wildestlogs | In Which Caroline Organizes a Town Hall

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In Which Caroline Organizes a Town Hall

Who: Everyone
What: Caroline holds court and everyone hashes it out over how to organize.
Where: The Heartstone.
When: After the leadership post on the network.
Warnings/Notes: Conversations may get intense due to the baggage characters are bringing to any conversation about authority, particularly structural authority. Threadhopping is encouraged; my notifs are off and you can treat this like a network post, just with face-to-face interaction. The mods reserve the right to shut down threads or the post entirely if it gets out of hand.

Caroline and Stacia have, by now, made little portable deer-hide cushions for every person they've counted up in the camp, all fifty three. It's taken them a while, and in the meantime, Stacia was on the mirror network announcing her candidacy for leadership, and Caroline was in the background making little tutting and tch noises. This is why she doesn't do the internet.

Finally, she gets her own mirror out and makes an announcement, then arranges the little cushions for everyone in a wide, multi-tiered circle, staggered so everyone has a view towards the center, all at perfect fifteen degree angles to the one next to them. She sets six little campfires to ensure everything's well-lit. And she folds her arms and she waits.

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:I don't mind telling you, but do you really want to talk about it here and now instead of watching the meeting? I suppose it's as safe as anywhere.:

[He might get more people coming up to talk. She'll notice in time to pause and wait it out, but she knows that can be annoying.]

:...Well, looks like I've been spared by the dyheli. 'For now', hah, and I'm not to talk to him again.:

[unsaid: whether she messed with Alloran's memory of the encounter or decided he was too much of an alien to risk that. Raist doesn't need to know she can alter memories.]

:The meeting's largely breaking up. I could have told them they wouldn't accomplish anything meaningful; the real issue seems to have been conflicting cultural expectations and people getting ahead of themselves in an effort to feel they have control over the situation:

:It's an old song, and they've sung it again. My dear, you're so cynical.:

[That observation is as approving as a smile.]

:And I suppose my fears were unfounded. Old proverb, older than I am: better to prepare and look foolish than not to prepare and look dead.:

:We have a similar one, and I'm quite fond of it:

:Tell it to me? I’m sure there are more elegant ways to phrase mine but, eh.:

:There are variations. The one I grew up with is "better to have and not need than need and not have." The dwarves say "better a heavy pack than a quick death." And the elves say "Cutting back is easier than growing," which makes rather more sense in their own tongue - it's a very contextual language.:

:Hm. I like that.:

[She knows her name is just one of those words that appears in different forms in most languages - that's part of the point of a lyke-name, she's been called hundreds of words that mean need - but it's still amusing hearing it unexpectedly.]

:As to your question, there are multiple Gifts often regarded as magic. Exactly how many depends who you ask, they're lumped together or split apart sometimes and there is overlap and interconnection. The three most generally recognized categories are Mind Magic, Healing, and True Magic. Mind Magic is purely mental and takes no tools or rituals. Healing takes the energy from one person and greatly influences the natural healing processes of a body; knowing how it's put together helps to guide it, but it's not necessary. True Magic, the closest to what you understand as magic, can duplicate some of the effects of the other kinds, but it's much more difficult and not as subtle.:

[Not that she uses tools or rituals or special words in her magic. At high levels, in Velgarth, those are obsolete.]

:We also differentiate between healing and true magic - we call it High Sorcery - but that's because healing is a gift of the gods, one that's vanished from Krynn. I think I've mentioned it before? High Sorcery is a refinement of the wild or primal sorcery that filled the world in the days just after creation. The three gods of magic taught mortals how to harness and shape it, and founded the three Orders of Wizardry.

We don't have anything like what you describe as mind magic. There are techniques that can replicate some aspects, but they're spells and rituals of High Sorcery. Possibly a true cleric, if any existed, could do similar.:

:Hah. One of the subsets of True Magic is called High Magic. The unversed think of it as the only 'real' magic, and it is the one with the most power and fewest rules attached, the one that takes the most study, the one that can best mimic the other kinds. A Healer can lay hands on a wound and coax it to clean and close without even knowing that the heart pushes blood through the body. Meanwhile a mage can create spells that heal and even enchant objects with healing spells, but if she doesn't know what she's doing, at best the spells are unreliable. If she forces it and causes the body to change without knowledge, disaster. The body is a stunningly intricate construction and must be listened to in places, overridden in others. It's such a lot of work and Healers do the service so well that most mages don't bother to learn all that much. Of course, sometimes you get someone with both Mage-Gift and Healing-Gift, and she can be extraordinary.:

[Need herself is a very good mage-healer but not a Healer.]

