The Heartbeat in the Soil: Why I Chose Dirt Over Wands

 A note before we begin: this essay discusses the magic system in my novel set in the village of Morecroft. I’ll be drawing on some passages from the book, but I’ve kept things as spoiler-light as I can. Think of it less as a plot breakdown and more as a peek behind the curtain at why I built magic the way I did.

Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928) Midsummer Night

Part One: The Anatomy of the Groundseer

When I sat down to design the magic system for Morecroft, my first instinct was to ask myself a single question: what does power feel like when it belongs to the land?

Not the land as setting. The land as a living, breathing, broadcasting entity.

In Morecroft, the earth isn’t just dirt; it’s a broadcast.

The women who can receive that broadcast are called Groundseers, and their gift is, at its core, a gift of listening. Not in the metaphorical, spiritual sense -- though that’s there too -- but in the most physical sense possible. The body is the instrument. The soil is the signal.

When we first step into Eva’s point of view — she is the eldest of three generations of women at the heart of the novel — she is already mid-ritual.

This morning, like every morning, she gave thanks to the earth. Forehead pressed to the ground, she recited the words her grandam had taught her: “Beneath my feet, all wisdom grows.” The earth answered with the familiar stirrings of rabbits waking from their winter slumber, a welcome piece of news she would pass on to the hunters. It was more than listening; it was a recognition of vibrations, a skill she had possessed since she was eight years old and first pinpointed a den of motherless kits.

I love this passage because it does the work I wanted the whole magic system to do: it makes the gift feel earned and ordinary at the same time. Eva isn’t casting. She is pressing her forehead to the ground and paying attention. The earth answers not with thunder or spectacle, but with the quiet news of rabbits stirring.

This is what I think of as the ‘Foot-Sense’ -- the Groundseer’s ability to read the vibrations moving through the soil beneath her feet. Later in the book, Eva is walking through the village when:

The hum of an unfamiliar presence in her left foot hurled Eva back to the present. Not an animal; the vibration was too heavy. She recognised the vibration of nearly every resident in Morecroft, but this was new. The newcomer caught up to her, bowing his head.

This is the detail I find most satisfying about how the gift works. It isn’t a psychic ping. It isn’t a sixth sense floating somewhere outside the body. It’s weight. It’s rhythm. It’s the physical difference between the light flutter of a rabbit and the heavier, slower thud of a man’s footfall -- read through the ground itself. Eva doesn’t see the newcomer before she senses him; she feels him, the way you might feel a heavy cart rumbling down a cobbled street before you hear it.

I wanted a magic that felt as physical as gardening or hunting.

And that physicality extends to how the gift is accessed at its deepest level. There is a moment in the book where Eva needs to go further than her feet will take her. She drops to her knees and buries her wrists in the earth:

She dug her hands into the soft earth on either side of the blanket, pushing deeper until her wrists were buried in the dirt. She opened herself to the earth, allowing its raw energy to pour through her. The power was immense; the ground around them began to rumble and shake, and tiny cracks spiderwebbed through the soil around her and the newborn child.

This is what I think of as the Wrist-Deep Connection -- the deliberate, ritual act of making contact to draw on the earth’s raw power rather than simply receive its passive signals. The Foot-Sense is ambient; it’s always on, always humming beneath a Groundseer’s awareness. But the Wrist-Deep Connection is a choice. It costs something. The ground cracks under the weight of it. I wanted to make it clear that this magic isn’t given freely -- it is tapped into, and the earth responds with everything it has.

Part Two: The Duality of Elements

Morecroft is a village governed by women, and so its magic is also governed by a feminine duality -- two forces that are not opposites, but complements. Two halves of what the elder mothers call the unbroken circle.

The first is Earth: the domain of the Groundseer. It is the magic of protection, of rootedness, of memory. The earth in Morecroft does not forget. When Eva performs the protection ceremony on a newborn, she dips her fingers into a pouch of blessed earth -- an almost sticky red substance, like ochre or clay -- and smears it across the child’s chest:

“May the earth root you in our land, and may you always find strength in its spirit.”

The white stone placed over the red smear carries the same intent: “To remind that the earth remembers and watches over all who belong.” This is earth magic in its purest form -- not dramatic, not violent, but permanent. A staking of claim. A declaration that this soul is known, recognised, and held.

