The Arcane Messiah

History
Once upon a time, there was a young man who dreamed of becoming a Mage. He longed to be a servant of the people, a shepherd of the right, and he was filled with joy when he passed the tests and was accepted into the Tower of Secret Lore as a novice.

The young man did well as a novice, and then as an apprentice, and in due time he was accepted as an initiate. He was an earnest, focussed young man, and no-one was at all surprised when he elected to join the Light School. He studied in the school for several years, and was confused that the announcement of his raising to the position of Magister never came. For all his drive and his focus, he did not have the clarity to see what his tutors tried gently – perhaps too gently – to tell him: he was a thoroughly mediocre Mage.

One area in which the initiate did excel was in academic study. He loved to study and to learn, and spent many, many hours exploring the stacks and the vaults of the great Spiral Library. Some of his tutors suggested that perhaps, if he spent a little less time locked away with his books and a little more time with his fellow students, he might learn new things and increase his abilities? But our student knew that there was nothing these inferior mages could teach him.

It must have been during of these nights locked in the vaults that the initiate uncovered the book or the scroll from which he learned the rudiments of Mindbending. This should have been impossible – the purge of any knowledge relating to this perverted branch of Magecraft had been very thorough, and yet somehow the student left the Spiral Library able to manipulate the mind itself.

Like the original Mindbender, the student first used this technique to enhance his own mind, expanding his intelligence and opening himself up to new magical techniques. He was quick to show off the new Light spells he had mastered to his tutor and her fellow heads of the Light School, expecting to be warmly accoladed, maybe even offered the Magistership that was so clearly his due. But the tutor recognised natural progression of ability, and knew that what her student displayed was not that. She asked him how he’d been able to advance so far so impossibly quickly, after so many years of lacklustre progress. The student became angry, and tried to use his new art to change the Magistra’s mind, to make her think well of him – alas, he was unused to bending the minds of others, and pushed too hard; before the eyes of his School, he snuffed out his tutor’s mind like a candle.

The Mages’ reaction was immediate. Although none of them had ever witnessed Mindbending before, they had all heard the terrible stories of its history, and knew it could not be allowed to propagate. They came at the student as hard as they could, and as powerful as he had become, he could not stand against their combined might. Instead, he chose to flee the Tower.

Over the months that passed, he continued to use his abilities to enhance his own mind to the limits of mortal prowess, and then beyond. He has become possibly the most powerful Mage ever to walk the world, but that power has come at a terrible cost: the student’s self-belief and sense of purpose has also been magnified to insane proportions. He is the greatest Mage in the world, he theorises, therefore he is the only person qualified to rule it. He would bring his insight and clarity to the people. He would be their messiah.

A year to the day after the former student had fled the Tower, he announced his return in the most spectacular way: he stole his name. People who had known the Messiah for years – Magisters who’d taught him, students who studied beside him, even the family who’d raised him woke one morning to find they no longer knew any name for this man but “Messiah” – the name they’d previously known had just fallen from their minds.

Lectures of Magister Kelemen, Vol. 4
"People are accustomed to thinking of mages as being limited by their element, but this is not truly the case. All but the rawest initiate can exert control over impure form of their preferred element, and as a mage gains deeper understanding he becomes able to manipulate admixtures with lower proportions of that element. From water to wine, from wine to river sludge, from sludge to mist, and so forth. Any truly powerful mage can raise a block of earth and throw it - the only distinction being what part of that admixture he is acting upon. Even the earliest theoreticians held that there was some perfect apex to magecraft, some level of power at which all the elements became one inseparable potency. Living creatures are the hardest things of all for mages to control. It is tempting to interpret this fact as meaning that life is some close-to-perfect amalgam of all the elements, but as a living creature myself modesty forbids me from doing so.

"What relevance does this have to the Arcane Messiah? It should be obvious. What his twisted mind discovered, amid the heretical tracts and diabolic grimoires, was not some cosmic key to great power. It was a way to remake himself into something better able to approach that power. He took his human self and tore it apart. Reformed as a simpler rag-doll thing, it was more amenable to his magical control, making it possible for him to tear himself apart again, and so forth. How many iterations he went through, it is impossible to say. We only have the notes he left at the Tower, and even those turn to incoherence long before the final pages. What remained of him barely qualified as life, but it had vitality. Perhaps it was little more than a golem, a housing for his new, augmented mind. He could control it as easily as he could control the elements. Such human attributes as compassion, gentleness and patience seemed to have been discarded somewhere along the way.

"Perhaps now you begin to see why the Arcane Messiah has caused such tumult amongst the learned Magisters. If all he represented was a corruption of our teachings, another example of madness in the pursuit of power, then for all his puissance he would not be so significant. No, what he did was plant a seed of doubt. Doubt about what our studies are working towards. If perfect harmony of the six elements is a thing of horror rather than beauty, where does that imply for our entire order?"

Letter from Magistra Fausta
We took a prisoner. We barely escaped the rest of the A.M.'s army. We had to remove his arms and legs to keep him subdued.

He's still human, at least physically. As for his mind, we're not sure he even had one any more. It shouldn't be because of the pain of his injuries. There's light in his eyes, and he definitely retains his intelligence, but there's nothing there to talk to. It's as if something has scooped everything out of him that wasn't needed by the A.M., and replaced it with fanaticism and violence. Light balms, mind-speaking, sedatives, none of them seem to calm him or let us get through to him. He shrieks. It sounds like language, but we cannot make sense of it. M. J. has a theory that the army itself has developed some language of its own. Because we don't know what he may be communicating to the army, we've kept him gagged since.

You wanted me to bring one back to the Tower, but I'm not sure I should. His appearance and behaviour are beyond alarming - letting our defensive force see one of these will do more harm than good. In any case, the A.M.'s army is moving very quickly. I don't think we can get back to the Tower before he reaches it.

I will Send another letter if we learn anything more.

Ma. F.

Second Letter from Magistra Fausta
We chanced upon the corpse of one of the larger zealots. I am terrified. Her legs had been lengthened, thickened to hold her increased weight, but in lumps and distorted shapes. The arms are the same, but with the bones of the fingers drawn out to talons. The head is sunk back into the shoulders and lacking the lower jaw. There are teeth, but they are mixed up and rotten. The throat is closed over, so presumably this creature did not eat. The corpse is still alive with formication and hot to the touch, both evidently magical residues.

Overall it's not much larger than a man, but we've seen ones like this tear through stone walls with little effort.

L., this used to be Sanem - you know, the barmaid from the Bridge and Crown? I can tell from what's left of her face. They got to her. He made her into this.

Why would M. T. join up with this insanity? What could he have been promised? Did he even still have his mind? I'm leaving now. I'm heading for the hills. I can't deal with this any more. It feels like the madness is leaking into my mind.

If you had any sense you would do the same.

Ma. F.