characters. Well, it’s amazing to us anyway. We could be easy to impress. We might be weak compared to a lot of writers, especially role-playing-game writers, but it sure feels like a ton of development. Even when something gets just a passing mention or is glimpsed in the background, there’s been thought put into it. Plus, there are in-jokes, and meta-references, and braided or circular storytelling that have as much to do with stand-up joke framework (warmup, first callout, setup, gag, punchline, callback) as with screenplay or prose structure. Some person or building in the background might be important six books down the line. In one interview we laughed and said we always have four pages of notes for a two-line reference.
This essay shows a little bit of what that forethought is like. And you know what? This is our job, seven days a week, writing and drawing and researching every single day, and we still get things wrong all the time. But I promise you, we sure do our very best for you.
My specialty is the How and Why Things Happen Department. Here are some insights into the Hawkbrothers, the hertasi, and just what a Vale is—and what it’s for.
About 1150 years ago from the “current” point in the Valdemar/Velgarth timeline (circa Perfect Day and Transmutation), the paired disasters known as the Cataclysm occurred. And it was a mess. A deity-level, impossible-to-fix-instantly mess. The seventy-some years before the Cataclysm were called The Mage Wars, because Velgarth’s native magic fields had been harnessed like never before by cabals and individuals. In the centuries before, magic work had been at what might today be called journeyman level at best, and those who used sorcery had few, if any, mentors. Spellwork was mostly experimentation. Experimentation was often lethal. Magery wasn’t a career choice for a long life. Some of these early wizards did keep notes, though, and the ones that didn’t die in a flash of Mage-shaped embers passed their notes along. And so, schools of thought regarding magic and what could be done with it led to those that could eventually be called Adepts.
These Mages often became more than tyrants and more than leaders. They became strategic weapons. Alliances and one-time deals shaped the courses of tribes and nations alike. Just having the social favor of a Mage could be enough to stop a rivals’ invasion of your duchy or hunting grounds. A warlord of great strategic ability could employ a Mage for tide-turning battle tactics, and the Mage would be kept safe and comfortable by the warlord all the rest of the time. Everybody—and let me stress that, everybody—who understood any sort of civilization knew that those who worked magic were to be respected.
The next turning point after Adepts came very swiftly. An Adept could train others to do parts of spellwork and then combine their subworks into a Great Work. This was first used to enrich an eroded floodplain, while the baron’s men built levees to make use of the renewed soil. This historic Great Work used just under sixty journeyman-level Mages and a single Adept.
One of the journeyman Mages was a very young man named Urtho.
At this time, the “texture” of Velgarth’s magic was very rough. It took a brute force approach to cause something to happen, and Great Works nearly always resulted in serious injury for two-thirds of the magic users involved, because excess energy would manifest as light and heat. Very often, spellwork simply wasn’t worth the chance of losing a percentage of your Mage teams to blindness and burns. Magework was reserved solely for things that laborers, soldiers, and engineers could not replicate. And, not incidentally, wherever there was magic, something was going to explode. This was partly because no one had the slightest concept of static electricity, and magework would sometimes create a huge potential charge that would ignite materials and gasses nearby. That never helps. Other times, enchantment-prone materials would accidentally get charged up and detonate. This led to a brief and ill-advised fad of naked spellcasting, which ended not long after the first spate of full-body, smoking head and groin hair burns. Obviously comparing notes literally couldn’t hurt.
A bold tradition arose, by Urtho’s doing, that got Mages together in “salons” to share their information freely about spells and energies, regardless of their political leanings or ranks. It was against common law, even considered traitorous by some, but the fear of and respect for Mages were such that these salons were not once raided. Urtho was, to put it mildly, likable. Whereas so many colleagues were gruff or pained by old wounds or insufferably self-important, Urtho had kind eyes and a kind heart, to match his ability to maneuver socially. A knack for bribery didn’t hurt, either.
Urtho’s salons became a “movable feast” that would travel village to city, Mage school to secret cabal, and every year they became more lavish and the food much better. Mages were always wealthy. The salons advanced magical theory to a level that might have taken a century more, had they not flourished. Inevitably, these gatherings collapsed due to schism and war, but the world gained much knowledge (and fewer explosions) from them.
