Fifteen years ago, Lutz Schaefer was a Sergeant of the Hornau Crossbow Regiment in his late twenties with a single child. After Stirland's crossbow regiments were disbanded as the new Elector Countess attempted to modernize her military, he and his squad joined the Karak Eight Peaks Expedition in the hopes of earning enough money to buy some land or purchase a commission in order to secure an income for his nascent family. The Expedition proved successful beyond most expectations, and instead of returning home with gold, he brought his wife and child down and established himself as an officer of the Undumgi. Today, Lutz Schaefer is a Lieutenant and a father of five.
Man has managed to do really well for himself.
"It's possible," you say cautiously as you try to decipher his tone. It takes you a moment not because it's especially cryptic, but because you're not used to the idea of a father being excited to learn that his son might one day be a Wizard. You adjust the planned arc of this conversation. "If he goes to the Colleges, his level of ability would be measured and he'll be given the level of training appropriate for his capabilities, as long as he's willing to learn. From what you've told me, it sounds like he could have a strong affinity for the Wind of Metal, that we call Chamon. If that is the case, he could one day become a Gold Wizard, like Johann and Maximillian."
"That's great news," he says with complete sincerity, and you very deliberately prevent yourself from lingering on how rare that reaction is, and how much more welcome it might have been for some than what they actually got. When you were one Apprentice among many, you'd heard many of the stories of your fellows awakening to their magical ability, and the reactions of their families. Some had stories that rivalled your own for traumatic experiences, but the most common version was of a family reacting with muted despair, as if being told that their child was crippled or dying. The only positive receptions you've heard of previously was among magical families like Panoramia's, or among those who had grown up in orphanages or on the streets.
Goes to show the culture that Mathilde has helped to create, being a Wizard isn't a horrible curse it's a potential career that can become very lucrative for those who are in it.
He seems more reassured by that than perhaps he should be. It's a complicated topic, the fees that students of the Colleges are charged and can sometimes accumulate over the length of their education. The Colleges would theoretically be able to sustain themselves from funding from the Emperor, tithes from their members and the various income streams specific to each College, but they charge Apprentices varying but always significant amounts for their education anyway. The amount is carefully calculated to be burdensome but not crippling for the student's family. If the family pays it, the theory goes, then they are made materially invested in the student's success and are less likely to get cold feet about it years later, when an Apprentice has been ensconced within the College for years and finally emerges with strange new quirks and physical properties. If the family does not pay, then it drives a wedge between the Apprentice and their family early on, bringing the matter to a head immediately instead of allowing an influence opposed to a magical education to linger in that Apprentice's life for years or decades. In either case, when the Apprentice becomes a Journeyman, they are more encouraged than they would otherwise be to pursue the more profitable paths available to them, and in doing so they not only repay the debt to the College or their family, but also have a larger income for the College to take its tithe from. The College may not directly prohibit someone with the potential to become a Magister from spending the rest of their life making a very safe living keeping a forge burning for a blacksmith or something, but it will give a nudge or two to try to prevent it.
You're not sure if you're entirely convinced by this logic. You suspect it may have come about in a time when the Colleges were less established and more in need of funding, and that it continues on at least partly because the Wizards making this decision had to deal with student debt in their youth, so they feel affronted at the idea that future students will not have to. Undoubtedly there are those that would argue it builds character.
Mathilde's thoughts on the tithes are rather interesting and insightful.
Your musings on the topic last until you arrive at the family's dwelling, where you are introduced to a wife and an array of successively smaller children. Your attention goes straight to the boy whose feat had brought you here today, who very clearly doesn't know what he should be doing with himself, and he's fiddling with what you take to be a chunk of silver-bearing ore taken out of the deposit he discovered. You only need a glance to spot the ambient Chamon within the ore stirring at his touch. It takes a longer look to determine that the stirrings only partially correlate with the boy's movements, so it can't just be a natural physical affinity for the Yellow Wind - there must be an unseen variable exerting force upon the Winds, and the most likely candidate is the boy's will.
Chamon is the Wind that would make sense given where the boy lives.
