Benedict Jacka

Part One of this article described the powers of fire magic:  this part will look at the nature of fire mages, and their place in the magical world.

Why So Much Fire?

Elemental magic is the most common family of magic, and fire mages are the most common type of mage, so much so that some people think there are more fire mages than any other two types of mage put together.  Nobody’s quite sure why there should be twice as many fire mages as air, water, or earth mages, although a simple explanation could be that the particular personality traits that attune a mage to fire just happen to be really common ones.  Another theory is that it’s something to do with fire being a symbol of humanity’s dominion over the natural world.  And some people say that it’s because fire’s the most destructive of all the elements, and humans are really good at destroying things.

Because fire magic is so common, fire mages are very much a known quantity.  Pretty much everyone in the magical world knows a fire mage, or at least has seen one, and their abilities are very well-known . . . as are their weaknesses.  As always, though, there’s enough variation within the type to make sensible mages careful about assuming they know everything about what a fire mage can do.

Nature and Demeanour

Fire mages have a reputation for being spontaneous, passionate, and creative.  If mages are making up a story and want a romantic young lover, they usually make the character a fire mage.  Of course, fire mages also have a reputation for being dangerous, violent, and destructive, so if a fire mage isn’t being cast as the hero there’s a good chance they’re being cast as the villain.

Both reputations have some truth to them.  Fire mages do tend to be intense and charismatic, and they do tend to attract a lot of attention (even if it’s not always the good kind).  On the other hand, an awful lot of thugs, tyrants and killers in magical history have been fire mages, too.  Fire magic is just so very good at causing fear and destruction, and a fire mage always has to fight the temptation to get rid of their problems by burning them.

If there’s one thing all fire mages have in common, it’s activity.  There’s practically no such thing as a passive fire mage.  No matter their interests, fire mages are doers, people of action, and a fire mage with nothing to do is a recipe for trouble.

Mundane Boredom

Fire mages often find that the aggressive nature of their magic makes it hard for them to fit in.  They’re great in high-stress high-intensity situations, but in quiet, peaceful settings they can feel like a fifth wheel.  On top of that, the ability to burn things doesn’t qualify you for many jobs.  It does however make you very good at extorting money from people who do have jobs, meaning that all too often the easiest way for a fire mage to earn money is by violence.

The Council’s traditional solution to this problem has been to recruit fire mages as Keepers, soldiers, or both, presumably in the hope that if fire mages have a place in society and a job to do then they’ll be more likely to expend their energy in ways that are helpful rather than randomly smashing things.  Sometimes it works, but it’s very common for fire mages to drift into predatory lifestyles with high risks and high rewards.  It’s an open secret that many fire mages are involved in illegal activities, and the Council generally turns a blind eye as long as they don’t directly harm the Council’s interests.

Fire magic is probably the most iconic type of magic out there.  It’s common, widely known, and very very noticeable.

Playing with Fire

At a basic level, fire magic gives control over heat:  creating it, manipulating it, and moving it.  The most obvious use for this is of course burning things, and unsurprisingly that tends to be exactly how most fire mages get started.  A master taking on a fire mage as an apprentice is well advised to hold lessons in a non-flammable location.

As they gain experience, fire mages learn to use their magic in less destructive ways.  Their ability to control heat can be used as a protection as well as a weapon, moving and dissipating a fire away from things it might threaten.  In the same way that they can start fires, they can stop them.

Fire mages can also protect themselves against heat, and they’re very good at it.  Trying to burn a fire mage is a lot like trying to drown a fish – they can survive unbelievably high temperatures and there have been confirmed reports of fire mages walking through bonfires, furnaces, and even lava.

Infravision

Like most elemental mages, fire mages can sense the presence of their chosen element.  A common way this manifests is in a kind of thermal vision, letting a fire mage ‘see’ heat in a similar way to a thermal imaging camera.  Warm objects stand out in their sight, while cool areas fade into the background.  The spell has a wide variety of uses – seeing in the dark, telling if someone has a fever, noticing malfunctioning electrical components, knowing when the roast is done, etc.

