Tim B. | Congas.blog

A short history of magic

An old book full of magical symbols.

  1. Numa is a kind of energy formed from lived experience. When a living thing dies, its numa sinks into the earth. More complicated experiences produce richer numa that sinks deeper underground.
  2. Humans and animals sometimes connect to the numa in their dreams. Strange patterns reveal themselves, forgotten within moments of waking.
  3. Only, sometimes, the humans donā€™t forget right away. A woman might wake up with a start, explain her dream to her husband, and within moments their house would burst into flames. Afterwards, neither of them would remember what was said.
  4. For thousands of years, ā€œcursed dreamsā€ were the stuff of whispers. It wasnā€™t until early civilizations invented writing that a man chanced to write down the patterns revealed to him in such a dream.
  5. When the man spoke of his dream, flowers bloomed spontaneously around him, but he forgot the dream shortly after. When he returned to his writings, he found with effort he could memorize the dream again, but that he would always forget it after speaking it.
  6. When the man showed his people how he could reliably cause flowers to bloom, he was executed for witchcraft. Much later, the first wizards began to practice the art of memorizing numa dreams.
  7. The great wizards of the Golden Empire were the first to create spells through a kind of lucid dreaming. They used their magic to dramatically increase crop yields and usher in unprecedented prosperity.
  8. But the great wizards didnā€™t know, or couldnā€™t admit, that their spells angered the shallow numa that comes from plants and animals. After a thousand years, the land itself began to resist cultivation in favor of ever-encroaching wilderness.
  9. The great wizards delved deep into the earth to contact richer, more potent, more human numa, but they were too late. The Golden Empire fell.
  10. Gyldria is mostly wilderness, now, outside a few capitals where the old magic still holds. Nightmares, brought to life by the numa, haunt the shadows beneath the trees. And a few remaining wizards cling to musty old spellbooks, the last records of ancient dreamsā€¦