"Good morning, Initiates," he said in his calm, pleasant voice.
"Good morning," they said in unison, except for Allia and Keritanima.
"My name is Master Sevren, and I'll be teaching you your first day's lesson. I have no doubt that all of you are wildly curious about what we will do today, and what you will be doing for the next few years." Keritanima's eyes narrowed at his use of the word years. "That is what today's lesson will be about. A tour of the parts of the Tower we use for instructing Initiates in the use of Sorcery, an oveview of what will happen in the next month, and a little bit of historical lecture, so you will know where the katzh-dashi came from, and where we hope to go in the future. Because it's early yet, we'll take care of that right now."
"The Katzh-Dashi are a very ancient group," he began, raising a hand and conjuring forth an Illusion before him. It was a two-dimensional illusion, a simple image like a portrait, but drawn on air rather than canvas. The image conjured by the illusion was the Tower itself, without the six surrounding Towers. "They have occupied this land for nearly seven thousand years. Most of what happened in such distant past is lost to us, but we do know that even then the katzh-dashi performed tasks that gave us our name. If you didn't know, katzh-dashi means "servants of man" in the Ancient Tongue."
"Servant?" the young lady who'd been glaring at the man said in a hot tone. "I am nobody's servant!"
"We all serve, Milina," he told her cooly. "You serve your father by being here. I serve the Keeper by teaching you. The Keeper serves the needs of those she commands with her decisions. We all serve. It was always the goal of the katzh-dashi to serve mankind by using our magical powers for man's benefit. Anyway," he said adjusting the spectacles over his eyes, "for thousands of years, we did just that. We served. The city of Suld developed around the Tower of Sorcery, and over the years, grew to its current size and position of one of the largest cities in the West. I'll not go into the specifics during this time, a time we call the Age of Power. You'll get the specifics at a later date. What you need to know is that, at that time, the Ancients and the Sha'Kar worked harmoniously towards some unkown goal, and served man when not actively working towards it."
"What goal, Masster Sevren?" the blond young man asked.
"We don't know, Kev," he sighed. "The records of what the Ancients were working on were lost in the Breaking."
"Who were the Sha'Kar?" Keritanima asked idly, examing her short, sharp claws.
"Again, we don't know," he answered. "All we know is that they were a Non-human race who were very powerful in the Gift. The entire race vanished during the Breaking."
"Well, what is this Breaking you keep talking about?" Keritanima asked.
"It is the darkest hour of our history," he replied soberly, and the illusion changed to a large group of people standing outside the Tower gates. "It happened exactly two thousand, one hundred and twelve years ago."
"Ah, that. We call it the Year of Chaos," Keritanima said in a disintered voice.
"Different cultures would have different names for it, but they are the same," he said calmly. "Anyway, it was the end of what many call the Age of Power. Back during that time, magic was a commonplace thing. Many practiced it, and many more had created items of magical power to perform tasks. Even the most dullard farmhand had the magical aptitude to cast minor enchantments and cantrips, if he studied the proper magical words. Perhaps it was this commonality that created the Breaking," he speculated with a sigh. "Anyway, to make it short, since most of you probably know many stories about it, the Weave was ripped. We still don't know how or why it happened. Most scholars think that the magical pressures placed on it by the peoples of the world had torn it, and the backlash caused almost all of those magical objects to explode, almost all at the exact same time. Since those magical treasures were owned mostly by the rich and those versed in magic, it killed most of the important people in the world. Kings, Emperors, powerful Wizards, rich merchants, nobles, many of them were killed by the disaster. The sudden power vacuums in each kingdom caused chaos as wars erupted over succession. It was a ghastly time," he sighed. "What was probably worse than this was that it killed almost everyone with knowledge of Magic. There was a void of magical power in mere seconds."
"What about Sorcery?" the dark-haired girl asked.
"Well, that is itself a mystery," he told her. "After the initial explosions, some courtier rushed to the Tower to seek aid for the wounded king, and he found nothing. The Towers, all seven of them, were totally, completely empty. Even the furniture was gone. The Ancients, our forebearers, had vanished like smoke in the Breaking. To this day, we have no idea what happened. Whether they all died, or simply foresaw what was coming, and removed themselves. If so, we don't understand why they didn't come back after the backlash had finished.
"This disappearance caused problems," Sevren sighed, pointing at the illusion. "The people of Suld believed that the Sorcerers were responsible for the cataclysmic accident. We still take blame for it, even though we honestly don't know if the Ancients caused the Breaking or not. There simply is no evidence left behind. Anyway, because of this, the Tower was attacked by a mob of Sulasians seeking vengance by trying to tear the Tower down. But the magic that had raised the Tower was still strong, and they couldn't so much as scratch the stones. After that, the new King, taking the place of the prior one who had died of his wounds, declared all Sorcerers to be enemies of Sulasia, and they were to be killed on sight. The Tower was considered to be cursed by most, and it was abandoned to fall to ruin."
He removed his spectacles and cleaned a lens on his robe. "I don't need to describe the next few hundred years to you. I'm sure all of you have heard the stories." Tarrin had indeed. Almost one hundred years of war, famine, and chaos, where kingdoms rose and fell by the year. "But things settled down, as things had to. But the loss of the many Mages and Priests, killed by their own magical objects, left a void in our culture that took almost a thousand years to replace. As to the Sorcerers, well, anyone who displayed talent in Sorcery was branded a witch, and was either killed or driven out. The Priesthoods of many kingdoms actively hunted down Sorcerers, killing them wherever they could find them, and especially the priesthood of Karas, the patron god of Sulasia. In one particularly heinous act, the Crusaders, a militant arm of the Church, sacked and destroyed what is now Jerinhold, but was then a small village called Bluewaters. They slaughtered everyone in the village when they failed to hand over a suspected witch, who wasn't even in the village. The order of Karas was not the only one to commit such atrocities.
"The Gods, who had not noticed these events, suddenly stood up and took notice. Karas especially was very unhappy with the conduct of his priests and their place in the whole business. He stripped them of their magical power for a period of one hundred years. And in that time, Sulasia lost half of its lands to surrounding kingdoms in constant wars. But Sulasia survived, if somewhat smaller."
The illusion changed again, showing the face of a young man. He was handsome, a bit weary in the eyes, with long brown hair and a small scar over a thin-lipped mouth. "For a thousand years, not a single Sorcerer had stood on the Tower grounds. What few of us there were were called witches, and were hunted down and killed. But there were a few who managed to persevere, to find others with the Gift and teach them, and we continued. But it was a dangerous life. That changed when Marek the One was born. He came into his power late, as we measure things, well after he'd started a life as a caravan guard. He managed to teach himself once he understood what he was, using some scraps of books left over from the Age of Power. He came to Suld in his travels, saw the Tower, and stood for hours lost in its beauty. He claims in his writings that he heard a gentle voice calling to him, a voice he could not deny. It convinced him to come into the Tower, and he did so. Marek claimed the Tower of Sorcery as his own. Of course, nobody really noticed this. Nobody came onto the Tower grounds, because the people of Suld thought that the grounds were cursed. He was only the first, for more began to show up at the Tower gates, young men and women, all drawn here by some strange, mysterious voice. That, of course, was the voice of the Goddess, calling her new children to their home, just as it drew Marek. They were all Gifted to some degree or another, and almost by general consent, they organized themselves into the new katzh-dashi. Marek was named the first Keeper of the Key, or the Keeper, and they started on a quest of recovering the knowledge that was lost when the Ancients vanished from the world. A quest that we still pursue to this day."