Lore
The lost pages, harbor rumours and the codex.
The lost pages#
Read the pages (spoilers)
Page one. "The first drain engines were not built. They were dug up — from under an old academy nobody remembers, in a country that no longer has a name."
Page two. "Where the engine drinks, the sky goes still. I have measured it: the stillness moves at the speed of a walking man, toward whatever holds the most magic."
Page three. "It is not weather. Weather has no preference."
Page four. "The void crystal at the engine's heart takes more than it can hold. It is always a quarter full of something that wants out."
Page five. "A small crystal cut from the same seam will sing when it is near its mother. I have one. It hums in my pocket as I write."
Page six. "There is a seam in the heart's housing — here, I have drawn it — where the growth did not close. One strike, in the right place, by hands with no magic in them."
Page seven. "If you break it, everything it drank goes home at once. I do not know what that will do to the people standing next to it. I am sorry. Break it anyway." — signed with a hand-drawn crossed circle.
Codex#
Codex: The Charter
Who may cast, and where, and for whom.
The Charter says who may cast, and where, and for whom. It was written after the war to keep magic in the Academy's hands, and it has kept it there. A registered mage carries papers. An unregistered one carries a price. The Excise enforce it at every Charter port, with brass meters and a great deal of patience.
Codex: The Lowborn
The column nobody chose.
Every citizen in the Charter register is written in black, while the Lowborn, working folk of the lower class, are written in crimson; those of them who find magic usually discover and learn it on their own. Some captains paint that crimson across their hulls now, and dare anyone to challenge them.
Codex: The Carriers' Guild
The lanes, the contracts and the debts.
The Guild owns the lanes, the contracts and most of the debts. It will lend a captain a freighter and hold the debt until the ship is paid for, and it has never once been in a hurry. The Collector works for the Guild in the way a storm works for the sea: nobody gives the order, and everybody knows.
Codex: Ley Currents
Why some passages cost almost nothing.
Magic runs in the sky the way water runs in a valley: downhill, toward whatever wants it most. Where it runs strongly a ship can ride it for almost nothing. Air mages feel the currents in their teeth. Everyone else follows the dotted blue lines on a good chart, and trusts whoever drew them.
Codex: Mageholds
Towers along the lanes.
A magehold is a tower with a Charter license and a garrison. They were built along the lanes to keep the peace, and they still do, for a fee. Their batteries do not ask who you are before they fire. Fly high, or fly with papers.
Codex: The Hush
Dead weather.
Where the drain engines absorb magic, the sky goes still: no wind, no mana, no sound. Lamps burn blue and then not at all. The Hush moves at the speed of a walking man toward whatever holds the most magic, and nobody who flies into it comes back quite the same.
Codex: The Lineages
Trace, Blooded and Deep.
The beastborn carry an animal's blood, a little or a great deal: Trace, Blooded or Deep. The clans keep the old lines, hawk and bear and fox and wolf, and the rarer ones turn up in the mines and the foundry towns. The Charter counts them as neither mage nor mundane, which suits the Charter very well.
Codex: Wild Casters
Magic nobody licensed.
Some people are born with magic the Academy did not teach and cannot license. Menders, Wispers, Quickeners, Shapers: the Charter calls them all leaks and hunts them all the same. The Undertow smuggles them out one crate at a time. Control comes with time, stillness, and someone beside them who does not flinch.
Tavern rumours#
- They say the Hush swallowed a mail courier whole off the Shard. Every lamp dead, every sailor asleep and cold.
- A gnome in the Cogholds swears the dead weather has a sound, if you listen with a device.
- The Excise are paying double for anyone who reports a ship that comes out of dead sky alive.
- The clans say the Stormmother has not come down from the thunderheads in a month. Something is wrong with her.
- In the Reaches they whisper about the Undertow like it is a saint and a curse at once.
- A surveyor mapped the dead sky years ago, they say, and nobody would print it.
- The great houses are selling flasks at twice the price. Someone is buying all the crystal.
- Don't fly dark past a Charter cutter. They take it personal.
- The Collector keeps something in his lockbox that sings at night. His debt enforcers won't go near it.
- Refinery dust will make you fly like a hawk for twenty seconds and cost you a year.
Data from Magehold Fairwinds v1.9.26. Spotted something out of date? Discord