Right now, it's harmless. He can move it around, but without instruction it would take years for that to develop into enough grasp over it to twist it into the form of a spell. No, the actual danger is that his receptivity to Chamon will not necessarily remain restricted to Chamon. All it would take is some sort of meaningful event to give him even a small level of affinity for one of the other Winds - a nasty burn or beast attack, or the death of a loved one awakening his awareness of mortality, or something else along those lines - and he'll be inadvertently juggling two Winds within his soul, Winds that will have additional speed and turbulence for being within the soul of a nascent Wizard, propelled to and fro by the emotional turmoil of youth. That would put him on a gradual but inexorable path towards Dhar poisoning.
You explain as much to the parents, and while they're certainly concerned to hear it, they seem accepting of the reality of the matter - perhaps not unexpectedly, considering his most likely trajectory had been to follow his father into professional soldiering. You'd expected to face resistance when you explained that it would be best to get him into the mono-Wind environment of the Gold College as soon as possible, and that a delay might be fine but might also be disastrous, but they agree with it immediately. You're not sure whether you were especially convincing, or whether they just want to leap on what they see as a great opportunity for their son as quickly as possible. So you give them the rest of the day to say their farewells and prepare the boy to uproot his life.
Dhar poisoning is really risky and Mathilde isn't really sure how to handle the parents being excited for their son.
That evening, you, the child, and Max board your Gyrocarriage to set off to Altdorf. Johann might have gotten along with the child more easily, but his example of Alchemical Thaumaturgy is perhaps a bit intense to be a child's first example of their future.
After some hesitance and awkwardness - not least of which because of the necessity of having to speak quite loudly to be heard over the sound of the engine - the two settle into a discussion about the theorized origins of mountains, from the passé 'the Gods did it' to the outré 'enough stone in one place causes gravity to reverse'. The two spend quite some time mocking the fringe belief in simple physical forces shaping the world over millions of years. The child perks up as the conversation touches on the relation between stone and Chamon, when he says something that causes you to turn your full attention to the conversation.
Mathilde and Johann are good at social stuff and can engage the kid's curiosity.
"The opposite of water?" you ask, prompting him to elaborate on his theory.
He blinks up at you. "Water likes to flow around on the surface, but if it can't do that it'll start sinking into what it's on. The looser it is, the easier it sinks in and moves around, and that's where you get well water. But it'll still sink into stone, just slower. The energy is the other way around - it'll sink into stone if it can, and if it can't then it'll sink slower into soil if the soil doesn't already have another energy in it, and only if there's nothing else for it to do does it flow around on the surface. The opposite of water." He smiles proudly at his theory, and looks closely at you for a reaction as you consider it.
That's a good insight from a beginner.
The child is clearly only familiar with Chamon out of the Winds, which for his current circumstances is for the best. Once he's taught a more rounded understanding of them, 'water' could be easily replaced with Ghyran, which flows either like water or with water - the exact cause and effect there is debated. And from there you have an alternative theory of Wind cardinality, one where Chamon and Ghyran are cardinally opposed. The mainstream theory puts Chamon across from Shyish and Ghyran from Aqshy, putting the permanence of metal against the finality of death and the growth of life across from the consumption of fire, but while this depiction can be found in many places in the Colleges, it is far from unassailable, and other theories tend to find a ready audience. An alternate cardinality theory around the way the Winds interact with and flow through the physical world would be an intriguing beginning to a Wizard's career - it's very unlikely to one day rival the Elemental-Mystical-Cardinal triune that currently dominated Collegiate magical theory, but it could very well join the ranks of the numerous other models that have all kinds of niche uses in specific areas.
Making his own magical theory would be impressive regardless.
"That's a very interesting way of thinking about it," you say to the child. "You should keep it in mind, and develop it as you learn how the other Winds work."
From the expression on his face you feel confident that he'll do everything within his power to do so, and you smile. Despite the lack of an extended family, the child shows no evidence of the precocious maturity of an older child of a large family that has had to serve as an additional parent to his juniors. That speaks well of the support structures within the Undumgi - or, you hedge, at least the formerly Sylvanian portion of it. You'd say he has a better chance than most of taking well to the sudden change of environment into the alien structure of the Gold College.
You make a mental note to try to remember his name so you can follow his career with interest.
