“The Year that Magic Broke Its Chains: When Darkness Unleashed the Plague”
Third chapter from:
THE MANUAL OF MAGIC
The fathers of magic’s original opera
Following the shocking death of the Knights Templar, contrary to the hopes and expectations of Pope Clement V, there was no enlightened era ruled by just individuals. Since the Templars had been the ones to lay the foundations of magical laws, an emergency council was immediately convened to address the issue of their successors. They were not supposed to let their hearts be corrupted by power, as had happened to the Templars. Thus, great wizards and witches gathered to discuss all these matters. The judgment was presided over by Lichos, a first-rate sorcerer. He decreed several laws that allowed magic to circulate even more freely than before.
However, what the council knew but failed to take seriously enough was that Lichos was a specialist in the dark arts. He aimed to make Dark Magic supreme, forcing Good Magic to succumb.
Thus, a feud broke out in the royal palace, fought between the noble opponents of the corrupted mage and his supporters. Lichos’s rule was based on magical freedom and on the idea that with magic, anything is possible; he therefore sought not to exclude any spell. On the other hand, however, his opponents loudly protested that Lichos was effectively allowing even deadly spells.
At that time, it was therefore extremely easy to kill someone through magic without the culprit being exposed.
The war ended with the assassination of all the opponents and of His Majesty. Lichos then took control of the kingdom and carried out his ambitions. More and more dark spells were added to magical manuals, and the mortality rate increased. Some people then opposed all of this, but they never returned from the royal palace. Lichos ruled unchallenged.
It so happened, however, that a young peasant—his name still unknown to this day—belonging to the bovine race and ignorant of the bourgeoisie, experimented for his own amusement with a dark spell he had learned from a Manual gathered who knows where. Perhaps it was Fate itself that delivered it to him through some merchant. This, unfortunately, remains one of the greatest mysteries of magic.
What matters is that he attempted a dark spell. It was of a roguish kind (thus allowing one to rob someone), but something went wrong, and from his crude staff rose a thick black smoke.
Local chronicles recorded a great black cloud emerging from the fields and swiftly racing toward the city. Its inhabitants tried to flee, but it was already too late. The dreadful cloud had already enveloped the people, and they died upon contact from a terrible disease.
Lichos observed all of this from his palace, and before he could cast even a single spell, the smoke had entered through the window and already engulfed him. He died because of his misdeeds, for having made Dark Magic even more accessible.
This smoke spread across many lands and then faded, lingering in the throats of the infected, who, by traveling, unintentionally spread the contagion to many others. For this reason, the mysterious plague was renamed the Black Death.
And absolute chaos followed. A pandemic of such magnitude, never experienced before, struck Europe. The Reaper appeared to some mortals, proudly riding her steed of bones. In London, a true dance took place between the Reaper and the damned souls. Humanity was shaken with terror; many no longer dared to leave their homes. Yet no matter where they hid, the Black disease always found them. Some Good mages tried to counter the Reaper’s power, but no one can stop Death. Fate watched all this and reveled in satisfaction. The world was exactly as it had wished it to be.
Finally, after harsh centuries in which the pandemic raged—albeit with brief respites from time to time—a group of White mages known as the White Slayers managed to counter the Plague for eternity. Never before had such a catastrophic event been recorded: tens of thousands of white specters, servants of the Reaper. But for the first time in history, humanity had managed to confine Death and force it to renounce its thirst for blood. The Reaper grew deeply troubled, fearing a loss of importance.
Following the liberation from the Plague, efforts were made to identify those responsible, though with very limited results. The White Slayers convened a second council, with a majority composed of White Mages. At last, the peace once envisioned centuries earlier by Pope Clement V had arrived. The year was 1486, running like a ghostly steed of the Reaper. The age known as the Middle Ages had thus come to an end, and in that same year two friars present at the council published the infamous treatise Malleus Maleficarum. They accused witches (that is, practitioners of Dark Magic) of plotting to unleash the Plague upon the world. The council found itself having to decide whether or not to accept these grave accusations, given that no mage had ever been captured for their misdeeds. And if the culprits were witches—that is, the female segment of the population practicing dark magic—it would mean excluding a vast number of people from the Magical Laws. If the council accepted, it would mean that magic was no longer equal and available to all, but reserved for a small elite of White Mages. But if the council ignored the friars’ provocations, it would risk events similar to the Plague in the immediate future.
The council therefore chose to take the first path. The Arkazam system was updated by adding a Tribunal located in the Inferno, where the guilty would be judged, governed by the Bathuman, and roles of prestige were created such as the Rādcniht and the Magister (see the differences between the two in the chapter “The MG: Magical Hierarchy”). Moreover, what made this event of global importance was the absolute prohibition of Dark Magic.
If a sorcerer were discovered, they would be immediately burned at the stake. And this was the fate of those condemned by the council of the White Slayers.
For years, witches were hunted across Europe and in the New Continent called “America,” and an enormous number of them were killed. Fate was convinced that from then on, with the witch hunts, Dark Magic would remain marginalized forever, forced into the shadows…