The second is Water: the magic of transformation, healing, and becoming. Where earth magic roots and protects, water magic transforms and renews — and its purest expression is the Restoration of the Mother, the sacred rite all women of Morecroft undergo after childbirth. A mossy green pool. A waterfall whose rumble is as old as living memory. And a new mother walking into the water:

Joan reached the water’s edge, where it lapped at her toes, inviting her into its depths... She began to submerge her body, shivers instantly halted as the warmth of the pool enveloped her.

The Restoration moves in a deliberate sequence: the elder mothers chant, the herbs and petals are scattered, the new mother enters the water and is stripped of her old self. The chant makes the intention explicit -- ‘She will emerge transformed, a new being of strength and certainty. Mother to one, mother to all.’ And then Joan does something no one tells her to do. She plunges herself and her child beneath the surface:

They vanished beneath the surface. For a heartbeat that stretched into an eternity, there was nothing but the churning water. Then they re-emerged, the mother gasping for air, and the baby letting out a defiant, healthy shriek.

What I love about this moment is that the water magic isn’t performed on Joan -- it is performed with her. The elder mothers create the conditions, but she is the one who chooses to go under. And crucially, the same water that restores the mother also heals what earth protection alone could not fully guarantee for her fragile child. This is how the two elements work together to form the unbroken circle: earth claims the child for the land; water breathes life back into both of them. One roots. One renews. Neither is complete without the other.

Part Three: The Sacred Burden - Vision vs. Vibration

So far I’ve described a magic system that feels, I hope, peaceful. Quiet. A woman pressing her forehead to the cold ground at dawn. Rabbits stirring. Snowdrops arriving exactly on time.

But the Groundseer gift has another face, and it is not peaceful at all.

There is a moment in the book where Edith -- Eva’s daughter, and a Groundseer in her own right -- is gripped by a waking vision she did not ask for:

Dionisia stands in the doorway to the Chandler house clutching a folded white shroud. Her eyes swollen and with tearstained cheeks, her mouth opens to scream, and a thick grey sludge flies from her mouth, choking her.

The contrast with the rabbit-heartbeat scenes is intentional and stark. Sensing a sleeping rabbit through the earth is an act of harmony -- the body opens, the earth speaks softly, and life goes quietly about its business. But the visions are violent intrusions. They arrive uninvited. They do not ask permission. And when Edith tries to process what she has seen, Eva offers her an interpretation that captures something true about prophetic gifts:

“The vision is not always for the one who is seen,” Eva said. “The Lady shows you Dionisia because She knows you would heed it. She shows you the one thing you would not ignore.”

This is where the gift becomes a cage.

I won’t spoil what unfolds from this vision -- but I can say that Edith’s gift is one of fixed futures and protection through isolation. She sees. She holds. She carries it alone, bound by the same secrecy that surrounds the Restoration, the same silence that the elder mothers keep about everything sacred. A gift wrapped in secrecy doesn’t just protect; it isolates. It turns insight into a private weight that no one is permitted to help you carry.

Dionisia, by contrast, embodies what I think of as the living web of consequence — the idea that the future is not fixed, but threaded through with choices, darknesses that can be cast out, fates that might still be redirected. Where Edith sees and holds and carries it alone, Dionisia feels her way through:

The connection snapped, and the world rushed back in. Dionisia stumbled away from the glowing wall, her breath coming in ragged gasps, the phantom scent of dust and old hay in her nostrils. Her knees buckled. She could still feel the echoes of it all: the strain in Mateo’s shoulders, the sharp, blinding pain in Peter’s leg, the wave of collective relief that had washed over the square like a physical tide. She had not just watched it. She had been there. She had felt it.

This is the difference. Edith receives visions — fixed, sharp, isolating. Dionisia receives experience. She doesn’t see the future from a distance; she is dragged bodily into it. The black bile that Eva and Edith discuss after the vision is not just a symbol of illness — it’s what happens when something is left to fester in silence, when a gift that demands connection is met with secrecy instead.

I’ve always been drawn to magic systems that cost something real. Not just magical energy that recharges after a good night’s sleep, but systems where the gift and the burden are inseparable. In Morecroft, the women who feel the most are also the women who carry the most. Eva can sense the heartbeat of a dying newborn through the soil. She can feel her daughter’s anguish reverberating across the village before she’s even crossed the threshold. But she cannot unfeel it. She cannot turn it off.

The earth broadcasts, yes. But a Groundseer has no choice but to receive.

If you’ve made it this far — thank you. I find magic systems endlessly fascinating to write about because they’re really just a dressed-up way of asking: what does it mean to be gifted? What does it mean to pay attention? What do we owe the people and the land we belong to?