The stone towers were lonely in the distance, pillaring up against the sky. The common folk often treated them with awe, whispering to each other about ill omens and wicked curses. If a black or white bird was seen flying from one of the windows, people would turn away from the sight and mutter invocations of protection under their breaths. It was known throughout the land that the tower was a place of great evil, a prison for those who dabbled in the darkest magics, and that even going near such a place could make someone absorb some of the evil that trickled down through the stonework.

In reality, the evil of the towers was a much more subtle thing, and the people that were held prisoner were not what the rumors proclaimed them to be. Instead, the occupants were mostly women, brought there from their early years, to be watched over with careful eyes. Taken from their families, they were locked away in the towers because they held the spark within them that let them do magic. Mistrusted by the general population, most female magic users had been hunted down in the past. After the practiced witches were taken care of, any further girls who showed the spark were carefully supervised to make sure they never learned to harness the magic they held in their frames.

All this came from the deep jealousy held by the male magic users. While males had a very steady flow of magic, wavering very little, females had a cycle of power that ebbed and flowed. A woman at the height of her cycle could do much greater magic than a male, and during her lowest level of the cycle, she would still be able to hold her own. And so, fearing this advantage, they sought to take away this power but found it difficult to do. By vilifying the female magic users, and turning others against them, they were able to wrest control from the local guardian witches, shrouding the word in evil associations. And the ignorance that rose from the change just perpetuated itself, until very few remembered the days when female spell casters were prominent and beloved figures.

With the power of the male casters firmly in place, they collected the young girls with power, and the parents, afraid of being associated with witches, gave up their children, disavowing them rather than facing the shame of having such a cursed and wicked person in their family. But the tragedy was that these young girls were completely innocent of any wrongdoing; they were simply born with a power that others had been taught to fear. And so their tears were real as they were pulled from their families and pushed into tiny cells inside the towers.

From within the tower, their lives were simple and ascetic. Most of them never understood why they were there. They either fought their fates, or they meekly accepted them, but neither option gave them any illumination as to what they had done to deserve it. In the earliest days of the towers, the girls were largely there for study; the male casters wanted to know how the differences manifested, in hopes of claiming the power for themselves. But they could not replicate the source of the power, for the creation of life was one of the strongest things, and a woman’s body was designed to hold life, rather than simply contribute to it. The experiments done on these young women were cruel because they were cold and clinical, not from hate or retribution.

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As the magical scholars continued their studies, however, they learned several disturbing truths. Girls under a certain age had very little power, having no more, and no less, than most boys. But as their bodies grew into their cycles, certain benchmarks of those cycles marked a rise in their powers. Firsts, in particular, were very strong. And as more ambitious scholars realized the power potential, they would watch the girls’ developments more carefully. It was a particularly lustful individual who made certain discoveries that created even more distrust of the female casters: they could absorb any life connected to them for magical gain.

This divided the magical world even more. Some casters pushed for all these women to be eliminated immediately; they were too great a risk to be left alive. Moreover, all further female babies born with magic should be destroyed as well, rather than leaving them to grow up in the towers. Other casters denied any necessity of making such a change, believing things were fine as they were, though more towers might need to be built in the future. A small, but strong, segment of the population wanted to divide up the girls among them, using the powers within them to fuel their own ambitions. The rest of the casters were beginning to fear that they had made an error in judgment. Leaving the girls in the towers was leaving them open to exploitation from ruthless scholars; they were safer out in the open, where more people could keep an eye on them.

Menym was but a young apprentice when he first saw the towers. His mentor was one of the wizards sent to clean out the towers, rescuing the females who could be integrated back into society, protecting the ones who couldn’t, and destroying those who had become unhinged with their captivity. It was a brutal process, and Menym learned at an early age that magic, when used improperly, was a corruptive force to be guarded against. Still, despite his emotional scars during this dark time in history, he remained dedicated to a life of learning, and using, magic. But the things he saw in the tower would forever haunt him. Especially since, in his callow youth, he fell for the charms of one of the women in the tower, not realizing that she had been raised to seek out and bond with a wizard such as himself.