V. The Price of Wonders

In the generations after the rise of the Antediluvians, the turmoil surrounding forbidden magic gradually subsided. The Imperial Inquisition had destroyed many of the circles openly pursuing immortality, vampires withdrew from major settlements, and controversial works disappeared from academy shelves. Necromancy and Blood Magic did not vanish, but their more dangerous applications were pushed behind closed doors, where scholars learned to pursue them with greater secrecy.

For most people, this brought a welcome measure of calm. The great academies continued teaching, artificers returned their attention to less troubling pursuits, and the magical works already woven into daily life remained in use. Skyships crossed the skies, Galarium-powered lighting illuminated streets and workshops, and the Great Leyline Conduits carried power between the growing cities of the age.

The response to the immortality crisis had nevertheless changed the arcane world. Academies became more selective about what they preserved and who could study it. Mage orders guarded their archives more closely, while rulers imposed greater oversight upon work they considered dangerous. Knowledge still traveled, but discoveries increasingly passed through institutions that had learned the value of secrecy, and methods developed in one city were not always shared freely with another.

At the same time, the material demands of the Age of Wonders continued to grow. Galarium had become essential to transportation, industry, defense, and the operation of countless arcane devices. The largest conduit systems depended upon enormous Galarium cores, while cities that had expanded around those networks could no longer easily imagine functioning without them.

Generations of extraction began to take their toll on the richest deposits. Productive sources became harder to find, older mines were driven deeper, and expeditions traveled farther in search of new ones. A substance once prized because of what it made possible was now fought over because so much depended upon it.

Nowhere were those pressures felt more sharply than within the Thessaric Empire. At its height, Thessaria had been able to coordinate resources across a vast territory, directing Galarium, trade, military protection, and arcane infrastructure where the imperial court believed they were needed. As supplies tightened and provincial governments grew stronger, those decisions became increasingly difficult to enforce.

Provincial rulers questioned why Galarium taken from their lands should be carried elsewhere. Noble houses competed for control of mines, trade routes, and leyline nexuses. Mage orders protected techniques that might give rivals an advantage, while wealthy families financed their own artificers, soldiers, and magical defenses. Imperial offices responsible for regulating these interests became increasingly vulnerable to corruption and political pressure.

The habits learned during the earlier inquisitions contributed in subtler ways. Institutions that had been taught to restrict dangerous knowledge had also become accustomed to deciding what knowledge should be shared at all. Research into Galarium refinement, conduit construction, defensive enchantments, and other valuable fields could become the property of a single order or patron rather than part of a common body of scholarship. Cooperation remained possible, but it was no longer guaranteed.

Over time, political disagreements hardened into open conflict. The struggles later remembered as the Sundering Years were not one great civil war, but a succession of rebellions, assassinations, provincial disputes, and battles between noble houses, imperial forces, and powerful mage orders. Fighting could disappear for years before returning somewhere else, and treaties often settled only the immediate dispute.

The infrastructure of the empire became part of those wars. Galarium mines could finance armies, while control of a leyline nexus could determine which cities received magical power. Conduits crossed provincial borders, leaving settlements dependent upon systems controlled beyond their own territory. Some were captured and redirected during campaigns, while others were damaged and repaired according to immediate military or local need.

Thessaria survived the Sundering Years, but it no longer governed as it had before them. Imperial authority remained substantial in some provinces and largely ceremonial in others. Noble houses retained forces raised during the fighting, and mage orders emerged with control over archives, workshops, and infrastructure that the court could not easily reclaim.

The upheaval within the empire also forced arcane scholars to reconsider how their own institutions worked. Generations of private research, conflicting traditions, magical disasters, and closely guarded knowledge had left even respected academies unable to agree on basic methods. A growing number of magisters argued that arcane study needed standards that did not depend upon the authority of individual masters or the traditions of a particular school.

From this movement came what would later be called the Period of Rational Magic. Scholars placed greater emphasis upon observation, repeatable experiments, consistent notation, and theories that could be tested by others. A spell developed in Calvessa could now be described in terms that a magister in Vel'Nathar or Alven'Nathiss might reproduce without ever meeting its creator.

The approach brought real improvements. Galarium could be tested and refined with greater precision, artificers developed safer methods of regulating magical energy, and engineers gained better tools for maintaining the conduit networks inherited from earlier generations. Arcane scholarship became easier to compare across borders, and discoveries no longer needed to remain bound entirely to the academy in which they had first been made.

There was a cost to that certainty. Traditions rooted in intuition, religious practice, local experience, or forms of magic that resisted consistent measurement were increasingly dismissed by the great academies. Some survived outside formal scholarship, maintained by communities that saw little reason to abandon methods that had served them for generations. Others faded as the new standards came to dominate arcane education.

For much of Eldareth, however, the results were reassuring. The worst excesses of the immortality crisis had receded, the Sundering Years had quieted, and the institutions responsible for magical study appeared more disciplined than those of the generations before them. What had once seemed dangerously uncontrolled could now be measured, catalogued, and subjected to rules.

The Age of Wonders entered another period of relative stability. Vel'Nathar and Alven'Nathiss established formal diplomatic ties, opening a sustained exchange of scholars, magical theory, and culture between the mainland and the Sera'drin isles. Elsewhere, academies that had once existed beneath Thessarian authority developed reputations and traditions of their own.

That growth continued even as the empire itself weakened. Calvessa, Vel'Nathar, Tessarion, Célaine, Vashkova, Ostheria, and other provinces gradually withdrew from imperial rule, establishing governments that no longer answered to Thessaria. Some retained close diplomatic and economic ties with the old capital, while others made their separation nearly complete.

The Thessaric Empire endured in name long after its reach had contracted. Its borders remained on maps, its titles continued to be used, and successive Sovereigns attempted reforms intended to restore authority over territories that increasingly regarded themselves as independent states. By the final centuries of the age, imperial power extended little beyond Thessaria and a handful of loyal enclaves.

There was no final battle for the empire. When the last Sovereign vanished, the treasury was already struggling to maintain the remaining legions, and many imperial offices had become ceremonial remnants of institutions that once governed half a continent. The court finally dissolved, leaving Thessaria as the former capital of a power that had shaped Ethelra for more than a thousand years.

The disappearance of the empire did little to halt the work it had helped begin. Arcane scholarship had spread too widely for that. Calvessa, Alven'Nathiss, Vel'Nathar, and other powers supported academies of their own, and the questions pursued within them increasingly reached beyond the Material Plane.

By then, no single empire stood at the center of arcane study. Academies in Calvessa, Alven'Nathiss, Vel'Nathar, and elsewhere carried centuries of accumulated knowledge forward, while artificers continued refining Galarium technology and scholars increasingly turned their attention toward realms beyond the Material Plane.

Planar study advanced considerably during these later centuries. Val'Syra was formally charted as the Realm of Dreams, bringing greater structure to a realm previously known through scattered accounts, visions, and rare crossings. Scholars compared observations from different expeditions, refined their models of planar boundaries, and recorded phenomena that earlier generations had lacked the means to examine.

Not every observation could be explained. Some divinations produced faint, persistent echoes that did not correspond neatly with any known plane or boundary, but such anomalies were hardly unusual in a field still taking shape. They were recorded alongside countless other unanswered questions and left for later scholars to investigate.

So life continued. The cities remained bright, the conduits carried power beneath their streets, and skyships still crossed between nations that had outlived the empire which first connected many of them. In workshops and academies, new generations inherited centuries of knowledge and every reason to believe there was still more to discover.

For a little while longer, Eldareth seemed to hold her breath.