The Darkfire Wizard and Wars
The Darkfire Wars
The Darkfire wars are worse than anything the people of Glence had experienced before. Always before, the wars were among the wizards, or against another country, this is the first time that a war was waged by a wizard against everyone. Glence is a nation that has always experienced conflict, intrigue, and violence as the different Provinces and the different Wizards fight for control. However, in its long history, it has only known two wars that compare with the scope and significance of the Darkfire wars.
The first was close to two thousand years ago, when Lisbet D’Loradon the Lapis Wizard overthrew the hereditary heir to the High Throne and began the tradition of magical merit being the sole determination of worthiness to rule. This reign is better remembered for setting the basis for one of the few laws that is enforced within all the Provinces of Glence, namely, the prohibition of stealing the magical forces of other Wizards. Lisbet, arguably the most powerful Wizard that Glence has ever known, not only discovered how to strip the magic from her fellows, but then proceeded to increase her own power by systematically draining those who refused to worship her. The war to remove her caused Wizards to take sides in a way that had never been known before, and left several long legacies in the politics of Glence. These include: Only the powerful can control the powerful, Blood is an indicator but not the sole source of power, stealing magic is worse than murder, your worth is determined by your magical power. However, that war was largely restricted to the magical community, with the lowest levels of Glence society unaffected since they possess neither magic or bloodlines.
The second war to compare in scope was the Telimarian War, when the expanding borders of Glence encountered the Telimarian Empire, where a natural immunity to magical energies resulted in the first border war that threatened more than one Providence. Further, Telimarian metal not only nullifies magic in its vicinity, but can break a Wizard’s ability to control magical energies all together. Several generations worth of Wizards lost power and status before Glence was able to raise a non-magical army strong enough to oppose Telimarian victories. Eventually, a mere hundred years ago, a truce was reached between the two nations, but it is still very much an uneasy agreement between countries with vastly different moral stances concerning magic. A positive result of the conflict was an increase in opportunities for non-magical citizens of Glence and the development of a standing army and the potential for status through physical might. A negative ramification is the increased paranoia of the mages that their world order has been threatened.
The Darkfire wars are unique in that it is the first ‘war’ that does not differentiate between magical and non-magical victims. Traditional non-targets, such as the Breliven Province and the Court, are attacked, random victims whether high noble family or poor village are razed with equal aggression. The Darkfire mage is not interested in conquering or ruling; he seems focused on nothing more than sheer destruction. In the face of this chaos, a variety of different people, mage and non mage, take advantage of the opportunity to battle for control.
The Darkfire Wizard
The Wizards of Glence do not actually know who the Darkfire Wizard is. According to their paradigm, they think they know him to be a powerful Wizard, possibly of one of the Highest blood lines as a rogue D’Loradon.
The truth is that the Darkfire Wizard is not someone that Glence would normally recognize as a high magic user. Prior to the Darkfire wars, Bartholomew D’Kenp was a low level military officer and veteran of the bitter end of the Telimarian war, who was reduced from his Wizard status by a gunshot injury sustained that striped him of his War magics, joined the military. Once a contender for the throne of Kenp, he was forced to pursue power through the military instead and was well known for his intense hatred of the enemy. Unwilling to be a member of the unmagical masses, he secretly experimented with various Telimarian metals and long over looked magics, until he uncovered references to weapons left over from Lisbet D’Loradon’s reign.
He sought out hidden research facilities deep in the Loradon mountains and experimented with what he found there. By combining the Fire magic artifacts with Telimarian metal, Bartholomew produced Darkfire. The initial weapon is metal infused with contaminated blood. Once the rusty metal comes into contact with fresh blood, it activates and turns that blood into a contaminate. When rigged to explode, the metal bombs produce a very hot burning darkfire. The real kicker is where the Life energy that the Darkfire consumes goes - it gets funneled back to Bartholomew and makes him stronger. Every life the darkfire takes strengthens him. But it also drives him deeper into madness.
Using Darkfire, he seeks vengeance against both the wizards who rejected him after his fall and the non-mages who he considers compliant with Telimarians. His long term plan is to completely overthrow the traditions of Glence by destroying the unifying components of the country, and then to take over with a new breed of warriors who combine magic and physical might. Keeping his identity a secret, he has risen to a high rank in the military during the Darkfire wars and uses his influence to undermine any perceived success of the centralized government.
Darkfire contamination has several key stages: First is the initial exposure, where the darkfire metal sears flesh and poisons the blood, and if amputated within the first few hours, the victim has a solid chance of surviving without any other effects. Secondly, the darkfire burns through the blood stream, quickly eliminating most forms of magic and causing the body to endure a devastating fever. The only real question is how long the body can survive the constant draining of Life that the darkfire inflicts. Should a person endure long in this stage, they often begin vomiting or coughing up blood, as the magical poison eats away at internal organs and seeks to continue its spread. This blood, like any blood the person infected sheds, is highly contagious and should be treated as a hazard.
