The first to sense the great upheaval in the mortal world was Ares, the God of War.
War among mortals was his greatest delight. Born with a love of battle, his greatest amusement was to stir up conflict and then watch it unfold as entertainment.
Whether it was humans scheming against one another or blood-soaked slaughter, whether wars of conquest driven by greed or desperate, tragic struggles to defend one's homeland, all of these were spectacles that Ares relished.
The proud god, who prided himself on his handsome face and unmatched strength, looked down most on, and envied most, his brother, Hephaestus, god of fire and smiths.
He despised Hephaestus for his ugliness and his lameness, and he scorned him for his meekness.
Yet, he still envied him, because the most hideous of gods had somehow married the most beautiful goddess: Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.
What comforted him was that Aphrodite had never shown Hephaestus the slightest warmth. Even on their wedding night, she refused to be alone with him.
Their so-called marriage was nothing more than a hollow formality.
That, in Ares' eyes, was an opening.
To him, he was tall, handsome, magnificent, far superior to Hephaestus a hundred times over. Surely Aphrodite, who loathed her crippled husband, would fall in love with him at first sight.
And after all, she was the goddess of love and beauty. Surely such a goddess should be passionate, indulgent, eager to take a lover.
From his own father's example, Ares had learned this behavior, and believed it to be truth.
But reality was not as he imagined.
Aphrodite, though goddess of love and beauty, conducted herself like a maiden goddess.
She rebuffed the advances of every god without exception, even publicly declaring that though she was married to a man she did not love, she would never give herself to anyone else. She would wait, until she found her true destined one.
Such words made Zeus and Hera, who had arranged her marriage, look sour. Yet as long as she did not truly betray her vows, she remained within their tolerance.
Her purity even earned her the admiration of many more righteous deities, Apollo, the three virgin goddesses Artemis, Hestia, and Athena.
Even Athena, who had always been on good terms with Hephaestus, began to view Aphrodite with sympathy and understanding.
As for Ares…
Again and again, his pursuit of Aphrodite met with rejection.
This drove him into frequent rages, pushing him deeper into his obsession with the games of war.
After yet another rejection, Ares stormed back to his temple, ready to soothe his wounded heart by watching the war at Thebes.
But what he saw shocked him. The so-called war had ground to a halt.
The reason? The dead were rising.
Every fallen soldier returned as an undead, attacking the living indiscriminately. How could war be fought under such conditions?
The sight of undead disgusted Ares.
Mortals struggling against monsters, what fun was that compared to war?
If the undead were allowed to run unchecked, his greatest amusement would vanish. This, Ares could not allow.
So where had the undead come from?
Ares, god of battle and of life's vigor, saw the answer instantly: the souls of the dead could not enter the Underworld. Trapped within their corpses, they mutated into abominations.
The fault lay in the Underworld itself.
So he went to demand answers.
Hades, Lord of the Underworld, said he knew nothing. Matters of the dead were always the work of Thanatos, god of death.
But Thanatos had not returned for three days.
That was troubling.
Ares immediately reported the matter to the other gods.
Only then did the gods as a whole realize the chaos spreading among mortals.
To be unable to die, this was no small matter. It shattered the order of the human world.
The gods began seeking the cause.
Suspicion quickly fell upon Sisyphus.
After all, Thanatos had last been seen going to confront him.
Hot-tempered Ares descended to the mortal world at once to deal with Sisyphus. Only by ending this disturbance swiftly could wars return to their proper course.
Naturally, Sisyphus was no match for the war god. No ordinary magic could affect a true deity.
Thanatos was rescued, and Sisyphus was dragged by Ares himself into the Underworld.
As the gods' eyes all turned to this matter, relieved that the crisis had been resolved in time, elsewhere, on the island of Colchis, a far greater event was unfolding, unnoticed.
…
Since the founding of Mystra Academy, decades had passed.
In that time, Mystra Academy had educated thousands of mages. Most, lacking the talent to pursue higher mysteries of magic, left the academy and returned home.
Yet some were unwilling to leave. They wished to remain near the academy, where they could continue to draw upon its resources.
Some professors also desired homes of their own, rather than living crowded together in the castle, fine as the castle was.
Thus, new settlers appeared on Colchis Island. All were mages. Near the demi-plane entrance of the academy, they built a small village.
As the number of graduates grew, the village swelled into a small town.
The population was not large, only a few hundred, but most were mages.
By the academy's rules, only graduates pursuing further studies had the right to settle on the island, whether or not their advanced studies succeeded.
Other graduates from the basic program could remain only by becoming family to those qualified to stay, in other words, through marriage.
With such rules, and with mages ever conscious of their descendants' potential, families of mages began to form.
These were the first mage clans. They lived in the town, running industries tied to magic, such as cultivating rare magical plants for the academy.
The headmaster gave this town a grandiose name: Heart of Spellcraft.
And today, something extraordinary occurred in the Heart of Spellcraft.
The academy, usually hidden in its demi-plane, suddenly appeared in the material world.
In truth, the two planes had temporarily overlapped under the influence of great magic.
The townsfolk gazed at Mystra Academy before them in shock.
Usually content to seclude themselves in their homes, now they poured into the streets like ordinary folk gossiping at a festival, craning their necks to watch.
What they saw was this: upon the marble plaza before the castle, a colossal magic circle blazed with light.
The array was so intricate, so profound, that not even these mages, who had spent years in the academy's shadow, quietly studying, could understand a fraction of its design.
All they could perceive was the vast, surging power it contained.
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