When the ward lowered and the mob stormed the Tower, they found it empty.
Totally empty. Not even the furniture remained. The Sorcerers had decided that rather than kill innocents, or allow themselves and their knowledge to be destroyed, they would simply vanish. And in vanishing, they would take themselves and every scrap of the knowledge that they had accumulated along with them. Eron had told him that to this very day, nobody knew what happened to the Ancients, as they were called, or where they went.
The mob, thinking that it was some great curse laid on the place, fled in panic. And the Tower remained empty for over a thousand years. After the vanishing, Karas, the patron God of Sulasia, was incensed at his priests for their duplicitous destruction of the Sorcerers, whose Goddess, a goddess that had no name anywhere, was an ally. He stripped the priests of Karas of all their magical powers, and decreed that they would remain without magic for a period of one hundred years. And that was how it was. Without their magical powers, the priests of Karas were subjected to the humility of the common man, and so they were punished for their part of the deed.
Things remained thus until Malin Trent, the Crusader, entered the Tower and called out to all his hidden brothers and sisters who practiced the forbidden art of Sorcery to return and dwell in the Tower in peace. Malin suffered serious challenges to his crusade to restore Sorcery, for the priesthood again took up their old war against the Sorcerers, whom they despised, calling Malin Trent a witch and a consorter with evil. Malin and those Sorcerers that did return to the Tower found themselves to be the objects of ridicule and scorn, and not a few outright attacks. One year after Malin reclaimed the Tower, and had persuaded some three hundred of his secreted brothers and sisters to join him in the open, the priests again carefully staged and incited a near-riot, whipping up the people against the Sorcerers to drive these new ones out just as the old ones were. The old ward that once stopped a mob was restored, for it was an ancient magic that was still in place and had not deteriorated over the centuries.
In desperation, the Tower met in secret and reached an agreement with the King of Sulasia, Ulan the Wise. The Sorcerers would be permitted to return to their ancestral seat and return to their lives of study and contemplation. The Crown would protect the Tower and the order from the priests and the people. But in recompense, the King demanded that the Sorcerers perform certain tasks for the crown which their Goddess did not deem unsuitable, tasks that the order of Karas would not do themselves, for in their arrogance they felt themselves above the Crown. The Sorcerers would also rise up in defense of Suld itself, should the city ever be attacked. The treaty was sealed, and Malin Trent returned in secrecy to the Tower.
After Ulan's army put down the riot and dispersed the people, the Tower quickly proved to the Ulan how incredibly useful they could be. Ulan had inherited a weak nation from his father, for with the punishment of the priests so long ago added to the taboo of housing the Sorcerers, Sulasia did not have the political or military power of its neighbors. Draconia, which was one nation at that time, was at that time preparing to invade Sulasia for its rich farming land and deep harbored city of Suld. The kingdom of Tharan, which had been to the east and on the land that Aldreth now stood upon, also was preparing to attack the weakened nation. In a concerted effort, the two nations invaded Sulasia and found undefended territory, for Ulan had pulled all his troops back to Suld, to defend the ancient and proud city against invasion. The two armies reached the vast plain on which Suld stood, and advanced in total confidence that the city was theirs for the taking.
Bound by their treaties with the King, the Sorcerers of the Tower rose up and smote the armies with their magical power. Eron had shuddered at that point in the story, only saying that the destruction wrought by the Tower was horrific. Neither army managed to get a single man to the walls of the city. The army of Tharan was totally annihilated, and the Draconian forces escaped with only one tenth of their total manpower. And that small fragment itself was destroyed when the Sulasian army flooded out of Suld and caught up with them on the south side of the Scar. The natural boundary proved to be the doom of the fleeing enemy, who, in their mad rush to get over to the safety of Draconia, broke the bridge under their weight and doomed those behind them. After the slaughter, Sulasia quietly marched into Tharan, whose king was killed at Suld, and annexed the entire nation. Ulan also captured and annexed the southern marches of Draconia below the rugged hills that marked the western edge of the Skydancer Mountains.
The priests of Karas were outraged at this new alliance, but there was nothing they could do. They had refused to be of service to the king, and in that rejection they had lost his ear. That place was now held by the Keeper, and so long as the Crown and the Keeper were allied, the priesthood could do nothing. They did, however, continue to try to turn the people against the Tower. But after a yet third attempt, one which the priests orchestrated from a veil of secrecy, Karas himself took notice of the behavior of his priests, and stripped them of their magic for a period of one year as a warning that such behavior would not be tolerated.
That Glowglobe represented what the Sorcerers had lost after the Breaking, for the secrets of the Ancients had disappeared with them when they vanished. All of their accumulated knowledge was gone, and the hatred of the Sorcerers caused the destruction of nearly all of the knowledge they had gathered that had not been housed in the Tower. The eradication of knowledge had been so complete that literally nothing was left of the Ancients, only this ancient Tower which they had built, and the smallest of scraps of lore from old tomes and training that was passed down through the generations, training that deteriorated from the tremendous power of the Ancients, a power that was only now, after two thousand years, just beginning to be researched again. It was the driving force of the Tower now, to rediscover the power of the Ancients and return it to the world.
A lofty goal, Tarrin though it. But grand, and noble, in its own way. In the thousand years since the return of the Sorcerers, they'd more or less stayed to themselves, opening the school in the Tower and forming a somewhat unfriendly alliance with the priests of Karas, by way of the Knights. The Knights were a militant order of the church of Karas, but were sworn and duty-bound, on command of the Crown, to defend the Tower itself and to protect and guard the Sorcerers whenever they left it. Arman the Just, the king who had made that decree, had done it to try to foment a favorable relationship between the two orders, but it had done little more than anger the priesthood and strengthen the Sorcerers. A Knight's oaths were to Karas, not the order of the priesthood, and defending the Tower and the katzh-dashi were their primary goals. They did perform service for the priesthood, but when and only when those duties did not come before their defense of the Tower and its inhabitants. They were a free-standing entity, related to the Church but not a true part of it, and that situation made every high priest of Karas chew on the carpet in frustration for the seven hundred years that the Knights had been in existence.
And during all that thousand years, they had done almost nothing but study and research. Since his father was no Sorcerer, he didn't really know how far along they'd gotten in their quest to reclaim the power of the Ancients. But Tarrin was certain that they'd managed to make some gains, some discoveries. After a thousand years, that was almost a given. And it was what he would learn.