Pt. I, Ch. 2: [Interlude/Historic] The Last Day of the Wizards War

22nd day of the month of Kan, Imperial Year 2379
(Saturday, May 13, 1899 in the Terran common era)
6th year of the Wizards’ War
Blockade around the Isle of Mages

Admiral Marius Nement looked on with satisfaction as a flight of bombers returned to his carrier, the flagship of a fleet that his nation had built in a few short years since the newcomers had arrived.  The Admiral had started his service in the Second Slave War, almost thirty years prior. He had been a lieutenant on one of the battleships that had bombarded Pandac at the end of the war, and ships had not changed much in the first 25 years of his career.  The knowledge the newcomers had brought with them had changed the world very swiftly.

The blockade around the island was as tight as modern technology could make it. The prior winter’s bad weather had broken, and from what he could see, the Wizards’ stronghold was on the verge of collapse.  If they had anyone left to assail the steel ships directly, they did not send them out, and the balls of fire or ice flung from the island were more sporadic while bombs fell more regularly, limited mostly by their ability to fuel the planes.

One of the newcomers, an engineer named Harry Hoyle, was on board as an advisor.  He knew as much about the big planes as anyone who could be spared for the fleet and had apparently made a study of what the newcomers called the Second World War.  Most of all, though, he was the newcomers’ expert on the big bombs that the fleet held in reserve.

“Do you think we’ll need to use them?” Hoyle had asked at the captain’s dinner the prior night.

“I certainly hope not,” replied the Admiral, “but I’m glad I don’t have to make the choice whether to land an army if they don’t surrender.”

The conversation moved on, but today he had called Hoyle to the flag bridge to discuss flight operations.  Their conversation had wound down, and Hoyle would likely have returned to consult with the engineering staff had they not been watching the bombers return.

Then, suddenly, there was a very bright flash in the eastern sky, almost blinding, and as vision returned he could see it was followed by a gigantic plume of smoke or steam past the horizon rapidly rising as high as one could see.

“Holy cow,” said Hoyle. “They’ve actually got one.”  Then, after a moment: “We’ve got minutes before a shockwave reaches us, Admiral.  Possibly a tidal wave after that.”

Orders went out first, questions later. “Mr. Hoyle, does this mean that they’ve got these bombs as well?”

“That looked too large to be anything else from my world. Given magic, I couldn’t say for sure.  I think it must be something like this, not straight magic, though – if they had that much power left, rationally, they’d have used it on us.”

“You’ve seen the photos of what they left of Behele and their own people. The wizards are anything but rational.”

The fleet was far enough away from the island that it weathered the blast, and Hoyle was wrong – tidal waves do not form in deep water.  Instead, the wave hit all along the coast of the Etciv and of Toyeri, with many lives lost, a final retribution of the guild – indiscriminate to whether it killed enemies or their former allies.

The cloud had gone up into the stratosphere, but it also spread out across the fleet, terrifyingly dark but there was no obvious ill effect; Hoyle and the ship’s senior magician had each taken measurements, and come to the same conclusion – this was the result of some kind of magic, not the physics that Hoyle’s bombs would have used, and if there was any danger to it, it was deeply hidden.

The cloud took hours to settle, and left a fine ash on every surface.  After the decks were cleared, the fleet sent out a reconnaissance plane.  As it approached where the island should have been, no anti-aircraft fire, neither magical or fired from guns, greeted it.  Indeed, where the island should have been there was an open ocean and the only sign of it was scattered floating debris and odd new volcanic rocks floating on the waves.

Whatever magic the Wizards had used, it was something of remarkable subtlety for the amount of power it had unleashed; destroying an island that large directly would have echoed throughout the world in ways even untrained but magically sensitive people would have felt. It was debated by the greatest magicians of the age, or at least those who had not stayed part of the guild after it broke its traditional neutrality and thus perished with the Island.  The consensus they came to was that the guild had somehow tapped into the natural magic and geologic forces that had led the guild to settle its headquarters there in the first place.

To the rest of the world, that the guild was gone and had blown themselves up was enough; the war was over.  The newcomers’ bombs, useless in peacetime, were dismantled and remained a great secret of the war.