Their ability to see heat makes fire mages better at subtle operations than most people would think.  A fire mage can spot a warm-blooded creature in pitch darkness more easily than most people can see them in broad daylight.  Unless a person gives off no heat at all (difficult to do) it’s almost impossible for them to avoid a fire mage’s notice.

Combat Magic

Fire mages can do a lot of fancy stuff, but it’s their combat magic that they’re really famous for.  Fire magic has a horrendous amount of destructive power and can burn through buildings, armour, or flesh with equal ease.  Other types of magic can destroy as well (if not quite so effectively) but fire magic has a psychological impact that air or earth magic doesn’t.  Nearly all living creatures fear fire, and when used as a weapon fire kills in a particularly horrifying and agonising manner.  The sight of a human being turned into a screaming, flailing torch is quite terrifying, and one glimpse is usually enough to instil a deep fear of what a fire mage can do.

Fire mages, however, have one major Achilles heel when it comes to combat.  While their magic is great on the attack, it’s very bad at defence.  Fire shields can hold off spells and ward away people, but they’re terrible at stopping physical objects, particularly very fast ones (such as oh, say, bullets).  If a fire mage is about to be hit by a bullet travelling at 2,000 mph, then the only thing a fire shield is going to do is ensure that they’ll be hit by a red-hot bullet travelling at 2,000 mph, which really isn’t much of an improvement.  Some fire mages deal with this by developing spells or foci to include a kinetic element to their shields, but at a fundamental level fire magic just isn’t designed for defence.  Tactics with fire magic usually come down to some variant on ‘kill them first’.

Newcomers to the magical world have a lot of questions.  One question that everyone asks sooner or later is “How come mages have such weird names?”

It’s a fair point.  For every mage who calls themselves Alex or Anne, there are two or three more who go by names like Cinder, Deleo, Sagash, Levistus, Caldera, and others that are equally hard to imagine a parent giving a baby.  The reason’s simple:  in most cases, the name an adult mage goes by isn’t the same name he was born with.

What’s In A Name?

An adult mage has two names – their birth name and their mage name.  They go by their birth name as a child and continue to use it when they enter a master’s service and become an apprentice.  At some point in their apprenticeship they pick their mage name, and when they graduate to the status of a journeyman mage they take it as their own.

An apprentice’s choice of name is serious business.  It’s considered a rite of passage, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood.  Socially, a mage who doesn’t have their name yet isn’t really considered a mage at all – they’re still treated like a kid, even if they’re twenty years old.  Interestingly, this is one subject that Light and Dark mages don’t disagree about.  Both consider a mage’s name equally important, and for the same reasons.

Picking and Choosing

Apprentices choose their names personally.  It’s one of the few areas of the master-apprentice relationship where the master doesn’t have the last word – even attempting to dictate an apprentice’s name is considered a major breach of etiquette.

Methods of choice vary.  Often an apprentice will pick a name related to their magic type:  geological or mineralogical names for an earth mage, combustion- or heat-related words for a fire mage, and so on.  Another common choice is to take the name of a historical mage who the apprentice identifies with or wants to emulate.  Some make up a new name, using etymology or just picking something they like the sound of, and some masters even encourage apprentices to treat the choice of their name as a full-on quest, consulting magical creatures or seeking visions.

In every case, a mage’s name tells you something about them.  It’s the identity they’ve chosen, and it’s how they’ve decided to define themselves in their dealings with the magical world.

Child to Adult

Once a mage has become a journeyman, her mage name becomes her ‘official’ name.  If another mage approaches her or if she’s referred to in any formal way, they’ll use her mage name:  in magical society, her mage name is the one that’ll identify her from that moment until the day she dies.

A mage’s name can be a touchy subject.  It’s usually best to avoid the use of a mage’s birth name unless you’re very familiar with them (and sometimes not even then).  Some mages continue to use their birth names, especially with close friends and family, but others abandon them completely.  As a general rule, the more distant a mage is from their non-magical life, the less happy they’ll be about being addressed by their birth name.  Independent mages tend to be the most likely to keep their birth name, while Dark mages often treat the use of their birth name as a fairly serious insult.

