Benedict Jacka

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.

Mages are an individualistic lot and the Light Council is divided into many political factions.  The two big questions in Light politics are:

• How should the Council deal with Dark mages?
• What sort of relationship should mages have with normal society?

The way a mage answers these questions determines who he’ll be aligned with.  At last count there were seven major factions within the Light Council, and these factions will be covered in the three parts of this article as follows:

Part 1:  Isolationists and Guardians
Part 2:  Crusaders, Centrists, and Directors
Part 3:  Weissians and the Unity Bloc.

Factions or Parties?

The Light factions are closer to systems of belief than they are to political parties, though they’ve got things in common with both.  Since mage society is relatively small most of the participants in Light politics know each other, and as a result there isn’t any need for the large-scale campaigning and publicity work that the parties in a mass democracy have to do.

Individual mages don’t belong to a party in the manner of an American congressman or a British MP – they’re likely to have one faction that they identify with and consider themselves members of, but this is usually informal.  ‘Informal’, however, does not mean ‘unimportant’, and at the higher levels a mage’s choice of which factions to associate with is very serious business.

The edges of Light factions are blurry and it’s not always easy to say exactly which faction a mage is a member of: the Guardians and Crusaders in particular have a big overlap and the Centrists have something in common with just about everyone.  For this reason it’s hard to get an exact count on their numbers, although it’s generally agreed that the biggest faction is the Centrists.

Isolationists

The Isolationist faction of the Council want to have as little to do with normals as possible.  It’s an old faction, dating back to the bad old days of the mage/normal wars, and it hasn’t changed much.  Humans have always been dangerous, but now with the rapidly advancing pace of modern technology they’re more of a threat than they’ve ever been, and Isolationists fear that normals (given the chance) will inevitably end up resenting mages and trying to destroy them.  The Isolationists’ solution to this is to make sure normals never have any reason to suspect that mages exist in the first place.  Mages should stay as far off the radar of normal society as possible.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Isolationists are the strongest supporters of the secrecy clauses of the Concord.  In fact they don’t think the Concord goes far enough; if they had their way they’d institute a full-on suppression program with punishments for any mage who draws publicity.  The Isolationists’ other goals vary from mage to mage and come a very distant second in priority.  Secrecy is everything.

The Isolationists’ closest allies are the Centrists.  Just like the Centrists, the Isolationists want peace with Dark mages, but for a different reason:  the Isolationists think that normals are the real threat and squabbles with Dark mages risk drawing attention.  Isolationists are suspicious of the Directors – they’ll grudgingly admit that control over normals is useful, but they’re always afraid that the Directors will screw up and the normals will figure out that they’re being used.  However, the faction the Isolationists really hate are the Weissians.  They’re absolutely convinced that the Weissians’ grand plans will end in disaster and that the only hope for the Light Council is to make sure they’re blocked.  So far, they’ve succeeded in doing just that.

Guardians

The Guardian faction harks back to the original Treaty of Light signed by the very first Council.  Those who signed the Treaty swore to protect all humans both from monstrous creatures and from the Dark, and the Guardians carry on that legacy to this day.  They believe that the highest calling of mages is to protect the human race from supernatural threats.

In the past Guardians would hunt down Dark mages and monsters, but these days they’re generally reactive rather than proactive:  they won’t target anyone unless they believe them to be a clear threat to humans.  Guardians used to be the dominant faction of the Council but with the decline of magical creatures there are fewer obvious threats for them to mobilise against and much of their support has gradually drifted away.  Nowadays most threats to humans come from other humans and mages are less keen to take action against their own species.

The Guardians generally get on fairly well with the rest of the Council.  They’re often called militant or idealistic or out-of-touch, but all the same they get a certain grudging respect for the fact that whenever something really horrible shows up it’s the Guardians who’ll be the first to step up to face it.  (It also helps that the Guardians are usually practical enough to get the support of the other factions before they go kill something.)  The only group with whom the Guardians have much friction are the Unity Bloc, as the Guardians dislike the Unity Bloc’s willingness to look the other way when it comes to Dark activities.

Before a mage can practise a spell he has to learn it, which is easier said than done.  There are two main ways for a mage to learn a new spell – they can be taught it by another mage, or they can develop it themselves.

Copy Cat

Learning a spell from another mage can be very easy or infuriatingly difficult, depending on the relationship between their types of magic.  If the capabilities of the two mages are very similar, it’s easy:  the second mage just has to watch the first mage casting the spell and then copy it.  There’ll always be adjustments to make and it still takes practice to get really good, but it’s basically straightforward.

