from a primer written by Aislinn, the first seer of Orandia, for later seers

Reading auras is a delicate skill that only seers and soul healers do instinctively, although some Rhiannon-descendant witches can do so using an aura spell. But seers and soul healers always see auras unless actively shielding themselves since it ties closely to their powers. Seers because they see the current truth, read the past, and foretell the future. Soul healers because they must alter their soul to be able to mesh it with their patients’.

Reading auras reveals a lot about creatures, including their emotions, health, personality, and magic. The stronger these traits are the more intense, faster moving, and more motes in an aura. Reading auras is how seers and soul witches can sense latent magic. (Side note, plants possess auras as well, but theirs only show personality and health.)

Emotions are seen as pulses of color across a person’s base aura. Positive emotions are the pure color, while negative emotions are threaded with brown and appear muddy. Here are the different emotion colors:

• Positive:
  • Red: passion, strength, drive, determination
  • Orange: confidence, playfulness, curiosity
  • Yellow: positivity, joy, friendliness, charm, enthusiasm, relief
  • Green: balance, harmony, welcoming, trust
  • Blue: calmness, tranquility, patience
  • Indigo: love, generosity, devotion, empathy, protectiveness
  • Violet: dreaming, imagining, intuition, longing
  • White: purity, newness, spiritualism, truth, wisdom, intellectualism, discipline, awe
• Negative:
  • Red: anger, lust, hatred, mulishness
  • Orange: pride, recklessness, contempt, gloating, upset, shock
  • Yellow: depression, sadness, fear, panic, disgust, hurt
  • Green: gluttony, greed/envy, distrust
  • Blue: sloth, shame, guilt, regret
  • Indigo: obsession, jealousy, selfish, grief
  • Violet: shyness, self-hostility, cruelty
  • White: deceit, overwhelmed, confusion, lonely, melancholy
    

Health is seen in shades of gray and black. Gray means a person is somewhat ill or injured, while black means they are mortally ill or injured. If their malady encompasses their entire body (like wraith flu), this color shades their entire aura. If their malady is specific to an area (like a broken bone), it only shows at that part of the body. In some cases, their malady will shade their entire aura because ’tis impacting their entire body but be more intense at the part central to the malady (like lung fever will be darker over the chest but their entire aura will be gray-tinged as well.)

• Unlike maladies, healthy pregnancies do not darken the mother’s aura, but make it more intense about her waist, and this intensity increases until the baby’s aura appears several months before birth.
• Also, witch healers do not use typically auras to examine their patients—they use a spell called healing sight instead.
  

Personality is seen as a person’s base aura (except for soul healers.) A person’s dominate trait determines their aura, but this can shift over time. Here are the different personality colors:

• Red: passionate, powerful, strong, driven
• Orange: adventurous, confident, independent, fun-loving, playful, curious
• Yellow: positive, joyful, friendly, magnetic, charming, enthusiastic
• Green: balanced, harmonious, inclusive, accepting
• Blue: calm, peaceful, tranquil, grounded, patient
• Indigo: romantic, loving, generous, kind, devoted, empathic
• Violet: visionary, dreamer, creative, artistic, intuitive
• White: pure, new, spiritual, wise, intellectual, disciplined
  

Magic is seen as metallic motes in a person’s aura. If without magic, an aura has no motes. If some, then a few, slowly-moving motes. If a lot, then many, fast-moving motes. Magic created by a person shows inside their aura, while spells impacting them hover outside it. Since humans do not generate magic, their motes appear at the edge of their aura and move inward, while magical creatures’ motes emerge from their core and move outward (in essence they emit them.) Echoing the magical properties of metals, the type of metallic mote indicates the type of power for both humans and magical creatures:

• Ivory: the basic mote > general witches with no speciality, non-sentient magical creatures
• Gold: protection, wealth, vitality, healing > witch healer, sun witch, griffins
  • Magical creatures that are also healers have their creatures’ motes plus gold.
• Silver: sight, intuition, purification, fertility > seer, cosmic witch, nightmara
• Electrum: a mixture of gold and silver > soul healer, melissae
  • In addition, soul healers’ base aura is transparent.
• Copper: energy, love, sensuality, relationships, favored by the Sea God > type depends on form of copper
  • burnished: fire witch, werebeasts, fire creatures (e.g. firebirds)
  • patinated: sea witch, sirens, water nymphs (mermaids, naiads)
• Tin: abundance, prosperity, growth, wisdom, favored by the Goddess > alchemist, hearth witch, unicorns
• Bronze: a mixture of copper and tin > nature witch, land nymphs (dryads, oreads)
• Iron: war, strength, determination, courage > war witch, chaos witch, dragons, gargoyles
• Lead: time, death, stability, grounding > spirit witch, lore witch, banshees, thanatoses
• Ebony: evil > black witch
  • If metallic mote mixed with ebony, then can still be redeemed.
  • If pure ebony, nearly impossible to redeem.
• (Please note: the auras for magical creatures is not complete, and the auras of elves varies like humans’ do.)