Dear Grey,
In our last lesson, we discussed the Fourth Age and the evolution of the kinship system. Today, we will explore the Fifth Age and the significant changes it brought to our culture and reality itself.
During the Fourth Age, many crowned ruled many lands all bordered by the endless thorn wildlands. But during the eons of the dawn of the Fifth Age, at the Beloved’s desire, reality transformed to much as we understand it now: the vastness of space, with planets and stars populating the sky.
There is much argument and confusion here for though we have more records and recollections of this time between us, it seems that our members are divided upon a very important matter: was our world restricted to this one planet covered by land and water orbiting a sun in a galaxy or have kin in fact populated different worlds in the solar system at different times?
The problem comes from the sameness of these descriptions that supposedly happened on other stars to stories and legends from the Second or even Third Age. This has left us baffled and unable to determine what is true. Were the legends of the previous ages simply recreated and re-lived on other worlds during the Fifth Age, in the way of archetypes that are common to our species and the Beloved’s whims? Is this confusion an effect of our chaotic reincarnation cycle? Or do we not have enough information yet to distinguish firmly between what recollections are definitively previous ages and which ones are from various periods of the Fifth Age. This is a mystery between us that we have yet been able to solve with our current resources.
What we can say for a surety is that we lived on this planet and at one point during our history, a single kin named Safia rose to prominence almost unheard of by our kind. She became the ruler of this world, supported by a group of powerful magicians known as the Pillars who gave her their loyalty, power, and adoration through affinity.
It is said that Safia became so beloved that many kin began to turn away from their own personal studies in magic and in fact began to ask Safia and the Pillars to conduct magic for them through prayers. To our knowledge, such a thing had never existed before and it marked the first mass adoption of any sort of religion among us that encouraged bowing to an outside power rather than our own soul sparks and creating greater power divides than we had ever known. Previously, crowned had been loved and honoured by those that they protected but it had been a thing of power and love, not of the soul and prayer such as Safia evoked. Truly, we felt she was favoured by the Beloved.
Safia and the Pillars lived long and prosperous lives and it was a time of great peace. The longer they lived the stronger their magic became and the less magic was to be found among the other kin. Eventually many kin forgot how to conduct their own magic and lived without worry in the seemingly endless paradise that Safia and the pillars upheld.
Unfortunately, this was a situation that could not last, and eventually, the love between Safia, the Pillars, and the rest of the kin faltered. Conflicts and wars sprung up that Safia could not quell and the great love for her that was shared amongst the kin turned to rage and hatred in the hearts of some. To try and resolve this Safia began to open schools of magic, against many objections, to reteach what had been lost to her fellow kin, that they might wield their own magic once again and re-find purpose and the means to equally shape our destiny as a species. But catastrophe loomed over us and it would be a great reminder of the chaos that ever exists in the Beloved’s cosmos.
Some few kin who had continued to rely on their own wells of magic, even without Safia’s newly formed schools, had turned to various kinds of study, including the study of this new reality of planets, moons, and stars. It was one of these that realized that the two moons that had long graced our skies at that time were falling into each other and if unchecked, would surely crash, bringing untold destruction to our world. It would be a calamity unlike any known to us and Safia, try as she might, did not have the power to stop it.
Some believed this disaster came to us because we had turned away from the old ways and invested too much power in a single kin and some believed it was because Safia had begun to teach the wrong kinds of magicians how to access their powers and these undisciplined, chaotic wills conflicted with hers in preserving our reality. Others believed that it was simply the whim of creation, the Beloved reaching out to make her power known once again. Regardless of what was said, Safia and the Pillars tried their best to prevent the tragedy. Of this we can say that she did not succeed and our civilizations were destroyed.
Here we enter into another time period of confusion and a frustrating lack of records. There is much debate as to exactly how our fall from grace happened. By the laws of our physical reality as we know them now, the actual impact of the moons would have taken quite a long time on their own. Surely it would have been enough time for us to prepare some sort of protection and defence for ourselves. But perhaps it was the unlucky combination of not one but two tragedies that befell us during that time that sealed our fate.
Precious rare written accounts tell of the end of Safia’s reign, known as the Night of Ruin, when many magicians caught a mysterious fever and ran wild and violent through the greatest of our cities, including the home of Safia and the Pillars. It targeted the strongest of us, as the stronger the magician the more quickly the fever took them.
The fever, named the Ruin or the Ruin fever because of these events, triggers what is normally a natural magical state in kin called the “chrysalis”. The chrysalis marks a kin’s evolution from one stage of magical mastery to another and is normally perfectly safe. We enter a lucid dreaming state, asleep and still as we experience powerful personal visions. It is a mystery that any one of us may access. But when evoked by the fever, instead of the beautiful dream of the chrysalis we are given a nightmare full of fear and horrors, our aggression elevated by the fever’s manipulations on our body. Our bodies do not remain still in sleep with the fever but are active and mobile, acting out these dream sequences, often causing violence and destruction around us as the fever coaxes ever greater magic to expel from our bodies. It is more dangerous than any sleepwalking and causes untold havoc. Rarely do kin survive the toll on their bodies and those that do have no memory of what happened when the fever takes them, left only to mourn the destruction they have caused when they come out of it.
For an unknown amount of time the Ruin spread, and during this time the two moons were destroyed and our planet was enveloped in chaos and death. The debris of this event rained down upon our world, year after year, transforming it once again. Precious few pockets of our once flourishing species survived both of these events. The Fifth Age, which was known as an idyllic time of serenity and peace, gave way to the Ruin whose echoes shape our lives even now.
We have many unanswered questions from this time. What became of Safia and the Pillars? Why did they not protect us? Did they die during the Night of Ruin or some time after, protecting survivors? As of yet, we do not know.
In our next lesson, we will continue with the known history of our current Age, the Sixth Age, and discuss how our species has survived the end of our very way of life through the restriction of magic.
Sincerely,
A. Grey