The more differences there are between the mages’ styles of magic, the more difficult the process gets – the student will have to adapt the spell more and more heavily.  If the two styles are really different the process is almost guaranteed to fail, because the two systems work on completely different principles – it’s like trying to install a Windows program on an Apple computer.  Unfortunately, there’s no reliable way to know if it’s possible to learn a spell from a particular mage without trying.

Spell Research

Mages who can’t find a good teacher (or any teacher at all) must develop spells on their own.  This is much harder, since the mage has to do the equivalent of reinventing the wheel.  If the mage is smart they’ll build on the work of others wherever they can, stealing bits and pieces from other spells in order to minimise the amount of original research they have to do themselves, but even so the process can take weeks, months, or even years.

All the same, many mages enjoy research.  Researching a spell is creative work, much like writing a song or a poem or making a new piece of design, and most mages find the process satisfying.  It also has side benefits – a mage who researches a spell himself will generally understand its principles much better than if he’d copied it off someone else, and he’ll have had more opportunity to customise it to his preferences.

Scarcity of Knowledge

The rarer a mage’s magic type, the more difficult it is for them to find a teacher they can easily learn from and the more likely it is that they’ll have to develop spells on their own.  Elemental mages are the most common family and and also tend to have the most similarities amongst themselves, and for this reason elemental mages find it relatively easy to learn new spells.

Universal mages have it much harder.  They’re rare enough that there may be only a dozen or so of each particular type in an entire country, and there’s no guarantee that any of them will be willing or able to teach a novice.  Living mages are somewhere in between – they don’t have the easy access of elemental mages but benefit from more of a community than universalists.

As a result, elemental mages tend to be quick starters and universal mages slow ones.  A new elementalist can pick up lots of spells rapidly, quickly outpacing a universal mage.  However, over the years, the universalist can catch up with the elemental mage and even overtake him.  Being able to copy spells is a nice shortcut but sooner or later you have to master the theory.

It’s possible for a mage to cast a spell with only their mind and will, but most don’t.  Instead they add extra ingredients to a spells formula, and these are referred to as components.

In theory just about anything that can be replicated by the mage can be a component, but the most common ones are physical or verbal.  Physical components are body movements, especially hand and finger gestures.  Verbal components are usually words, recited when the mage casts the spell.

So a fire bolt spell might have three parts to its formula:  the mental concentration, the verbal component ‘Ignis’, and the physical component of making a gathering and flinging motion with the right hand.  The mage concentrates and speaks the word ‘Ignis!’, and fire gathers in his hand and flies to strike as he throws.

But They Said The Magic Words

Components usually confuse the hell out of non-mages.  People see a mage chant an invocation to cast a spell and they naturally assume that the magic comes from the words.  The truth is that the words are just a prop.  The mage needs the words to cast the spell, but it’s not because they’re magic words, it’s because that’s how the mage learnt the spell.  The words don’t have to mean anything, and in fact they can be total gibberish.  What matters is that the words are associated in the mage’s mind with a particular magical effect.

The association is done by the mage, and it’s almost completely arbitrary.  A fireball spell can be associated with the Latin word for ‘fire’, but the mage could just as easily pick ‘water’, ‘destruction’, ‘towel’, ‘ice cream’, ‘my little pony’, or no words at all.

So if components are meaningless, why do mages use them?

Links and Patterns

If a mage learns a spell as a purely mental formula, then every time they think through that formula the spell will go off, which can be quite inconvenient if you start thinking about a fireball spell while you’re waiting for a bus.  In this way components act as a sort of magical safety catch.

Most mages also find that components make spells easier.  Humans are active, social creatures:  most of what we do in a day involves doing things with our hands or talking to people.  Linking a spell to a specific physical or verbal action makes it more natural.

Using components for a spell also makes them easier to record and remember.  Physical components can be remembered via muscle memory, and verbal components can be written down and stored.  This is the origin of the iconic wizard’s spellbook, and there’s a lot of truth to the legend – many mages do have books and scrolls filled with invocations.  To anyone who doesn’t understand the spells that they’re linked to, though, they’re just ink on paper.  Only a mage has the power and knowledge to actually turn them into magic.

Surpassing the Focus

Despite this, components have disadvantages.  A spell with components is slower than a spell without them, and just as a physical or verbal component is easier for the mage to remember and recognise, it’s easier for other mages to remember and recognise.  A mage who always uses components gives away a lot more information than one who doesn’t.

A mage who relies on spells with a particular type of component can also be crippled if circumstances stop him from using it:  it’s hard to make physical gestures if you’re in a cramped space or if someone’s grabbing onto you, and verbal components can be disrupted by a hand over the mouth or just a really bad sore throat.

It’s a point of pride amongst master mages to use components as sparingly as possible, and they tend to think less of mages who over-rely on them.  Some say this is because being able to bypass components is a mark of skill.  Others just think it’s an excuse to look down on everyone else.