Mistakes and Magic

The worse mistake ever made by the nations of Eshara World started in a large nation named Askalandrul.

This was a Polar, Temperate nation, with a small portion of its territory in Equatorial clime. Shaped as a scimitar, or a New Moon, accompanying the coast line and the spine of a mountain formation. They had a strong centralized govern, and a ugly recent history of resisting invasion and separatist movements implanted by foreigner nations. Or, at least, patrocinated by them.

Here, a govern as democratic as any, ruled by a Senatorial Delegation, decided to concentrate all the mages of the nation in one city. Those children born in this city who didn’t showed potential for magic would be moved to the capital of Askalandrul by the age of 7. There they would be raised in internship, receive high quality education, status, and comfort. According to the high status of their parents, and their services to the nation.

Is easy to understand why someone thought that was a splendid idea.

The plan was to create more interaction between mages. To favour the atmosphere of that sort of mix between competition and cooperation that helps both academic and magical activities. Also, they expected that more mages, and more powerful mages, would be born, from unions between people with mage descendance.

Like most really huge disasters that one started as a marvellous success. Because, of course, they were correct.

Ashkalandrul got more mages, and more powerful ones. Other nations stole the concept and started implementing their own mage cities too. Ashkalandrul was ahead of everyone else a couple of decades or two, and that sort of advantage is huge in economic and geopolitical fields.

In just a few generations they had so many mages that was necessary to build other mage cities.

Practically all children born from mage families in those places was a mage. Servants and slaves became gradually less necessary, replaces by spells. Magic grew so much in power than they started using the term “High Magic” to differentiate it from what the lesser nations still had to rely on. Instead of “mages” those who used High Magic called themselves wizards.

So, they were immensely powerful. So much so that there was nothing the govern of Askalandrul could do against them. To **** obedience or demand their services.

Their High Magic allowed Mage Cities to build ultra-productive farm rings, and achieve self-sufficiency.

They connected all “Wizard World” by teleportation portals. Could have slaved the non-wizards with minimal effort. Instead to do so, they just declared independency and cut their ties with the countryside and old settlements of Pre High Magic Ages.

Funny how such a simple action changed everything for the nations that had existed up to that moment.

They could have just discounted the territory of mage cities from their own. Forgetting wizards existence, the world was the same.

Just because the wizards and their high magic existed, they didn’t had to change.

Then changed.

Every single nation in the world, save for a few xenophobic isolationists and barbaric tribes in pre-magical state.

No one could take seriously any govern, knowing that a single wizard was able to destroy entire armies without leave his tower. All efforts of humanity became focused in lick the balls of mages (metaphorically, more often than not) to get scraps from the table of High Magic.

That was the end of National Governs. The start of a long period of populational decline and moral degradation between the external farm rings of Mage Cities.

The Golden Age of High Magic, is the entire History of High Magic, from the point of view of those excluded from the joy of being wizards themselves.

Only wizards and slaves could live in mage cities, that was the law imposed on mages at some point. By non-mages. In the age of wizardry, slavery was abolished for most practical purposes. So, only wizards lived in their cities. The privilege of being the rare exception for that rule was the highest dream of those who lived outside the Metropolis.

Many generations later, that ended poorly for the wizards. When that happened not be in a Metropolis became the enviable condition. As you know.

For a very brief period of time. Because them all those who where in a Metropolis had died.

Nowadays no one remember that our world was once called Eshara. True to be told, few even remember the existence of a world beyond the limits of their narrow regional interests.

We are barbarians compared to the basic understandings of culture and civilization that our ancestors had during the most primitive days of National Unifications. When magic was present but not determinant to daily life.

Now we don’t have High Magic. We have lost most the magic that conduced humanity to High Magic. To add humiliation to injury, we don’t even have the non-magical knowledge that was common place before the first Mage City was build. We could learn medicine and engineering from those primitive fellows who lived feudal lives before the Magical Ages. In most cases, we would be improving ourselves.

What we have, that they didn’t had, is a world populated by magical monsters and destructive miasmas from the abyss.

We are that lucky.