This entry finishes up our guide to the political factions of the Light Council by looking at the Weissians and the Unity Bloc.

Weissians

The Weissian movement takes its name from the writings of the nineteenth-century mage Kolman Weiss.  Weiss incorporated elements from the existing Transcendence and Klaussian movements to form a new political faction which has been slowly growing ever since.

Weissians believe that magic represents the next major step in human potential, and they want to see the human race embrace it.  They want a world where mages have a place in normal society, practising their magic openly, with magic taught in schools side by side with maths and science.  In the long term they’d like to see magic spread more widely:  their ultimate goal is a world where every human is a mage.

The Weissians’ plan is obviously incompatible with keeping magic a secret, which places the Weissians squarely at odds with everyone who supports the Concord.  For their plan to be approved they’d need to get enough of a majority to get the Concord amended, which at the moment seems pretty unlikely:  the Centrists, the Directors, and especially the Isolationists hate the Weissians’ proposals and have gone out of their way to block them.  Even if the Weissians could overcome this opposition they would have to deal with two other problems:  first, the normals that the Weissians want to uplift think magic is a joke, and second, no-one has any idea how this ‘uplifting’ thing is supposed to work anyway (though the Weissians are doing their best to figure it out).

The Weissians don’t have many friends.  Some of the Guardian faction are sympathetic to them, and that’s about it.  Oddly enough the Weissians’ most frequent allies are the Crusaders, partly because they’re the only two factions opposed to the Concord (although for different reasons) and partly because they’re both pariahs disliked by everyone else.

Note:  ‘Weiss’ is pronounced ‘vice’, as in ‘vice squad’.

Unity Bloc

The Unity Bloc is the newest and currently the smallest of the Council factions, though it’s probably more accurate to say that their faction isn’t new but cyclical:  the idea has been around ever since the Dark Wars and it’s waxed and waned over the centuries.  The Unity Bloc want Light and Dark mages to unite.  They see Light and Dark philosophy as two sides of the same coin rather than violent opposites, and they’re frustrated by the endless infighting.   They want mages everywhere to co-operate and work together as a single brotherhood, as legend has it they once did long ago, and they hope that by doing so magic will enter a new golden age.

Needless to say, the Unity Bloc has a lot of opposition.  The Crusaders hate them and the Guardians don’t like them much either – both of them consider the Unity Bloc fools at best and fifth columnists at worst.  On top of that, most of the Dark mages that the Unity Bloc wants to help aren’t particularly grateful for the offer and in fact are seriously insulted by the implication that they need ‘helping’ in the first place.  But some Dark groups see potential in the Unity Bloc, and as a result the Unity Bloc has by far the best relations with Dark mages out of any Council faction (not to mention a small but significant number of Dark members).

As the newest faction, the Unity Bloc hasn’t had time to develop many alliances.  At present they’re making overtures to the Directors and the Isolationists, arguing that a unified Light and Dark council would serve their own interests, and in the long term the Unity Bloc are hoping to bring the Centrists round to their way of thinking.  Centrists are supposed to want peace, after all.

A member of the Unity Bloc is called a Unitarian (as well as several less complimentary names).

None of the Above

Dark mages and relations with normals aren’t the only issues in Light politics:  there are plenty of others, such as magical creatures, culture, and religion.  However, these tend to be more spread out over the factions:  none of the groups has a monopoly on religious members, for example.

Even when it comes to the main ‘axes’, the faction a Light mage belongs to doesn’t tell you everything about them.  A mage might join the Guardian faction because he sees normal humans as equals, worthy of respect;  such a mage would probably be very sympathetic to the Weissians but would dislike the Directors for their habit of manipulating mundane society.  Another Guardian might see normals as below them, to be protected and guided;  that Guardian would think the Weissians were idiots and that the Directors had the right idea.  A third Guardian might defend normals not out of any particular empathy but out of a belief that reducing the number of magical predations in the world protects mages in the long run by reducing belief in the supernatural;  his closest allies would be the Isolationists.  All three would want to stop monsters from harming normals, but for different reasons.

Finally there are a fair number of Light mages who don’t permanently ally themselves with any of the factions.  These mages tend to get lumped in with one faction or another, but it’s more accurate to call them independent agents.

