The academy founded by Alaric was named the Mystra Academy.
This name was borrowed from that of a famous goddess of magic in another world.
Nearby, the wizarding town surrounding the academy was called Heart of Spells, a name taken from the divine realm where the goddess's kingdom once resided.
And the Mythallar Core Alaric had devised drew its inspiration from a well-known magical construct of the goddess's former plane, the great Netherese Empire.
Its purpose was simple: to absorb the raw energy of the Weave, and then transmit it across the entire domain as a steady supply of mana.
Through the power of the Mythallar, Netheril had mastered the Weave, creating mighty constructs such as floating cities, top-tier magical marvels that could even mass-produce quasi-magical items.
Quasi-magical items were easier to craft than true magical artifacts, though they could only function within the influence of a Mythallar.
Yet even with this limitation, Netheril possessed an industrial productivity akin to a technological civilization, allowing it to dominate the world for a time.
And within Netheril, there had once been a wizard who ascended to godhood.
His name was Karsus.
The title he bore as a deity was the God of the Instant, a god of but a single moment.
Karsus did not ascend in the conventional way. He used magic.
In a feat never before seen, he created the only twelfth-level spell in existence: Karsus's Avatar. This spell was designed to temporarily steal the divine power of a god, granting the caster divinity for a fleeting moment.
When Karsus cast this spell, he foolishly chose the goddess of magic, Mystryl, Mistress Mystra's predecessor, as his prey.
The moment he unleashed it, his body swelled with the sudden torrent of divine power, and his mind was flooded with knowledge beyond imagining.
Karsus instantly realized the horror of what he had done, yet he also knew nothing could stop what had already been set in motion.
The divine authority he had stolen from Mystryl was precisely that which she used to maintain and repair the Weave itself.
When Mystryl lost the ability to hold the Weave together, Karsus was far from capable of shouldering her role.
The Weave fell into violent turmoil, and the lands of Netheril, and beyond, were engulfed in a catastrophic magical flood.
The surging tides of raw arcane energy were far more destructive than ever before.
At last, before irreparable devastation could spread, Mystryl sacrificed herself to save the Weave.
That act of self-immolation briefly suspended the Weave's functions, causing all magic to cease for several minutes.
Tragically, with their steady mana supply cut off, the Mythallars failed, and Netheril's floating cities plummeted to the earth.
Karsus himself was slain the instant Mystryl sacrificed herself, for her action severed the link that sustained his stolen power.
When the goddess returned, she was reborn under a new name, Mystra.
The tale of Karsus was a stark warning: that even the mightiest of mortals, no matter how powerful a wizard, cannot bear the responsibilities of the divine without courting disaster.
And so, with such a precedent, Alaric would never allow Pandora to suffer a similar fate.
He already had a solution in place.
The magic circle Pandora now stood within was, in truth, a vast projection spell, its sole purpose to project the Mooncell Automaton from the moon.
As a supercomputer capable of calculating the entirety of the solar system, the projected Mooncell, though but a thousandth the size of the original and lacking its full power, was more than sufficient to help Pandora master all of Greece's ley lines.
This was why she had to link her consciousness to the circle before the ritual began.
As Alaric activated the spell, the magic array in the plaza erupted with light that pierced the heavens and the earth.
At once, vast mana gathered above Pandora, condensing into a colossal blue crystal cube, three hundred kilometers across.
Its surface was crisscrossed with a lattice of grids. Within, countless streams of azure light flowed like rivers, exchanging torrents of information at impossible speed.
This was the projected Mooncell.
Standing beneath it, Pandora's consciousness linked with it. The sudden rush of data made her brow furrow.
"How is it?" Alaric asked inwardly.
"Such… overwhelming power," Pandora replied in his mind. "I feel as though… I could use its complete calculations to predict the future of the entire world."
"I advise against it," Alaric warned her.
"Prophecy is meaningless. The Mooncell's duration is limited. I'll activate all the Mythallars now, you'll use the Mooncell to control them and simulate the birth of a god."
"I understand." Pandora agreed without hesitation.
At that, every ley line in Greece began to blaze with light. The glow began faintly, then grew stronger, until the entire ley network shone visibly.
For the first time, ordinary mortals could see the brilliance of the ley lines.
But as most people knew nothing of their existence, chaos spread across the land. Even magical beasts deep in the wilderness near ley nodes grew restless and afraid.
Only beasts and mages could truly sense it, the light heralded the violent surging of leyline mana.
The turbulence sent waves of arcane tides crashing outward.
Fortunately, Greece had few mages, and the influence of magic was not as widespread as in other lands, so few perceived the disaster.
But to those who did, it felt like calamity itself had descended.
Such terrifying magical tides, erupting across Greece simultaneously, naturally drew the attention of the gods. Yet they could not determine the cause at once. They dispatched messengers in all directions, instructing mountain gods, river gods, and earthbound deities to calm the leylines.
But these leylines had never been within the dominion of the gods.
Only Artemis and Aphrodite quietly guessed that the disturbance was linked to Alaric. Yet neither revealed their suspicions.
On the island of Colchis, the massive leyline there nearly spiraled out of control as well.
But because it lay closest to Pandora, the turbulence was brought under control within moments by the Mooncell.
As her consciousness spread across the other leylines, the disturbances subsided one by one.
None of the surges lasted longer than a minute.
The gods were left bewildered. The leylines had flared into chaos, only to stabilize before they could even react.
They had neither discovered the cause nor taken any measures, and already it was over.
Were it not for the fact that all of them had felt it with their own senses, some gods might have thought it was no more than an illusion of their minds.
Just as relief began to spread, only a few seconds later, the anomaly returned.
This time, it was not mere turbulence.
It was something far greater.
The gods felt it: every drop of mana in Greece's ley lines was surging into mighty torrents, flowing like ten thousand rivers converging to the sea, rushing toward one singular place across the ocean.
That place was Colchis Island.
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