The Winds of Magic and the Colleges

Magic in the Old World is not a tidy thing to be conjured from a book. It is a wind, or rather eight of them, blowing ceaselessly south from the broken poles of the world, invisible to ordinary eyes and lethal to the careless. To work magic is to reach into that gale and seize a fistful of raw power that wants nothing more than to consume the one who holds it. For most of human history, men who tried died horribly or worse. That the Empire of Man now fields disciplined battle-wizards at all is the gift of an elf, and the story of how sorcery was tamed is one of the pivotal moments in the whole history of mankind.

The Eight Winds

All magic flows from the same source: the raw stuff of Chaos pouring from the ruined polar gates, described in our account of the Realm of Chaos and the Wastes. As it blows across the world it separates, like light through a prism, into eight distinct winds of magic, each with its own colour and character. There is Aqshy, the red wind of fire and passion; Chamon, the heavy gold wind of metal and alchemy; Ghyran, the green wind of life and growth; Azyr, the blue wind of the heavens; Hysh, the pure white wind of light and truth; Ghur, the brown wind of beasts and the wild; Shyish, the purple wind of death and endings; and Ulgu, the grey wind of shadow and deceit. Together they are the palette from which every spell in the world is drawn.

The Peril of Raw Magic

The elves and the slann of Lustria can perceive all eight winds at once and weave them together into the subtle art called High Magic. The human mind cannot. Where an elf sees eight distinct colours, a man sees only a single blinding torrent, and any wizard who tries to drink from that torrent whole is soon overwhelmed. Untutored human magic, the hedge-sorcery of village witches and self-taught conjurers, meant grasping at raw, mingled magic that twisted the body, unhinged the mind, and flung open the door to the Dark Gods. Small wonder that for centuries the Empire answered witchcraft with the pyre. A human spellcaster was as likely to become a gateway for daemons as a servant of his people, and the fear of magic was, in its way, entirely justified.

Teclis and the Gift of the Colleges

Everything changed in the aftermath of the Great War Against Chaos. The elven mage Teclis of the High Elf Realms, the greatest sorcerer of his age, had come to the aid of Magnus the Pious, and in the war's wake he chose to leave the men of the Empire a lasting gift. Understanding that no human could safely master all eight winds, Teclis devised a wholly new discipline: each wizard would learn to attune himself to a single wind, and to that wind only. A mind aligned to one colour could hold it without being torn apart, where the same mind grasping at all eight would be destroyed. On this principle Teclis founded eight orders of wizardry in Altdorf, and taught the first human students of the newborn Colleges of Magic.

The Eight Colleges

Each College embodies a single wind and the temperament that goes with it. The Bright College commands the fire of Aqshy, its wizards fierce and quick to anger. The Gold College masters the metal-wind Chamon, its alchemists secretive and precise. The Jade College draws on the life-wind Ghyran to heal and to nurture. The Celestial College reads the heavens through Azyr, its astromancers forever scanning the future. The Amethyst College wields the death-wind Shyish, its sombre magisters walking easily among the dying, though they are emphatically not necromancers, for the raising of the dead is a corruption they abhor. The Amber College channels the beast-wind Ghur, its wild shamans dwelling apart from the cities. The Light College harnesses pure Hysh, and the Grey College cloaks itself in the shadow-wind Ulgu, its wizards masters of illusion and misdirection. Eight winds, eight orders, one hard-won discipline.

The Craft of the Battle Wizard

In peace the magisters of the Colleges study, scry, and counsel; in war they are among the deadliest assets the Empire possesses. A Bright Wizard can immolate a regiment; a Celestial Wizard can call down lightning from a clear sky; a Grey Wizard can hide an entire army behind a veil of shadow. Yet the battle-wizard's craft is always a gamble, for the winds of magic gust and fail without warning, and a spell reached for at the wrong moment can miscast catastrophically: burning out the caster, killing his own comrades, or tearing a hole through which something dreadful climbs. The greatest magisters are respected and feared in equal measure, and never wholly trusted, for the men of the Empire have long memories of what unchecked sorcery can do.

The Lure of Dhar

Beneath the ordered winds runs a darker temptation. When the winds of magic mingle and curdle, they become Dhar: dark magic, the raw and corrupting power from which necromancers, warlocks, and Chaos sorcerers draw their strength. Dhar is stronger, faster, and far easier than the disciplined single-wind sorcery of the Colleges, and that is precisely its danger. Every magister is warned against it, for the road that begins with a shortcut through dark magic ends, invariably, in damnation and the service of the forces of Chaos. The witch hunters of the Empire watch the Colleges as closely as they watch any hedge-witch, and not without cause: the line between the sanctioned wizard and the damned sorcerer is only ever a matter of discipline.

Magic in a Doomed World

The founding of the Colleges was one of mankind's greatest achievements: the moment men learned to wield the world's most dangerous force without being consumed by it. Yet it changed nothing about the source. Every wizard of the Empire still drinks, ultimately, from the same broken poles that birth the daemon and the mutant, and when Chaos rises the winds blow wilder and the temptations grow stronger. Magic in the Old World is a borrowed fire, snatched from the same blaze that threatens to burn the world down. That the men of the Empire wield it at all is a triumph of will and discipline over terror, and, like so much else in this doomed and defiant world, a bargain that must be renewed with vigilance every single day.