NOVEL NEXT 10. The Grand Coven
An excerpt from Master Syeliban’s ‘Lecture on the Witch’s Schism: Compiled Notes.’
“... and so it was that the practitioners of witchcraft and magecraft distanced themselves from each other. The dissolution of the bonds between former practitioners of wizardry resulted in the nature of magic as we see it in Aulpre today. While it is known that the traditions of witchcraft persist amongst the people of this land, the catastrophe of the Grand Coven shattered countless generations of oral history—ironically, it was this disaster that paved the way for the prevalence of the Arcane discipline today.”
Tirk wandered through the door and sat down next to Yenna, looking for all the world as though he had been invited. Seated up on the bench designed for kesh, he looked comically small—Tirk could barely see over the edge of the table, though he still managed to meet everyone’s eyes. After a bemused silence, the boy spoke up.
“Weren’t you going to tell a story?”
“I guess I was. How did you know?” Yenna frowned, tilting her head in confusion.
“My horn always points towards a good story!” With an unbearably cute grin, Tirk tapped the blunt tip of his nub of a horn. Putting aside that rather unscientific statement, he had not been wrong.
“Not going to keep the boy waiting, are you?” Lumale had copied Yenna’s pose, one arm across her chest, the other leaning on it to tap at her chin—a quiet tink punctuating each tap.
Yenna gave a sigh and nodded. “In that case, I’ll consider it a lecture. I hope you won’t deny me the chance to teach as I am used to.”
Despite the nature of what she meant to talk about, the mage couldn’t help but feel a little excited. Removing a ring from one of her fingers, she carefully placed it on the table and cast a spell. Tiny symbols lit up along the inside of the ring, a magic circle of blue light appearing above it. Yenna raised her hands above the circle and began to manipulate it as a puppeteer would, causing a tiny kesh figure to appear. Tirk gasped in wonder, and the two yolm women barely stifled their own surprise. Lumale watched intently—any gasping on her part would have to be entirely intentional.
“Long ago in archaic Aulpre¹, there were none who called themselves mage. Instead, all masters of magic were known by the simple title of ‘wizard’. Magic was not the defined science we know of today, and wizards one and all used the power of their instincts to manipulate magic to their will.”
The tiny kesh, a ghostly illusion clad in blue robes and pointed hat, waved a staff about dramatically. With these gestures, the illusion conjured up the equally illusory effect of building a tower with her spells. As the pretend wizard summoned bricks and mortar, another kesh wizard joined her, clad in green.
“Amongst the wizards, there were two schools of thought. Some saw magic as a thing to be treated with care and respect, fearing great disaster would befall those who did not treat it with reverence.” The blue-clad wizard moved carefully, arranging her tower with utmost care. The green wizard watched on, pacing about restlessly.
“The other school of thought held that they would never in a hundred lifetimes finish their works if they were to be so cautious. They saw this reverence as a pointless limiter, and sought instead to dominate
magic, to twist it to their own ends.”The group watched on as the green wizard raised aloft her own staff and reared on her hind legs, an enormous stone pillar shooting up out of the ground to stand tall over the tower. But no sooner had she raised it, did it begin to teeter. “They were reckless, and often brought disaster on themselves and others. For that, they were branded as witches.”
The stone pillar fell and crashed down through the wizard’s unfinished tower, leaving naught but rubble. Tirk ducked to avoid a flying stone brick that sailed over his head harmlessly. The blue wizard wordlessly shook her staff, upset at the damage, and the green wizard fled. With a sweep of her hand, Yenna dismissed them into smoke and crafted a new scene.
“These witches began to resent the other wizards. They did their magic in secret, and passed their words down verbally—part of why we don’t have much record of their spellcraft.” Yenna side-eyed Lumale as she conjured a small group of witches in green, and the silupker made a quiet chuckling chime. Tirk raised a hand.
“Why didn’t the witches write their spells down? Wouldn’t that make it easier to share?”
Yenna opened her mouth to answer the boy, but Lumale cut her off.
“It would, exactly. Which was why they were never written down—whatever would a self-righteous mage do, were they to find someone’s spellbook full of forbidden spells? Perhaps steal them for themselves, before putting the witches to the torch.” Lumale gave Yenna a pointed look that, despite the lack of eyes to glare with, made the mage feel quite uneasy.
“I…I won’t defend the actions of overzealous witch-hunters from ages past. However, it was the witches who sealed their own fate. Historians argue over the exact nature of the catalyst, but the witches found or created some object of great power, and around it united to form the Grand Coven.”
Yenna’s illusory witches were joined by more and more comrades, of all different shades of green, to form a crowded circle around a black sphere. “They united for one purpose—to perform an immense ritual, to empower all practitioners of witchcraft with supreme power. What they did not realise was that there was no shortcut to mastery, and the object of power failed to empower anything but itself.”
Each of the witches raised her staff, wisps of smoky magic floating into the black sphere at their centre. Each wisp made it bigger, until it crackled with black lightning. Bolts struck out, turning witches to ash—some turned tail and ran, but were struck down before they could ever escape. The group watched wide-eyed as barely a handful of witches escaped the sphere’s wrath, before the object itself vanished in a puff of black smoke.
“It destroyed nearly every witch—we know some must have escaped, or we would have no knowledge of what happened. But not one would ever say what ritual they had attempted that night, and witchcraft all but vanished from the world. It was the proponents of careful study that took the reins of Aulprean magic from then on, calling themselves mages and employing the methodical approach to magecraft we call Arcana.”
With another sweep of her hand, Yenna blew away the illusions and put her ring back on.
“Don’t mean t’sound rude, Yenna,” Jiin spoke up after a moment’s silence, “But I think y’missed a bit. Didn’t Lumale seem t’think it was the mages’ fault the witches are all gone?”
