Mages and Loremasters

 Q. What’s the difference between a mage and a loremaster?

A. In many parts of the Realm, mage is the title given to someone adept in spellcraft and divination who offers his or her service to monarchs, governments, or cities in need of magical assistance. Mages provide protection against supernatural threats. They predict the future (once in a while they actually get it right), they solve riddles and uncover arcane secrets, and they offer sage advice (sometimes it’s actually good).

Many professional mages begin their training at the college of magecraft on the island of Kyning Rore. They then go on to have illustrious -- or infamous -- careers at royal courts. 

Sometimes mages who have different skills will band together as a guild or league and offer their services as a package deal. The people of Skald hired one such guild of mages, but the “deal” turned out to be a bad one for them. It has often been remarked that a kingdom was doing just fine until they hired a mage, and only then did all sorts of frightening and inexplicable things began happening. There are those who have even accused mages of stirring up or faking supernatural trouble and then stepping in to solve the problem, in order to trick the gullible.

A loremaster, in contrast, is someone who collects and tells stories. To some this seems like a far less important calling than that of a mage. But it mustn’t be forgotten that the Realm is a world made of stories. Magic comes in many different shapes and forms in such a world, and in some stories there is no magic at all. So the power of any mage or wizard or sorcerer is limited by the “laws” of the story they are part of. Whereas a loremaster studies and delves into the deep source of all magic and all stories: the fathomless fire.

This is the power to shape Story itself, and mages who do not understand this power use it unwisely, with disastrous results. The hasty and ignorant tend to disregard the work of loremasters in favour of the dazzling spectacles that some mages can put on.

Q. Why doesn’t the city of Fable have a resident mage or mage guild?

A. Some say this is because Fable isn’t important or wealthy enough to afford a true mage as advisor. No mage who wanted to make a name for himself would bother setting up shop in such an out-of-the-way place. There would be no renown (or money) in it.

Others suggest Fable has no mage because they’ve never had need of one. Fable has a resident loremaster, Nicholas Pendrake, a toymaker by trade. He may in fact be the last of the loremasters, although his granddaughter Rowen is said to have inherited much of his gift for Story.

The Broken Years

After the Great Unweaving unraveled the threads of Story, the Realm was plunged into a dark age during which much wisdom and knowledge was lost. No one can say how long these Broken Years lasted, because in that time, time itself was torn asunder.

The seasons no longer followed the yearly cycle that folk had lived by since time began. In some storylands winter refused to give way to spring. In others, summer lingered on and on, drying up rivers and withering crops. In many places the stars disappeared from the night sky, and the sun and moon rose at strange times and according to no rhythm or pattern that anyone could have faith in. Folk found that they had lost days, or years, out of their lives. Stories that had once been places of harmony and order descended into war, famine, and ruin. Many precious, irreplaceable stories, and storytellers, disappeared into silence.

It was during the Broken Years that the men and women known as loremasters first appeared in the Realm and fought against the darkness and the silence. They did not fight with swords or spears or devices of metal and fire. Their weapon was knowledge.

The loremasters journeyed through the Realm, learning all that they could of the ancient time of the Stewards, and sharing that lost wisdom with all they met. It was the loremasters who discovered the forgotten knot-paths that linked far-flung regions of the Realm, and the hidden refuges for travelers known as snugs. It was the loremasters who carried the light of the fathomless fire through the dark so that it did not utterly go out. And it was the loremasters who kept the memory of Story as it had once been, and could be again. With their tales and songs they rekindled hope, and mended the wounds of the Great Unweaving, and the shadows of fear and ignorance slowly drew back. It was said in later ages that these great loremasters told the disordered seasons into harmony once again, and even restored the sun and moon to their proper round in the heavens.

In the most lightless lands, the first star to reappear in the empty night sky was named the Waylight, in honour of the nameless loremaster who had gone about with his lantern, driving the creatures of darkness away and promising the people that the night could not last forever.

Malabron, the Night King, had been defeated by the Stewards, but not destroyed. He retreated into his kingdom of shadow, but during the Broken Years his power began to grow again. Much of the terror and loss of that time can be attributed to him. Malabron once more began to weave a story of his own into the fabric of the Realm, a tissue of lies that painted him as a saviour, a bringer of light who had been exiled by the jealous Stewards. And many who gave in to fear and despair in this time believed his story, and submitted to Malabron and became his willing servants.

It is the destiny of all mortal things to die and rejoin the Weaving, from which they may some day return, in new bodies and forms. Malabron deceived his followers with the lie that the Weaving did not exist, that there was only death and darkness beyond the grave, but if they followed him they could live forever. And so they refused the Weaving, and came to Malabron’s shadow country, and he did give them a life beyond death, but it was the lifeless, hopeless existence of the fetch.

Malabron hated the Tain Shee, the Fair Folk who had stood against him with the Stewards. But he hated and feared the loremasters almost as much, for they woke people up to his lies. So he sent his servants to hinder and destroy them. There had once been many loremasters, for they shared their treasure of lore with anyone who wished to learn it. But in time, as Malabron’s hunters did their evil work, few dared openly call themselves loremasters anymore. The few who survived and carried on did so at great peril and often in secret. They came to live in out-of-the-way places, and were known to folk only as farmers, tinkers, cobblers, healers… and toymakers.

The Great Unweaving

The most ancient days of the Realm, when the Stewards walked the earth and tended the many worlds of Story, have been separated from us by the event known as the Great Unweaving.

Much about this time in the Realm’s history has been lost, but most loremasters and enigmatists agree that the Great Unweaving was brought about by the war between the Stewards and the Night King, Malabron. Naming himself the Lord of Story, Malabron attempted to draw the threads of every tale into his own, so that if he was victorious the realm of all stories would contain only one story, his own, a nightmare of endless grey sameness and despair.

Along with their allies  the Tain Shee and others, the Stewards resisted Malabron’s campaign of conquest and destruction. But as these two mighty opposing forces clashed, the weave of things was warped and twisted and torn out of its harmonious shape. Gaps and holes appeared, stories fell into darkness or were changed into bleak and violent versions of what they had been. It was in this lost age that storyshards first appeared.

Even time itself was affected by the Great Unweaving, and this is why we cannot be sure how long ago these events happened. Loremasters call the ages between the Great Unweaving and our time the Broken Years, because time itself was literally broken. Seasons no longer followed their ancient cycle (in some places winter might last for years, or summer would draw on so long that crops would wither and rivers would dry up). All the ways in which people counted and measured time became faulty and unreliable, and so there is a gap, a blank space, in all histories and almanacs between the ancient days and more recent times. Those who tend to such matters dated the New Era from the moment that the star known as the Great Waylight first appeared in the night sky, and from that event began a new count of years. Their dating became the Realm standard, and by its measure, for example, the year that Will Lightfoot first came to the Perilous Realm was the year 2021 of the New Era.

Some inhabitants of the Realm, like the Tain Shee, live far longer than mortal folk like you and I. The Shee may in fact have been immortal before the upheaval of the Great Unweaving. All they will say about the days before their war with Malabron is that “time was much wider and deeper than it is now. A moment was a lifetime.”

Even the lifespan of the Shee, then, was changed by the Broken Years, and although they still appear to have some power to slow the passage of time, they can grow old as we can. Moth and Morrigan, the Shee whom Will Lightfoot met and befriended, seemed to him both young and ancient at the same time. One can be certain that they (as well as Shade the wolf) are older than 2021 years, but how much older, no one can say, for the Shee do not measure the years before they stood with the Stewards to defy the Night King (at least not as we measure them).

Danny Kaye: The Ugly Duckling