Pure Magic Being

A Pure Magic Being is magic incarnate. Such beings have extraordinarily strong magical powers, sometimes approaching godlike levels. For Pure Magic Beings, magical energy is frequently indistinguishable from Life Energy, so that running out of magic power means death, or fading out of existence. Things that consume or drain magic can be very dangerous to Pure Magic Beings.

Although reminiscent of Energy Beings, Pure Magic Beings usually have physical forms, though those forms are sometimes rather mutable.

See also: Cast from Hit Points, Pure Energy. May overlap with Our Phlebotinum Child.

---

Examples

Anime and Manga

• Yue from Cardcaptor Sakura. As a being created from the moon (which is only able to reflect power, not generate it) he is in danger of ceasing to exist because Sakura is too young to generate enough magic to support his existence.
• Date A Live:
  • Mayuri Judgment features the titular Mayuri, created from the collective energy possessed by the Spirits. She inherited their feelings for Shido and has been observing their dates over the course of the movie. Unlike the regular Spirits, however, Mayuri does not possess complete control over her Angel, which goes on a rampage, forcing Mayuri to sacrifice her life to stop it.
  • Later volumes reveal Reine is one as well. More specifically, she is the First Spirit to appear on Earth. All Spirits that came after her were regular humans that she turned into Spirits to further her plans to reunite with Shido.
  • While the Spirits of the other nine Sephira Crystals were once humans who received them, Tohka was born directly from her own, hence why she was originally nameless.
• There are several classes of living sentient beings made of pure magic in the Lyrical Nanoha series:
  • Familiars are created when a powerful mage infuses a dying animal with their mana, giving it sentience and replacing its physical body with one of pure magic. To continue existing, the familiar must be continuously fed with more mana by the master.
  • Unison Devices are magical constructs with AIs sophisticated enough to count as characters independent of their wielders. Some Unison Devices even verge on the Our Phlebotinum Child territory.
  • Living Programs are perhaps the most obvious example: sentient humanoid constructs created from magic by a powerful magical artifact, such as the Book of Darkness, which created the Wolkenritter in A's and their replacements, the Materials, in the PSP Alternate Continuity. In A's, the Wolkenritter disappear into light where drained of their mana, and their nature becomes a major weakness in Force where they are vulnerable to the Eclipse infectees and their dividers. Signum is in the hospital for months thanks to Cypha tearing her to shreds.
• In some way, this could be said of the majority of the Magic World's denizens in Negima! Magister Negi Magi.
• The mazoku in Slayers are primarily astral beings, so their physical manifestation is only a projection amounting to a fraction of their true power. Also, since the astral domain is ruled by Psychoactive Powers (being the domain of the mind/soul) this gives them the ability to be directly bolstered or harmed by emotions, and the Weaksauce Weakness that the harm to their ego caused by fully acknowledging more powerful beings could literally cause one to disappear in a Puff of Logic.

Comic Books

• Dormammu from Doctor Strange, of an entire race of such beings called Faltine. He and his sister are considered abominations for they crave matter rather than energy.

Fan Works

• Fate of the Clans: Servants, though they look to have bodies like other earthly beings, are in fact comprised of magical energy. Their status as spirits is the reason they have a superhuman level of strength and can be hard to kill. But Servants require mana to survive like humans require blood. If a Servant runs out of mana, it fades. Fighting and existing consumes mana. While a Servant's magic circuits restores mana naturally, it takes time to restore the amount lost. There are alternative methods for a faster mana restoration.
  • The type of familiar Servants are is Ghost Liner. While others of this classification are nowhere near as powerful or durable, they have the exact same physiology and are just as dependent on mana for survival.
• In Pony POV Series, Lilith the First Witch Was Once a Man, but over time became a being of pure evil magic after discovering Dark Magic when it was sent to Equus by Morning Star. This has caused her to go from a mortal woman to an Eldritch Abomination powerful enough to destroy the entire world. This causes her first death when Magic Star uses the Alicorn Amulet to seal her magic away, reverting her back to a woman...which is so shriveled and drained that she crumbles to dust.
• In the Triptych Continuum and its spinoffs, Discord is essentially a living chaos storm, a creature of pure magic rather than flesh and blood.