Kid seems really eager.
When you delivered a substantial bounty of Ithilmar, a metal with only one known source in the entire world, you were offered several methods of payment that would have made you fabulously wealthy. Each and every one of them has been spurned in favour of feeding the endless appetite of your beloved and growing library. The Queen has formalized your previous means of securing a trickle of Elvish wisdom and employed vast swathes of Tor Lithanel's comfortably bored underclass in churning out a copy of almost the entirety of the Library of Mournings. While you're kept quite busy organizing the incoming flood of Eltharin instruction into some semblance of proper organization, you're not so busy that you can't spot what is missing, and it turns out to be substantially less than you expected. While most books on strategy are notable for their absence, tomes talking about combat at smaller scale are numerous. Books on magical concepts are present but generally low-level, which you're mostly sure is a reflection of Laurelorn's power dynamics rather than a deliberate choice - the greatest understanding of magic belongs to the Grey Lords, and the penultimate tier to the local Temples of Hoeth and Hekarti and the Houses that dominate them.
It all amounts to a bounty of knowledge you could spend a lifetime perusing, and that you intend to spend a lifetime at least leafing through. You suspect that in your future, there will be very little you put your mind to that won't be assisted by some measure of Elvish insight.
Trading Ithilmar for books was totally worth it for the sheer amount of books and acess to the Library of Mounrings' knowledge. You can bet that she got a lot of scholar respect by doing that.
While your library's security, having been constructed by Dwarven architects and residing within a Dwarven Karak, was judged as good enough for most purposes, there was one part of the Library of Mournings that requires a greater dedication to security, including a failsafe to destroy the contents should the vault that will contain them be forcibly breached. The scrolls in question are the largest you've ever seen, and covered with carefully-copied diagrams and notes in a language that seems entirely alien, even after you catch a glimpse of both Eltharin and Khazalid in its patterns. You get the impression that mere ink and vellum should be entirely incapable of containing the message within, and that it condescends to be contained in a merely mortal medium as an act of generous benevolence. It is beyond the peoples of the current era to even measure how many steps they are removed from the original lessons of the Old Ones, those that joined forces with the Dragons to shape this world and held back the onslaught of Chaos for long enough for life as you know it today to grow strong enough to take up the fight themselves.
..... hhahahahaahahah YES!!!!!!!!!!!! Old One lore is insane.
In a letter to the Grey College, you briefly summarize the bounty of knowledge that you have acquired, and leave to them the titanic task of figuring out who in the Empire deserves to know about the secrets that have become available to anyone willing to make the journey to the edge of the continent.
Dumping it on the Grey College was smart, having that type of knowledge is going to be really useful for the Empire.
I love this so dearly. It's very clear that the Undumgi see wizards as something positive, reputable, and foremost profitable. A reputation that the wizards of K8P have been working at for a decade. I have nothing but joy for this, and I do hope the kid will follow the example of reaching out to communities around him.
Edit: Just realized that there are few priests (aside from the Ulrikian heresy) and even fewer witch hunters around. Might be that.
Mathilde and co have changed the perspective on Wizards in that way and that is shown to matter and it's great.
Hey just read this entire story for the first time a few weeks ago but wanted to hold off for an update to comment. Delightful to read, wish I found this years ago
Interested to see what it's like to follow a new turn from the start next update!!!
Somebody has probably mentioned it already before in this massive thread but I like the Dwarf-Undumgi dynamic a lot. Reminds me of Laketown and how it interacts with the Dwarves in Tolkien's work a bit.
I guess if there's any input I'd have on purchases it would be to consider consolidating some of our spread out resources, namely by looking to sell off the Stirland lands. I know those go way back to the beginning of the quest so a lot of people might have an emotional connection to it but reading through everything since it has always felt sort of distant and unrelated to everything else that's going on. Between the college, the library stuff, and the EIC, it feels like it's always the poor relation and if anything interesting ever happened with the area it kind of feels like it would just take up even more action points that we don't have. I guess it's part of our noble title but if all we're caring about there is the title then being an unlanded noble doesn't feel like that big of a deal given that it's probably the least of our titles at this point anyways. We're not engaged in any sort of dynasty building. I definitely wouldn't be looking to invest anything more into the area. If the elf vacation is on the menu sometime soon bringing along a lot of gold to that for that brief period when we can seems like a good idea so I wouldn't want to spend like crazy anytime soon.
