The Aether

The aether is a field of invisible energy that surrounds everything. All creatures are able to indirectly affect the aether, as it warps around them. However, some creatures are able to purposefully manipulate the aether. In humanoids, this ability is uncommon and generally weak, though there is a great deal of variation in what people are able to do.
Manipulations of the Aether often include the transfer of energy into and out of the aether. The aether indeed is known to act as a good conduit for transferring the form that energy takes.
Humanoids who are able to learn use of the aether sometimes specialize in different uses of it. These uses generally fall into the direct use of the aether (by wizards), the use of the aether to imbue objects with energy (artificers), and the use of the aether to change the properties of substances (alchemists/ arcane chemists). There is however a significant amount of variation within each of these groups. The process of using the aether is generally considered to be aetherial (or arcane) magic. The understand the aether consists of a field that can be manipulated is relatively recent, and humanoids historically manipulated it with a partial or complete lack of understanding regarding the mechanism that they use.
The primary breakthrough in understanding the relationship between the energy and the aether was the implications that other energy sources then internal human energy could be used in magic. Previously, only internal human energy was used for most spells. Humans would train for years to come to more efficiently use their energy when casting spells. While the transfer of energy has a small cost in human energy, it tends to be much smaller than the internal energy than was previously required.
Nearly all the spells that currently exist draw energy from the individual. These spells are only as effective as they are because of the countless generations of improving the spells.

Manifestation

Humanoids who use the aether often would waste a small amount of the energy they are transferring to add a visual style to their actions.

Type

Metaphysical, Arcane