160, 1/2

In the illuminated yurt, where Erick, Poi, Nirzir, Jane, and Teressa stood or sat, there was silence.

And then Poi said, “There’s not much to tell, but I will explain.”

Erick almost told Poi to forget it, for lingering anger still percolated in the back of his brain, and he truly didn’t care to hear the Mind Mage’s justifications for not helping when they could. But maybe he needed to hear those justifications.

Erick already knew the broad strokes, and he could guess at the rest. What probably happened, was that the Mind Mages tried to help suss out the various problems everywhere, but people didn’t believe that they could do what they said, and then when the Mind Mages proved themselves, they were corrupted by interior or exterior forces, which likely led to a civil war, and also to the people of the world coming down on them. Shades were likely involved.

Except, now that he was thinking about it, Erick doubted that it was that simple.

The Mind Mages were a part of the Forgotten Campaigns, after all, and those were massive purges of certain peoples of Veird in order to rid the world of something too damaging to let exist. Those tragedies were not fully the Mind Mages’ faults, though, for the gods and the wrought were also involved. A great many people were likely involved in purging knowledge of Atomic Magic (for example) out of the civilizations of Veird.

That was just Erick’s educated guess, though.

So, the reason Erick did not stop Poi was, perhaps, that it would be nice to know the actual, true history of the Mind Mages. If the Mind Mages were capable of telling people their true history, anyway. They likely had forces out there that compelled them to speak lies all the time, and possibly to believe their own lies, too. Would Poi just spout lies at him? Lies that he didn’t even know were lies, himself?

Ah. Erick’s anger wasn’t going away anytime soon.

Best hear some more lies, then.

Poi paused, eyeing Erick a little, then said, “Perhaps we could shelve this conversation until after all these major events have calmed down.”

Erick said, “I would prefer to have it out, now, for I need to know why these problems can’t be solved by the people capable of solving these problems.”

Teressa glanced between Erick and Poi, seeming unsure who to stick up for. Jane looked at her father like she was slightly mad. Nirzir spoke to someone else through [Telepathy] about whatever it was she was doing, or maybe she just had an open connection; her eyes were very much focused on Erick at the moment, and she looked both frightened and intrigued.

The yurt continued to trundle along, without anyone paying too much attention to the path ahead; the land was flat and the grass was level, so this was fine.

Erick sat down. Everyone else took their seats.

After a long moment of silence, Poi began, “The story of why Mind Mages don’t openly involve themselves in the world begins at the beginning, in 195 Post Sundering on the continent of Quintlan. This was about 55 years before the Fall of Quintlan, which started around 250 PS, and continued all the way to 350 PS, when it is widely regarded that the oozes became too much to fight.

“It was upon this stage that the first Mind Mage, and his entire school of magic, was created through the direct Wizardry of Melemizargo.”

Jane, Teressa, and Nirzir jolted; they didn’t know this.

Erick had only just now guessed that Melemizargo had been involved. Those Shades and their Dark God got everywhere, after all. They were responsible for practically all of Veird’s woes.

Erick asked, “Should we have a Privacy up for this?”

“Unnecessary.” Poi said, “This is a story that anyone would know if they went looking. It has simply taken you this long to ask this question.”

So Poi was being a bit flippant. That was fine. Erick saw that the guy was obviously uncomfortable with this new scrutiny. Erick had never wanted to intrude upon Poi’s privacy before, or upon the Mind Mages, so he had mostly stayed away. He had never expected this sort of conversation to happen, either, but here it was, and here they were, and so, Erick had to know why life was more dangerous than it had to be.

Perhaps Melemizargo was to blame, again. Perhaps the Shades vowed to kill the Mind Mages whenever they stepped out of the shadows. But that seemed too simplistic.

The Mind Mages were intensely insular, by choice. They did supply truthstones to everyone who wanted one, though, and they had avenues of communication open between them and everyone in power the world over. But they never did anything proactive. In both a good and bad way, and in a way that likely had nothing to do with the Shades at all, the Mind Mages had a strict moral code that prevented them from telling people’s secrets to the world.

And yet…

Erick amended his earlier ideas about the reluctance of Mind Mages to include the idea that the Mind Mages were the way they were, because if people knew their Dark history, they would be judged for it. So, in that way, Erick couldn’t blame them for their reluctance.

