Does life count as a type of magic or as a sphere of influence?
Sphere of Influence.
Flesh (as it's been mentioned previously) falls under either Life or Death, depending on what you're doing with it. If you can reason hard enough, I'm sure you can make it fit under either.
Healing, for example, falls under Flesh; you could begin to teach your followers Flesh magic (if you could inspire it in them of course) for this purpose if you have the Life sphere. If your initial foray into it, on the other hand, was something like 'decaying flesh immediately,' it would be Death. Magics can be very flexible with the right amount of reasoning and belief.
As you contemplate the nature of magic and enchantment, you realise that necromancy could also happen from soul-weaving, which falls under your Magic sphere. Magic covers both influencing followers to tap into magic at all, as well as magics that 'touch' the dreamstuff or outside-creation.
Your followers can learn magic that you do not have a sphere for, and this will give you knowledge of a new sphere. You will not be able to inspire them to this directly, however. You will progress as they do. For example, you actually cannot teach a hatchling earth magic ... but inspiring magic to wake in a hatchling with a heavy interest in rocks and mud may prove fruitful in that direction.
Basic elements fall under the 'Nature' sphere.
You guys make me think way harder than I realised I would need to. Good players. You all get gold stars.
Magic sphere is surprisingly useless. If I'm reading this right all it gives us a piddling price discount. And despite intelligence sphere our followers still seem to be pretty stupid.
Spheres themselves just influence things directly. If you hadn't had Intelligence, your 'bolds would not be learning skills in a season.
Think about history - perfecting ideas takes
years. In the grand scheme of things, taking near-feral lizard dudes and giving them fishing and trapping in less than a year? Seems pretty impressive to me.
Also, the Magic sphere all depends on how you look at it. I think you guys could come up with lots of ways to use direct access to the dream layer, 'higher' energy types, and soul power.
Because anything not-creation could potentially fall under Magic. Creation is not existence; there are things outside of the physical world that are normally extremely inaccesible to mortals.
You potentially have the most
powerful combination, as long as you know, you don't get disbelieved out of reality.
But I won't tell you how.