Welcome to the quest, I hope you've had a great time reading it. One of Mathilde's best resources and tools is that she's really good at building connections between varying different groups, it's part of how the Dwarf-Undumgi thing went so well and why the Waystone Project is possible.
I still can't believe that voters used this amazing transcendent boon from a wealthy dwarven polity on a library of all things. I get why with the overlap between 'people that love this quest', 'people who are in too deep on Warhammer Fantasy lore', and 'nerds who would actually like being part of something like that in real life', but when I got to that part of the read through I face palmed pretty hard regardless🤣
The Quest is awesome like that.
Unironically, pilgrimage to K8P could turn into a big industry. There was already the halls where the Ancestor Gods are first known to have mined to attract dwarven pilgrims. Now a library where books exist that otherwise simply can't be found outside inaccessible elven archives? All kinds of scholars are going to want to see those.
Yes, it's a long, difficult, journey. So was going to Jerusalem in the first millennium CE. Even low thousands a year, well, that doesn't sound like much by modern tourism standards but considering the population of the karak it would be huge. Each of those visitors will be a person of means (or escorting such a person) or they wouldn't have the money to make the journey, all of them needing a place to stay and food to eat and all sorts of other things, especially the researchers.
Honestly, Belegar might turn a net profit on his investment by the end of his kingship.
I can see that happening, it's a religious and intellectual site of great importance.
We've still got a fair bit more books coming in, too - we've yet to finish copying the rest of Nuln's libraries. Once that's complete, I'd be pretty comfortable calling KAU the greatest library on the continent.
At that point, our goal should shift to gaining agreements from the rest of the libraries in the Empire, Tilea, and Estalia. We could make a play to see if we could get access to a decent chunk of Kislev's books too, by offering Boris an oathbound place to "back-up" Kislev's knowledge for the next Chaos incursion.
We can start sending out feelers to Ind and Cathayan libraries at that point, too - K8P is a major trade hub, after all, and we'd be getting large to the point that cross-continental collaboration starts to look semi-feasible. We'll see how the elfcation goes, but that's an opportunity to talk to the White Tower, too.
As for Mathilde personally, I'd love to see her learn both Anoqueyan and Arcane Khazalid, and then with that backing make an attempt at the Old One writings to see what she can glean. It would make for a nice research project to gnaw at, now that the Morbs are winding down.
KAU doesn't have the history but it has the connections and books to make it qualify as one of the greats, and it's security is better then all but a few libraries.
The idea to reconstruct or learn the Old One writings has been present for a while, having actual materials makes it a lot easier.
It's not quite as crazy as it might seem. Altdorf seems to view Wizards as a kind of "don't mess with them, but they're around a lot" phenomenon where their frequent and uneventful appearances around the city make Wizards seem normal rather than inherently terrifying.
At K8P, people are used to seeing wizards come and go, perform helpful tasks that aren't scary (Panoramia helping to work the fields, Mathilde talking with dwarves about stuff, Johann sparring with fisticuffs), and even when magic is involved, it's benign (Mathilde riding around the Karak on her Shadowsteed, Panoramia doing magic in the fields, Hubert flying through the air, the wizards shooting targets at a range with precision spells). Hell, they all live in the shadow of a giant wizard tower, and yet the only thing that wizard tower has done is make a terrifying Waaagh all die.
So they're used to magic a bit. But they're also used to Wizards being people who help out with real, scary problems and help make those problems go away. K8P is a small community compared to the entire Empire, so rather than Wizards being something you associate with evil magic from religious sermons that you probably haven't seen any good examples of, with a Wizard showing up being a rare occurrence, Wizards are a part of your community and they do harmless examples of magic that you can go and see often.
