Urtho gazed at an oil lamp one evening and mused, “If it were a bowl of oil, touched by this fire, it would explode. But it is a lamp, and the wick is restricted, so only the wick burns. It gives just a little light and heat, and that is just what I ask of it.” Urtho wrote this in one of his many notebooks, unaware that by doing so, he had just changed the history of the entire world and the spirit realms above and below it.
Urtho’s great accomplishment in the years after the salons was to develop a set of “weights and measures” for magic use. It all began with that first observation from the oil lamp. His title, Mage of Silence, was because spellwork at the time put out a huge “signature” that could be detected even at long distances; but Urtho’s spellwork used exactly as much power as was needed and no more. Thus, “silence,” and others feared and respected the fact that Urtho could have operations going and operatives active right beside them that they simply couldn’t detect. It became the bluff that saved countless lives.
Magery, like anything, has its trends and fashions. Animal husbandry enhanced by magic came into fashion, and from that came something called “uplifting.” Creatures could be made stronger and swifter, yes, but also smarter. Adepts, by this time numbering in the scores and as influential as kings, became bored with being the era’s equivalent of field cannon. Several put their knowledge to work on improving horse breeds, and others toward creating giant versions of small but deadly creatures like ice-drakes.
The hertasi could be described as semisentient at the time Urtho picked up where a predecessor of his, Khal Herta, had left off. The wild hertasi were mild-tempered reptiles, available in large quantity, living fairly simple lives. After Herta’s experimental work, hertasi had simple structures, organized hunting and fishing, and rudimentary medicine. Several of the bands settled at Ka’venusho were former followers of Herta who adopted Urtho when Herta passed on. They brought Khal Herta’s notes and all of the hertasi with them, knowing that the Kyamvir’s unified tribes would easily subjugate the hertasi if any stayed in their native northern swamps.
Urtho took the approach of increasing the intelligence of hertasi social leaders, encouraging them to breed with their subordinates and then increasing the intelligence of their offspring. It created a surprisingly seamless acceptance among the hertasi, for those who were far smarter than any had been before were their own children, not strangers from an Adept’s lab.
Part of Khal Herta’s uplift process was instilling a mild compulsion in the hertasi to be appreciative for what they had become, and Urtho left that intact. This lives on, into the current timeline, as the unstoppable helpfulness the hertasi as a whole have. Even the grouchiest hertasi knows that they “owe” Urtho for having as good a life as they do. Interestingly, that compulsion did not carry through into the tyrill, the “bigger siblings” of the hertasi. Urtho constantly struggled with ethical questions of practicality and free will, and when the compulsion bred out of the tyrill, he simply let it go, almost as if he were making up for its presence in the hertasi.
It is also important to mention here that Urtho was but one man, but the work of uplifting a species was done by a small legion of lesser Mages working under Urtho’s direction. Urtho’s greatest work, the gryphons, took forty years of constant design and spellwork by nearly three hundred lower-ranked Mages, and each of them had a personal staff of helpers. Urtho’s Tower had as many sublevels as it had floors, plus scores of outbuildings. Every day Urtho made the rounds of the workrooms and directed the swarms of probability sprites that tested each organ and behavior of the species. Urtho is the Great Mage who got the credit, but thousands of others supported him, including the survivors who would become the Tayledras.
Kal’enel, the goddess revered by the Hawkbrothers is, like every other Velgarthian deity, a nonphysical creature of limited abilities. When the Cataclysm was on their horizon, the deities of Velgarth could see that it was much more than they could handle. Much as a ship’s crew cannot stop a storm but can choose a course and batten down the hatches, the deities that had genuine prophets knew the Cataclysm was coming and could only adjust their sails, so to speak. The most compassionate of deities made plans and worked great magics to preserve their followers. Some deities, to put it plainly, blundered, did not survive, and are only remembered in historical documents.
The Cataclysm was so horrible, even for the gods, because it consisted of one of Urtho’s weapons that they knew little about and could not counter.
Indeed, to attempt to counter it would only worsen it.
As you may remember, a “spell” is the use of magical and nonmagical physics, in a structure, to produce a desired effect. A “spell” is a process, not a thing. Its nearest analogy might be the construction of a simple arch bridge, where specially shaped materials depend upon each other both to stay cohesive as a bridge shape and to perform the task of being a bridge.
Urtho’s weapon was an “unspelclass="underline" ” a “self-sustaining disjunction,” in his words, and it was not some nuclear fireball one might imagine from something named a cataclysm. To continue the bridge analogy, it caused the pieces of the bridge to cease to have a hold on each other; the friction and pressure required to maintain an arch simply broke down into thousands of fissures, and the bridge ceased to be a bridge. Catastrophically. And then the debris from the bridge caused whatever it touched to disintegrate as the bridge did, and so on.
Like most things the Mage of Silence created, it began slowly, and it initially spread from its epicenter at a pace similar to a walk. Its wave peaks were higher and closer together at its epicenters, each lengthening out until their “bow wave” reached a level of equilibrium where the arcs between magical materials were simply too far apart to sustain the effect. The edges of Lake Evendim and the Dhorisha Plains resulted from the settling of debris pushed along by the waves when they reached this exhaustion.
The disjunction, most simply put, broke down the links between energy fields that sustained long-lasting spellwork. When a spell or item’s power was violently released, its “magical shrapnel” struck the next nearest one, and so forth. Therefore, the enchantment that helped a land barge float would not just collapse, it would fly apart in many thousands of “strands” that would “grasp onto” any other magical field or device in its path like chainshot. They, in turn, would lose their cohesion, and their own magical threads would fly out to latch onto the next device or Mage energy, and so forth, throwing off light, heat, and debris.
The gross effect of this during the Cataclysm was that raw strings of magic snagged onto enchantable material like, say, a good bit of hardwood or a sword with a well-made crystalline forging, and arced across them in heat and light while physically pushing them away from the disjunction’s epicenter. The ground lunged upward from magic-induced liquefaction, while under the surface, crystals and other enchantment-receptive materials snatched up bits of loose raw magic and then exploded, bursting from the ground at the next wave-peak. The ground level dropped by as much as two hundred feet as the disjunction wave spread outward, due to the sudden aeration and then collapse of earth; what was left behind was not only tightly packed, but in many cases, entire acres were fused into glassine plates, such as where a magical ax or bow once lay.
Urtho’s Tower itself, though, had been designed to collapse in on itself in a very specific way. Its hundreds of keystones were enchanted to project light. Most people thought of this as a mere convenience, but Urtho did this knowing that if the disjunction was ever unleashed—and odds were if things ever got that bad, it would involve the Tower—the Tower’s calculated implosion would safely entomb and preserve the chambers below it. This is why the Tower’s ground floor was so thick.