🔮 The Arcane Arts & Forbidden Knowledge
Magic Is Not Divine. It Is Stolen Life
The Truth They Hide
Every spell cast. Every portal opened. Every barrier raised.
All powered by human souls crystallized into stone.
The Empire calls it divine blessing. We call it what it is. Murder made beautiful.
The Nature of Magic
Magic is not mystical. It is physics the Empire does not want you to understand.
Energy flows through crystals. Crystals come from life. Life becomes power. Power maintains control.
Simple. Brutal. Hidden behind five centuries of religious propaganda.
Life Crystallized Into Power
Take a human. Perform the ritual. Add Essence. Three days of transformation. One perfect crystal.
The younger the victim, the purer the stone. Children under ten produce flawless gems. The Empire calls this "achieving crystalline perfection."
We call it murder.
These stones power everything. The portals between cities. The barriers against monsters. The lights that never dim. The throne that keeps Varel alive.
Every convenience. Every protection. Every miracle. All paid for in blood.
Fragments of Power
Not everyone can afford a Perfect Stone. So the Empire created Lenses. Fragments implanted directly into flesh.
A Lens in your hand lets you cast fire. A Lens in your eye lets you see through walls. A Lens in your heart... well, that makes you something else entirely.
But Lenses are leashes. The Empire controls production. Tracks every user. Can deactivate them remotely.
Freedom through magic? No. Slavery with extra steps.
The Catalyst of Change
Before stones. Before crystals. There is Essence. A powder that exists between states. Neither matter nor energy. Both. Neither.
Inhale it and you might become a Perfect Stone. Or you might survive and gain power. Or you might simply die screaming.
The Empire harvests it from living beings at the moment of death. Different creatures produce different types:
Verdant Essence: From nature. Green. Smells like spring rain. Promotes growth or cancer.
Solar Essence: From light. Gold. Burns to touch. Grants vigor or immolation.
Void Essence: From darkness. Black. Absorbs sound. Offers invisibility or erasure.
Street dealers cut it with sugar. Addicts snort it for visions. The desperate eat it hoping for power.
Most just die.
The Ancient Artifacts
Relics of the Lost Continent
Before the Empire. Before the corruption. There were artifacts of immense power.
Some say they were gifts from the gods. Others believe they were created by the first mages. The truth is lost to time.
What remains are fragments. Pieces of a greater whole. Each one containing power beyond comprehension.
🗡️ Weapons of Legend
🛡️ Armor of the Ancients
📿 Trinkets of Power
📜 Forbidden Tomes
The Art of Identification
Not all treasures reveal themselves immediately. Some require a trained eye. Others demand sacrifice.
The Forbidden Arts
Magic Without Lenses
The Empire says only those with Lenses can channel magic. They lie.
There are other ways. Older ways. Dangerous ways.
The Price of Power
Every path to magic demands sacrifice.
Lenses drain your life slowly. Blood magic takes it in spurts. Wild magic gambles with your soul. Essence consumption risks everything.
Choose carefully. Once you start walking a path, turning back becomes impossible.
Advanced Technologies
Arcane Innovations
The Empire restricts technology that threatens control. But innovation finds a way.
The Shadow Markets
Where Desperation Meets Opportunity
Beneath every major city. In forgotten tunnels. Behind false walls. The real economy thrives.
Where Dreams Go to Die
Dark rooms filled with sweet smoke. Bodies sprawled on dirty mattresses. Eyes glazed with visions of power.
They inhale Essence hoping for magic. Most just get addiction. The lucky ones die quickly. The unlucky ones linger for years.
Dealers cut their product with ground glass. Ash from crematoriums. Anything that glows. Anything that burns.
A gram costs a month's wages. Two grams cost your soul. Three grams and you become product yourself.
Trading in Crystallized Death
They know where Perfect Stones come from. They do not care.
Stolen from Empire vaults. Pried from dead mages' staffs. Harvested from battlefield corpses.
Each stone has a story. Usually ending in screams.
Buyers ask no questions. Sellers tell no truths. Everyone pretends not to notice the blood.
Surgeons of the Desperate
Back alley operations. No anesthetic. No guarantee of survival.
They will implant a Lens anywhere you want. Hand for fire magic. Eye for true sight. Heart for... something else.
Half die on the table. Another quarter die within days. The survivors become something between human and weapon.
The Empire executes grafters when caught. But there are always more. Poverty breeds desperation. Desperation breeds innovation.
Your Awakening
You survived what should have killed you. The Essence did not transform you into stone. It transformed you into something else.
Now you see what others cannot. Feel what others ignore. Know what others fear.
The Paths Before You
🗡️ The Warrior's Way
🔮 The Mage's Path
🌑 The Shadow's Road
⚖️ The Balance
What You Carry
Your burden is not just power. It is knowledge.
You know Perfect Stones are made from children.
You know the Empire's order costs thousands of lives.
You know Erevos offers freedom through dissolution.
You know there might be another way.
What will you do with these terrible truths?
"Technology is neither good nor evil. It simply reveals what was always there. The evil was not in the revelation. It was in what we revealed."
— Anonymous Rational College Scholar, Before His Execution