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The Mage Wars describes the period in history during which the power-hungry Adept mage Ma'ar conquered much of Velgarth.[1]

The Wars began when one of the Great Mages, Ma'ar began a quest for secular, rather than magical power. He began by uniting warring clans "to keep them from annihilating each other."[2] But then he built an army of followers and began instilling a xenophobic racism with his talk of a "superior breed," eventually rising to the position of Prime Minister to the King of Predain. When the king died without an heir, Ma'ar took the throne and began reshaping the kingdom.

Anyone officially declared a foreigner, such as Kaled'a'in like Amberdrake, were subject to ever tighter restrictions. Eventually Ma'ar began "deporting" them, though no one knew where. In all likelihood, they were simply killed. Ma'ar's campaign soon encompassed anyone who might oppose him as well as anyone who might oppose wars of conquest against their neighbors. They were tortured and killed or forced into slave labor.

Through it all, the Great Mages had taken little notice of what was happening until Ma'ar moved to expand his territory beyond the borders of Predain. By that time, he was nigh unstoppable. He and his armies rolled across Velgarth. Kingdom after kingdom fell to him until he eventually came up against the borders of Tantara.

Ma'ar followed his usual technique of weakening the nation from within by destroying the central government. In this case, he activated a fear spell in the middle of the Royal Palace. The result was to drive away nearly all the kingdom's leaders, including the king. They ran in a panic, then stayed away out of shame for their "cowardice." One of the few unaffected was the Lady Cinnabar. A Healer, Cinnabar slept under full mental shielding, and so escaped the spell. She called on the kingdom's Archmage, Urtho, for help. One of the Great Mages, Urtho took command of the kingdom and her armies, centering them on his Tower, and sending them out to battle via permanent Gates.

Unfortunately, Ma'ar was too strong, and he slowly marched his way across the kingdom, town by town. Urtho did his best to protect people, setting up permanent Gates and evacuating non-combatants as a contingency. Eventually, Ma'ar took the Royal Palace of Tantara, and set up his headquarters there. Some of Urtho's own people betrayed him, allowing Ma'ar's trups behind Urtho's lines. At that point, it was hopeless. One of the treacherous mages, Conn Levas, poisoned Urtho. What Ma'ar did not realize was that Urtho had placed the equivalent of a magic deadman's switch on his Tower. When he died, it would unleash a magical explosion destroying the Tower and everything in its vicinity.

Knowing his time was short, Urtho ordered complete evacuation, sending his people out through the Gate network. He gave Skandranon a weapon that would disrupt Ma'ar's magic, to hopefully destroy him in the unraveling. He intended Skandranon to use it at a later date, but Skan immediately infiltrated the Palace, detonating the weapon shortly before Urtho died.[3] The resulting double explosion became known as the Cataclysm.

The site of the Royal Palace became Lake Evendim; the site of Urtho's Tower became the Dhorisha Plains. With Ma'ar's destruction, the Mage Wars were finally over. But the Cataclysm initiated the lasting waves of mass destruction known as the Mage Storms.

In the Series[]

Notes[]

  1. In Under the Vale and Other Tales of Valdemar, "Under the Vale essay", published in 2011, 17 years after The Black Gryphon (1994), Larry Dixon describes the Mage Wars as "The seventy-some years before the Cataclysm," when magical theory had developed to such an extent that "Velgarth's native magic fields had been harnessed like never before by cabals and individuals." Conflicts between mages were numerous, as they became "more than tyrants and more than leaders." In contrast, The White Gryphon novel of 1995 states that the conflict between Urtho and Ma'ar lasted only ten years, as Amberdrake states in Chapter Two, ten years after the Cataclysm: "At the start of the war with Ma'ar—had that really been twenty years ago?" Until Dixon's essay appeared, this was the only information about the Mage Wars, and the novels, the stories, and the wiki reflect this.
  2. Storm Breaking, Chapter 2
  3. The Black Gryphon, Chapter 17
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