We have ill news from our friends on the Subcontinent. The offensive in the Hindu Kush has failed catastrophically. Survivors report of Atlantean aerial vehicles of a type never before seen, armored and enclosed chariots that repel every known assault spell.
To make matters a hundred times worse, the armored chariots spray a deadly potion in their wake. The potion is clear and odorless. Many of the resistance fighters on the ground first believed it to be natural precipitation and believed the demise of their colleagues to be casualties of battle. But afterward, when massive civilian deaths were tallied in the armored chariots’ flight paths, our friends had no choice but to conclude that Atlantis had unveiled a terrifying new weapon, death rain.
—From A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion
14. IT CANNOT be stressed enough that blood magic is not the same as sacrificial magic. Sacrificial magic, needless to say, has always been taboo in mage realms. Mages who choose to break the taboo usually do so among nonmages, manipulating local religious rituals to suit their own ends.
Blood magic does not require the taking of lives or the severing of body parts. Furthermore, its spells, contrary to popular belief, do not drain the body. Only a very minute amount of blood is needed to power a spell, and that blood must come from willing participants. Forcibly spilled blood neither keeps secrets nor binds anyone in oaths.
—From The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer
15. IT BEARS remembering that advances in magic do not always follow a linear progression: Some developments commonly regarded as modern are but recent rediscoveries of what had come before. Court physicians for the rulers of Mesopotamia, for example, had formulated entire classes of prophylactic spells. The spells were eventually lost to war, fire, and other ravages of Fortune, but records survived to attest to their miraculous effectiveness.
To consider a more current example, magical historians have argued for years that the venture-book, perhaps the most successful magical application in a generation, is but a commercial adaptation of devices that had been employed for centuries by the House of Elberon to instruct and train its young heirs, especially in times of adversity. Newly unveiled documents concerning the Last Great Rebellion seem to indicate that Prince Titus VII indeed had at his disposal devices that performed many of the functions of present-day venture-books, except better.
—From “Everything Old is New Again,” The Delamer Observer,
2 December, Year of the Domain 1151
16. THE COALITION for Safer Magic and the League of Sensible Parenting—henceforth referred to as the undersigned—hereby petition the Ministry of Education to remove all mentions of mage-to-animal transmogrification from textbooks intended for primary and secondary educational establishments.
Each year, dozens of young magelings, piqued by the allusion in these textbooks, attempt such transmogrifications. They concoct dreadful, frequently toxic potions, misapply spells, and cause fires and explosions at home and at school—not to mention harm to their persons. In this past winter alone, there has been a mageling unable to breathe normally from having grown gills; another turned nearly blind after acquiring bat vision; and a third who lost all his hair by molting. That the cases have been reversible do not mitigate their severity.
—From Petition No. 4391, lodged with
the Ministry of Education, 21 April, Year of the Domain 1029
17. THE BANE’S public embrace of mind mages marked a watershed event in his ascendance. Until then, mind mages, even those valued as tools of torture and extraction, had always been kept out of view, not acknowledged and certainly never honored.
But the Bane brought them out into the open and gave them some of the highest offices of his empire. And not just those of Atlantean birth but mind mages from many realms, in the secure knowledge that their first loyalty would always be to him, who elevated them to positions of trust and distinction, and not to the native realms that had treated them with fear and loathing.
—From A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion
18. THE POWER of a potent mind mage is often compared to that of a drill, boring through the skull to reach its quarry. But the truth is slightly more complex. In a probe, the mind of a mind mage, though dominant, is in a sense as exposed as the mind of its prey, as vulnerable as it is devastating.
—From The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer
19. AS ANYONE who had read a story of misunderstanding knows, overhearing part of a conversation, without the proper context, can lead to devastatingly mistaken conclusions.