Dear Grey,
We come now to the darkest time in our history, our current age known as the Sixth Age, the Ruin.
Unlike previous ages where the transition from one age to the next was marked by a great change in physical reality at the whims of the Beloved, the change from the Fifth to the Sixth Age is marked with the destruction of the moons, even though we cannot say exactly when this impact happened. It has been argued among us that we do not know for sure that they did in fact collide and instead must say that we know that they were destroyed. There are kin among our members who survived this transition, but every one of them at some point contracted the Ruin and their memories of this time are disjointed and chaotic. Indeed our very world seems to have been disjointed and chaotic until, at long last, the debris from the two moons reformed in our atmosphere into the single moon we have now. A kind of stability returned to our world and we began to build again.
By the time we have any coherent records or recollections of the Sixth Age, our planet’s huge land masses had become smaller islands sustained by the remaining magicians who were either immune to the Ruin or had survived contracting it. And though we showed great resilience as a species during this time, our suffering was far from over.
It became known to us that a particular kind of seaweed had been exposed to wild magic, thought to have originated from debris and moon rocks falling into our atmosphere, evolving over the years to draw sustenance from the elevated magical energy. It floated freely in the oceans in great clusters we still call “Clouds on the Water” and when they made land on the beaches of our islands, we learned that we were not yet safe from the ravages of the Ruin.
These plants, named Ruin plants, spread the very same Ruin fever that had helped destroy our civilizations so that they could feed on the magic we expelled. They migrated from island to island, drawn to the remaining magicians’ power, always hungry. And unlike the wildlands of the Fourth Age, they spread voraciously, covering any surface they came in contact with, searching for us. When they found one of us in reach, they bound us, piercing our skin with their thorns so that we could be infected with the Ruin fever. And as before, the more magic we performed, the quicker the plants and fever found us. So, those of us that remained began to learn to do without as we could.
Until this point, magic had been the centre of our very lives. It was through magic that we built our societies and cities, sustained our very life. It was through magic that this world was able to be populated with so many diverse plants and animals. But we could no longer depend on it and were forced to find alternative means. What little experiments and studies we had done before now became our lifelines. We used our rudimentary knowledge of the world around us to begin to invent technologies and processes to replace the role of magic in our lives. It was slow, and dangerous, and we suffered. We suffer still. Our experiments brought both great achievements and great pain to us as we learned to create that which we needed to survive and at the same time accidentally created toxins and hazards in our environment that injured and sickened our bodies. Unfortunately we had no choice. We could no longer depend on magic to ease our way and could only depend on our minds and hands.
You may be interested to learn that it is from this time period that our organisation originated, though it operated under another name. The desperate need for knowledge gave rise to this institution, among others, to preserve that knowledge. Before the Ruin, we had been little concerned with recording our wisdom. After it, the sharing of knowledge became a matter of survival. Magicians still existed among us, but the ever present threat of the Ruin plants had made it so that few dared to practise their arts and fewer still survived the fever that came for them when they did. There were still those that displayed immunity but even those individuals often restricted themselves in the use of magic, not wanting to lure the Ruin plants to their homes and vulnerable loved ones.
In time, we grew more sophisticated and our dangerous and toxic technologies gave way to greater wisdom so that we could again begin to enjoy life. And while we are grateful for our survival, it must be said that we are not as we once were. Many of us suffer from ailments caused by our desperate need for technological advances and the eons of pain we have experienced. Our souls, once light and unfettered, are burdened by our recent history. Though it cannot be said why, we also experience much less kin blossoming than in other ages and so there are much fewer than us as well.
That brings us very close to this present day and almost to the end of our history lesson. In our next lesson, we will discuss the very recent history of the island city states and their rulers.
Sincerely,
A. Grey