2/6/366
It is done. I completed what I set out to do. Yet stealing the diamond chalice from the cathedral is but one step really. I mean yes I managed to pull something off that not even the manus was able to pull off at their peak, but alas the theft of the chalice is nothing without the steps that follow. Without them the chalice is but a trophy, a trophy that I can never allow to be seen, and really what use is a trophy if it can not be gazed upon by others.
No. This chalice is far too important to serve as a simple trophy. Not only shall it serve as a beacon, setting the foundations for something greater, but it also serves as an integral part of a great mages research, which sadly has been lost to time. I do not believe I will be able to complete what Averius von Luthin set out to do so many years ago, but I will certainly try. But before I even attempt to continue his research, I must complete another integral task.
The mages of this city are so torn. They look at each other not with potential for what could be, but with suspicion. They refuse to work together out of fear, fear that has been created by the order. I read this history and I see a time when mages could work together as brothers and sisters without suspicion of one another, even after the consolidation, yet I see no trace of this in any of the mages I have met in this city. How have we fallen, as a community, so far after the downfall of the manus. Was the safety that the manus tower provides all that kept that group working together? I’d like to believe not, I’d like to believe they worked together because they shared common goals, a desire to remind the world of just what magery is capable of. I read back and I can see a time when the manus was spoken about with fear, when magery in general was spoken in fear. Now… Now magery is nothing but a shell of it’s former self, no one fears it anymore and merely laugh it away like a child’s antics. Did the fear the manus and magery inspire really just disappear when they did? Or was it our own actions and inability to work together that lead to this.
So many fledgling mages lost to flames because they lacked proper teaching. Are our hearts so numb to our fellow mages that we just look away at what could have been? Is it not the duty of the experienced to train the inexperienced, to pass on our knowledge to those just beginning… but instead we just allow them to be fed to flames, all the while comforting ourselves with fallacies. This is not what the great mages of the past would have wanted, mages allowing other mages to fall because of our own insecurities. And I will not allow myself to turn a blind eye anymore. It is time that I take a stand and try to regain what has been lost in this city… Trust. They will be hesitant at first, scared even of the notion of working together, but I hope they will see reason and realize that we are stronger and capable of so much more when we are able to trust our fellow mage.
It was not the tower that made the manus, but the people in it.