.  Even those who survive such tribulations have no guarantee of becoming wielders of the divine.  Additionally, wielders 'manufactured' through such religious rites and traditions tend to be less powerful in the long run.  A priest of Toran who is the lone survivor of a terrible battle, who staggers through covered in wounds and pierced by arrows yet is triumphant and who feels the divine spark ignite with them, is likely to be a more potent vessel than the brotherhoods of clergy who survive the lethally dangerous Trial of Flame each year and come out with divine power.

Overall, divine magic remains relatively rare amongst even the largest church organisations, and highly valued.  Some churches are capable of fielding significant numbers of spark-wielding agents, even putting substantial detachments of war-priests into battle, but there is no way to simply train in wielding the power of the divine, no sure way to acquire the power, no easy path to divine patronage.