Chapter 91: There is Only War

[Saint (Possessed)]

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..." Saint began, before curling up in a grey bubble a second before Noah lobbed a fireball at her.

The black flames struck her barrier and faded to nothing, failing to burn even a single hair on her feline head.

"A decent cast time," Saint acknowledged. "But even balefire still requires oxygen to burn. In future, consider a combination spell to address this deficit, bring a small bubble of air with the flames to sustain it long enough to pierce a vacuum shield."

Emma reached for her Oversoul, tempted to end the ability, only to find that she'd lost control of it altogether, and could do nothing to the possessed feline short of a direct attack.

"Joking aside, this is a story that begins in antiquity, fifteen centuries or so before a certain man started turning water to wine. A magus of that bygone era was nearing death; having lived well into his fourth century, with old age beginning to take a severe toll even on his magically enhanced vitality. Age extension is perhaps the oldest school of magical research, for every generation of man fears death, but the process becomes exponentially more difficult the older the subject. To persist beyond half a millennium would have required the elixir from a philosopher's stone, a peach of immortality, or a similarly potent equivalent crafted by the hands of a Master.

This magus was not skilled enough to obtain such a bounty himself, nor did he have a patron willing to provide it. Resigned to his coming death, he, like many others in the same position before him, began to think of posterity. He wrote his memoirs, a trifling thing that took only a few months, before embarking upon a much more ambitious project, his final and most enduring work of research: a comprehensive analysis of the Cycle. The knowledge of mana floods and droughts existed long before him, for sure, but he was the first to collate all that information together, in a format easily accessible and understandable even to laymen.

In his final three decades of life, he travelled the magical world of the time, collating the writings of scholars, the oral traditions of wise men, the whispers of summoned beings and the crazed ramblings of oracles. He was the one who set in writing the core of 1100 years for a cycle, the standard deviation and the margin of error. From his writings were born the understanding that the decline from peak to nadir would last no more than 600 years, before mana levels bottomed up, then began to rise once more. This was true for the five cycles before him, and was verified again in the three that followed, each no less than 1000 years and no more than 1200, without exception.

With this understanding came optimisation, as individual practitioners, organisations and nations began to set their long-term policies in accordance with his calendar. The planting of divine orchards were timed such that their harvest would arrive near the peak, to maximise crop yield, while the training and recruitment of new practitioners became increasingly standardised, subject to quotas dependant on the current phase of the cycle. In lean periods, only the best were selected for training, often in a one-to-one system of master and apprentice. In times of bounty, vast institutions arose, to nurture as many students as possible in the hopes that the best would survive when times turned hard once more.

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Advances in precognition made it possible to predict the expected length of the cycle to within a few years, allowing for greater optimisation with every passing century. After the peak of 870, the Walpurgis Night, it was business as usual for the world. Magical colleges were steadily wound down over the next five decades, practitioners hoarded resources for the lean season, and recruitment dwindled. A few centuries passed without incident, and our tale reaches the critical point. Oracles the world over agreed that the current cycle would be short; predictions converged on a nadir within a few years of 1400, and the next peak well before the turn of the millennium.

Accordingly, as the year 1300 dawned, the magical community was already well into its preparations for a new era of plenty. Long-shuttered academies were refurbished and staffed, while scouts roamed the world, recruiting the next generation of practitioners. They would be trained in hardship during the final century of decline, learning how to wield magic with the scraps of mana available to them. In this way, they would develop in their formative years an unparalleled degree of control, such that when mana became more readily available they would be far better placed to take advantage of it than someone born and raised in abundance, all the better to seize the opportunities of the new era.

Then, in 1313, seers the world over were struck down without warning. Many died outright, others lost their sanity, whilst those who survived relayed a single message. Overnight, the Cycle had changed; all those who survived reported that the expected nadir of 1400 was no more. Fate had been rewritten, and indeed there was no end to the drought that any of them could see. So, all of a sudden, the great powers of the magical world were in trouble. They'd emptied their coffers raising a new generation in expectation of riches that would never come; their infrastructure groaned, struggling to support the numbers of practitioners raised up, and all of these young, ambitious children who had endured great hardship in their studies for the promise of a better future? Well, they suddenly had only a lifetime of poverty to look forward to.

Unsurprisingly, it only took a few days for widespread anarchy to take hold. If there were no riches to come from the Cycle and resources remained slim, the only possible advancement for the new generation would be seized from the bodies of their peers. Meanwhile, those of greater means looked at rivals across borders, nations and oceans, and saw in their treasure vaults the means to survive an extended drought. Within weeks, conflict was rife, and within months the entire magical world was at war on every side. Likewise, we Founders were also divided as to what to do; having all been blindsided, even my own precognition failed utterly.

Overmind found this a hilarious outcome, and opened her armoury to anyone in the Empire willing to turn their attention abroad. With her encouragement, the Empire brought war to the Sects of Asia, the tribes of the Americas and the Empires of Africa, becoming the primary aggressor in a show of unprecedented ferocity. Paradox fought only a single engagement, sinking an entire city to the ocean floor after they sent shadows to steal from her home; after that, she vanished for the next three centuries, vowing to discover what tampered with the Cycle. As for me? I looked at all the deaths the world over, and all the magical knowledge that would be lost to War.

I realised conflict of this scale would set magical society back an age, and so I started work to preserve the world's magic, even in the event of an extinction scenario, and laid the groundwork of the System."