[Lore] Can we see Aether ?

[Ultimatecalibur]

In my understanding, all non-Pure-blood Garleans* have a 6th sense to go along with the 5 (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Taste and Touch) that we have: an Aether sense and it is what allows for the use of magic. This sense is not normally a strong/dominant sense for the Spoken races. It takes fairly dense concentrations for most to noticeably "see" Aether. Many of the visible effects we see (energy tethers, Aether currents, Darkside Aura, etc.) are visual representations of the Aether our characters sense.

The Sharlayan googles do something similar to real world infrared goggles. We can naturally sense temperature with our sense of touch, but because of how weak and short range this sense is we developed an method to convert heat patterns into visible images. The Sharlayan googles do this for Aether patterns.

Y'shtola's trip trough the Lifestream blinded her, and like many real world blind people she shift focus from her lost sense to another sense in order to compensate. Instead of shifting to hearing she shifted to her Aether sense. For some currently unknown reason relying heavily (to the point that in compensates for total blindness) on your Aether sense drains your personal Aether shortening your life.

*Pure-blood Garleans may have it, but it may have atrophied to the point of non-function.

[Lucke]

Y'shtola's trip trough the Lifestream blinded her, and like many real world blind people she shift focus from her lost sense to another sense in order to compensate. Instead of shifting to hearing she shifted to her Aether sense. For some currently unknown reason relying heavily (to the point that in compensates for total blindness) on your Aether sense drains your personal Aether shortening your life.

That also explains how she's much more powerful after her little vacation. She throws out WHM spells like nothin'.

You can also think of Aether as matter. Everything is made of aether/matter, but unless it's super concentrated we can't see it. We can't see individual atoms, but we can see the desk, computer, and PS3/4 that the atoms made. That fire spell is made of aether, but since it's so condensed we can see fire.