Existential Questions
The primary, repeating theme in all of the stories of Glence lies in the experience of being magicless in a setting where magic is most important. What is a wizard without magic? In the Lisbet war, the main character struggles with slowly losing her magic as the queen, who she supports, drains it, while another one of the main characters is a magicless member of the royal family. In the Telimarian war, one of the main characters is a wizard working with the constant fear that his magic will be taken away, while another main character’s magic is made erratic and she is reduced to being a disrespected mage who is still using every speck of magic she has and showing how a little power can go a long way. In this Darkfire war story, the question plays out with Ioann and Bartholomew.
Bartholomew purposely set out to violate the laws of the land in order to gain magic, since he has none of his own. Ioann goes down the same dark path out of his desperation to have magic after his was taken away. Both characters make the conscious choice that it is better to be an evil wizard than not one at all, though they each have different motivations. Part of the intention of the plot is to bring Ioann into parallel with Bartholomew, so that when they finally face each other, Ioann needs to face that he has become the very enemy he is dead-set on destroying.
Ioann’s story purposely contrasts with a classic hero paradigm. It starts off similar, with the character being born into privilege, and then leaving home to receive special training. However, instead of continuing on to epic adventures and then ultimately have a fall from grace due to hubris, a random act of chance breaks him out of that cycle and into a more tragic one.
Ultimately, his story is doomed to an unhappy ending. He has to choose, in the bitter end, what is more important to him: revenge or redemption. Down the path of revenge lies power, might, control, and the destruction of everything that comes into his life. Ioann would become a force of destruction as powerful as the original Darkfire wizard, at the cost of the destruction of Breliven, a place that by that point he harbors a sense of betrayal enough to feel righteous in getting vengeance against. The other side of the path is effectively sacrificing himself to save it, and thwart the Darkfire wizard’s attempt to drain it of power.
He can only get to the point of being able to choose redemption through his experiences in the war; By interacting with people who have never had magic but have lived under the rule of mages. Ioann needs to be hit upside the head by people who think he’s being a proud little spoiled rich kid who is thinking only of himself. And he needs the friends that he makes, both the ones who give him space to confide and the ones who threaten to kill him if he goes to far. Ultimately, Ioann is forced to grow up, in order to truly say that there is something he loves more than his own life, pride, and power. Which is something Bartholomew will never be able to say
The Darkfire wars are worse than anything the people of Glence had experienced before. Always before, the wars were among the wizards, or against another country, this is the first time that a war was waged by a wizard against everyone. Glence is a nation that has always experienced conflict, intrigue, and violence as the different Provinces and the different Wizards fight for control. However, in its long history, it has only known two wars that compare with the scope and significance of the Darkfire wars.
The first was close to two thousand years ago, when Lisbet D’Loradon the Lapis Wizard overthrew the hereditary heir to the High Throne and began the tradition of magical merit being the sole determination of worthiness to rule. This reign is better remembered for setting the basis for one of the few laws that is enforced within all the Provinces of Glence, namely, the prohibition of stealing the magical forces of other Wizards. Lisbet, arguably the most powerful Wizard that Glence has ever known, not only discovered how to strip the magic from her fellows, but then proceeded to increase her own power by systematically draining those who refused to worship her. The war to remove her caused Wizards to take sides in a way that had never been known before, and left several long legacies in the politics of Glence. These include: Only the powerful can control the powerful, Blood is an indicator but not the sole source of power, stealing magic is worse than murder, your worth is determined by your magical power. However, that war was largely restricted to the magical community, with the lowest levels of Glence society unaffected since they possess neither magic or bloodlines.
The second war to compare in scope was the Telimarian War, when the expanding borders of Glence encountered the Telimarian Empire, where a natural immunity to magical energies resulted in the first border war that threatened more than one Providence. Further, Telimarian metal not only nullifies magic in its vicinity, but can break a Wizard’s ability to control magical energies all together. Several generations worth of Wizards lost power and status before Glence was able to raise a non-magical army strong enough to oppose Telimarian victories. Eventually, a mere hundred years ago, a truce was reached between the two nations, but it is still very much an uneasy agreement between countries with vastly different moral stances concerning magic. A positive result of the conflict was an increase in opportunities for non-magical citizens of Glence and the development of a standing army and the potential for status through physical might. A negative ramification is the increased paranoia of the mages that their world order has been threatened.
The Darkfire wars are unique in that it is the first ‘war’ that does not differentiate between magical and non-magical victims. Traditional non-targets, such as the Breliven Province and the Court, are attacked, random victims whether high noble family or poor village are razed with equal aggression. The Darkfire mage is not interested in conquering or ruling; he seems focused on nothing more than sheer destruction. In the face of this chaos, a variety of different people, mage and non mage, take advantage of the opportunity to battle for control.
