Arcane Pacts in the world of Gaius are the magical binding of souls between two or more beings, and are considered a controversial subject.



By binding the participants' souls together, a pact can increase their strength by a considerable magnitude via exponentially increasing the threshold of how much energy one can channel to cast magic, a telepathic connection that can allow the sharing of one's knowledge, memories, senses and understanding of concepts with great ease, and allow the pact partners to share and develop abilities that would be otherwise unique to an individual.



On the flipside, the pacts are permanent and ensure that the lives of the participants are intrinsically linked, to where if one member dies the rest will immediately follow. And upon their deaths the pact members' souls are fused into an amalgamation, which can vary from having the constituent souls operate as a gestalt consciousness, to the most powerful soul subsuming and "absorbing" the weaker souls into their subconscious, to sometimes rarely outright fail to fuse properly and be destroyed in the process. In addition, many consider the telepathy to be a double edged sword, given how one can never have a truly private moment again, although there are methods and techniques 'block out' the others via dulling the strength of the connection to a vague and ignorable presence. Finally, the pact can often cause a mutation in one or more members as a result of the souls partially fusing in life.



When Micaug offered a pact to a young Rosaria in a desperate bid to regain enough strength to one day face down Veral, he explained all of this as clearly as he could to the traumatized survivor, giving her the option to back out up front. She readily agreed, however, and as a result of the pact and Veral's binding curse on Micaug, her left eye mutated into a serpent's with black scales growing around the socket. In exchange she developed the ability to perceive souls like a psychopomp, allowing her to determine their overall disposition, the general strength and health of the soul and a sense of their "purity" or "corruption".