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Chapter 1: The Price of Magic

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Chapter 1 - The Price of Magic

“I reject your reality and replace it with my own.” - Every. Mage. Ever.

Mages, by their very nature, are broken. In a world that has broken them, they have gained the ability to break the world. With phenomenal cosmic power at their fingertips, each use of a rote, dedicated magical tool, or even creative thaumaturgy fundamentally breaks down the laws of the Fallen World, and lets it touch with not just the Supernal Truth, but the Abyssal Lie. Everything has a price, and it’s only now that the mages of Havrion University are realizing this as they look back at the events of the past century.

The Diamond Orders have had a strong interest in both the wonders and the students from the university, especially due to the prophecies of Professors Colder and Tsinghua. Unknown to the outside world, the theoreticians and academics at Havrion know one thing is certain; magic has a price. What’s the price? Is there some cosmic accountant in the end who will come calling to collect debts? No one knows, but it is part of the mission and obsessions of the faculty and some of the students at the university.

As the price of magic gets higher, abyssal intrusions and other weirder things are becoming more commonplace around the world. The Adamantine Arrows have developed the College of Battle Magic to train and develop fierce warriors of the order in order to protect the masses (and potentially magic) from threats both magical and mundane.

The Mysterium wants to save magic by finding all grimoires, palimpsest, wonders, and other relics scatted across to world to see if this has happened before and if there’s a way to stop it. Surely, time is but a repeating cycle, they say, and there must have been some point in history (or pre-history) where mages had to contend with such a thing.

The Libertines are taking a different approach. Humanity is magic. While the Mysterium searches on Earth, the Libertines are looking beyond, not just to other realms, but other planets. Surely, life isn’t just on Earth, and thus they look to the stars, hoping to find that somewhere, out there, LIFE IS MAGIC, so that they can take it back to Earth to teach a new way or supplement what’s going on.

The Silver Ladder and Guardians are severe denial of ‘the death of magic’. They do not believe in the prophecies and consider it simply the Seers doing. As such, they are going out and increasing their actions against the Scelesti and the Seers of the Throne, to try to stop their perceived death of magic by removing any and all obstacles. Who knows if they’ll consider their peers obstacles in the future?