The Seven gathered together; each renowned, each more powerful than armies, each immortal, each alone. It was a dark night, darker than most. The field they had randomly chosen was quiet, only the sound of the owls interrupted the howls of the wind. Everyone knew of the men gathered on this field, they were the ones that kept the peace between the kingdoms. They could topple a civilization without a second thought. Who would wage war when infinity was the opponent? They were beholden to no king, but did not crave power themselves. They wished for happiness for all.
Their loved ones aged and died. Always they aged and died. But the Seven endured. They were immortal, they were forever, and they were alone. Until... the Precursor of Time, as he would later be named, had an idea. What if each of The Seven was to lend his power to his fellows? They could give the gift of magic to everyone so that all may share in a piece of eternity.
First the Precursor of Blood poured his blood into a vial. His blood created the foundation of which this most monumental magic of all time would took place. His blood magic allowed the others to fuse their powers together, to each other and to him, in order to combine their powers together and give them to the rest of humanity.
Then the Precursors of Life and Death poured their bloods into the vial. This addition gave magic the ability to reach in and affect people’s life forces, and manipulate the forces of the afterlife. The Anti-magic Precursor gave his blood unto the vial so that the infinite power of the Precursors would not curse anyone ever again. The Precursor of Gravity lent his blood to the vial so that the magic of the Bloods were tied together. The Precursor of Elements gave blood so that the magic could be used by, and manipulate all things. Finally the Precursor of Time gave his blood to the vial that the magic they wrought here would continue on through ages innumerable.
One by one the Precursors gave their magic to the vial, and one by one the Precursors blinked out of existence. When one of The Seven gave his Blood he turned to ash and disappeared, the enormous amount of energy required to perform this infinite and eternal magic taking its toll on all of them.
The magic shot out from the field, the effect hastened the terrible howl of wind. Magical essence coursed through every living being in a hundred mile radius. The humans near the epicenter of the event would later say that they felt a great tremble in air, and many experienced déjà vu, that is they felt like the events were occurring several times.
From that moment onwards, magic started changing, evolving, devolving, twisting, and breaking off on tangents unforeseeable to The Seven. Over the next several hundred years, magic would take on a new image. It would become classified, ordered, controlled. Life force became a unit of storage for magical excess. Living depleted it over time, not only because life spans are finite, but also because replenishing ones stores of magic took away from this pool of life force. The larger the magic store; however, typically the longer the lifespan associated with it became. The longer the lifespan the slower one was to age. Magic became a way of life for all; everyone had it, and used it on a near daily basis. Some would be more powerful than other, some sought to use it for purely selfish means, and others would defend the innocent.
Magic was generally genetic after the Seven gave up their lives. Most of the time the parent’s magic would be duplicated or closely copied to the offspring; however, these small variances in the similarities eventually led to great disparities between the magic held by the people, and the magic once wielded by The Seven.
Magic was eventually classified into two groups, active powers and passive powers. Most people were born with three active powers, although in rare circumstances some were born with more or less. Although no one had ever been recorded to have had more than four active powers at once.
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For some reason, debated by many Blood mages, a person’s active powers would fuse and morph into a passive ability. The active powers were directly responsible for creating the passive power. The passive power was a potent mix of the three active powers used to make it.
The active powers were classified by scholars: Greater, Higher and Lower powers. Greater powers were those that could directly manipulate one of the powers of The Seven. These were: Life magic, which gave people the ability to heal others by tapping into their life-forces; Death magic, which gave those that used it the ability to raise the dead, conjure curses, or create diseases; Blood magic, which allowed direct conversion of life force into usable magic, netting huge sum of magic all at once instead of over time; Anti-magic, which allowed the user to cancel out other magic, or certain aspects of that magic if the user was skilled; Elemental Magic, which gave the ability to manipulate the primal forces of Earth; and Gravity magic, the ability to directly control an items inherent weight, whether by increasing or decreasing its value. Time magic was extremely rare with only one in a million people being able to use it; this was attributed to the fact that the Precursor of Gravity bound the magic before the Precursor of Time gave his blood.
The next tier of magic was higher magic. These included the ability to use a small, but potentially lethal, portion of power from the Seven. These abilities were never ‘pure’, but instead a mixture of the Seven’s original abilities. The final tier of active magic was lower magic. This includes all magic involving things like temperature changing, bending light, and other such non-lethal possibilities.
Passive magic includes all other magic, generally not Greater magic, but in a constant usage that did not consume magic energy. Special cases include resistance to high or low temperature, the Discerning Eye, which allowed the user to see magical auras, and magic resistance (both an off-branch of anti-magic), all speak, which gave the user the constant ability to talk to anything living and, in cases where living matter recently came in contact with it leaving a magical residue, nonliving things. Also among the passive abilities is incredible strength or heightened senses.
Magic, generation by generation, became less and less like it was when controlled by The Seven. Eventually completely new branches of magic would pop up. Some magic died out, others flourished. But magic as a whole became more potent. Eventually it became common place to see a mage that could destroy an entire city, or create one, with just a flick of his wrist, when walking to market. Most people did not care to use their powers to such an extent but some did. Many towns were destroyed, by unknown mages, for no reason at all. Entire lifetimes of work could be demolished by an unruly youngster.
To help prevent this schools were created to teach mages of any age to better control their powers. These schools quickly became renowned for their ability to turn someone who could barely use their power without destroying something, into someone that could light a single candle in a group of one hundred, without harming the others.
As time passed more and more powerful mages came to these schools, thus they needed to expand, taking on many high level mages as teachers. Some of the people that graduated even stayed on as support for the teachers; or if they had the talent, teachers themselves.