A bunch of questions have been building up in the comment sections, so I figured I’d clear them out. Here’s the first batch.
Comment from Juliette Gregson:
Hypnotism, real or fake..?
Uh, what?
Comment from Angelika:
I have like dozens of questions, but the one that interests me the most is this:
Dark wizards live by the “might is right”-rule. BUT Alex is often hesistant to do something he thinks is right, because he fears the consequences by the Light wizards. Then, he does them anyway. And lives.
So, here are my questions:
1) Is Alex a Dark wizard? Morden certainly thinks he is one, and nearly every other Dark wizard seems to respect him in some way. And they certainly wouldn’t respect a weak Light wizard. After all, there philosophy is about power, not about moral.
2) Are there some Dark wizards that do ‘good’ things with their power?
1) Tricky question. The thing about Dark mages is that they don’t have membership cards. I mean, there are mages who definitely are Dark, and there are mages who definitely aren’t Dark, but it’s not like there’s a list somewhere that decides who counts and who doesn’t.
There are a bunch of mages (especially on the Council) who think your faction is whichever one you were apprenticed with. So by that logic Alex is a Dark mage, and so are Anne and Vari. Personally I think that’s stupid as hell, but a lot of people seem to believe it. The way I see it is that being Light or Dark is like belonging to a religion, or being left-wing or right-wing in politics. You’re whichever one you act like.
Dark mages seem to think Alex is a rogue/traitor, but at the same time they do seem to respect him a lot more than the Light mages, in a weird way. Maybe they understand each other.
2) It’s not like Dark mages are all puppy-eating psychopaths or anything. Most Dark mages just keep to themselves and don’t really bother anyone else, and they’ve got friends and family and all the stuff that normal people have. So it’s not really that unlikely that a Dark mage could end up doing something nice for you.
Whether they make a habit of doing good things, though . . . depends. I mean, the basic Dark philosophy is that you can do whatever you like as long as you’ve got the strength to back it up, so if you want to use your magic to help someone that’s your business. I’ve heard stories about Dark mages suddenly showing up to help out an apprentice, or giving advice to adepts, but half the time people think it’s because of some really sinister motive.
Comment from Angelika:
And I guess I would love to hear more about how they deal with the normal humans. Where there big incidents in history? How did they cover those up? Who is responsible for that?
The arm of the Council in charge of dealing with normals is the Order of the Cloak, one of the Keeper divisions. They’re supposed to do the cover-up jobs, not that it’s exactly hard most of the time. You would not believe just how determined normals are not to believe in magic. They’ll believe anything sooner than a supernatural explanation.
As for big cover-ups . . . well. I guess the really big ones would be ones I wouldn’t know about. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is the Coldbringer War. It was some sort of flare-up in the 60s and there was a war between the Councils of a few different countries. It was over pretty quickly but there was some sort of secrecy order about it and no-one’s clear exactly what it was about. Official explanation is that it was a territory dispute but that doesn’t make any sense and the couple of times I’ve asked mages who were old enough to have lived through it they wouldn’t tell me anything.