Since the mortal is taking his sweet time returning, I must take it upon myself to further his recording of my history and the knowledge I intend to impart before leaving your world. To address some questions and take care of a general misunderstanding about spells and rituals. You have to remember the more general a task you have to complete, the more ways you have to solve it. Like putting out a fire, or throwing a rock, some ways are easier than others or require special circumstances. Like a Grease fire or needing the rock to go a particular distance or speed. Defining the parameters is key in a spell, Rituals are more variable.

Ritualization is like a mold, spells are clay, you can shape a spell any way you want to, and molds are pretty cut and dry once formed. Some molds are still flexible, letting them be altered to some degree but you can’t change too much without needing to completely recreate it. You can put different qualities into a ritual that a spell would have to be remade completely to do. It is a crutch until you are skilled enough to make spells on the fly fast enough and powerful enough to do the same as a ritual or far exceed it.

Related to that, I’d like to take a moment to dispel any great lingering questions about other planes and divinity. The other planes do not operate on our rules of reality, time does not exist naturally in some of them, and they are outside the scope of it, to leave or return to and from some of them requires very strong time and space manipulation. So strong in fact you nearly have to build a demi-plane of space time around yourself just to be there in the first place. Other planes are not material in any sense of the word. There is only energy and structures of particular kinds.

There is however a very real heaven and hell in a cascading band of ranges, it’s about structures of the soul and the way you have built your own mind. Your end destination is very much so your own making and that should scare you far more than you can initially imagine. If anything, avoid death as much as possible, it’s both boring and in most cases worse than you might hope.

Hopefully that will generate more questions to answer, but since you seem so enamored with the author and myself I intend to give you plenty to think about. I have existed longer than your star has burned. I’ve watched your world in my idle collection of the resources I harvest from it every few thousand years. I know your entire history beyond the first scattered prisoners abandoned to this undeveloped and barren prison you call your home.

Make no error here, you are the descendants of the native primal creatures of this world and the castaways, exiled, and prisoners of worlds far beyond your reach. Which says more of your reach and less on why you have developed so slowly. It is deliberate and purposeful that it has taken you a few thousand generations to reach where you are; you are not alone and you are being watched albeit passive and lazily.

I suspect you will be reset again if you get too ambitious in your hunger, zealous in your wrath, and spiteful of your neighboring stars. Worst case, you become another Mars.

As for my history, my origins are from a fair sized world, the primal mages had a systemic cult of ritual slave mages. The practice was, that ritual mages were owned by a respective master primal or true magician. My master was a necromancer with a specialization in healing. My first task was to perform three rituals; restraint, stabilization, and analysis. I worked in the hall we were kept in for some rough equivalent of 90 in your years. I was then responsible for treatment, supervising training other acolytes that came after me for longer than you can readily conceive of. Finally I was then taken by our master and trained as an adept, on the pretense I was being executed for incompetence I was killed then resurrected to be taught how to kill others. Then how to resurrect more in a pyramid scheme of assasins.

Every necromancer must experience death in order to really use their power to the fullest. You do not understand how dying affects things until you have died. You start getting very creative when you are motivated by vengeance on your own master. The system is designed such that you are given a false master made of failed ascendants, if you fail to kill the false master, you become one, no more than a puppet in the game of breeding far greater powers. Once you kill a false master, you revive him to train other potentials and are given the right to create your own hall. This was how it was done for necromancers on my world, but the principle remained the same for other disciplines. It was about overcoming a master’s creation with your own. Then it becomes about how many masters you have developed and their quality of skill.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Around the time I created my own hall, we had started to finally have an awareness of powers not far from our space, and big enough in size to be a threat. Something I learned from this time period is that you have nothing to really fear from things more than twice your size, you are beneath their notice if you do nothing to attract their attention. It is the smaller more volatile things you have to be careful of when dealing with outsiders.

First it was trade and diplomacy learning of the empire on our doorstep. Then it was some hunting and skirmishing testing their mettle while siphoning resources from the deep well of power they had from harnessing stars.

By the time the civilization started collapsing under its own weight the first time, or in some of our historical records the third time. I had trained five true masters with their own halls, ten more ascendants holding their own mastery in my halls, and a good thirty or so initiates that oversaw one hundred fresh acolytes to the path. I was only about six hundred at the time and things were going well for most of us.

I decided to hand over my halls to my trained masters and left my home to explore the larger neighboring empire that had a bit under a hundred stars in their control at the time. I worked mainly as an assassin with a front as a student of healing at the great library of the capital star system. Over time I began to see more work as an assassin than my front as a student would allow, forcing me to learn a lot about planetary security and defensive systems. I eventually had enough power and favors to develop a new training hall on a small asteroid off one of the prime world’s moons.

I was researching methods to kill my targets with things around them at the time, and had acquired an acolyte who formerly studied illusion magic. He posited a solution, if you kill someone with a knife, people look for who held it not the knife itself. So I started experimenting with using servants and people close to the target to kill them. It took a few tries to make it work, then I ran into the problem your police forces figured out in only a few generations is that people can be coerced or forced to kill others. Your history of poisoning each other alone is worth study in detail on this subject.

After a few hundred more years we had developed a pretty sustained system in the empire. Since we had basically learned more or less how to resurrect people at this point, we’d kill someone, charge their family or estate to resurrect them, and if they couldn’t pay they were rebuilt, enslaved, and sold off for public labor pool projects. Then after a few thousand years of this scam, we started seeing assassination requests for a death without the possibility of resurrection. This is where I had to really start looking at the divine and messing with targets soul and mind. It is also ultimately what lead to the cascade failure of all the surrounding worlds.

There is a special feeling in fully killing someone who is supposed to be immortal and the fear of mortality causes people to make some very rash decisions. The empire started collapsing because of it, with the lack of anything to keep things together rather than stick around for the creation of a new civilization and the stamping out of my hall of assassins, I left.

Ever since I have started wandering, a black star and omen of the times in the wake of my passing to some, a sign of prosperity and bright futures for others. There is no true place of rest in the universe, you can only sustain a perfect place in stagnation, to retain immortality you must never stop your growth or cause it to be maligned. The disease you know as cancer is in most cases a skewed growth, a negative mutation and relic of genetics. It won’t be long until you find that it can be screened out almost completely genetically. The first artificially enhanced genetics are already being tested, it may take a good 40 years for you to realize it in these genetic experiments but afterwards there likely won’t be many naturally born humans left on your world. These small bits of wisdom and prediction are some of the great hope and calamity I bring. Which leads me to why I am here.

The unfortunate author caught my attention by showing rudimentary signs of being an inheritor of my first school, most likely one of my first students was caught and broken, then cast away to your world to live a short and bitter end. He is suited to Necromancy in its purist form, and I am not one to discourage growth of a kindred magician that I taught generations ago.

So tell me, Reader, is your curiosity and interest high enough to speak with me before we watch the struggles of the author and the place he has been cast out to?