The Krean Arcane Arts

The Krean believe that all possibilities exist simultaneously - like sheets of paper layered on top of one another - and that the most probable events exist in "our" reality. Krean mages replace one piece of reality with another, less probable version. They do this by making it the most probable, causing the two pieces to be exchanged. Krean Magic derives from Krean philosophy - and Krean philosophy is built on six premises: (i) Everything is energy - or as the Krean put it: Everything is thought, given form; (ii) Reality is objective, and exists independently of our perception of it; (iii) There is an infinite number of possibilities, all of which exist simultaneously; (iv) All sentient beings have freewill; they have the capacity to make choices; (v) Contradictions collapse: Existence is logical; (vi) All things are interconnected - or as the Krean say: Connected is everything, to everything else (Savere edor edora).

All Krean arcane arts - for instance, the magic of the Priestesses of Ankriss as well as that of "secular" Krean mages - rests on the same theoretical foundation. What differs is practice - that is: how these principles are put into operation, how magic is cast. This entry offers an overview of the principles common to all Krean magic.

Santharian Interest in Krean Magic. Santharian interest in Krean Magic flared when Lord Coren FrozenZephyr made one of the most controversial statements in Ximaxian history:

Picture description. Archmage Akiris Akai (3211-3114 b.S) - considered to be one of the three founders of Classical Krean Magic. Picture drawn by Sheil.

"I have been asked to weigh the magic of Ximax and that of the descendants of the Krean against the magic of the Ancient Krean. I do not dispute that the Academy of Ximax houses some of the most powerful magi in all of Caelereth - but does one hold a candle flame to the sun?

There was a story among the Ancient Krean about the legendary emperor DÃ©Ã¡rÃ¡n Asaen. It recounts the day the Temple of Ankriss rose against him, outraged by an endless stream of reforms following one after the other like waves in the ocean:

The High Priestess, a being of prodigious power and herself a figure of myth and legend, called forth every priestess in the Krean realm to meet her in the Valley of Light. Now, you must understand, a Krean mage was like a tempest among men. But there are storms that make other storms look like harmless, rogue winds that lift a straw here and a straw there. Such were the priestesses - each a cloudburst of immeasurable vigour, thunderous, swift, unyielding...

The priestesses planned to waylay the Emperor at a moment they knew he would be alone - for he had a predilection for taking long walks before the Viziers woke and the work of the day began. Every morning at Firstflame, with the rising sun behind, he would come out of the Valley of Light, and walk, unattended, to the gates of the capital, through those grand avenues of pristine white stone, up terrace after terrace after terrace, all the way to the Imperial Gardens where the Divan met.

The Temple was to intercept and imprison Emperor Asaen before the army or the arcane academies could come to his defence. So at the mouth of the Valley gathered the strongest of the strongest: the priestesses of Ankriss. The moment the priestesses caught sight of the Emperor, a tempest overtook the Valley.

They danced on the earth. They danced through the sky. They danced over mountain and stream. Priestesses, thousands of priestesses, swirling and springing across impossible distancesâ€¦ They danced the Great Dance and sang - danced and sang until only the Dance remained.

Their hands and feet sketched complex patterns on the ground and in the air around them, which pooled and coursed together into a shimmering lacework of runes. The movement of their bodies breathed life into the spells their hands and feet shaped. And all through, by swiftly shifting between hand positions and precise finger arrangements, they refined and connected the spells taking form around them.

The more accomplished among them could weave dozens of spells at once. Their hands and feet traced different incantations, the upward swing of one arm released one spell whilst the shifting hand positions of the other arm fine tuned yet another. With perfect synchronisation, all the elements of their spell-casting were woven into one flow. Hundreds of complex patterns, synchronised through breath and woven together through song, flashed and sparked and ran around their dancing bodies.

Wherever their feet touched blossomed into great eruptions of magic and power. Plumes of flame and light swirled around their bodies like the tails of a long dress. And many more plumes sailed across the sky like colourful bolts of cloth tossed into the air in a moment of wild abandon - bolts woven not of cloth but of strands of light and life. Gradually the spells stretched from one priestess to another until a complex structure of light and sound spread between them like lacework.