Literature

• The gods in Trudi Canavan's The Age of the Five.
• Simkin from The Darksword Trilogy
• The imps from Terry Pratchetts Discworld series. While not as powerful as other examples on this page, imps are tiny magic based demons, that while lacking in any imagination whatsoever, can be summoned and programmed by the Discs wizards to perform a variety of functions. They seem to be able to turn regular food into magical energy, as without feeding they simply evaporate and disappear.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Most of the non-humans that Harry Dresden encounters are Fae, beings made of Ectoplasm and magic. Because magic is so intrinsic to their nature, they have perfect control over their use of it, unlike wizards. Wizards have spillage, and so they can't use modern technology because they short it out. The world simply doesn't like Harry Dresden.
  • It's unclear if Angels and Demons (which do exist) are made of Soulfire and Hellfire, respectively, or just use it as a power. Because both of those magics are fueled from one's soul, they would be perfect examples of this trope.
• Many of H. P. Lovecraft's Eldritch Abominations, including Cthulhu, Azathoth, and certain avatars of Nyarlathotep.
• The fairies from The Last Rune series by Mark Anthony. When they travel to Earth, where magical power isn't nearly as common as on Eldh, they suffer horrific pain and slowly die unless they take special drugs.
• Niffins in The Magicians. In the event that a magician screws up a powerful spell, they end up being consumed by their own powers and transformed into a being of pure magical energy. Capable of unimaginable feats of magic, they're also completely divorced from any notions of law, morality and consequences, and lose most of their former personality; in other words, a catastrophic accident - or a very dangerous last resort.
• In The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • The Elohim people are Earthpower incarnate.
  • Covenant himself is transfigured into a being of pure Wild Magic at the end of White Gold Wielder.
• Spren in The Stormlight Archive. Though some of them are very powerful and intelligent in their own Realm, they can have very little direct effect on the Physical Realm, and are also almost mindless there unless they find a human to bond to. Such a bond lets the spren use the human's brain and the human use the spren's powers.

Tabletop Games

• Blackbirds RPG: Aes are beings of magic energy with a mask-like face of unmoving bronze. This causes them to have an innate ability to sense the Od, an immunity to disease, aging, poison, suffocation, exposure, or starvation, and a limited form of Resurrective Immortality, but also makes them unable to benefit from mundane forms of healing. Unusually for this trope, Aes are incapable of manipulating the Od and are thus unable to actually perform most forms of magic, though they do have a few unique tricks.
• Dungeons & Dragons has Living Spells: spells which somehow gained sentience and whose magical energy lingers indefinitely. They can be formed from literally any damaging spell.
• Planeswalkers used to be this in Magic: The Gathering. Then the Mending reduced them all to "merely" powerful mages.

Video Games

• Ghosts and other strange things in Atelier Series games effectively have 0 HP, but they will, uh, die when they have 0 MP. It's possible for a ghost character —such as the recurring character Pamela— to, well, kill themselves by casting spells that require more MP than they have.
• Big Bad Pain Elemental Chzo of the Chzo Mythos. He'd actually die of magical starvation if he ever crossed over to our dimension since there isn't enough magic to sustain him.
• Imps in Dungeon Keeper and its sequel can only be summoned to your dungeon through the use of a spell and, while they do not require the usual lair, food and pay of your other minions, they subsist entirely off of their keepers Mana. In the sequel it was entirely possible for your imps to fade from existence should your magical reserves run too low.
• Fate Series: "Servants" are the consciousness of famous mythical/historical figures (called "Heroic Spirits") being summoned into a body made of pure mana of the summoner (usually called "Master"). They require constant supply of mana from their masters to stay alive, and using their supernatural abilities may exhaust the Master's mana if they're used too much. Killing a Servant would require either being killed by other Servants (or other supernatural beings), or having their mana supply cut off in some way, usually by affecting their Master.
• Espers and the Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy VI. You can actually kill Ultima Weapon by draining its MP to zero.
  • Several normal enemies (generally with a consistent techno-organic design scheme) also follow this, down to dying if their magic points are zeroed out.
• In Guilty Gear: Revelator, it's revealed that Axl Low and I-No are both "magical foci", basically bundles of sentient magical information.
• The Fae in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are described as beings of pure magic. This actually works against them — the Prismere that empowers the Tuatha warps their minds due to the Prismere screwing with the magic within them, which is why all of them are such brutal destructive warmongers. Mortals on the other hand can wield Prismere with no ill effects.
• Xerath is League of Legends performed a ritual to turn himself into one of these, as a human body was limiting his power.
• The Big Bad of Neverwinter Nights 2, the King of Shadows is a creature of pure shadow weave magic.
• The Shantae series has the full genies, who are beings made of pure Light Magic. The reason why full genies no longer exist is that they drained themselves of magic in the past to defeat a threat (revealed to be the Pirate Master in Shantae and the Pirate's Curse), forcing them back to their Magical Land as they could no longer sustain themselves in the physical world.
• The "Aggregate Sentiences" in Tales of the Abyss are this, and since the same spirits show up as summons in most installments of the Tales Series, it's theorized that this is the case for other instances of the spirits as well. In the case of Abyss, the definition is important in a Fridge Brilliance way; Luke fits the definition of one particularly important Aggregate Sentience - Lorelei - due to being a replica.
• The Monsters in Undertale are mostly made of magic, which attunes them to their SOUL. This makes them physically weaker than humans, as they die when attacked by someone with enough Killing Intent, but they can become much more powerful if they absorb the SOUL of a human. When a monster dies, their body turns to dust.

