Item from The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb
The Farseer royal magic — a telepathic power that lets its wielders reach across distances, heal, command, and ultimately dissolve into a current of consciousness that promises everything and consumes without mercy.
The Skill is the Farseer line's greatest weapon and most insidious trap. At its basic level, it allows telepathic communication, emotional manipulation, and remote viewing. Advanced practitioners can heal injuries, command obedience, and even kill through mental attack. Masters can pour their consciousness into stone, creating Skill-dragons that preserve a form of immortality. The seduction of the Skill is the current — a river of shared consciousness that feels like belonging, like coming home, like dissolving every boundary between self and other. It is addictive in the most literal sense: users who touch the current want to return, and the deepest danger is simply letting go and merging with it forever. Verity nearly lost himself to it. Fitz has had to be pulled back from it repeatedly. The Skill offers transcendence, and the price of transcendence is personhood.
The Skill has no physical form, but its use is visible to those who know what to look for. Practitioners' hands develop a silver sheen during intense use, eventually staining permanently silver-black. The Skill current itself is experienced as a vast, rushing river of consciousness — beautiful, seductive, and fundamentally dangerous. Skill-pillars (standing stones) serve as its physical infrastructure, and raw Skill manifests as a mercury-like silver liquid called Silver or dragon Silver.
Also known as: The Skill, Skill Magic, Farseer Magic