:Hmm. Our gods as a whole haven't had such a heavy hand in what humans and our creations do with our different forms of magic since before my time. Religions restrict and meddle and claim the gods feel this way and that, and there are some straggler and upstart gods who do, but overall they've long agreed to let us set our own course and interfere in only limited ways.:

:Hmm. Divine healing doesn't seem to have required any knowledge in particular, though many clerics were medically adept. The cleric implores the god for, in effect, a miracle; the god delivers according to the cleric's piety and the plausibility of the miracle.:

[it always sounded a bit like a protection racket, to him, but given that he's fond of his own goddess, he generally keeps that to himself]

:I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are the clerics of your world not granted divine powers?:

:I see. Certainly priests can appeal to their gods for a miracle and that may include striking some bargain for healing, but our gods prefer to work indirectly. Part of my purpose involves, hah, answering prayers for certain of them.:

[There's flakes of memory here, too fast to really track. The clearest involves Kethry with a shattered spine, bleeding into the snow as Tarma weeps and pleads and holds her limp hands around Need's hilt.]

:They aren't. When a god gives me power to heal someone, it's the same as the power I take from ley lines or people. Priests who are mages learn spells particular to a god's followers, perhaps. Divine magic is different in degree from human magic, but not in kind. Urtho proved that it's within human capacity to create a new species from nothing, even, I'll give him that. Or it was.:

:Creating life? Now that is truly blasphemy:

[Raistlin is being wry]

:Or so I was taught. Divine magic is different in kind, because of the nature of the gods. A mortal imposing their will on the world as mages do is fundamentally an unnatural thing, tolerated only because the gods of magic speak for us in the divine courts, and govern us accordingly. Mortals are part of the world, not set above it as gods are. Gods are of the world and yet not, part and apart, and it is in their fundamental nature to be what they are. Mortal magicians, on the other hand, choose their natures. It's the difference between actually being a storm, and merely being able to blow as hard as one.:

[that's what they taught him, anyway]

[Need chuckles at his tone.] :How about making that life to worship its creator and struggle greatly to question him at all, even long after he's gone?:

[Some images of gryphons and tervardi. ...It's probably a good thing that Urtho didn't become a lich.]

:I understand that it's different for you, but that seems uncomfortably separate to my perspective. For me, magic is a byproduct of life. Living things generate it the way wood generates heat and light as it's consumed by fire. Some of those living things can sense it, and if they can sense it, they can use it. Our gods, the greater ones anyway, only judge us for so much.:

:Your gods sounds eminently sensible. Though far be it from me to judge. Mortal that I am:

[if the gods haven't been bothered to come out of their sulk in three hundred years since the Cataclysm, they're not going to bother to reach out and zap him across dimensions]

:My experience, of my own magic, however, has been that it does not come from within me, except in the sense that I take it into myself when I memorize the spells that hold it - except here. That is what I meant when I said my magical seemed to have fundamentally changed. I can run out of magic now, with spells uncast - that shouldn't be possible, normally. Magic doesn't run out. Only the wizard's strength fails:

:You've had a Cataclysm? It can't be the same as ours.:

[She keeps much about the Cataclysm from coming across just yet.]

:Fascinating. The change for me is in the physics. And in Magesight not working.: [She's really, really put out by this! In Velgarth you can't work magic if you can't See it! which comes through a bit.] :A High Mage who's something called an Adept might say something similar about only the wizard's strength having limits. One of the hallmarks of High Magic is the ability to harvest magic from elsewhere instead of only relying on a personal reserve. The more highly she's ranked the more potent the sources she can tap. Adepts can take magic from the most powerful sources we know, but handling it like so is an effort.:

:Not unless your Cataclysm involved the gods lobbing a great big flaming volcano down in the middle of the continent, no. According to legend, the Kingpriest of Istar offended the gods by seeking to set himself as either their equal or superior, depending on the version you hear. They retaliated by destroying him, the city of Istar, and half of the continent. And since then, they've kept to themselves, abandoning the mortal realm to its own devices. All save the gods of magic, but they care only for their own.