Urtho gazed at an oil lamp one evening and mused, “If it were a bowl of oil, touched by this fire, it would explode. But it is a lamp, and the wick is restricted, so only the wick burns. It gives just a little light and heat, and that is just what I ask of it.” Urtho wrote this in one of his many notebooks, unaware that by doing so, he had just changed the history of the entire world and the spirit realms above and below it.
Urtho’s great accomplishment in the years after the salons was to develop a set of “weights and measures” for magic use. It all began with that first observation from the oil lamp. His title, Mage of Silence, was because spellwork at the time put out a huge “signature” that could be detected even at long distances; but Urtho’s spellwork used exactly as much power as was needed and no more. Thus, “silence,” and others feared and respected the fact that Urtho could have operations going and operatives active right beside them that they simply couldn’t detect. It became the bluff that saved countless lives.
Magery, like anything, has its trends and fashions. Animal husbandry enhanced by magic came into fashion, and from that came something called “uplifting.” Creatures could be made stronger and swifter, yes, but also smarter. Adepts, by this time numbering in the scores and as influential as kings, became bored with being the era’s equivalent of field cannon. Several put their knowledge to work on improving horse breeds, and others toward creating giant versions of small but deadly creatures like ice-drakes.
The hertasi could be described as semisentient at the time Urtho picked up where a predecessor of his, Khal Herta, had left off. The wild hertasi were mild-tempered reptiles, available in large quantity, living fairly simple lives. After Herta’s experimental work, hertasi had simple structures, organized hunting and fishing, and rudimentary medicine. Several of the bands settled at Ka’venusho were former followers of Herta who adopted Urtho when Herta passed on. They brought Khal Herta’s notes and all of the hertasi with them, knowing that the Kyamvir’s unified tribes would easily subjugate the hertasi if any stayed in their native northern swamps.
Urtho took the approach of increasing the intelligence of hertasi social leaders, encouraging them to breed with their subordinates and then increasing the intelligence of their offspring. It created a surprisingly seamless acceptance among the hertasi, for those who were far smarter than any had been before were their own children, not strangers from an Adept’s lab.
Part of Khal Herta’s uplift process was instilling a mild compulsion in the hertasi to be appreciative for what they had become, and Urtho left that intact. This lives on, into the current timeline, as the unstoppable helpfulness the hertasi as a whole have. Even the grouchiest hertasi knows that they “owe” Urtho for having as good a life as they do. Interestingly, that compulsion did not carry through into the tyrill, the “bigger siblings” of the hertasi. Urtho constantly struggled with ethical questions of practicality and free will, and when the compulsion bred out of the tyrill, he simply let it go, almost as if he were making up for its presence in the hertasi.
It is also important to mention here that Urtho was but one man, but the work of uplifting a species was done by a small legion of lesser Mages working under Urtho’s direction. Urtho’s greatest work, the gryphons, took forty years of constant design and spellwork by nearly three hundred lower-ranked Mages, and each of them had a personal staff of helpers. Urtho’s Tower had as many sublevels as it had floors, plus scores of outbuildings. Every day Urtho made the rounds of the workrooms and directed the swarms of probability sprites that tested each organ and behavior of the species. Urtho is the Great Mage who got the credit, but thousands of others supported him, including the survivors who would become the Tayledras.
Kal’enel, the goddess revered by the Hawkbrothers is, like every other Velgarthian deity, a nonphysical creature of limited abilities. When the Cataclysm was on their horizon, the deities of Velgarth could see that it was much more than they could handle. Much as a ship’s crew cannot stop a storm but can choose a course and batten down the hatches, the deities that had genuine prophets knew the Cataclysm was coming and could only adjust their sails, so to speak. The most compassionate of deities made plans and worked great magics to preserve their followers. Some deities, to put it plainly, blundered, did not survive, and are only remembered in historical documents.
The Cataclysm was so horrible, even for the gods, because it consisted of one of Urtho’s weapons that they