The Darkfire Wizard
The Wizards of Glence do not actually know who the Darkfire Wizard is. According to their paradigm, they think they know him to be a powerful Wizard, possibly of one of the Highest blood lines as a rogue D’Loradon.
The truth is that the Darkfire Wizard is not someone that Glence would normally recognize as a high magic user. Prior to the Darkfire wars, Bartholomew D’Kenp was a low level military officer and veteran of the bitter end of the Telimarian war, who was reduced from his Wizard status by a gunshot injury sustained that striped him of his War magics, joined the military. Once a contender for the throne of Kenp, he was forced to pursue power through the military instead and was well known for his intense hatred of the enemy. Unwilling to be a member of the unmagical masses, he secretly experimented with various Telimarian metals and long over looked magics, until he uncovered references to weapons left over from Lisbet D’Loradon’s reign.
He sought out hidden research facilities deep in the Loradon mountains and experimented with what he found there. By combining the Fire magic artifacts with Telimarian metal, Bartholomew produced Darkfire. The initial weapon is metal infused with contaminated blood. Once the rusty metal comes into contact with fresh blood, it activates and turns that blood into a contaminate. When rigged to explode, the metal bombs produce a very hot burning darkfire. The real kicker is where the Life energy that the Darkfire consumes goes - it gets funneled back to Bartholomew and makes him stronger. Every life the darkfire takes strengthens him. But it also drives him deeper into madness.
Using Darkfire, he seeks vengeance against both the wizards who rejected him after his fall and the non-mages who he considers compliant with Telimarians. His long term plan is to completely overthrow the traditions of Glence by destroying the unifying components of the country, and then to take over with a new breed of warriors who combine magic and physical might. Keeping his identity a secret, he has risen to a high rank in the military during the Darkfire wars and uses his influence to undermine any perceived success of the centralized government.
Darkfire contamination has several key stages: First is the initial exposure, where the darkfire metal sears flesh and poisons the blood, and if amputated within the first few hours, the victim has a solid chance of surviving without any other effects. Secondly, the darkfire burns through the blood stream, quickly eliminating most forms of magic and causing the body to endure a devastating fever. The only real question is how long the body can survive the constant draining of Life that the darkfire inflicts. Should a person endure long in this stage, they often begin vomiting or coughing up blood, as the magical poison eats away at internal organs and seeks to continue its spread. This blood, like any blood the person infected sheds, is highly contagious and should be treated as a hazard.
Existential Questions
The primary, repeating theme in all of the stories of Glence lies in the experience of being magicless in a setting where magic is most important. What is a wizard without magic? In the Lisbet war, the main character struggles with slowly losing her magic as the queen, who she supports, drains it, while another one of the main characters is a magicless member of the royal family. In the Telimarian war, one of the main characters is a wizard working with the constant fear that his magic will be taken away, while another main character’s magic is made erratic and she is reduced to being a disrespected mage who is still using every speck of magic she has and showing how a little power can go a long way. In this Darkfire war story, the question plays out with Ioann and Bartholomew.
Bartholomew purposely set out to violate the laws of the land in order to gain magic, since he has none of his own. Ioann goes down the same dark path out of his desperation to have magic after his was taken away. Both characters make the conscious choice that it is better to be an evil wizard than not one at all, though they each have different motivations. Part of the intention of the plot is to bring Ioann into parallel with Bartholomew, so that when they finally face each other, Ioann needs to face that he has become the very enemy he is dead-set on destroying.
Ioann’s story purposely contrasts with a classic hero paradigm. It starts off similar, with the character being born into privilege, and then leaving home to receive special training. However, instead of continuing on to epic adventures and then ultimately have a fall from grace due to hubris, a random act of chance breaks him out of that cycle and into a more tragic one.
Ultimately, his story is doomed to an unhappy ending. He has to choose, in the bitter end, what is more important to him: revenge or redemption. Down the path of revenge lies power, might, control, and the destruction of everything that comes into his life. Ioann would become a force of destruction as powerful as the original Darkfire wizard, at the cost of the destruction of Breliven, a place that by that point he harbors a sense of betrayal enough to feel righteous in getting vengeance against. The other side of the path is effectively sacrificing himself to save it, and thwart the Darkfire wizard’s attempt to drain it of power.
He can only get to the point of being able to choose redemption through his experiences in the war; By interacting with people who have never had magic but have lived under the rule of mages. Ioann needs to be hit upside the head by people who think he’s being a proud little spoiled rich kid who is thinking only of himself. And he needs the friends that he makes, both the ones who give him space to confide and the ones who threaten to kill him if he goes to far. Ultimately, Ioann is forced to grow up, in order to truly say that there is something he loves more than his own life, pride, and power. Which is something Bartholomew will never be able to say