Like wind that shifts and lifts and breaks the waves of the ocean, their spells seized the very essence of the world and raised from it an arcane tempest. The wind gathered into a terrible gale and howled and rushed across the Valley of Light. An unnatural quiet had fallen upon the wildlife; animals sought shelter between the trees and underground, and birds fled the Valley in great numbers, battling against the wind. The current gathered and grew. Bears, wild boars and all manner of creatures whirled across the sky like dusty balls of cotton caught on the wind, surprised perhaps by their newly discovered powers of flight. The storm continued to grow. Great trees were uprooted, picked off the ground and hurled across the Valley like handfuls of grass grabbed by a child and tossed randomly over his shoulder. The Valley had been covered with a thick carpet of green, but now the forest floor was being stripped of its trees like a hallway of its carpet. Hundreds of trees popped off the ground and flew in all directions until the Valley of Light looked less like a valley than a plain.

A blast went through the lacework and the mountains around the valley were flattened for leagues. It was as if an invisible giant had picked up the very earth and unfurled it from the centre outward, with the kind of movement that resembles a sheet being draped across a bed with a flick of one's wrists. Thus, what was once a small, cosy vale broadened into one of the widest valleys in the Peninsula. Another burst rippled through the priestesses and the lacework between them. Streams of blazing flame and light flowed from their spells down towards the ground, infusing it with their runes until even the stones melted and the Valley glowed like molten metal. The priestesses wanted to make sure the Emperor did not survive, and they were very thorough in their work.

But then a miraculous thing happened: The bears and trees and debris swept up in whirling cones of wind did not fall or come crashing down but hung suspended in the air, floating gently.

The Emperor walked through the tempest, unaffected and untroubled, calmly and with poise, as the sea-gull glides through the air. The wind that surged elsewhere in the Valley had calmed down to a playful breeze around him, brushing lightly against his body and lifting a strand of his hair, now here, now there. He seemed to be in a conversation with something - or someone. Perhaps it was the wind, for from time to time the wind would spiral around his limbs with renewed gusto and the Emperor would stop to listen. His head would be cocked to one side as if he were mulling over something he recently heard. Then he would nod slowly or say something in response. They even seemed to exchange a few jokes. Every now and then his face lit up with a smile and his laughter filled the Valley - a laugh that was inundated with humour and goodwill, beginning with a deep resonance and effortlessly climbing several octaves.

The heat that had scorched the valley floor and melted the rocks did not burn his feet; the ground cooled just a few peds ahead of his step as if the heat was drawn deep into the earth, like water into sand. After a few moments, a soft undulation would go through the spots where his feet had touched the ground and sprouts began to push their heads up through the soil.

When the first of these appeared, DÃ©Ã¡rÃ¡n Asaen seemed to be taken by surprise and laughed as if he had just remembered something. As he continued to walk, the boars and the bears and all the animals of various shape and size drifting overhead shimmered and disappeared through doorways of light, and were deposited safely elsewhere in the Peninsula's forests. The trees and debris did not go through these doorways, but instead dissolved into clouds of crystalline light, and were sown again into the earth.

And he walked to the gates, as he had done every morning for seven years. He turned his head up towards the firmament and smiled as the sky cleared and the sun shone across the Valley again, bathing it in warmth and a gentle radiance. The storm had subsided and there was no sign of the priestesses' lacework of spells.

Just before he passed into the city, he glanced back, perhaps with a half-smile on his lips, and chided the High Priestess - as one might gently scold a child so as to correct or improve him:

'You make a lot of noise, but you do not make music.'

But noise they at least made. Alas, the magic of this era, in the face of the magic of the Ancient Krean, raises as much clamour as an ant passing wind in a gale."

Since then, the legend of Ancient Krean Magic has captured the imaginations of Sarvonians - a magic so powerful that the Ancient Krean seem creatures more of myth than of flesh and bone. Did they, we wonder, people a landscape of thought rather than the lush landscape of southwest Nybelmar? Were their mages really as powerful as Nybelmarians seem to believe - or did their feats grow with the passage of time, embellished by generation after generation of storytellers?

Alas, history becomes legend as its events recede into the mists of time - and memories grow dimmer in the slumber of peace. Thus the people of Nybelmar languished in millennia of peaceful splendour, growing forgetful of the dark times their land once knew. With the protection of the Krean gone, will the ancient evil that plagued Nybelmar rise again and terrorise Caelereth once more?

Terminology. Magic is complex - so in explaining it clarity is important. It may be possible to describe an arcane system without using any specialist terminology - but doing so without the benefit of clearly defined terms becomes a clumsy endeavour. After all, imagine having to write about Ximaxian magic without using caráll or ounia or xeuá or ecuá!

The purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of the Krean system for those who may never have heard of it, and to make its ideas tangible and understandable. Therefore, only the most fundamental terms of the Ancient Krean system will be defined here. Each definition is pruned down to the minimum necessary to make sense of this overview: