Further Writings of An Old Mage: The Continued Writings of Timulty Keel

[LightlyFrosted]

*A beautiful cursive script rests in dark ink upon the vellum of the page.*

And here we are again.

For years, the only journals I kept were workbooks; the occasional notation in the margin of a travelling spellbook (note to self: need new travelling spellbook.  Old one somewhat soggy from Windjammer cave misadventure), the occasional personal essay, and of course the extensive notes of my years of training and research.  It would hardly do, after all, to abandon such studies to the slightest gap in memory.

In truth, I had come to feel self-conscious about my humorously-entitled journal from the 'old days'.  Deciding that such diaries wwere the providence of the young and vain, I closed my previous journals, and shut them away in a cupboard in my room, where, in the intervening years, they have done little but gather dust.  The odd temptation to bring them out was overcome by modesty or disinterest, and so they stayed shelved until just this past week; on a whim, I brought them out, blew off the dust, and sat down to read.  My prose was amateurish, my diagrams inelegant, and my ideals somewhat nauseating in their optimism, but there was something wonderfully true about them.  A younger me was incautious in his words out of bravado and a sense of immortality.  Of course, an older me is less cautious in his words because he's now become a powerful wizard, but that's beside the point.

Still, there rings something true about my older writings, and I hope to recapture this in my new ones.  I am not vain enough to imagine that this will ever serve to entertain anyone but myself, but dear reader, I hold this to be true.

There are magics out there which most men - even the great wizards - never capture or grasp.  The Art that we know today is but a pale imitation of these magics, but I attest, dear reader, that some of them still survive.  I have seen a man flawlessly and effortlessly transmute himself into other various humanoid shapes, an act of disguise I had previously imagined reserved for illusion alone.  I have met the ghost of a great golem maker, and hold a journal of his secrets.  I have seen magics so powerful that I only just begin now to comprehend them.  And, of course, I have experienced first-hand the magic of the bindstones, restoring to life more than once, if imperfectly, a foolish old man.  There's the arena of Vehl, which lets no one perish by way of violence while within it; it predates the fort by centuries at least, and its magics are, I affirm, incredible.

And here is the secret.  I do not believe these arts truly lost.

I am not saying that I intend to build a bindstone; I couldn't if I wanted to, I'm sure.  Such workings are beyond me - likely, they will continue to be beyond any mortal providence for centuries if not millenia after my death.  But I cannot shake the feeling that they are not divinely crafted; no god has taken credit for their making, and this is not the sort of thing about which gods are classically humble.  What's more, they appear in many major temples, regardless of deity - may in fact, predate these places of worship.  If they are mobile, I cannot truly say that I have ever seen one being moved.  Where then, did they come from?

I say to you, they are workings of some great and ancient magicker, now long forgotten.  For all we know, their purpose is far greater than those ends to which we currently use them; perhaps allowing a man to live again a hundred times before dying a final death is but the least of their powers - it is difficult to say, and I hesitate to experiment upon such works.

But the fact that such Art exists - the fact that such magic and magickers have left their influence to be felt in the world fills me full of hope, and wonder, and love of magic.  It is not simply a matter of power; there is a nuance to all of these great magics which bespeaks incredible skill.  To learn even a fraction of that skill; an iota of the carefully balanced power that flows through those wonders of a prior age and more - that is a dream to which I will someday awaken.  Gentle reader, I bid you join me.

Let us learn magic.

- Timulty Keel

[LightlyFrosted]

*Some thoughtful pages pass, waxing eloquent upon the state of art as it stands today; recent spell developments - a short essay on each of Brac'ar's and Alantha's magical achievements.  A bit of musing later brings the topic to the idea of finding lost tomes of spellcraft.*

To be perfectly frank, although it would seem to be the best way to rediscover the past, I have only modest hopes pertaining to finding secrets of losst arts in old books; the same applies to etchings, carved walls, or any other such pictograms or puzzles.  It took me years to crack the code on the one journal I had, and even then I had some trouble with the language.  While the runes of the dwarves or the flowery script of elves may retain their form over the handful of generations that make up a millenium for such peoples, the common tongue has shifted remarkably in its usage over only a few hundred years.  I had some problem with that when first I came to Hlint; a few hundred years as a stone statue had done little to modernize the my linguistic sensibilities, and it was at least a few months (and even then, only that because I am, modestly, smarter than many people) before my grasp of contemporary idiom was solid enough that I could safely feel that I had understood most of what my contemporaries had just said.

Some effort spent learning some of the older tongues would doubtless not go amiss; Elven, Dwarven, and even Halfling or Gnomish languages, or other, more obscure tongues.  If nothing else, it would save me the risk of a mis-translation, for such a thing could be disastrous if one is attempting to discover the nuance of a new spell or technique; a hired translator might not quite comprehend that there really isn't a 'close enough'.  Still, there will doubtless be a number of scripts I cannot read, tomes unperusable because the dialect or tongue in which they are written is hundreds of years out of date.  What to do about such linguistic follies?

Well, what can one do?  Do one's best and soldier on.  Once upon a time I had thought to make my grand quest a truly impossible one; learn Floraine, and become the world's only living scholar of the tongue.  Then, it occurred to me, that this was one of the stupidest things I could waste my life doing; the reason Floraine is such a dead language is that there are no existing writings in it, nor natural speakers.  With nothing of the language surviving - except, if I recall correctly, a handful of tattoos upon the body of the bard Acacea Thistletongue.  Frankly, I'm a trifle skeptical that she has any actual evidence that they mean what she thinks they mean, but that's somewhat beside the point.  For all the effort that it would take to learn such a language, given its complete lack of usefulness, I might just as well create an entirely new tongue of my own, and claim it to be Floraine - or not even bother to do even that.

How better, then, that I instead tilt at the windmill of Higher Art; instead of hoping to learn a truly extinct language, I instead hope to master the art of truly marvellous, but no less obscure magic.

At least one cannot say I set my sights too low!