Magic is real. It has always been real, woven into the oldest bones of the world, older than the Andals, older than the First Men, older perhaps than memory itself. But it is not what it was. Those who study such things speak of it as a tide that has been going out for a very long time, leaving behind only shallow pools where there were once oceans. In Westeros, most men and women live and die without ever seeing anything they could not explain by natural causes. Septons call magic the province of demons and false gods. Maesters file it under the higher mysteries and largely leave it there. The smallfolk cross themselves and repeat what their grandmothers told them, which is usually wrong.
What few people in King's Landing in 140 AC would tell you openly is that magic still exists. It is diminished. It is unreliable. It costs more than it once did and delivers less. But it is there, in the margins of the world, in the blood of certain people, in the rituals of certain traditions, in the dreams of those who cannot stop dreaming. It is not gone. Not yet.
The world of 140 AC is one in which magic has been in retreat for some time. The great workings of legend, the Hammer of the Waters that shattered the Arm of Dorne, the sorceries of the Valyrian Freehold that shaped stone and steel and bound creatures of fire to human will, belong to a vanished age. Even the more recent past feels remote. The blood-workings and sorceries of prior centuries are spoken of in whispers, half-disbelieved even by those whose grandparents lived through them.
This does not mean magic is gone. It means it is scarce, and what remains is diminished in scope. A practitioner who might once have accomplished a great working with relative ease now finds the same effort yields a fraction of the result. The old knowledge still exists, in Asshai, in Essos, in scattered traditions across the known world, but the power behind it flickers where it once blazed.
In Westeros specifically, magic has always been rarer than in the east. The Alchemists' Guild still produces wildfire in their guildhall on the Street of the Sisters. A red priest might still read something true in the flames. A Northerner with old blood might slip into the skin of a wolf in his sleep and not understand what he has done. But these are isolated things, quiet things. Nobody is moving mountains. Nobody is raising armies of the dead in the Seven Kingdoms. The age of wonders is over, and most people would tell you it never happened at all.
What is available, for those rare few born to it or trained in it, is subtle. A fragment of a gift. A working that costs greatly and accomplishes narrowly. Magic in 140 AC is not a tool anyone wields comfortably. It is something that happens to people, or something they reach for with great effort and uncertain result.
The known world contains many traditions and many names for what they do. Scholars disagree on whether these are truly different kinds of magic or different expressions of the same underlying force. What follows is a practical account of what has been observed and recorded.
Dragon Dreams
Those with the blood of Old Valyria, House Targaryen above all, have long been known to dream true. These are not ordinary dreams. They come with a quality the dreamer recognizes: vivid, weighted, soaked in meaning. They concern things that have not yet happened. The imagery tends toward the symbolic rather than the literal, and the meaning does not always reveal itself until after the fact.
Dragon dreams cannot be summoned or controlled. They come when they come. They are as likely to be a burden as a gift. Some of those who carried this blood have been broken by what they dreamed. The visions do not always show what the dreamer wishes to see, and they do not always show it clearly.
Not every Targaryen has this gift, and those who do carry it in varying degrees. In 140 AC, with the blood of the dragon spread across multiple lines of descent from the civil war, it is possible, though rare, for a character of Targaryen heritage to carry some trace of this.
Greensight
Greensight is prophetic dreaming rooted in a different tradition entirely, older than Valyria, older than the Andals, belonging to the world of the First Men and the children of the forest who preceded them. Where dragon dreams tend toward fire and ruin, greendreams are stranger, more natural in their imagery, tied to the turning of seasons and the slow memory of the earth.
A greendreamer knows their visions for what they are. The dreams have a quality distinct from ordinary sleep, charged with a certainty that ordinary dreams do not carry. The dreamer does not always understand what they have seen, but they know it is true. Some greendreamers also show an unusual rapport with animals, and the two gifts often run together.
This ability surfaces most often in people with deep First Men ancestry. Crannogmen of the Neck have a particular reputation for it. It is vanishingly rare in the south, though old blood runs in unexpected places.
Skinchanging
A skinchanger, sometimes called a warg when their gift runs specifically to wolves or dogs, can slip their consciousness into the body of an animal and experience the world through it. They see what the animal sees, smell what it smells, feel the pull of its instincts. With effort and practice, they can direct the animal's actions.
This is not a comfortable gift. The animal is not a vessel. It has its own nature, its own wants, and the longer a skinchanger spends inside another creature, the more that creature's instincts bleed back into them. Those who have spent too long in the skins of wolves have come back changed. The boundary between the self and the beast is not as fixed as most people would like to believe.
Skinchangers are most common among people with old First Men blood, Northerners, crannogmen, and some wildlings beyond the Wall. They are almost unknown south of the Neck, and those who carry the gift in the south often do not know what they have. It expresses itself as unusually vivid animal dreams, an inexplicable rapport with a particular creature, or a feeling of strange doubling that they cannot explain.
Entering a human mind is possible but considered an abomination by every tradition that acknowledges skinchanging. The taboo against it is absolute.
R'hllor Magic
The priests and priestesses of R'hllor, the Lord of Light, practice a tradition of magic tied to fire, both as a physical element and as a source of vision. Their abilities fall into several expressions.
Reading the flames. Red priests seek truth in fire. The flames show them things: distant events, faces, the shape of things to come. This is not infallible. The flames can deceive, or show truth in a form that misleads. But what a skilled priest sees is not nothing.
