Dzyun the enchantress and Gordian the evoker, a wizard showdown.
If Dzyun wasn’t one of the cat-folk she would be awarded the title of “great” or even one minted just for her, as the most revered wizards of history. She didn’t care: she spent her life fighting against The Holy Imperial Empire and its wizards and their titles are meaningless to her.
The Holy Infernal Empire and the Beasts’ Nations have a long and complicated history stretching back to the Accord, the thousand years old peace treaty between Hell and Heaven.
The Beast People (minotaurs, cat-folks, nagas, raven-folks, and other minor tribes) were allied with the devils in their fight for freedom against the despotic angels. Two centuries of harmony passed until the divine founders of the nations eventually died, cut off from the extraplanar energies after the War. After that, the relationship between the scions of Devils and the lineages of the Feral Lords rapidly degenerated. The rise of a new religion in the Beasts’ Nations, the Spirits’ Way (Vogineri Chanaparhy, or simply Vogin), caused a rift and provided a casus belli to ambitious Infernal princes and the greedy Beastly Kings. Ideological opposition and political tensions inside the respective nations alimented a long series of conflicts, most of them centered on the control of the Northern Erebus / Southern Anapat region, Khothark’. The contended region, a vast plain full of desirable land and poor of geographical obstacles, passed hands at least half a dozen times between the IV and IX century and became known as “the battleground”.
Forty years ago, after a long period of peace, the Beasts’ Nations allied with the Angelic Unison and joined them in the Third Axamian War. The goal of the Beasts’ Nation was to conquer all the trans-alpine lands of the Empire once for all, “taking back what was theirs”, but it turned out to be an overambitious plan. The Empire succeeded in containing the multi-front assaults of the alliance and eventually turned the tide, winning the war.
Since the end of the war, Khothark’ is part of the Principality of Erebus, known officially as the Northern Region. From the Empire perspective, they just reconquered a lost province, while for the Beast People this is a brutal occupation.
In the eye of the law the Beast People are second-class citizens as, for the Diabolist Faith, they are not part of Humanity (this doctrinal position was decided after the Beasts’ Nation adopted the Spirits’ Way). This, of course, is the cause of many injustices, in recent times the Empire lifted its vengeful heel and the “loser” aren’t actively oppressed or persecuted anymore. Not everywhere at least. Some infernal nobles (the ones ruling the borders) are still keeping a tight grip on their “non-human” subjects and exploit them. Diabolism values justice above all: punishing the guilty and the sinful was the devils’ job and their heirs are proudly continuing their work (or so they tell themselves). Since the Beast-People were aggressors in the Axiam War they deserve harsh treatment and since they are not entirely human (“they have animal faces and features! How can they be like us?”) the laws don’t apply fully to them. Minotaurs and Cat-folks (the main inhabitant of the borderlands) are heavily taxed and are given unfair wages and unfavorable agrarian contracts. An Imperial noble should never uphold slavery (one of the strongest taboos of Diabolism) but some aristocrats are getting close to it, with arbitrary penal labor sentences and indentured servitude uphold in all but name.
This oppressive regime sparked a resistance movement, Dimadrel. The members of Dimadrel help the battered population and exact vengeance on the cruelest despots. In the early day of the occupation, the resistance used brutal ways and fear tactics: heinous murders, massacres, fires… This approach didn’t help in the long run: even if this vigilante justice gave a thrill and some hope to the population in the occupied territories there wasn’t a real plan beyond that.
Things changed in the last ten years: Dimadrel became more organized, doing more focused actions. They start targeting only widely despised figures and help people escape dire situations rather than try to end them with violence. Their support among the population grew tremendously. The prince was already (in his eyes at least) doing his best to iron out the conflict between the populations and the actions of this “new” Dimadrel were undercutting his endeavors. The prince of Erebus decided that was time for a crackdown.
Dimadrel proved elusive. Clearly, there was some base camp, a physical place that offered central coordination and hiding for the resistance agents but it was impossible to pinpoint. The prince spent a ridiculous amount of gold to employ the best enchanters to probe the mind of captured Resistance members, all in vain. Even if the enchanters could find the possible location of the Dimadrel stronghold there was nothing there.
Dzyun was the one that rendered the stronghold “unfindable”. She created a complex spell that canceled the Resistance’s base from the eyes and mind of anyone undesired. The prince’s army went many times near the stronghold, some soldiers were even touching its walls but they never realize it. Confound memory and physical light and sounds is already a master task, but what was unheard was the scale and the persistence: the spell covered an 8 miles radius area and it was self-sustaining. The key of this prodigy was flowers.
To cast a spell a wizard must put some of her life energy in it. The amount of energy varies with the ability in the execution, the time at disposal, the quantity and quality of mystical foci, and so on. All magical objects have either an “expiration date”, after which the energy stored will dissipate, or they need a living user from which to draw some energy, sometimes very small but never null.
