Olz Hap casting magic in the style of Léon Spilliaert, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Chapter 5: Quintidi

  Mikla metropolitan area

  Year 5638 of the Confluence

  Countdown: 18

  It was another day of no meaningful progress on the Blight. Olz took care of other issues, which seemed small and inconsequential.

  She remembered to ask the Excession Investigator what the responsibilities of the team’s Invokers were, and he explained that the two used enhancement magics on the rest of the team in order to minimize the risk that someone would panic and do something stupid.

  Mellow, indeed. There were not many jobs where people were allowed to walk around under Mellow influence all day – basically because not much would get done and there would be the risk that Mellowed-out workers would neglect something important and make mistakes.

  Ironic, then, that at the frontline of a war threatening the survival of their civilization, such laidback enhancement was not only not a risk, but even a core element of operational security.

  As a student, Olz specialized in history and specifically pre-Confluence history. (This was an optional subject for whatever spare time she had left after doing her Invocation studies.)

  She thought it was good fun and especially enjoyed comparative studies between the pre- and post-Confluence eras. For some people this was only the comparison between barbarism and civilization, but Olz knew it wasn’t that simple.

  The ancient era was complex and multifaceted, and progressed and regressed through a bewildering range of epochs. She agreed, of course, that much of what was going on back then was straightforwardly barbaric, but you had to understand it in context.

  These were dark and chaotic times when almost no one had realized their magical potential, and people were doing the best that they could under the circumstances.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Olz had enjoyed learning about the classical epoch, which stretched over something like three thousand years. It was a time of empires and slavery, but also republics and philosophy and human rights. Great religions swept across the world, and there was almost constant warfare.

  Again and again, the people of one nation would start to think of themselves as great ones, proceed to conquer other people and lands to lord over them, and then eventually see their empire collapse spectacularly.

  During the final phase of the classical epoch – which people at the time had ironically called the modern epoch – there had been technological progress and a great leap in industrial production, as well as some societal progress too.

  Nothing very impressive, but at the time she learnt about this Olz had thought that if she had been born at the start of this so-called modern epoch, she would have been suppressed both because she was a woman and because her skin was not colored light pink, and they would not have approved of her sexual adventures either.

  But towards the end of this epoch – well, many places had not really changed at all, and some had started regressing back to what they were before, but some places seemed fairly ok, at least for a while, and she might have been able to live a half-decent life there, even though she would obviously have missed the conveniences and luxuries of a Confluence life.

  There were only scattered hints about magic use back in these days, and it seemed that people who could cast magic kept quiet about it.

  Sometimes they used it for nefarious purposes, like the late-classical tyrant – she did not remember his name – of Kemvikramlos Mordor, who used deception magics to manipulate people into fearfulness and passivity while he sent marauders in armored vehicles and aircraft into neighboring nations to expand his empire.

  Soon after, of course, this empire collapsed in the usual spectacular fashion. The magister of history had suggested this tyrant might have been a renegade who was driven insane by his attempt to combine several fields of magic – notably Abjuration for obfuscation magic and Invocation for emotional manipulation.

  He was probably a psychopath as well, but lots of people in the pre-Confluence era seemed to be psychopaths. According to the magister, the difference was not that there were actually more psychopaths back then, but rather that society was organized in such a way that psychopaths more often managed to claw themselves up into position of power.

  Today there were no emperors and no wars. Well, except for the Blight and the Demons and the Glitter and what have you.

  Olz supposed it would be more correct to say that today there were no civil wars. Human civilization was not divided against itself any longer, although it occasionally encountered hostile beings that probably constituted some sort of alien wildlife. We have called it war, but it may be more like encountering lions on the savannah. Then again, who knew.

  While she acknowledged the numerous differences, Olz sometimes wondered if the civilization of the Confluence was really that different from what came before it. Most of the same psychological and societal dynamics seemed to be in play today, only they were expressed in more muted form.

  Back then, people wanted to be emperors so they could have status and power and control other people, but was her own rise as a politician and finally to High Magus driven by something very different? She had fought for status and power too, vanquishing political opponents along the way in a manner some would call ruthless.

  True, she had also had nobler motives, she wanted to make this world better in certain specific ways, but maybe these are just the stories we tell ourselves to hide the fact that, when all is said and done, we are primarily looking out for number one.

  Even the tyrant of Kemvikramlos Mordor probably told himself that he was acting in the best interests of his nation or something like that.