Nowadays, most people believe the gods never existed, or if they did, they're never coming back. Except mages, but no one asks our thoughts on the subject, and we might not share it if they did:

Edited 2021-12-15 00:27 (UTC)

:It certainly didn't. I might say the opposite, actually. That is... extreme. Surely a lightning strike would have been enough, or something more creative and localized if lightning might be taken as natural.:

[Need doesn't approve of these gods, is coming through almost as clearly as if she'd out and said it. Being from Velgarth, and being an immortal entity who's friendly with horse angels and various actual gods, she has absolutely no compunctions about judging.]

:All right. Why wouldn't they ask mages?:

[Raistlin doesn't really have an opinion about the Cataclysm one way or another; it happened, and the gods are gone, save for the moons of magic. Since he has no idea that the gods are going to return in his lifetime, he's never given particular thought to any of them other than his patrons]

:Because most of Ansalon isn't entirely convinced mages aren't the reason that the Kingpriest fell. Mages are unnatural and dangerous, and anything they have to say on the subject of the gods, or the Cataclysm, is bound to be suspect in some way, or serve some agenda. Even the White Robes aren't fully trusted, and they're about as sanctimonious a bunch of a hall monitors as you're ever going to meet:

:I suppose if they're afraid of consequences for half a continent that would engender suspicion. Still. That's tremendously foolish and short-sighted.:

[Krynn is just sounding worse and worse tbh.]

:Shall I tell you about Velgarth's Cataclysm? It was two thousand years ago and entirely the work of human mages. I was there.:

:Please do.:

[oh boy storytime!]

:If I'm not going to take hours, there are just two major players - Ma'ar, the Mage of Black Flames, and Urtho, the Mage of Silence. The two most powerful mages in all the world, and in that time, that meant a lot more than it would today. I've mentioned Ma'ar before as using a dyrstaf; he rose to power and got command of a powerful nation called Predain, then immediately started ethnic cleanses and then sending armies into nearby countries. I never met him myself, but I know a great deal about him.

Meanwhile, Urtho was... oh, I'll admit it. I was fond of Urtho. He was brilliant, of course. I can't describe what it was like to feel him thinking, relentlessly, about everything, every moment. Every other mage who created a sentient race took a species of animal and altered it to whatever degree; he modified someone else's attempt, tried it himself for practice, and then he took his team of hundreds of mages, because he was also incredibly charismatic, and created the gryphons, something entirely new. He had a way of being very interested and able to pick apart and improve on... well, anything. My work understanding the human body and deconstructing others' spells included.:

[Need sends Raistlin a mostly-clear, slightly-scribbled image of a man who doesn't look like a powerful mage. He's very tall and thin, with waist-length curly silver-white hair, huge gray eyes, and an intent, soothing fascination with whoever he's looking at. This is the kind of person who the unwary would mistake for a scribe. ...He also slightly resembles Need's human self. It's not a familial resemblance. Something in the nose, the jawline, maybe the brows suggest that they are, if not the same race, somewhere adjacent.]

:He would have been very happy to continue experimenting and creating art and magic, but you see, his kinsfolk were among the ones Ma'ar was hunting down and killing. One thing led to another, and then they were each leading vast armies against each other. Drawn by their reputations or outright called up, mages signed on from everywhere in droves, my bearer and I included. Those years of conflict are generally called the Mage Wars. It's a terribly generic name, but there had never been two Sorceror-Adepts in that sort of position before, or such a concentration of mages. It was... very exciting, sometimes, and concerning as well.:

:But of course, a war between mages can only end one way, can't it?: This was why the gods of magic had intervened in the Age of Dreams, founding the orders of wizardry and regulating the conduct of mages. Because mages had been free once, free to make war and found empires, and as a result there were still places where the grass would never grow.

:Hmm. In a manner of speaking.: Meaning not really, or not the way he's thinking, but there are some parallels.

:In the end Urtho was hit with miranda thorns - so, dying, but with a little time left. He got his armies and staff evacuated, staggering out with as many books and artifacts as they could carry, and set off his final weapons. One there in his Tower, one hundreds of miles away in Ma'ar's palace. I can't say I had a hand in designing those weapons directly, but some decades before, he'd wanted to know how I can defend against other magic. He made some notes and speculated about using these principles to create a "self-sustaining dysjunction", and then he got distracted by something. Hummingbird metabolism, maybe.:

There's definitely something she's not saying about how she defends against other magic. Need is... in a distant way, she's grim. More sober than she was, but she can't work up the depths of feeling she thinks this apocalypse probably deserves, and so on some level it's just sort of interesting. She remembers the fear and the uncertainty. It's far away now.

