The following is an excerpt from the book I am writing on Capennan Folk Magic following my recent visit to the plane.
Chapter Three - Cephalids
The Cephalids of Capenna are similar to the octopuses, squids, and other cephalopods of other planes, lacking in hard bones and instead using pressurized blood and powerful muscles to remain upright.
They are most common among the Obscura family of New Capenna, where their lack of bones, as well as their propensity for illusion and mind magic, make them excellent spies and infiltrators.
However their main source of folk magic, known in Planar Common as "Two-Tides" represents truth and falsehood equally.
Normally here, I'd put the native Cappenan Cephalid name beside the Planar Common name, but there is no decent way to represent Capennan Cephalid with Planar Common Script, and printing presses are not equipped to print Cappenan Cephalid so here's a photograph of a clay tablet, with the name of this branch of folk magic in Capennan Cephalid inscribed upon it.
Two-Tides is a sympathetic folk tradition, where the main way of engaging with it is sculpture, typically of clay. This aids in the ritualistic aspect of associating two or more truths or ideas and forcing an amount to become false while forcing the rest to remain true.
Vasro Hayashi, the interplanar representative of the Obscura describes this mechanism thusly: "A Cephalid can lock in a truth that their hand is touching something they want to steal when they momentarily touch it, and lock in the truth that their hand is in their pocket, then tighten those two truths together and the magic will cause the object to dissolve into sea foam and reappear in the pocket of the Cephalid."
The clay typically helps in this tradition by making the truths or falsehoods easier to link. Mr. Hayashi went on to say, "Alternatively, a Cephalid can make you just flat-out die by making a clay sculpture of your corpse and taking the false-truth of 'you are dead' and the truth of 'you are alive', linking them, and making the death one true. This is quite hard to do, however, since all replicas used this way have to be mostly size accurate."
Despite the macabre nature of these examples, Cephalids frequently use this magic for day to day workings, as attested to by the Cephalid text "An Outsider's Guide to Cephalid Magic." The following quotation is from a Planar Common translation of the text.
"Cephalid Magic is frequently used to alter the weather, turn inedible objects into edible food and to aid or harm others. Outsiders will frequently only see this magic in big dramatic events, but every pot and sculpture is usually a spell."
I, the author, profess very little skill in this method of magic, although I have done minor workings in this system. I found myself with a glass of polluted water from the canals of the Caldaia, and with no options decided to test out this magic. I held the truth that water is drinkable along with the truth that this water had unsafe particles and used a flow of mana to force the pollution one to stop being true. Lo and behold, before my very eyes the water cleared as if it had never held those things at all.
The Cephalids in addition to their folk magic have a few other sources of traditions and spell work. Being closely associated with the sphinx Raffine and the Obscura, divination is common among them. I interviewed an Obscura agent who did not wish for their name to be recorded here, but told me "Raffine torments all her agents with visions of the future." Unlike other forms of divination on other planes, this is not a voluntary process and many would descibe it as being forced to see past the veil. In addition, while few worship them now, there are the Old Gods of Old Capenna. Many of their names are lost to time and the sealing of the city, but the Old Men of Water and Dirt and their union which makes the clay used for writing and magic were once important to them, as attested to in recently discovered Old Capennan text "Hymn to the Elementals." Some sources, like the Old Capennan text "The Ends of The Land" suggest a tie to the deity known simply as That Which Watches, represented in murals as the night sky, although much less is known about how this god was worshipped, if at all, by any Old Capennan culture.
