Ceremony of Magick

"Some say he failed. Others say we failed to understand what we witnessed. Perhaps both are true."

— Aranon, centuries later

The Ceremony of Divine Ascendance was meant to be a simple rite of passage - each young god demonstrating their mastery over their inherited domain. The great amphitheater of the House of Aranon was filled with divine witnesses, their attention focused on the demonstrations of power that would mark their children's entry into the celestial hierarchy. Branon sat rigid with anticipation, hoping against hope that his son would finally manifest some spark of proper earth magic.

When Bron's turn came, he stepped into the ceremonial circle not with the traditional implements of earth magic - the crystals and stones his cousins had used - but with a single glass vessel containing what appeared to be water from his mother's realm. This deviation from protocol already caused murmurs of disapproval among the assembled gods. But it was what he did next that would be remembered for millennia to come.

"The boy held up that vessel like he was offering it to Te Vevutur, and for a moment - just a moment - I swear I saw every god's power reflected in that water, as if all our divine essence was nothing but ripples in a pond."

— Anonymous divine witness

Instead of demonstrating control over earth, Bron attempted something unprecedented - he sought to show how divine power could be reflected, refracted, and potentially redistributed. As he raised the vessel, the water inside began to glow with an inner light that seemed to draw power from every god present. The assembled deities felt their own divine essence responding, resonating in ways that made many of them deeply uncomfortable. Some would later describe it as feeling their godhood being "questioned" by reality's fabric.

The effect built to a crescendo as Bron began speaking words that seemed to twist in the air - not commands to power as gods typically used, but questions about the nature of divinity and power. The water in the vessel started to transform, becoming something that was neither water nor divine essence, but a new state of matter that appeared to exist between realities. Those nearest to the ceremonial circle reported seeing hints of what would later be recognized as the first manifestation of what Zastor would call the "liminal state" - the crucial transition point where divine power could be transformed into mortal-accessible magic.

"In that moment, we felt our divinity waver. Not diminish, but... shift. As if our power was being shown a different way to exist. It was terrifying. It was revolutionary. It was blasphemy of the highest order. It was genius."

— From the secret memoirs of an Eeirendel witness

The ceremony collapsed into chaos when several elder gods, instinctively reacting to what they perceived as a threat to the divine order, released bursts of power meant to disrupt whatever Bron was attempting. The competing divine energies collided with his experimental process, creating a cascading resonance that shattered every crystal in the amphitheater and briefly caused all divine powers to cease functioning within the sacred space - a phenomenon that would not be properly understood until Zastor's later work with dead god essence.

In the immediate aftermath, the incident was deemed a humiliating failure, with many calling for Bron's punishment for bringing dangerous and heretical ideas into a sacred ceremony. None of the assembled gods wanted to acknowledge that for a brief moment, they had felt their powers respond to a fundamentally new paradigm. The official records listed the ceremony as a "regrettable display of youthful impudence." Unofficially, several younger gods began secretly experimenting with their own powers in ways they had never considered before.

"We called it failure because we lacked the wisdom to recognize radical success."

— Nera, speaking to Zastor centuries later

Millennia later, magical scholars would recognize this ceremony as the first documented attempt to manipulate the fundamental nature of divine power. The principles Bron had stumbled upon - that divine essence could be reflected, refracted, and potentially redistributed - would become central to the development of what eventually became known as Magick. The "failure" that drove him from his father's house would ultimately prove to be the first step toward revolutionizing the relationship between divine and mortal power throughout all of Aina.