With a Single Spell

NOTES

In Y.S. 5226, when the noted wizard Tobas of Telven consulted an oracular priest in Ethshar of the Spices, his primary purpose was to locate two people he felt he owed an unpaid debt. However, he took the opportunity to obtain answers to certain other questions as well. Those answers are provided here for any readers of this chronicle who might be interested.

Roggit knew perfectly well that Tobas had lied about his age; he was not as far gone as his apprentice believed. He was, however, a very lonely old man and took pity on the boy. Only after accepting him as an apprentice did he have misgivings, which were responsible for the delays in teaching Tobas anything useful.

The area in the mountains between Dwomor and Aigoa where wizardry would not function resulted from the second use of the spell Ellran’s Dissipation. This incredibly powerful but very simple first-order spell was discovered quite by accident in Y.S. 4680, by the little-known research wizard Ellran the Unfortunate; it renders an area of indeterminate size “dead” to wizardry, permanently. Since the military government of Old Ethshar relied heavily on wizardry, while their Northern enemies did not, the spell was deemed to be not only useless, militarily speaking, but exceedingly dangerous, and accordingly it was vigorously suppressed. It was only performed twice: once in 4680, when Ellran discovered it, and again in 4762, when Captain Seth Thorun’s son, a bitter and inept former apprentice of Kalirin the Clever, himself an apprentice of Ellran’s, used it to end a pointless feud with his rival, Derithon the Mage. Derithon’s home was destroyed, and Derithon himself was presumably killed. A secret military outpost devoted to magical research was also rendered “dead” to wizardry, and was consequently abandoned. This was the “village” Tobas and Peren explored. Seth Thorun’s son was tried for murder and treason by a proper military tribunal, found guilty, and hanged on the sixth day of Rains, 4763, and his Book of Spells burned, putting an end to the line of apprentices passing down Ellran’s Dissipation.

Captain Istram of the Golden Gull could not be bothered to locate the rightful owners of the boat Tobas had left in his care, but did not feel justified in keeping it. Accordingly, he sold the boat and donated the proceeds to a theurgical hospital for injured or aged sailors.

Prince Heremin of Teth-Korun did not actually speak Quorulian as his native tongue at all; he spoke Teth-Korunese. His interpreter spoke Quorulian and was unaware of the distinction between the two tongues. Other than differences in the use of the subjunctive and in the genitive-case endings of proper nouns, the two languages are, in fact, indistinguishable.

Dragons were endemic to the hills of Dwomor for centuries, but none caused serious problems before Y.S. 5220 or so, because until then none ever lived long enough to grow to a formidable size. The dragon Tobas killed had resorted to eating livestock and people only when it had devoured everything else big enough for it to catch; if it had been just a little smarter, it would have moved on to a different area, instead, and gone on eating deer. Dragons have no known limit to their growth; but since young ones tend to be quite stupid and easy to capture or kill, very few ever exceed what humans consider a manageable size. They reach reproductive maturity at about six or seven feet in length, so that the tendency to get killed off when they reach ten feet or so has not seriously endangered the species. The linguistic centers of the draconic brain usually develop around the twenty-foot size, but of course, like a human infant, a dragon cannot learn to talk without someone to teach it. The illegible page in the front of Derithon’s book of spells had once held his notes on the making of an athame; they were rendered illegible when his master found them and impressed on his apprentice with a willow switch that the athame was a secret. The lesson took, and the little code symbol Derithon used thereafter was the result.

The thing that sank Dabran the Pirate’s ship Retribution was Degorran, a little-known sea demon of the Fifth Circle. Shemder the Lame, the demonologist aboard the Ethsharitic trader Behemoth who was responsible for summoning Degorran, had been attempting to contact the much less formidable second-circle demon Spesforis the Hunter when he got lucky and brought up Degorran instead.

The invisible servant Tobas called Nuisance was in the castle in the void when Derithon first created it; in fact, it was arguably the castle’s rightful owner until Derithon placed it under several assorted spells of constraint and compulsion, and its abuse of Tobas was as close as it could come to wreaking vengeance for its enslavement on all wizardkind.

And finally, spriggans really are harmless, except in large numbers, but not quite as stupid as Tobas hoped; it took them three years to figure out that the mirror wouldn’t work in the fallen castle and another year after that to drag it somewhere it would work, unleashing the steady supply of spriggans that continued to plague Ethshar from then on.