Some spells are entangled with a living being and use the energy of the subject to sustain themselves. These are called curses or enchantments, depending on the effect.
What Dzyun did was to enchant other enchantments in a sort of magical recursion: spell over spell over spell…
The first “layer” is to enchant the land so that it will produce many big and special flowers. Then those flowers are in turn enchanted to create the first series of effects (the physical one, like invisibility and silence) and these effects are enhanced to create the psychic ones (the forgetfulness). The flower themselves provide the energy to sustain this web of spells so as long as the flowers bloom the enchantment will persist. And the magic to keep the flower blooming is quite simple.
In the Empire, magic is visualized as strands in the Mana Field, the energy that envelops everything. A wizard can form shapes and knots of this strand and “drag” them into reality, creating a magical effect.
In the Beasts’ Nation, magic is seen as a spiritual calling: for them, the Mana Field is the Spirits’ World, and a wizard doesn’t create a shape but calls a spirit.
It seems that this different perspective help develops different style and effect. Dzyun would say she asked the plant to grow in a particular way and these special flowers attracted the Butterflies of Oblivion that make things disappear.
The Imperial wizards were sure that the Stronghold was hidden by magic and that flowers were involved. Who went on a search mission for the Stronghold returned smelling of flower and dreamed for nights of fields of gigantic blossoms.
But how to eradicate those flowers? By hand? How to weed out invisible plants, that you can’t feel by touch and that you will unconsciously try to ignore? By fire, of course. But the first attempts were a failure: the fire just won’t spread. The only solution would be using an alchemical accelerant, but the cost of the material and the risk of the fire become untamable stopped the Prince, but restrained couldn’t last long.
Since the wizards devoted to illusions, charms, and mental magic couldn’t defy Dzyun and her spell the Prince called on wizard expert on fire in an attempt to eradicate the flower in a controllable way.
Gordian was just a student when he proposed its solution in an open assembly: why not burn just the magic itself and not the flower? One could devise a magical flame that feeds on the energy that sustains the spell: without that, the mana strands must unravel. It’s one of the basic principles of magic.
The various wise elders were skeptical, to say the least, but the Prince was so eager to a solution that gave Gordian permission to try.
After two weeks Gordian asked for a ruby gem, a pouch of gold dust, and a staff made of larch’s wood from the elvish boreal forest. His requests were satisfied. A month passed from then and most of the Academy was ready to ridicule Gordian when at last he says he was ready to perform the spell that day: the sky was the right kind of cloudy.
Gordian was alone in a field, with all half the Academy, the army commander, and the prince himself watching. After he scattered the gold dust in the wind he recites the incantation and called a rain of gold fire from the sky. The drop of liquid gold fire set the field ablaze, all the present were engulf in the golden flames but were not burn. Gordian quickly move the staff and made the fire move, like a wave or a stampede while the rain continued.
After a day and a night, the fire ended and a search party was sent to search the stronghold. They soon found it. But was not the only thing. The golden flames were not so harmless after all: the fire did not only unravel the magic knots but matter itself. To be exposed too much to that magical heat mean to be “undone”: things lose shape and detail and the matter loses its propriety. Inorganic things start to become amorphous like pebbles eroded by countless waves gaining an undefined texture and consistency. For living things it’s somewhat worse: a living creature will become more and more like an ooze or a jelly, but still alive.
the more the search party went near the stronghold, where the concentration of magic meant a more intense “unmaking heat”, they could see the landscape become more and more… gelatinous? The soldier had a really hard time describing the scene… the grass around the hill where the Stonghold stand became like big puddles… a series of green ponds… the wall were without any details, all the corner rounded, the brick smoothed. An in the courtyard there were… things… pink things… twitching, crawling.
The soldiers who found the Stronghold could not end their story. Not at first. For weeks they couldn’t start to describe the scene of the courtyard without being overwhelmed by despair and disgust.
They were not the only ones to be horrified: the wizard declared the Golden Flame a forbidden spell and the Prince had nightmares of guilt for years.
Nobody really could tell what the reaction of Gordian. From that day on he seemed frozen in a subtle smile like his mind was in a perennial state of fugue but he was still… functional. The Prince gave him a big gold prize and asked him to find somewhere nice to live… he would have sent Gordian to exile if he could but how could he punish someone for doing what he asked? Gordian refused the gold and kept on with his life as nothing ever happened. When he enters a room everybody falls silent. Gordian seems not to care… he seems not to care of anything.
Some say that many members of the Resistance that were there that day survived. Deformed, probably. Filled with hatred, surely.
Maybe Gordian is waiting for justice to come to him, in the form of an invisible flower, a phantasmal butterfly, or a disfigured cat-woman.