Glamoring. Some practitioners of R'hllor's tradition can work a glamor, making a person or object appear as something other than what it is. This is an illusion, not a true transformation. It does not alter what is there; it alters what is perceived. Glamors require sustained magical ability to set and are typically anchored to a physical object, a gem or piece of jewelry, to help maintain them. They slip under careful scrutiny and fade if the anchor is lost.
The last kiss. The most remarkable and most costly of R'hllor's gifts is the ability to restore life to the recently dead. This is not resurrection in any clean sense. Those brought back carry their wounds. They may find pieces of themselves missing, memories, warmth, the full flavor of who they were. It is an act of great power and uncertain mercy, and it takes a toll on the priest who performs it that is not fully understood.
R'hllor is an Essosi faith with a significant following in the Free Cities. A red priest in King's Landing in 140 AC would be unusual, a foreign presence viewed with suspicion by the Faith of the Seven, whose tolerance for rival traditions has limits.
Shadowbinding
Shadowbinders come from Asshai-by-the-Shadow, at the far eastern edge of the known world, and their art is considered the most sinister practiced there, which is saying something. They work with shadow as a physical substance, shaping and directing it.
The most dramatic expression of this art is the creation of a shadow assassin, a killing thing of darkness that can pass through barriers, leave no trace, and cannot be stopped by conventional means. This working requires a man of great power to serve as the living source from which the shadow is drawn. The shadowbinder is the conduit and the crafter. The cost falls on the man, not on the binder, but it is a cost drawn from whatever vital force makes a great man great, and it cannot be replenished indefinitely.
Shadowbinders typically wear lacquered masks. They are not common anywhere outside Asshai and the Shadow Lands. Their presence in Westeros is extraordinary and alarming.
Blood Magic
Blood magic, called blood sorcery by scholars and maegi by the Dothraki who fear it above all things, is considered the darkest and most powerful of the magical traditions. It is not an innate gift in the way that greensight or skinchanging are gifts. It is a practice. It is learned. The power lives in the ritual itself, in the correct performance of the working, the sacrifice made, the words spoken, rather than in any special quality of the practitioner.
This makes it both more accessible and more terrible than other forms of magic. Anyone, in principle, could learn it given the right knowledge and the willingness to pay what it asks. What it asks is blood. Often life. The exchange is fundamental to how it functions: something must be given for something to be received. The results are rarely clean. Blood magic can preserve life, but what it preserves is often not quite the life that was. It can bind, curse, and compel. It can reach into the workings of fate in ways other traditions cannot.
Its practitioners travel where they will. Knowledge of this art is scattered across Essos, carried by maegi, hedge witches, and others who keep what they know very close.
Alchemy and Wildfire
The Alchemists' Guild of King's Landing is an old order, much reduced from what it once claimed to be. Their guildhall sits on the Street of the Sisters at the foot of Visenya's Hill, and they call each other Wisdom in the manner of men who wish to seem more impressive than they are. Once, they say, the Guild could transmute metals and perform genuine wonders. Now they make wildfire.
Wildfire is not nothing. It is an incendiary substance of genuine magical nature: it burns green, it burns hot, it cannot be quenched with water, and it has been known to burn on the surface of rivers. It is volatile enough that the Guild's production vaults are built with protective enchantments to smother any accidental ignition. Making it is slow, difficult, and dangerous, and the Guild produces less of it now than their own scrolls suggest they once could. Their spells are less effective than they were. The pyromancers feel it, even if they cannot say precisely why.
Beyond wildfire, senior members of the Guild retain some ability to conjure and shape living flame, small workings sufficient to impress a crowd or entertain at court. These are real, if modest, demonstrations of the tradition they inherited.
Faceless Men
The Faceless Men of Braavos are not magic users in the way a red priest or a shadowbinder is. They are an order of assassins who worship the Many-Faced God, a deity of death they believe is present in every culture, known by different names. Their magic is the magic of transformation: they can genuinely alter their appearance, not through illusion but through an actual change of flesh. It is unclear by what mechanism this is accomplished, and they do not explain it.
They are extraordinarily expensive to hire, extremely capable, and completely without sentiment. They do not choose their targets; they accept contracts. A Faceless Man in King's Landing would not announce themselves as such. They are mentioned here not as something players practice but as something that exists in the world and could, under the right circumstances, make itself felt in the story.
The known world contains other magical traditions that are named in records and travelers' accounts but almost never encountered in Westeros. Aeromancers in Asshai who work with air. Spellsingers whose magic is carried in the voice. Stormsingers from the far east who supposedly worked with weather. Warlocks of Qarth who sustain themselves in a half-living state through years of drinking shade-of-the-evening. These things exist, but they belong to distant places and are not part of daily life in King's Landing.
It is not reliable. It is not safe. It is not something a practitioner can simply reach for and trust to perform as expected. The old knowledge exists, but the force behind it is thinner than it was, and workings that might once have been accomplished with relative ease now demand more and deliver less.
It is not widely known. The vast majority of the population of King's Landing has never seen anything genuinely magical in their lives. Septons preach against it. Maesters dismiss it. Street performers who claim to work wonders are almost universally frauds, and most people assume that anyone claiming real magical ability is either deluded or a charlatan.
It is not a tool. Even those rare individuals who carry genuine magical ability do not wield it the way a soldier wields a sword. It is something that happens at the margins of their lives, that costs them when they reach for it, that does not always respond as they intend. The age of great sorcerers performing grand workings is over. What remains is quieter, stranger, and harder to explain.
Magic in 140 AC is a thing that exists in the shadows of the world. Those who know it is real keep that knowledge close. Those who encounter it often do not recognize it for what it is until much later, if ever. It is present in King's Landing, as it is present everywhere, but barely, and only if you know where not to look.