Vaust straightened and pointed at the blade. “Tell me, Devol, even if your sword wasn’t a majestic, would you hand it to a child?”
The boy studied the weapon where it glimmered faintly in its sheath. “I started training young, but I’m guessing you mean would I hand a deadly weapon to someone inexperienced?”
“Correct.” The mori nodded.“Malefics also draw their power from their host exactly as a majestic does, but the user is nothing more than a supply of Mana to power the malefic. An inexperienced person may wield one for no more than a few minutes before dying, and even those who survive are…changed.”
“A majestic’s power is a focus, one that reveals the inner soul of the user. It calls you to power,” Asla said as if quoting the lines of a book. “A malefic’s power is like wine, sweet but corrupting. It tempts you to power.” She looked at the others and the moonlight illuminated her eyes. “That is how madame Nauru once described it to me.”
Vaust nodded again. “And some have given more than they could truly afford. Malefics not only take your Mana and potentially your life, but you must make a pact with one to use it at all.”
“A pact?” Devol asked. “They can speak?”
“Not like you or I,” the Templar corrected. “But in a sense, yes. It is like they plant ideas or thoughts in your mind. Every malefic has its own desires or needs.” He ran a finger down his face. “I have heard about that mask before. It is referred to as the Demon Mask in common tongue and grants monstrous power to the wearer as you saw, but the price demanded is your sanity. In time, you become nothing more than a furious demon, wanting nothing more than to destroy.”
Devol bit his lip, confused as to why would anyone make that trade. “If these malefics were so powerful, how have they not been used in wars, or—” He stopped himself as the mori gave him a grim look. “They have been, I guess.”
“Almost since their very creation,” Vaust confirmed. “The Templars tried to destroy them, but those who had made the malefics broke away from the order and created their own known as the Council of Numen. They believed that they had set a course for themselves to surpass the Astrals. The Templars fought in what is known as the Malefic War, which lasted over forty years and eventually destroyed the council. That would be the first part of what would lead to our current less than illustrious standing.” He looked mournfully at the ceiling. “The second would be that they tried to hide their wrongdoing.”
“But it wasn’t the order’s fault,” the boy reasoned. “The bad ones left, right? The Templars even fought them, so they shouldn’t be held accountable.”
“Some agree,” the mori conceded. “And perhaps that is how they should have explained it back then. I could not tell you what they were thinking as this occurred about two centuries before I was born. But they tried to hide the evidence and burned many of the notes and sketches the malefic creators had left there. It is a pity as we could have used those nowadays, and they might have told us how we could destroy them.”
“They can’t be destroyed?” Devol questioned. The Templar pointed at Jazai, who rolled his eyes.
“Now he wants to tag me in.” The apprentice chuckled but seemed pleased. “So majestics are an extension of their user. The wielder strives to bond and grow with their weapon and in the process, unlocks more power and the true nature of their majestic. But a malefic…” He extended an open hand and closed it slowly.
“It binds itself to its user—almost like a leech in a way,” he continued. “Unless the wielder is powerful enough to wield it properly, it takes continually from them—Mana, sanity, and strength. The one real weakness of majestics is also their strength—their connection to their user. Malefic are…maybe not autonomous, but that connection is absent most of the time. If a majestic’s user is killed while a strong connection is present, it can break or even lose its power. But a malefic, unless it is with a user who has found a way to truly subjugate it—you know, make the malefic their tool instead of vice versa—well, it simply keeps going.”
“We’ve had some majestics that could destroy a malefic,” Vaust added. “But even then, it wasn’t safe. Their power runs deep, and when you destroy a malefic or majestic, that power erupts before it vanishes and can cause havoc before departing, which has cost us some brave Templars.” He gestured to the box. “Which is why we hide them in a vault within the order that has a unique anchor point to a forgotten, desolate realm we simply know of as the abyss. We keep the recovered malefic there in a cavern that was discovered during a reconnaissance mission through that realm many years ago.”
“If you do all this,” Devol said thoughtfully, “why are there people who seem so suspicious of you?”
“Keeping secrets…well, it’s a hard thing to do,” the Templar admitted. “And even hints of one can breed rumors much worse than the secrets. On top of that, even after the Malefic War, the council had followers who escaped to spin the tale to the Templars themselves that they had created the malefics under orders from the grand master at the time and that their council was just and trying to stop their heresy.”
He uttered another wicked, coarse laugh as he shook his head. “I don’t think there are many who believe that now, but the damage was done. Malefics have wrought much pain and suffering over the centuries and their creation did stem from the order so over time, much of the anger and sorrow has been directed toward the Templars. But that is why we continue to move forward.
