Alienation Sorcery
Alienation sorcery is a strange and dangerous art founded upon the alteration, manipulation, and control of distances physical, mental, and conceptual. It functions through pushing targets away from their original place be it physical, mental, or conceptual with the placement of distances into an opportune position to create desirable effects. For example, the placement of physical distance between yourself and the blade of someone trying to murder you so that it cannot reach you, or the placement of mental or emotional distance between a person and an answer you would rather they not know or the solution to a problem you would rather they not solve. With time, practice, and sufficient reserves of space this effect can be scaled up neigh infinitely and can be extended to the conceptual allowing a skilled user to go so far as to literally alienate a person or object from existence (or reality, or simply the reality they live in, whatever suits the alienation sorcerer's purposes best). Of course, such feats require greater skill and power over the usage of distance as well as great reserves of distance in the first place to make the effect truly stick.
Indeed, the accumulation of distance or space is one of the fundamental and most important aspects of Alienation Sorcery. This can be done in many ways, the simplest being to distance yourself from people, places, objects, and ideas in a variety of ways accumulating physical, mental, and conceptual distances. As a result of this Alienation Sorcery tends to be an art well suited to ascetic practitioners and monastic orders, as well as a practice that comes easily to eccentrics and those forced to live on the fringes of society. At first, an unskilled sorcerer can accumulate distance for themselves through any means that could be said to alienate or distance themselves from something. This makes ascetic practices and certain philosophical doctrines that focus on seeing past the physical reality of the world and on learning to take distance from suffering and the self to become a part of the whole particularly adept despite the somewhat contrary goal of universal oneness. Eccentrics behavior of course creates a distance between an individual and those around them in a way that is rather ideal which can encourage some sorcerers to change their behavior quickly and erratically creating distance even from their changes in behavior. On the other hand, vile and crude methods such making many friends or simply creating connections with many people with the sole intention to burn those relationships as hard as possible or transform them as far as they can be stretched is yet another method by which distance can be rapidly accumulated, though this is mostly favored by the desperate. Beyond this an Alienation Sorcerer will eventually grow to be able to use even distance that is not formally "theirs" in their magic and eventually to automatically produce distance themselves. All this being said it must be noted to beware for one of the fundamental principles of Alienation is that to distance something from another is to bring it closer to something else and that axiom can bring unpredictable outcomes with the accumulation and usage of distance.
An example of this effect is the method by with distance can be automatically gathered, namely the practice of Estrangement, or gone awry Derangement. Essentially estrangement and derangement are what happens when a certain amount of distance accumulation from some aspect of a sorcerer's previous state of being becomes normal and they can be said to have become a fundamentally different person than they previously were. For example, if one were to consistently alienate themselves from life, or accumulate distance from life they might find themselves dead, permanently close to death, as some kind of deathly creature, or even just removed from what they traditionally think of as life (perhaps a carbon based creature might become some kind of silicon based rock man). This end state exists in contrast from and distant to their original state of being and thus staying in such a state consistently accumulates distance until such a state is completely normalized to the sorcerer. There are a great many ways of doing this on purpose and most, but not all, personal enhancement spells of alienation sorcery work upon this principle. Indeed one of the most consistent ways for a skilled sorcerer to increase their reserves is to go through a permanent ritual of estrangement reshaping themselves into some new form that creates and stores greater distances more safely and consistently. However, this is not a purely positive phenomenon, particularly as it is something that can happen unintentionally. Such is what makes the difference from an elevation of the self through Estrangement, and the unpredictable and often disastrous corruption of Derangement. If a sorcerer is not careful most anything can result from becoming something unable to properly live even under the condition of their home world to becoming some kind of horrible monster. A careless sorcerer will often allow one to become the other before they even realize what is happening, practice Estrangement at your own risk.
Sorcerers often specialize in on of three areas of Alienation Sorcery, namely the creation and understanding of distances, the manipulation and employment of distances, and the understanding of the results of alienation, of where things end up when distance is shuffled around, of relation and estrangement. Each of these areas has their strengths. The first is often specialized in some combination of sustainability, efficiency, and scale of workings. The second focuses on the swiftness, accuracy, and variability of employment of distance leading into the usage of a great range of effects target at their most effective times and places of employment. The last is the strangest and hardest to understand. It deals not only with enhancement and the permanent alteration of the self, but with a form of divination resulting from understanding of the ebb and flow of distances and being able to predict where things will land or otherwise to subtly interfere with causality to push them towards a desired or advantageous position, though that requires a level of skill and awareness that is rare amongst sorcerers.
