Old World» Memoirs of Xavier Chagas

This is a sheaf of parchment, covered in awkward writing in an archaic form of Common. The handwriting is poor, parts of the text are smudged, and splotches of ink stain the sheets; the author was evidently unused to writing with a quill.

These are the impromptu, hastily-scribbled memoirs of one Dr. Xavier Chagas. They were recorded in 301 R.C., shortly before Dr. Chagas (having been interred in the crypts beneath the cemetary of Halmerton, and at that time having risen as a wight) was destroyed and laid to rest (again).

The text is written in a highly intellectual, didactic manner, although it’s rather disjointed and sometimes rambling, as if the author didn’t know what to start with and how to structure his thoughts, and merely wrote down whatever came to mind. Much of the text is hard to follow, because so many of the references are unfamiliar. From time to time, Chagas seems to remember that he’s writing for people who lack vast amounts of background knowledge to interpret his recollections, and digresses into an explanation, but these explanations themselves aren’t entirely clear. Other times, he breezes right past offhand references that seem to imply potentially vast topics of discussion.

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His life

Xavier Chagas was born in the year 1942 A.E.¹, in a suburb of Solanar². In retrospect, he writes, the world was already in decline. He dimly remembers the crash of Ascension³; he was only six years old, but he recalls how upset and scared his parents were, and how there was talk of another war. Then it turned out that it had been an accident, and people didn’t know what to think… still, at the time, nobody saw it as part of a larger trend. Or, maybe they did, but they didn’t want to admit it.

Young Xavier displayed a talent for mathematics and magic early in life, and so he was sent to an Alliance⁴ school, on scholarship. He was hired by MURC⁵ right after he received his degree in arcanotechnic sciences. Chagas worked (and, apparently, lived) at MURC for the next twenty-five years, until it was shut down, in 1989, after Brightfire’s⁶ death.

Chagas moved back home, spending several years caring for his now-elderly parents. After their deaths, being increasingly worried by the rising tide of anti-wizard, anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-corporate sentiment in the Collective’s⁷ holdings, he moved to a small, remote farming settlement, which would soon become the town of Halmerton. There he lived for the rest of his days, participating in the newly-founded town’s civic life, using his arcane talents to help the townsfolk with their mundane needs, and becoming a respected elder of the community. He died in 2023.

His work

Chagas waxes poetic about his research at MURC, which consisted of pushing the boundaries of symbolic magic (evidently a quite abstruse area of study, yet a very useful one, as it’s the foundation for almost every arcanotechnic device—energy converters⁸ most famously, of course).

Still, one gets the impression that there wasn’t as much to show for a quarter-century-long career as Chagas might’ve hoped. The former researcher’s descriptions of MURC in his time paint a picture of a struggling institution, desperately trying to avoid admitting to itself that it was not what it once had been. There seemed to have been, in those times, a lack of direction and support from above; researchers left increasingly to their own devices, with little oversight; financial support slowed to a trickle; difficulties getting supplies; equipment failures; and, by the very end, an aging workforce, due to a lack of new recruits.

In the end, the career of Xavier Chagas seems to have produced a handful of magical trinkets (the glyph seal, and a couple of others that were so esoteric in purpose that it’s hard to imagine them ever being used outside of an arcane laboratory), some very obscure research results which cannot even be explained except to extreme specialists, and little else.

Chagas mentions, in passing, a variety of other topics studied at MURC (he is evasive on the question of when any particular bit of research was done; here again one gets the impression that by the time that Chagas joined the ranks of MURC’s researchers, the center’s glory days lay in the past). Besides his own field of symbolic magic, the wizard-scientists at Mon Uromo studied such wonders as living magic, information-theoretic arcane analysis, fundamentals of arcane structures, origins and evolution of magic, arcane construction, the melding of magic and life…

Implied, but never quite stated outright, is that the Mon Uromo Research Center was a research institution with a military purpose. The Forethought Alliance seems to have given the geniuses at MURC considerable latitude in research direction, but there seems to have always been a sense that the center was meant to be producing useful results (spells, magical techniques, devices, etc.) that would be useful in the FA’s efforts against its enemies.

His world

Xavier Chagas was not a historian. Indeed, he quite clearly was never very interested in history, having absorbed, almost against his will, a basic level of general historical knowledge from his environment, and never having bothered to learn anything more than that. Two long periods that together accounted for the better part of his life (his quarter-century-long career at MURC, and his quiet retirement in Halmerton) were spent in small communities in remote locations, having as little interaction with the wider world as he could manage.

Still, there were some things that any halfway-educated person of his time knew, and Chagas faithfully (although not very coherently) records them. Here, then, is the history of the world according to Dr. Xavier Chagas:

The history of the world, according to Dr. Xavier Chagas

Long ago, there wasn’t any magic. Or, maybe there was, and then it went away? And then came back? Or maybe people forgot about it? Ah, who knows. Anyway, people were once uncivilized savages, living in primitive tribes and kingdoms and what have you. Eventually they learned science and invented civilization.

Then, at some point, people started doing magic again. Wizards rose to the top of the world order. Dragons appeared, of whom some were evil and some were good. Magical beings and creatures became common. Mighty mage-lords and powerful dragons led great corporations⁹, which replaced the governments of old. There were wars for dominance and territory. The 19th century was a time of nearly constant war, with great numbers of people killed¹⁰, and the land itself scarred.

Brightfire, who was one of the greatest of the noble dragons, formed the Forethought Alliance. The Alliance was dedicated to the good of everyone, and fought to safeguard knowledge and protect the innocent. Brightfire’s greatest nemesis was Nox, another dragon; his followers formed an evil organization called “First and Final Strike”.

Many wonders were created in those days, and mages held vast power, and could do anything. The wars ended, mostly. Things were peaceful, and people could live their lives. But then things started to decline. The dragons began to weaken. The greatest mages died, and their successors were not as brilliant. By the end of the 20th century, almost all the dragons were dead, and many of the corporations had fallen apart. There was unrest and disorder. Gnolls and goblins raided human towns. People believed all sorts of nonsense. Things would probably never be like they were before.

But what was it like, really?

Chagas casually mentions a bewildering variety of wonders, which, it seems, were perfectly ordinary to him: teleportation; bizarre means of travel like carriages or entire houses that could move and even fly (!) on their own¹¹; making everything from clothing to entire buildings with magic; structures of improbable size and shape; ubiquitous magical constructs that served functions that are difficult to even understand, much less imagine; powerful magical creatures, controlled and harnessed for people’s use; healing (almost beyond even what can be done with the most powerful healing spells) available to everyone; weapons and spells of tremendous destructive power…

Much of it sounds quite fantastic and improbable. Despite his best attempts at explanation, with most of these wonders, one is left with the feeling that between hearing about it and seeing it firsthand lies an unbridgeable gap. At the same time, Chagas seems to have been blithely ignorant of many of the details of how his world worked; while he mentions various strange devices, materials, processes, and other things encountered in the course of his work and his everyday life, in most cases he can give only the vaguest, unsatisfying, and uninformative explanations of how exactly most of those things were made, where they came from, who was responsible for making them work or exist, and other such “trivial” matters.

One final detail cannot escape any reader’s notice. Chagas says nothing of clerics, nothing of gods, almost nothing of religion or worship of any sort. The only (apparently?) divine magic ever mentioned in his account is druidic, which seems to have been quite widespread (and associated with a city called Solanar). Even that practice does not appear to have been associated with worship, as the term would be understood today. The petitioning of supernatural beings for assistance is mentioned only derisively, as the refuge of the desperate, foolish, and ignorant. In particular, Xavier Chagas seems never to have even heard of Pelor.