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Marrishland has a long and violent history. Several civilizations have risen and fallen, here, and the book tells about events during one of the most turbulant periods - a period whose events determine whether a civilization survives or dies.

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Calm After the Storm (1 I.D.)

It can be argued that the initial success of the Kalkorae on the subcontinent was due in no small part to two significant misunderstandings. First, the Totanbeni, having only encountered fellow wints, until then, assumed that the invaders' magic was like their own. The strength of wint magic is dictated by the size of the wint community and the degree to which they share a common goal. The supply of a community's magical power likewise grows at a steady rate as each member contributes to it unconsciously over a period of time. Further, there is no limit to how much power a community of wints can accumulate over time.

In an environment that taxes their magical resources almost not at all, it is conceivable that a community could quickly store up a vast amount of power. For this reason, those Totanbeni who first came into contact with the Kalkorae and who witnessed their almost playful wasting of magical resources drew the logical and incorrect conclusion that these invaders had existed in such a nurturing environment that they had come to regard magic as a form of entertainment, not as a means of survival. Based on this misunderstanding, these Totanbeni further deduced that the Kalkorae must have accumulated an enormous supply of magic in their probably long existence.

For this reason, the Totanbeni determined that outright war with the invaders carried the risk of a swift defeat. Instead, they decided to wage a long war of attrition against the Kalkorae, believing that the foreigners' community was small and therefore could not recoup the magic they would lose with each battle. The slogan of the Totanbeni became "Each defeat brings us closer to victory," and they believed this statement to be true. Later events, of course, would make it an ironic motto.

The Kalkorae, for their part, were used to dealing with mede magic. First, it required a harvester, which the shadelshifs and Totanbeni outpost either lacked or possessed in a form utterly foreign to the Kalkorae. Second, it could not be stored up reliably, only transported via a physical conduit, which the Totanbeni also either lacked or possessed in a form utterly foreign to the Kalkorae. Third, a focus could not produce a magical effect at an extraordinary range — a mile, at best, and usually significantly less — which meant that the Totanbeni weather control device had a greater range than anything the Kalkorae could even imagine.

From these observations, the Kalkorae incorrectly determined that the Totanbeni possessed a knowledge of magical devices far beyond their own. They believed the Totanbeni had discovered a new and seemingly limitless source of energy, had developed a way to store magical energy for long periods of time, had produced foci capable of affecting large-scale phenomena such as the weather, or had accomplished some combination of these three marvels. On one hand, this meant the Totanbeni posed an incredible danger to the Kalkorae, if they brought these alien technologies fully into play. On the other, it promised the capture of magical technologies that would revolutionize their native civilization. The latter of these convinced the empire across the sea that had initially sponsored the Kalkorae to fully support the mission in the East, and when the two speculators who had gone to report on their progress returned to the subcontinent, it was with a fleet of warships and promises of a supply line that would never dry up so long as it was needed to further the new mission of the Kalkorae.

(Contributed by Weard Oda Kalidus)