Four facts a wizard might tell you

Most of this is me trying to take this old post and rewrite it as in-world lore, but Fact #1 is an all-new idea.

I.

Everyone knows that magic spells are "slippery," such that a wizard who casts a spell immediately forgets how to cast it. But did you know that this phenomenon extends to the geography of the world itself? Indeed, the larger the area depicted on a map, the harder your mind must strain in order to understand it!

For this reason, complete maps of the world's continents are exceedingly rare, although some claim to have completed them. I once knew a cartographer who believed continent maps would be just as easy to understand as local maps if not for the inscrutable meddling of some Great Cosmic Being, but I've since heard he was committed to an asylum.

II.

Wizardry is not so old a practice as you might think. The Golden Empire had its augurs and oracles, but the first proper wizard was Mysmak. A century later, people still blame Mysmak's prophecies for the fall of the Silver Court, but if you ask me, it's King Elwin's fault for trying to prevent the prophecies.

Anyway, it was Mysmak who discovered that, if you summon a demon to possess you and then baptize yourself in holy water, the demon is bound to your soul. Normal souls can attempt to cast spells, but the effects are highly unpredictable; only demon-bound souls can cast spells reliably, and that's what makes a proper wizard.

III.

Likewise, elves and dwarves and dragons and such only began to emerge from the Underworld in the past hundred years or so, although written references to such creatures go back at least a thousand years in this part of the world. Different sorts of creatures have emerged in different parts of the world that conform to regional systems of belief.

Some wizards speculate that the souls of the dead sink to the center of the planet, and that the Underworld exists because of their collective power to shape reality to be more like whatever the dead believed when they died. But only recently has that power begun to assert itself above ground.

IV.

Mysmak prophesied that, one day, there will come a terrible age of tyranny and war. Fire and blood and untold suffering; this is the future King Elwin sought to prevent.

But Mysmak also prophesied that, should mankind survive the wars, this world will become a paradise. Billions will live and die, and magic will provide for their every need.

And then, at a critical mass, the world will explode, and a newborn god will burst from its crust like a bird from an egg.

In death, we shall all join and transform into a new Great Cosmic Being.

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