Visual Novels

• Date A Live:
  • Rinne Utopia: Rinne Sonogami's made of Tohka, Yoshino, Kotori and maybe Kurumi's (due to the latter being trapped inside Eden) Spirit powers, and has no physical form, a trait she shares with Mayuri. When she's sealed, she effectively ends up dying.
  • Rio Reincarnation: Just like her mother Rinne, Rio Sonogami is a pure spirit, However, she differs as she is only Eden's function to search for the key to complete itself. She is nowhere as powerful as her mother was, and will disappear once Eden is complete.
  • Ren Dystopia: Ren has no human base and disappears when she kisses Shido to seal herself.
• Servants in Fate/stay night are each classified as a Familiar, but are completely made of magical energy and are thus incredibly strong and really hard to kill. Mana is to them what blood is to humans, so beings such as the Shadow are huge threats to them as it can drain the mana from whatever it touches.
• In Dies Irae and it's spinoff there exists the old gods. Different from the Transcendent and Hegemonic Gods which are human in origin, the old gods are beings composed to magic brought to life through human worship of the aspects of nature. However, as they are tied to the source of the worlds magic a.k.a Mercurius, that also means that they start to vanish once he is nearing the end of his life. By the time the story takes place only Methuselah is left, known as The Last Arcane as a result.

Webcomics

• In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: A recent page strongly implies that Clan leaders (Cubi who have ascended to Tri-Wing status) become this during their ascension if they survive the process.
• The Dementia of Magic: Nasal flies are creatures made of pure magic. However, they're made of pure faulty magic, created when mages experience a Magic Misfire, to the point where the spell winds up not doing anything else other than making a nasal fly.
• Drowtales:
  • The nether demons are made out of pure nether Mana, a far more potent version of the energy Fae use for sorcery. They exist in alternate universes, that any summoner with proper training can open a gate into and unleash them onto the world. These demons have no physical form and typically are unintelligent, spending all their time in the physical world feeding off of mana and auras of the plants and animals around them. They are feared and hated by most Drow, as demons also having the nasty habit of invading the bodies of aura bearing creatures, either simply tainting them, or taking over their entire body and killing the host, well twisting it into a mindless creature that attacks anything nearby.
  • It is revealed later in the series that the audience and readers of Drowtales are in fact also demons, which can only be seen by Kiel.

Western Animation

• One episode of Disney's Aladdin: The Series featured Genie being hunted by a magic-eating creature.
• In Ben 10: Alien Force, Anodites are Made of Mana, essentially making them lesser Reality Warpers without casting any real spells. In very much the same vein as the aforementioned (but obscure) Faltine of Marvel comics.
• The enchantress Mara, from the 1981 cartoon series Blackstar.
• On Gargoyles, Goliath describes the Third Race as "beings of pure magic." Their ruler, Oberon, is basically a Physical God, and even Puck manages to shapeshift an entire city twice in one night.
• In the final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the Best Friend Squad meets Melog, a creature made of pure magic that usually takes the form of a cat.
• Glossaryck and the Magic High Commission in Star vs. the Forces of Evil. When Star destroys the magic, they all fade out of existence.
• The Father, the Son and the Daughter in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

---