This is a story based on a dream I had.
Here I am a walker. Alone in the universe. I have walked this universe for 1300 years and seen more than my heart can bear.
There that castle it was a great center of learning of power and magic. The building used to hum with magical energy the very rocks of its foundation would pulsate as though they had a heart beat of their own. Some say that if you weren’t learned in the magical arts that if you set foot in the building you would quickly die.
This is an old wives tale a farce for those who don’t understand. It was often the students of the craft themselves who would be harmed or killed without properly preparing themselves.
This world used to be great. This world used to be full of life and substance, meaning and adventure. Our art, our craft is torn from us forcibly ripped from existence itself. We are powerless to stop them. Our only defense is to hide and pray for a better day. Maybe our brothers can open a gateway into another universe. I doubt it. There are too few of us now.
Our only defense is concealment. Even then it’s a fools errand.
Even my grand elixir which has kept me youthful and immortal for many centuries is losing it’s potency. I’m in good health but I expect I shall die soon. Soon for an immortal any way.
I suppose it started around the end of the dark ages. If you can call them that. It was the height of our empire a time of festival a time of war. The dragons were many and numerous. The giants. The unicorns. All gone now. These races still live at least shadows of them do.
Come the end of the dark ages reading became allowed instead of brothers and students of the art who were hand selected by great lineage, it became possible for the common folk to come and study at the great libraries. Little did we know the dangers, little did we know. Had we known we might have slain them for walking into the places of learning. But it seemed harmless enough.
Men who lacked the second sight, who were incapable of understanding the scared tomes of our ancestors could handle them without harm, without the usual purification rites. Our students employed them seeking knowledge that was long kept hidden.
The mundanes themselves learned to write the sacred language. Instead of writing weaving crafting every symbol for it’s exact meaning. They would write in a plain language. Using our noble craft for menial tasks. And it worked. It worked all too well. A new power was born they called it science. He growls under his breath science that word is so vile I hate to spit it from my tongue.
This science is itself a form of magic a deep all pervasive magic. It’s written from the tongues of the ancients and it has perverted them. The farce is that it exists to help common men understand the universe around them. To find coherence in a chaotic world. He seethes from the very depths of his soul. No that’s not what science is. Science is a diabolical and powerful magic.
The mundanes have a power, a power like no other. In the days of old we taught our own that language is sacred that words have power. We taught them the old ways of forming syllables that would stir up the arcane forces from deep within the earth. We created great monuments to collect and harness these forces.
The men of learning, the men of science but lacked the second sight could not understand. Scriveners would translate our sacred tomes without knowing the rites needed to preserve the arcane forces within their pages.
These new tomes are dangerous. They contain reams of knowledge but not one lick of understanding. No hint of their direct and practical meaning. The sacred language the sigils of old written and ordered to be empty of meaning. This is dark and clever.
The belief of even the mundanes has power. It’s nothing compared to the masters of old but collectively they use it on a scale that our ancestors could never imagine. They train themselves in schools from a very young age. Their self delusion praising the almighty science and it’s illusion of rational thinking while turning around and using it as a shield a lock that inhibits the very ways of reason and understanding which make the arcane forces accessible to mortal men.
The sacred language creates the very foundations of the universe we live in. Never did we stop and think. Never could we have imagined that magic itself could be used to erase itself from existence.
Then the machines first by horses then by wood. Little did they know what they were doing. How could they? Each new development from this science further confounded the natures of the world. These machines draw the arcane forces into themselves.The elements of fire and water created steam the steam used to drive engines.
The land of the unicorns burned. Without their sacred groves and the waters within the unicorns could never reach maturity they could never grow their precious horns. The were captured and bred and domesticated. At long last the faith of the mundanes was that there were never unicorns and that horses could never grow horns. Or that perhaps Narwhals of the ocean or rhinoceros were perhaps unicorns. Don’t they know? Faith which is the root of all can not only create, it can also destroy. And so was the death of the proud race of the unicorn and the birth of the horse a simple alteration spell gone horribly wrong on a global scale.
These horses were made to work and pull carts their lot was an easy one. The proud dragons who were a source of great knowledge and wisdom. The theory of evolution was born of this science. The proud race of the dragons grew dumber and more lumbering. Idiots of what they once were so too the dragons passed into myth and fairy tales. And so were born the dinosaurs, which were transported 165 million years into the past to be killed by falling rocks and cold weather. A most humiliating demise for our most proud and noble brethren.
The springs and their healing waters still exist and still possess their power but water purification plants render them useless. Nobody will ever know that the bitter taste of these springs is what gives them their healing properties, that preserves health and restores youth.
The towers that once stood of our noble art were met with direct defiance. The mundanes with their rational training were immune to our spells. By virtue of their closed observation and faith in a mundane universe, the glow of the enchanted stones began to fade and disappear all together. While more machines grew to harness the forces of nature so too did our mage towers dwindle. At long last these too were common rocks. The rites to preserve their power was stricken from the memory of our brethren by mundanes “demanding to know the truth” and never being able to accept that magic was right in front of them the whole time. These new mundanes had perfect faith in a mundane world. And tremendous skill and talent in stealing faith from others. And so were once there were powerful mages towers, the mundanes believe to only be religion.
That’s their excuse for everything supernatural. It’s either fiction, or religion. It can never be anything else. Not possibly anything more advanced. Only religion. And even their view of religion is a crumbling empty shell of the vibrance it once was.
Mundanity is the power of emptiness. The power of rejection. The power to forget. The ability to see the truth and be blind to it. And worse demand, always demand more truth than what they were shown. Just so they can reject it just the same.
The power of mundanes is vast much more vast than anyone realizes. They don’t just ignore power. They aren’t just immune to it. They actively render it useless. A world that was once a thriving fairy land, is not far off from our modern earth today. Even if something supernatural happened right in front of a crowd of people it would be forgotten,dismissed as fiction before it was ever seen.
Even the demons fear to tread here now. Perhaps in time they too will fade.
Perhaps not. Of all things, a cruel world is something the mundanes will always believe in.
—- Seeker.