And if the dwarves trust the wizards a lot, then it's hard to feel like you shouldn't trust them yourself. And it's hard to overemphasize how ingrained the wizards of K8P are part of the K8P community. Hubert is a beloved friend of and ambassador to the Winter Wolves. Panoramia is adored by and works alongside the halflings. Max is a blacksmith who studies under the dwarves and has built a lot of good relationships with them. Johann plays with his rat pups and with the children and Wolf. Mathilde frequently spends time with the dwarves and humans alike, with a sterling reputation among them all for tackling their weirdest problems. Adela is an important part of the Gunnery School branch. Gretel owns(ish) a tower of the Citadel and runs a closely-allied polity between K8P and Barak Varr. They're your wizards, part of your community.
Wizards have been shown to be constructive and really help out and the Wizards are shown to be people.
Cynicism is a part of it, but there's also past trauma playing a factor. It's not something that actually gets in the way of her life or goals so she's left all that still packed up and tucked away instead of processing it, but that does mean she has some inbuilt assumptions that it takes her a moment to consciously sidestep in circumstances like this one.
Ah yeah the ye old tragic backstory still effects her and she's very used to her magic being hated and feared by nonmagical people that are normal.
I honestly love seeing Mathilde getting to see the knock-on positive effects of her actions. Instead of the kid's family thinking that he's cursed or worse, he's basically considered as being actually gifted and with incredible potential, and his family is proud of that fact. Thanks to Mathilde, Panpan, Johann and all the other wizards on K8P and even the War Wizards in Sylvania the local view of magic users has changed substantially from the norm. Of course it also means that the kids coming from these areas aren't going to be prepared for how the rest of the Empire treats mages.
Mathilde getting to see it was wonderful.
This last bit makes me feel that it's more likely that they'll come back to K8Ps after experiencing how the Empire treats wizards, possibly after evangelising to their peers and encouraging them to come back with them.
K8Ps is a great place for a Wizard to live.
The off-handed mention when she met with Roswitha recently that Mathilde thinks of her younger self not with fond bemusement, not with embarrassment but with contempt still sticks in my mind... I'm very glad that her relationship with Panoramia is so clearly built on mutual care and trust. Mathilde needs people in her life to unambiguously counter what seems to be (to unpack what is probably obvious) her inbuilt assumption that she, as a wizard, needs to display unwavering competence and usefulness for her own security. Her romantic partner is a very good start to that (as was choosing to let the dwarves know about the daemon incident, honestly). It's not an unreasonable assumption, of course, given the world she lives in, but... Well, it's called trauma for a reason. Not a healthy assumption either.
Mathilde has issues that she keeps under wraps most of the time.
Mathilde is both a source of great pride and great headaches for the Grey Order.
When she comes back after this, they are totaly going to Daemon check her.
They're likely ecstatic about the Library gains.
The beauty of the favour economy is that the further it stretches the more it offers.
Mathilde turned metal-working favours into book purchases by trading favours between groups that weren't otherwise connected.
Belegar repaid all the College favour Mathilde put on his tab in various ways, often by calling in favours owed to him by other groups.
Money, influence, contacts and introductions. Favours cover all of that and so much more. The colleges will find something to pay with.
Mathilde has gotten really good at using favors.
The World's Edge Mountains are too tall to be formed by natural forces. Norsca is too jagged for the wounds upon it to be anything but brand new in geological terms. Ulthuan floats. The continent of Naggaroth has a navigable ocean underneath it. The border between Naggaroth and Lustria only became mountains after the Druchii started poking the lizards. The underground highways of the Karaz Ankor got shattered by someone reversing a few thousand years of continent drift in an instant. Ancient records and legends keep bringing up this rather large island just off the coast of Bretonnia that definitely isn't there any more. Immense plains of skeletons exist from where herd animals drove themselves extinct trying to follow migration paths that disappeared overnight. There's nowhere in the world that matches the description of where the Imperial Tribes left from. There are no poles, you can go north, reach 90 degrees latitude, and continue onwards forever if you survive long enough. The seasons have personality. Half of the planet's tidal forces comes from a body that gives negative fucks about orbital mechanics. There are astral bodies that only appear when it's dramatically appropriate for them to do so. The year is exactly 400 days long. Every planet in the local system has an orbital period divisible by forty days. There is an asteroid crater with teeth and a personality. There is a star that only Wizards can see.
The entire planet is fundamentally unnatural.
Warhammer universe is crazy like that.