“Why, yes! I dare say you did miss a few notes. I suppose I can’t blame you,” Lumale gave a somewhat dramatic shrug, “Seeing as you’ve heard only the lies of the colleges. Shall I enlighten you?”
Yenna would normally be offended to have her own instructors and masters insulted so, but she realised what an opportunity this would be—Lumale was around during the time, and it felt increasingly clear to Yenna that she was a witch herself. To hear what a real witch knew about the Grand Coven would be an amazing addition to my journal, to say nothing of the research implications.
With a nod and a gesture for her to continue, Yenna pulled out her journal and readied herself to take notes. Lumale gave a laugh like someone had walked into a windchime, but didn’t seem to take offence.
The silupker gave a tiny flick of her finger, and made a copy of Yenna’s illusory stage. The blue-robed wizard from her first example was assembling a tower as before, but this time she was building it at a painfully slow pace. Each brick was painstakingly lifted, aligned, removed, checked over, replaced, considered. The green-robed wizard arrived and began to use her magic to cause a building to appear, and the blue-robed wizard took notice.
“The wizards who would be called witches weren’t reckless,” Lumale insisted, “They were clever. While the other wizards would insist that magic was only for the most solemn of occasions, never once to be experimented with, the witches did all the hard work. They tried new things, and suffered the consequences of failure—it was the mages who copied their finished works, and patted themselves on the back for doing so.”
The silupker conjured another scene, of blue wizards shunning and denying their green peers. “For every experiment gone wrong, it was easier and easier for the wizards to convince the commonfolk that those on the forefront of discovery were instead dangerous elements to be sent away, to be hunted.”
One of the blue wizards cast aside her staff for a sword, and all jumped in fright as she rather gruesomely beheaded a green wizard. Even Yenna was surprised at the realistic nature of the illusion, though she kept her focus on the fact that it was just that—an illusion, nothing more.
“What exactly was it that the witches found that caused them to form the Grand Coven?” Yenna asked a question, hoping that Lumale would remove the expanding pool of illusory blood—she didn’t wish for Tirk to have a nightmare over it.
“On that point…I am unsure. To my regret, I was something of a hermit in those days. I did not go to the meeting of the Grand Coven, despite the insistence of my fellows. I had a bad feeling about it, and I was right. But what I do know is, the witches would not have been so pressed to do such a thing if it wasn’t under the threat of extinction.” Lumale tilted her head in thought.
“If it was real long ago,” Tirk chimed in, “Maybe Demvya would know?”
“CHILD.” The spirit’s booming voice startled everyone, including Lumale. “I KNOW NAUGHT OF THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS AND WITCHES. I WATCH OVER THE HARVEST, AND THE PRIESTS. AND NOW, I SUPPOSE, THE BLACK BOOK.”
“Black book?” Lumale’s surprise turned to interest. Demvya pulled the metal book from its hiding place, tucked into Jiin’s vest, and notably kept a two-handed grip on it. It seemed she had no interest in letting this book cause any more trouble, one way or another. Still, Lumale looked it over carefully.
“This is a dark thing you have. I have seen its like once before—but where?” Lumale suddenly seemed uncertain, turning away and taking a few steps from the table. “It was ever so long ago, before the Grand Coven. A…person. A travelling salesman, of a kind I didn’t recognise, offering me a book in exchange for…something.”
Lumale fell all but silent, the tiniest little noise of tinkling bells that Yenna took for mumbling emanating from her. With the silupker witch evidently distracted, the mage thought to flee, get everyone away before something bad happened. In the back of her head, a little voice insisted that this was likely the only chance she was going to get such a promising lead on the origin of the black book—possibly even a means of opening its lock.
“Can you tell us anything more? Even the tiniest clue could mean everything. Did this person say how to open the book?” Yenna got up and moved towards Lumale, the rest of the group watching on. After a few moments, the silupker turned back around.
“In all my years of life, I have vivid memories and dull ones. But this moment in time has been crudely torn from my mind—I can still see the scraps, but I’m missing the important parts. If you’ve any sense, you would bury that book deep where none can find it.” Lumale’s voice was tinged with fear, and the illusory surroundings were beginning to fade. Yenna shook her head emphatically.
“I’m afraid I cannot. Besides my own curiosity, that book seems to have brought disaster to a whole town of people. I cannot in good conscience hide it somewhere and risk it being found again without that dark context. Besides,” Yenna looked back at the fading illusion on the table, “It would be nice to show you a mage willing to take the risks for progress. We aren’t as afraid of learning as you think.”
Yenna held out a hand to Lumale, and the silupker froze. Her blank, veiled face belied no expression, but the nervous shuffle of her hooves and her fingers fiddling with her robes told Yenna all she needed to know. Lumale had remained alive for a very long time due to an excess of caution. One of the few remaining witches from those days, her head full of secrets, was being asked to risk her secrecy for the sake of a mage’s curiosity. A handful of tense moments passed, and Yenna began to worry she had offended the witch before Lumale put her stony hand into the mage’s.
“I’ll work with you, conditionally.” Lumale’s voice was crisp, her words carefully chosen. “Deny but one of my conditions, and you shall not hear a whit from me again—we work to prevent another disaster, nothing more.”
Lumale’s answer was clear. What secrets could she share to solve this puzzle, and what would she demand?
¹ - Yenna is frustratingly unclear in her writing about how long ago these events took place, as she seems to believe that anyone reading the phrase ‘archaic Aulpre’ would intuitively understand. Through some research, I have determined the era to encompass a span of time roughly one hundred to four hundred years prior to Yenna’s writing. The exact timing of the formation of the Grand Coven is unclear even to contemporary and later writers, making this a difficult thing to pinpoint.