Ask Luna #122

From: Kevin

Do adepts or sensitives who work for the Light Council get protections that they normally would not get under the Concord?

Yup.

From: Kurt Von Bosse

Hello Luna!

I was thinking about Richard Drakh and Mage Morden and what an odd couple they make. From the way Alex has talked about Dark cabals it seems that for the cabal to work well, someone has to be the boss. There must be one Dark mage that everyone else takes orders from and is afraid to cross otherwise chaos would ensue. Each Dark mage would scramble to assert themself as the leader or would attempt to doublecross their fellow cabal members and not much could be accomplished and not for very long. Even Dark cabals that have strong leadership can still have problems as we saw when Onyx disobeyed orders and openly joined the raid on the Light Council’s vault which resulted in Morden’s fall from power on the Light Council.

Everytime Alex has seen Mage Morden working with other Dark mages or been forced to work with him, Morden has been the unchallenged leader of those Dark mages. Morden is gregarious or pretends to be. He is seen at social gatherings and is often a center of attention.

Richard Drakh rarely openly works with other Dark mages. It was an unusual occasion when he showed up at the Tiger’s Palace with an entourage and they were there for their firepower and not their social skills. When he helped raid the Council’s security vault in disguise, even his fellow Dark mages didn’t know he was Archon. He no longer uses human servants at his mansion. He wasn’t known for taking apprentices before taking on Alex, Tobruk, Rachel and Shireen.

It seems to me that Morden and Drakh have worked well together because they haven’t had to physically work together. Each of them has acted as the boss of their own domain. I wonder that now that Morden is no longer a member of the Light Council if that working relationship will continue to run as smoothly as before. Between the two of them I think of Richard Drakh as being the leader, but I’ve never seen Morden defer to anyone else before.

Finally, there is a wildcard in Vihaela. She has a habit of double crossing her bosses and taking their places of authority. She’s probably not as strong as Drakh or Morden, though we have no way to measure that. My guess is both of Drakh and Morden think they can control Vihaela or deal with her more forcefully if the need arose. Then again, I bet her former employers thought exactly the same thing.

I’m wondering if Alex has said anything about Mages Drakh and Morden and if he thought their working relationship was unusual or out of the ordinary?

This is actually a good question, and it’s something I hadn’t really thought about. Because usually it’s like you say, in a Dark cabal there’s one very definite leader and they’re pretty brutal about maintaining authority.

Now that still kind of applies with Vihaela since Richard and Morden seem to have mostly kept her at arm’s length and every time they’ve worked together it’s been obvious what each side is getting out of it. But when it comes to Richard and Morden it just falls apart. There have been a good couple of times where one of them could easily have gotten rid of the other and taken over as the boss. But they haven’t, and I’m not sure why.

Maybe one of them is definitely in charge and we just don’t know it? Or maybe they’re just friends? (Weird concept, I know, but Dark mages are still people.) I dunno. I think I’ll talk about it with Alex.

From: Alexandus

Hi Luna. So, it’s been established that Vampires were wiped out in our reality. It’s also established that many magical creatures survived by escaping into other worlds. Do you think it’s plausible Richard’s interdimensional sojourn was to secure power / alliances with them?
Leading an army of them from a world portal does sound appropriately villainous for a villain of his scope. And Richard hasn’t aged, either…

I think that takes the record for weirdest theory about Richard’s plans/magic type/whatever that I’ve heard so far.

From: Thomas

Are there Dark Mage factions similar to the ones on the Dark Council? I remember Chalice discussing it with Alex but it was mainly about the ones who wanted to join the Light Council, do you know of any other groups?

Yeah, Chalice has told me a bit about it. They aren’t as organised as the ones on the Council but they do fall into vague groups. You get the reconciler types, like you say, who want the Light and Dark mages to unite, but they aren’t very common. Then you’ve got warrior-code types who are all strength-and-honour, anarchists who are about personal freedom, and a bunch who try to get Dark mages to work together. And then there are a good number who are just totally self-centered and don’t give a rat’s ass about anything except themselves.

From: Jonathan

Have you read anything from Ask Luna that has helped you guys out in general? I think that all of the Richard questions you have gotten recently might be the fandom for lack of a better word, trying to help you and the gang out since you are so busy dealing with mage politics. By that I mean having others look at it from a different perspective might bring up something you might have missed. The internet can be helpful some of the time at least.

It happens, but it’s rare. I do get that people are trying to help, but the problem is that they just don’t have the context. For every bit of information that’s public knowledge, there are about five or ten other relevant details, and those details tend to be quite small ones that you have to have been paying really close attention to spot. So when the people who write in start coming up with theories, they start off about ten steps behind.

The most useful questions from my point of view tend to be perspective, rather than suggestions – looking at things from an angle that we usually don’t do, either because it’s related to old stuff, or because it requires taking a step back and we’re too busy (e.g. Kurt’s question above).

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