But if anyone could find out this story, like Poi suggested, then that meant that the Mind Mages were beyond their beginnings, and that they held onto those beginnings only to show how far they had come. Or maybe they had asked for a Forgotten Campaign on their behalf, and they had been denied?

Whatever the case, Erick nodded, and waited for Poi to continue.

Poi, meanwhile, heard every single one of Erick’s thoughts, though he did not act like it.

It was tough being a Mind Mage, wasn’t it?

Poi continued, “The first Mind Mage was a Shade. That Shade went on to create a thousand lesser Mind Mages, and since Shade plots were what they were, within three years the world was one week away from annihilation, though they never knew it. Shadowy forces had infiltrated or gotten emotionally close to every single power that upheld the world, either through passive thought reading, or [Mind Control].

“But before Melemizargo could topple the world, a flaw in his magics would ruin his plan.

“Mind Mages hear the thoughts of others. These days, we have training to withstand those thoughts, but back then, we had none. Every single infiltrator had been altered by the people they had infiltrated, either through mental bleed, emotional bleed, or just plain kindness changing a person. Those people became the first Dissenters, though they did not call themselves that until the end of those first three years.

“In the beginning, these Dissenters were not willing to rebel, and they hadn’t even coalesced into a coherent group. Most were able to play along; able to infiltrate and corrupt as they were commanded. Some… Were not. Those few who saw what they were doing stepped out into the open. They tried to formally ask the Mind Mage Shade to stop his plans.

“They were killed for their kindness, or else they suffered worse fates than that.

“The Shade kept his plans. The years ticked by. Problems grew, but went unsolved, for while Melemizargo pressured his Shade to work harder, the Shade could only try to work better, and that disparity was easy to exploit. And so, when it finally came time to attack our assignments the world over, and plunge Veird into absolute chaos, the Dissenters turned on their Shade creator, and on every single other Mind Mage who wanted to keep to Melemizargo’s plans.

“Melemizargo, of course, remained untouchable.

“It was bloody. It was quick. It was over.

“The Dissenters, who were now just Mind Mages, stepped out of the shadows. The civil war had culled the population to a third. 330 Dissenters of Shadow had survived. A few Shadow Operatives had survived, too, but they didn’t matter till later.

“It was into this state of affairs that the Dissenters succeeded in joining with the rest of society.” Poi briefly gazed up and away. As he turned back to Erick, his voice changed into someone else’s, but barely, “We were successful with our integration into civilization. This was because we were already highly placed in many different governments the world over, and we had made them aware of what was happening. There were some difficulties, of course, but once the extent of our abilities became known and we started actively helping to cull the world of shadowy forces, using methods that no one else ever had access to… Well. That is untrue. The immortals of the world knew what we were capable of, for there were other names for our kind back in the Old Cosmology. We existed before Veird; before the Sundering.

“Those are unimportant details, though.

“What was important is that we were a known quantity that no one knew about until then. Using our power, we tore through almost all of Melemizargo’s power, reducing him to a handful of Shades that could only exist in the darkest parts of the Underworld.

“Fifty years passed like a dreamless sleep.

“In the year 260, Post Sundering, Veird seemed more stable than ever before. The Shades were beaten and the Light was here to stay. You understand: This was before the Rise of Ar’Kendrithyst in the year 503, when the spread of the Crystal Mimics and easy [Polymorph] potions became a pox upon us all. The nearer tragedy of the Fall of Quintlan was still 90 years away, in 350 PS, though as I will tell you: we were already into the first years of the gradual Fall. We just didn’t know it yet.

“The population of the world was at 15 billion people, and for the first time in a long time, it was climbing.

“Many, many Mind Mages had kids by then. And those kids had kids.

“Someone invented the truthstones, and though they were used in small business dealings first, their power proved invaluable to judicial systems the world over. [Witness] had long since been invented, of course, but in those early years, when no one knew how to circumvent the truthstones, having one on hand went a long way toward knowing if a Sin Seeker had to be called in for further investigation, or not.

“More and more decades passed. By 300 PS, over a hundred years since the creation of the first Mind Mage, Quintlan was in the middle of the Fall, though the population of the world, overall, was at 21 billion and still climbing. We were still rather short of the original number of survivors to make it to Veird, before the Death of all Halves, and before the Rage Wars, but we were getting there.