Part One of this article introduced the Isolationist and Guardian factions:  this part will cover Crusaders, Centrists, and Directors.

Crusaders

The Crusaders are the most militaristic amongst the Light Council.  Very few Light mages are completely comfortable with Dark ones, but the Crusaders want to go further:  they want the Council to be actively opposed to the activities of Dark mages and take the initiative in stopping them.  ‘Taking the initiative’ can mean anything from police work to starting a war, depending on the individual Crusader’s beliefs.

Almost no-one on the Light Council likes the Crusaders, but the Crusaders don’t care.  They think Dark mages are evil and need to be stopped, and they aren’t going to accept Dark behaviour just because the rest of the Council does.  Most Crusaders believe that the Concord is just a paper peace and can’t possibly last – sooner or later war’s going to break out again, and the Crusaders are going to be ready when it does.

As the most militant and the second-most radical faction, the Crusaders have a lot of enemies.  Isolationists don’t like them because Isolationists think the normals are the real problem, Centrists don’t like them because Centrists want peace, Directors don’t like them because blatant magical battles really mess up the Directors’ attempts at subtle political control, and you can probably guess how well Crusaders get on with the Unity Bloc.  The only faction the Crusaders like are the Guardians:  they’re the only other group who aren’t willing to turn a blind eye to the kind of things Dark mages do in their free time.

Note:  Crusaders don’t call themselves ‘Crusaders’.  They think of themselves as proactive Guardians.  ‘Crusaders’ is a label stuck on them by other factions, meant as an insult.

Centrists

The current version of the Centrist faction evolved in the aftermath of the Gate Rune War, although the opinions they subscribe to have been around since more-or-less forever.  What Centrists really want is stability.  They don’t want war with the Dark, but they don’t have any grand plans to reconcile with them either.  They don’t see normals as a threat to be avoided, but neither do they want to get particularly close to them.  What they want is peace, and for things to stay mostly the same.

The Centrists are probably the biggest faction, but their size is a bit misleading.  ‘Centrist’ can mean that a mage is actively committed to balance and peace, but just as often mages get lumped in with the Centrists simply because the Centrists are the most moderate of the factions.  While the Centrists have a lot of political power, they tend to accumulate it just for the sake of it rather than because there’s anything in particular they want to do with it, and as a result they can be swayed more easily than the other groups.

The Centrists are usually aligned with the more reactive factions (the Isolationists, the Directors, and the Guardians) and usually opposed to the more radical ones (Crusaders, Weissians, and the Unity Bloc), but they’ve been both with and against every faction at one point or another.

Directors

Directors want to guide and control normal society, for varying reasons.  Some do it because they think that normals are potentially dangerous and need to be closely monitored, some do it because control of national political, economic, and military institutions is a valuable asset, and some just do it for wealth and power.  Most of the Light Council’s influence over the government of the United Kingdom is due to the centuries of patient and methodical work done by the Director faction.

Although Directors don’t always see eye to eye with Isolationists, they agree with them on one thing:  it’s normals who really matter, not Dark mages.  Dark mages are a tiny minority who spend most of their time on infighting, while normals number in the billions.  Normals have wealth, power, industry, an entire global civilisation . . . and because of their ignorance of magic they’re so very easy to control.  Why waste your time fighting Dark mages when there’s an entire world out there waiting to be taken?

Of course, just because Directors don’t like to bother themselves with fighting doesn’t mean they can’t arrange it – they have a lot more power and influence in the mundane world than other mages and they’re quite capable of sending SWAT teams to kick down the doors of people they don’t like.  As a result, while the more old-fashioned mages may sneer at Directors for the amount of time they spend on their ‘pets’, they usually do it outside of Directors’ hearing.

Directors get on well with Centrists and have a love-hate relationship with the Isolationists – Directors and Isolationists usually agree on end goals (mages safe and powerful, normals kept ignorant) but have completely different ideas about how to achieve them.  Directors strongly dislike the Weissians:  they don’t want to be equal with normals, they want to be above them, and it’s a lot easier to stay in control if most people don’t believe you exist.