:Apparently, he remembered. That weapon released the magic in spelled items and long-lasting spellwork. Violently. Part of that magic turned to heat and force, part twisted into strings that went on to affect whatever else it touched, and on in a chain. There were so many that they even set off materials that weren't enchanted but would have taken magic well. Forged metal. Crystals, even unmined in the ground. Hardwood. Then there's what it did to mages, and the flow of magic, and living things. They didn't die, most of them, besides those that were caught in explosions, but a lot of them wanted to. The worst of the effects were around the epicenters, but storms swept the world. Many gods died or folded into each other. Civilization as I knew it, at least on the continent, ended. The world became much more chaotic and dangerous. That was the Cataclysm.:

An image - a vast glassine-plated crater, hundreds of feet deep and so big across that only Need's intimation suggests the other side and that it's crater-shaped at all. Around it, miles and miles of wasteland, all flattened trees and ash and sometimes an acre or two of glassy fused ground. Around that, life, starting with unknown plants like single hairs sprouting in the ash, transitioning to a riotous tangle of plants and animals and people fused together into bizarre new things. Poison and thorns and long teeth and claws are common features. This too is a ring, a broad and irregular one. Past it there are still strange creatures and evidence of great fires and storms and explosions, and whole cities have been leveled, but the world is more recognizable.

Edited 2021-12-17 11:58 (UTC)

[In return, he shows her the Blood Sea of Istar, or at any rate what he knows of it. He's never had the chance to see it himself, but he's studied maps and read accounts. A vast wound, shattering the continent, where the ocean had rushed in. The waters are tained red from the clay of the land that had once been the heart of the Istaran Empire, though the fanciful claim it's the blood of the dead, damned by the old gods for their unrepentant sins. Maelstroms and whirlpools wrack the center, a mass of un-navigable storms that periodically wrack the shores.]

:The Cataclysm also cracked open the land to the west, near my homeland, Abanasinia, creating the New Sea.

[Two maps, placed side by side: before and after.]

:Note the Plains of Dust to the south - the work of a mortal mage, the greatest in living memory. A cautionary tale - he reached too far, and failed, and destroyed himself and all you see there as a consequence:

Edited 2021-12-18 03:19 (UTC)

:I see. And I suppose if your gods won't clean that up, they won't touch the Plains, either. What did he reach for?:

[She investigates this like it's a figurine he's offering in an open palm, turning it over, considering the implications of things being so turbulent even after centuries. Anything called a Cataclysm has to be big. This is more damage to the land than hers. More lingering effects. Of course, powerful as Urtho had been he hadn't actually been a god, and Need thinks his weapon hadn't been intended to alter the world.]

:Urtho, and the Mage Wars in general, aren't taken as a cautionary tale. Partly because there's no relevant lesson; it will be more thousands of years before magic recovers enough that mages could reach those heights again. Partly because most of those who built the world as it became were part of Urtho's armies and support staff, and they loved him. Partly because it's been such a long time, and records are so fickle, that almost everyone has forgotten.: [It's uncanny how those few who remember him still love him. Even the Shin'a'in regard him as flawed but good. Need's opinion is more deeply mixed. She thinks of Urtho's weapon as dangerously short-sighted and careless of those he left behind. On Velgarth, though, the gods who lived hadn't abandoned their peoples.]

:When Urtho's kinfolk returned to their homelands to find them as I've shown you, they split between those who renounced magic and those who refused to give it up. The Clans were sundered into two peoples. The Star-Eyed intervened for both. She taught the magic-users how to cleanse the twisted lands and tasked them with doing so, for as many generations as it would take. For those who swore off magic, She turned the land of the crater into the Plains of Sacrifice, after their elders agreed to die and those left swore the service of all the generations to come after them. She came off well in those arrangements. The Tayledras and Shin'a'in are almost universally devout and eager to do anything she asks, even now.:

[Raistlin showed her a couple of maps, so Need returns the gesture. I don't have links, unforch. ...They're almost unrecognizable except that some mountain ranges and rivers are placed similarly - the rivers have different courses and everything has different names - and that when she overlays them, Urtho's Tower is at the center of the Dhorisha Plains, as the High Palace is at the center of Lake Evendim. Both are perfectly round. This continent is also large enough that neither map includes coastline.]

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