Olz Hap casting magic in the style of Gustave Moreau, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.
Chapter 2: Duodi
Mikla metropolitan area
Year 5638 of the Confluence
Countdown: 21
One thing the Protectors did not like about the High Magus taking personal control of the Blight investigation was that it would reveal the investigators’ fields of magic to Olz and her team. Most of them would obviously be Diviners – this was first and foremost an attempt to understand the threat they were facing – although, as it turned out, there were also quite a few Abjurers involved and, perhaps more surprisingly, two Invokers. Finally, a group of Conjoiners were responsible for coordinating the investigators.
The Excession Investigator briefed Olz and her personal team on how the investigation proceeded. One obvious question was how, exactly, people lost their energy. This was the main Divination project for the present stage of the investigation: by what dynamics did energy disappear. Along with this main task, however, other Diviners searched carefully for enemy attempts at detecting their probing, for any sort of triggers and traps that the main Divination team might set off, for various types of countermagics, and for obfuscation magics hiding any of these measures. There were so many things to look for that most of the Diviners involved – more than four out of five – were involved in these secondary searches rather than the main task. If and when any countermeasures were discovered – so far there had been plenty of detection and obfuscation magics – Abjurers moved in to nullify them. The Excession Investigator was proud to report that so far, no detection magics had been set off – everything had been properly nullified. The enemy should therefore be none the wiser about the capabilities of the Confluence than they were before their attack.
This was a great benefit. While serious, it was quite possible that the Energy Blight was only a probe, and one had to be very careful not to divulge information about the state of one’s capabilities. Being careful to the point of covering all eventualities took time, but the worst thing one could do in a situation like this was to rush it and make mistakes benefiting the enemy. It was better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing.
The role of the two Invokers, meanwhile, was to keep investigators alert yet relaxed. When people got afraid – especially if they panicked – they made mistakes, and it was therefore important to stabilize investigators’ emotional states. Via the efforts of the Conjoiners, the Invokers could be present in the Divination action itself and monitor the emotional state of the people involved.
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Things were moving forward, the Excession Investigator assured them. Perhaps not at high speed, but in a safe and controlled manner. They would get to the bottom of this, and they would get there without feeding information to their enemies.
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There was some sort of special relationship between Diviners and Protectors. Nobody knew exactly why it was so, but everybody knew that it was so. Maybe the reason was simply that to protect against danger, one needed information about how things might be dangerous. Knowledge production was therefore a core aspect of Protector operations – probably even more so than cancellation magic or anything related to the field of Abjuration.
Another thing that seemed obvious to Olz, even if she never talked much about it, was that Diviners have the capacity to observe what Protectors are up to. Doing so would be ethically and legally problematic, to say the least, but Olz did not recall any Diviner ever standing trial for attempting to spy on Protector secrets. Surely some of them must occasionally be tempted. And even if Diviners are as respectful of others’ privacy and as focused on ethical conduct as they always try to convince people that they are, it would seem out of character for the notoriously secretive Protectors to base their operational security on trust.
No. Some sort of arrangement here. A power-sharing agreement serving the interests of both parties.
The other fields of magic knew that there was a special relationship of some kind, even if they did not know the details. When it was time to elect a High Magus, the fields of Conjunction, Conjuration, Conveyance, Dissemination, Evocation, Invocation, and Transmutation always agreed on one of their own. Never a Diviner, and never (of course) a Protector. This had become standard practice and might even be said to be an unwritten constitutional law. Diviners and Protectors had always protested their innocence, but the Majority Alliance, as it was referred to among magisters of politics, persisted across the millennia. Apparently, the alliance went all the way back to the first Confluence assembly in year 1, although the office of High Magus itself was first established to facilitate a coordinated response to the Virus attack in 612. Anyway, as Olz understood the situation, the Protectors had eventually outmaneuvered the Majority Alliance by turning the High Magus into a largely ceremonial figure.
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After work, there was a dinner with the Invoker leadership she could not really skip. Invokers were generally doing alright under the Energy Blight, although the imposition of new duties – the Invoker-Conjoiner program to counteract the Blight’s effects on Confluence citizens – was taking a toll. More mundane tasks including psychological counseling were postponed, leading to increases in mental unhealth and Invoker frustrations. Of course, Invokers had their own ways to deal with such problems, but these days they were kindly requested to invest most of their magical energy in the Blight counteraction program. Denna Laureline, the High Invoker, was not critical of the administration’s work as such, she just informed Olz that even among the ranks of the field of Invocation – not the most vulnerable part of the populace – the Blight was having a pronounced detrimental effect.
