From the final writings of Sage-Consul Maren Thorne of the Ironbound Republic, composed during his imprisonment awaiting execution. These pages were smuggled from his cell by unknown sympathizers. The Ascendancy burned every copy they found. They did not find them all.
Thorne was executed by immolation seventeen days after completing this text. His crime: "Dissemination of heretical knowledge regarding the nature of divine power."
Read carefully. Men have died for these words.
ON THE REALMS OF POWER
The church would have you believe magic is divine breath, granted through faith alone. This is a lie constructed to maintain control.
Magic is energy conversion—nothing more, nothing less. The transformation of biological or stored potential into physical effect. It follows rules as predictable as gravity, and like gravity, it cares nothing for prayer.
Practitioners advance through five Realms, each containing five Stages. This progression is universal. What changes is only the terminology tyrants use to obscure it.
KINDLING — The awakening. Stages progress from Spark through Ember, Flame, Blaze, to Pyre. Ninety-five percent of all practitioners never advance beyond this Realm. Not because they cannot—because the church ensures they do not. An informed practitioner is a dangerous practitioner. Cost tolerance ranges from Tier 0 effects at Spark to manageable Tier 4 at Pyre.
TEMPERING — The refinement. Here the body begins restructuring itself for magical efficiency. Enhanced healing. Extended lifespan. Cognitive improvements that the church attributes to "divine blessing" rather than neurological optimization. Four percent of practitioners reach Tempering. All of them serve power—church, crown, or commerce.
FORGING — The fusion. Practitioner and magic become inseparable. Ageless. Nearly unkillable. At Stage 5, a core of consolidated energy forms that can sustain the practitioner through injuries that would destroy lesser beings. Less than one percent achieve this. They are weapons, every one of them.
TRANSCENDENCE — The separation. Physical form becomes suggestion rather than fact. The practitioner begins embodying abstract concepts—becoming, in some sense, an aspect of fire itself, or death, or change. Fewer than one thousand individuals across all nations. When they move, history moves with them.
APOTHEOSIS — The theoretical. Godhood, if such a thing exists. The fuel requirements are civilization-scale. Every deity in recorded history correlates with mass death. Draw your own conclusions about what the church worships.
ON THE NATIONS
Six powers divide Aurethia through a balance of terror and trade.
The Ascendancy of the Eternal Flame controls forty percent of all territory. Theocratic empire. Fire magic deliberately taught with crippling inefficiency—a leash disguised as liturgy. They maintain more Forging-Realm practitioners than any rival through blood-fuel facilities that officially do not exist. I have seen the records. The facilities exist.
The Thornveld Dominion practices hereditary blood magic. Power passes through noble lineage, accumulating across generations. Rigid, stratified, increasingly unstable as the eldest bloodlines fracture under the weight of centuries.
The Pale Sovereignty is ruled by an Emperor dead for eight centuries and more powerful than when he lived. Life force is currency. The living serve hoping to earn undeath. Their population dwindles; they do not care. The dead are patient.
The Verdant Communion draws power from the land itself, paying no personal cost within their forests. Beyond those borders, they are diminished. They cannot project force and so they endure, watching the rest of us burn.
The Ironbound Republic—my homeland—applies reason to magic. We alone study multiple traditions. We alone pursue efficiency openly. We are feared for this, and rightly so. Our weakness is scale; our population cannot match the empires.
The Shattered Isles dominate the seas and answer to no throne. They trade with all and ally with none. When the balance finally breaks, they will profit from the wreckage.
ON THE RACES
Eight species share this continent. A ninth once ruled it all.
Humans adapt. Ashborn burn. Thornblood drink. Hollowed endure. Verdani root. Forgeborn construct. Abysskin drown. Remnants fracture reality around them.
These are the children of the current age.
But before the Ascendancy, before the Dominion, before any power now standing—there were the Spirit Born.
ON THE SPIRIT BORN
For eleven thousand years, they ruled. They perceived magic not as mystery but as system. They optimized where others worshipped. They built where others prayed.
The Spirit King sat the Throne of Thresholds, commanding the boundary between what is and what lies beyond. Under their rule, magic was infrastructure.
Then came the Sundering. We do not know what caused it. We know only the aftermath: the King fell, the Throne emptied, the bloodlines scattered and diluted across generations until they became undetectable.
For 3,847 years, the Throne has waited.
The Spirit Born are not extinct. They are hidden—in dormant blood, in unsuspecting vessels, in lineages that have forgotten what they carry.
And they left something behind: the Inheritance System. Not magic—architecture. A framework to identify successors, activating when viable candidates emerge. Spirit Born blood. Compatible soul. Sufficient exposure.
The System demands three trials: Dominion—build and command. Accumulation—acquire by any means. Ascension—climb the Realms.
Succeed, and claim the Throne. Fail, and dissolve.
FINAL WORDS
I will be dead before this reaches you. My crime was truth; my punishment, fire.
Remember this: every throne is built on bones. The church knows it. The kings know it. The Spirit Born knew it eleven thousand years ago.
Whoever reads this, whoever seeks the Throne—know what you climb toward.
The crown is heavy.
It is made of everyone who came before.
Here end the writings of Maren Thorne.
May his ashes trouble their prayers.
End of Auxiliary Chapter