"Magic does not belong to the few. It never did." — Edric Varn, last entry
hey killed the man who could give magic to everyone.
They didn't know he had a son.
The son was fourteen when the cottage burned and he stopped being anyone's secret. What follows is their record — the archive of the ones who had already decided his father had to die.
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**Recovered Fragment — Athenaeum Evidence Archive, Case 0047-V**
**Classification: INNER COUNCIL EYES ONLY**
**Date of Recovery: 14th of Ashfall, Year 2714 of the Compact**
**Facility: Veranthos Central Archive, Restricted Wing, Vault 9**
**Presiding Archivist: [REDACTED — Directive 7]**
**Status: SUPPRESSED**
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The device was the size of a pocket watch.
Brass casing, seamless — no visible weld lines, no seams where the halves joined. The craftsman had fused them so completely that the join was invisible. That kind of work normally requires a full Crucible workshop, institutional tools, and a team of six. He did it alone. In a barn.
Glass aperture on the face. Not ordinary glass. When angled to the light, the aperture showed three rotating rings inscribed with a pattern our Senior Geometer has no name for. He calls it a "hybrid Crucible-Bastion array" for lack of better words. The pattern mixes transmutation work with defensive ward-work. According to Dr. Tallis, it breaks four of the six rules that have governed how magic can be inscribed for three hundred years — and it works anyway. Dr. Tallis has requested a leave of absence. His request has been denied.
For context: those rules say that one kind of magic cannot be combined with another. A Crucible mage inscribes one way; a Bastion mage another. The two are not supposed to be mixed. No hybrid has been documented since the Sundering War, and even then it took teams of specialists. This device was made by one man in a barn. One man with no institutional training, no access to restricted texts, and no logical way of knowing the rules could be broken.
We tested it on Subject 14.
Subject 14: male, forty-three, a barley farmer from the outer Hinterlands. Our tests showed no natural talent for magic — none. No family history of channelling. No sensitives, no ward-dreamers, no hedge-witches in three generations of parish records. He was the lowest possible baseline. If the device could do nothing else, we wanted to confirm that it could do nothing to him.
He was told we were testing a new agricultural tool. He was paid four silver crowns.
At 14:32, Subject 14 placed his right hand on the device.
At 14:32 and six seconds, the energy in the testing chamber spiked. Every ward sensor on the floor tripped at once. The backup containment grid — built to contain the strongest kind of channelling we plan for — activated and held. Barely. Two of the monitoring crystals cracked. One shattered.
The farmer screamed.
Not in pain — our medical team confirmed this in the post-test examination, which was thorough and, I will note, conducted with more urgency than any examination I have overseen in seventeen years of service. The scream was involuntary. Reflexive. The attending physician, Dr. Cassia Lehane, described it as "overwhelming sensory expansion." Subject 14's pupils went wide. His temperature spiked. His skin responded to our instruments in ways that broke the gauges — the needle bent.
When he could speak again, he said: "I can feel the walls breathing."
We ran twelve follow-up tests over six hours. The results were consistent and, I must be blunt, terrifying.
The device had induced a first-tier attunement in a man with no innate capacity for magic.
First-tier. From zero. In six seconds.
The Athenaeum's standard attunement programme requires a candidate who already has some natural talent. It takes between four and eight weeks. Failure rate: thirty-one percent. Cost per candidate: approximately two hundred gold crowns. And those are candidates who were *born with the ability*. Subject 14 was born with nothing.
I need to be clear about what this means.
The Athenaeum's charter, our political authority, our monopoly over magic-linked trade, our seats on the Compact Council — all of it rests on a single premise: magical talent is innate. You are born with it, or you are not. We measure what you have. We train what you have. The system is fair in the same way a race is fair when some runners start a mile ahead.
This premise is the reason we exist. It is the reason mages rule and farmers bow. It is the reason the Crown pays us seventeen percent of the continental tax revenue and why the Iron Covenant defers to our judgment on matters of magic regulation. It is the reason three hundred million crowns flow through our accounts annually. It is the reason the Inner Council has seven seats at the Compact table and the farmers' guilds have none.
**This device makes that premise a lie.**
If refined and replicated, every farmer, dockworker, and street sweeper on Aethermere could channel. The registration system collapses. The licensing fees vanish. The Compact's power structure does not survive that reality. Neither does ours.
I have consulted with Senior Councillor Harren and with the Head of the Restricted Research Division. We are agreed.
The craftsman has been identified as Edric Varn, second-tier Crucible Adept, unregistered. Workshop located in the outer Hinterlands, Eastern Reaches jurisdiction. Wife: Lira Varn, née Ashwood, unlicensed healer, unregistered. No institutional affiliation. No known associates in the academic or political spheres.
Research notes: not located. Our field team conducted a thorough search of the workshop and surrounding property. The notes are not there. Either Varn destroyed them, which is unlikely given the obsessive documentation evident in his other work, or he hid them elsewhere. Or someone else has them. This is the most troubling possibility and must be resolved.
The device prototype: secured. Currently held in Vault 9 under Directive 7 containment protocols.
Subject 14 has been administered a Class-C memory modification. He will remember the agricultural trial and the four silver crowns. He will not remember the scream. He will not remember the walls breathing. The modification was performed by Veil-adept Instructor Maren Sollis, who has been reminded of her obligations under Directive 7.
**Recommended action:**
1. Terminate Edric Varn.
2. Terminate Lira Varn.
3. Confiscate all materials from the workshop and surrounding property.
4. Locate and destroy the research notes by any means necessary.
5. Erase institutional records of Subject 14's test results.
6. Destroy the device.
Items 1 through 5 can be executed through existing Silver Office channels. Item 6 requires Inner Council authorisation, which I am requesting with this document.
**This experiment did not happen. This device does not exist. This man never built anything.**
**CLASSIFIED: INNER COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 7. SUPPRESS AND DESTROY.**
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*[The following margin note appears in a different hand, added at some point after the primary document was filed. The ink is lighter than the body text — a different formula, possibly from a different decade. The handwriting is steady but small, as if the writer was conscious of being watched, or as if they wanted the note to be easy to miss.]*
*"He had a son."*