“It was in that fifth generation, and in some places, sixth, that we knew we were in the middle of a disastrous failure.

“Our strict self-appointed rules against using Mind Magic to influence the people of the world began to falter around the second generation, and even more around the third. By now, there was full blown abuse in the noble houses of Quintlan, and in other places the world over. Our Mind Magic had also been spreading into the rest of the world through the Script for the last 100 years. [Sense Emotion]. [Calm]. [Sleep]. On the surface, they were all perfectly fine spells to allow into the populace, but in edge cases, there were problems.

“Monsters were always a problem; that had never stopped. The stresses of mortal danger put systemic stresses on everyone, and so some Mind Mages thought to solve these problems by Controlling people to erase their traumas. This ended up with people committing even more traumas, and not even knowing how damaged they were until they had unhealable psychotic breaks.

“And yet, Melemizargo’s Shades attacked here and there, though each scheme was easily seen through by the Mind Mages. Mostly, Mind Mages were bastions of power and safety. We healed the damaged minds of those who needed such healing, and we discovered the criminals and double agents hidden among us.

“But then, there was a fracture.

“Quintlan was already having trouble with [Create Food and Water], but then it got a whole lot worse. The nobles exacerbated the problem by hiring Mind Mages to track down commoners who could use the spell well, and then those unscrupulous Mind Mages mentally controlled those commoners into only working their magic for the nobles. Though, of course, those situations were both not that simple at all, and truly simple, once you got down to it.

“We know enough to not get involved in that sort of thing anymore. But back then, our children didn’t know, and our families were tied up in the various powers of the world, so we had to defend them; we had to defend ourselves.

“It was here, that many history books diverge. Some call the Tragedy of Quintlan the work of the Mind Mages. Some call it the work of [Create Food and Water]. Some say that with the systematic culling of monsters and the safety provided to the common person, that the people in charge weren’t busy enough with fighting for their lives on a daily basis that they had to invent fights with each other, and so they did. Some attribute the deaths of billions of people to a million small factors that worked in concert to tear away everything built in Quintlan.

“And then the wars of nobility started, and everything went to shit.

“The Mind Mages went to war, again, exactly how you wish for us to go to war these days, except not all of us were on the same side. There were even a few Shadow Operative Mind Mages still around, still working for Melemizargo and the Shades, for our purge had not been nearly as complete as we thought it had been. Those Shadow Operatives were even beginning to release the first Mental Monsters into the cities of Quintlan. The Puppet Minds. The Spinal Spiders.

“War came, and we saw through face stealers. We found Hunters. We found dragons. We found mental monsters, and some of us even made mental monsters to counteract the other mental monsters out there. Book Slippers. And others. Obviously, these were mistakes.

“Then came escalation. The world turned against us, for the Shadow Operatives were in full control of propaganda machines the world over, and we did not want to utilize even more Mind Magic to wrest control away from them, for that would surely result in widespread psychotic breaks.

“So the vast majority of us went into hiding.

“Wars rocked Quintlan, and yet the Tragedy of Quintlan was not contained to that continent alone. There were wars in the Underworld. Nergal and Nelboor and Glaquin. Billions died, and the Mind Mages fractured into a thousand smaller groups, each helping their own people to fight against all the rest as best they could.

“Many years later, when Quintlan was dead and only oozes prowled the land, many Mind Mages still had yet to learn our lesson of exposing the thoughts of the people around us.

“It always starts the same way, too. A call to compassion for those around us. We see problems that we can solve, so we should! Obviously, we should expose the hidden people before they can strike at others. This is all well and good.

“This tactic lasts ten years, and then the next generation in power realizes that they can do so much more ‘good’. It always goes the same, though the scale is sometimes smaller, or larger, it always looks the same.

“A Mind Mage tries to solve the world, and thus, when they see problems, they decide upon obvious solutions.

“What does the local buying-selling market look like? Oh! I should exploit this for more funds for this great project over here.

“What’s going on with the rulers? Oh! The king is cheating on his wife, and endangering the kingdom with a war of succession! Let’s Control that problem away.

“Which noble among all the rest is using blackmail and bribery in order to prosper? Oh! Roughly 90% of them! Well let’s stop that right now. So what if one or two of them die from psychosis-induced brain damage. It’s for the greater good.

“Where is the nearest dragon, and what does that dragon know about magic? Oh! They know everything? Let’s take all of that for ourselves, and also the dragon’s hoard, for we can do a lot of good with that gold. But first: How can we get two dragons to meet out in the open, elsewhere, so that we can loot both of their hoards while they are gone? So what if thousands die in the crossfire! They were always going to die anyway, for the local lord was going to use them in a war of his own making. So, hey! We just prevented a war, too.

“All of these are categorically, morally, awful things to do.

“None of these examples are exaggerations.

“And yet, in the moment, they all seemed like perfectly reasonable steps to take. It isn’t till one is way down on the road to darkness that they realize the road they are on. For even if you have a good reason, it’s never as good as you think it is.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“All sapient life and decisions must be respected, for no other reason than it is the right thing to do, and leads to a better world for all.

“And so, we have implemented a line that we do not cross.

“That line is ‘is someone in mortal danger at this moment, and if I speak up, can I stop this immediate danger?’ It is a simple line, and it is easy to keep. It is not fraught with morality. It requires no individual choice, which is often wrong. Even if you, yourself, have perfect morality, and are able to make every judgment call with exacting precision, the person who comes next may not be as good as you.

“And besides that: people are not the sum of their thoughts, or their actions, or their person. Sometimes a face stealer becomes a better king than the previous king. Many times, a Wizard becomes a beacon of civilization. Almost always, a dragon meets another dragon, and both are so good at their disguise that no one starts a fight. Almost every adventurer kills a hundred thousand more monsters than they kill people.

“We have no moral authority to judge people for what they think, or what they do, and neither do you, for even more important than the discussions of morality, there is one truth that we have found more true than most: Violence begets violence. And so, we can only help when violence is what we are up against. This is the line that we keep. We stop the violence of mental monsters, and the violence of rogue Mind Mages, and the violence that happens directly around us, in our presence.” The entity speaking through Poi said, “Ask no more of us, for we have given a lot already.”

For a brief moment, the only noise in the yurt was the sound of wheels turning, and the gentle mooing of distant cows.

Poi spoke, “There are history books that you have not read, that I have. There are memories of historical events that I have experienced from a first-person perspective, that you have not experienced. I know the danger of thinking that I can change the world by revealing the thoughts of those around me.” He stared at Erick, and said, “Apocalypse is what lies on the other side of that door, so it is a door that we keep firmly shut.”

Erick said, “Okay.” That Mind Mage story was not the whole story, but it was enough of one to make the whole of their hidden society make a bit more sense. Erick said, “I can respect that line that you will not cross. I take it that the face stealers and otherwise know of this line, and they purposefully stay your hand by working around you?”

“Not only them, but many people.” Poi said, “If you saw any play in any theater with a Mind Mage character in the cast, then you would know that everyone knows how to get around us, and so we try not to advertise who we are.”

“… And that’s the true reason for your peoples’ reluctance to stand in the open.”

“Correct.”

“So. Just to be clear.” Erick asked, “You won’t help find face stealers.”

“I’m all for the persecution and ending of face stealers and Hunters and all those types, but I cannot step past that line, Erick. I will, however, scan people who agree to be scanned, as I have done before, and as I will do again. But I won’t ever be proactive about this.” Poi said, “People deserve the privacy of their own minds, and I will not take that from them.”

“… Okay.” Erick felt some of his anger flow away. The Mind Mages were never going to help with this sort of thing, and he knew that already, but hearing the reasons helped to chip away at some of his anger. He asked, “So what do you think will happen when I Bless all of these Knives of the Night into Empathy, or with the dragon Ordoonarati when we get to Ooloraptoor?”

“What!” Jane asked, “You found the dragon?!”

At the same time Nirzir rapidly asked, “You’re Blessing all of the Knives of the Night!?”

Teressa just breathed out, not really prepared for such a quick shift of topic.

Poi suggested, “How about you tell us all of what has happened, recently?”

Erick looked around at the exasperated faces of his people, and said, “Yeah. I should do that, I suppose. So apparently ‘Master’ Daizing of the Knives of the Night is having all his people—”