The Point of Silence

On a nameless island in the sea of Kytar, an island where no foot has trodden in living memory, there lies a blackened, barren heath surrounded by the charred trunks of ancient trees, and the twisted remains of primitive battlements, torn apart by some terrible primeval power. Were this island to be rediscovered by some unfortunate explorer and should that explorer have the poor judgement required to stand among the windless ruin for long enough for its magic to take hold, the only indication they would have that something is wrong would be a sudden, but nonetheless subtle, affliction of deafness. Much has been lost to the ages in regard to the history of magic, but even with the Historical Revival busily excavating ruins throughout the world for the first time since the Nightmare War, there are not many people living who know that the first form of controllable magic used by prehistoric mages was necromancy. In fact, one of the many reasons organizations of sorcerers seek to guide young magic users so early in life, is that it is quite common for less developed minds to yearn to disrupt the natural cycle of life and death. When an individual first gains the capacity to use magic, usually referred to as gaining a magical presence, it tends to be under very stressful circumstances. It is only natural that a young person who's just gained supernatural power over the natural world would want to reverse such painful events as the passing of a loved one. Magic responds to intent like a gas filling a container, so necromancy comes to young mages as regularly as puberty. Naturally, early civilizations universally marked this witchery as blasphemy as soon as they had gods to pray to, and many of the earliest wars between armies armed with stone clubs and staves of wood and bone, were largely the efforts of early kingdoms to quell the spread of necromancy.
These battles were nearly always ended through a combination of zealous ferocity on the side of the anti-magic combatants, and the magic users destroying their own strength through mistakes made with their untrained eldritch powers. In these cases, the victors generally scrubbed subsequent history in an effort to deny the horrors of the past, but in this one specific case, to the abject horror of all participants, the arcane emerged victorious. The Tchung Kingdom, which is believed to has existed well before and well after whatever cataclysm flooded the region and created the Kytaran Sea, had sent a sizable contingent of warriors to the flattened peak of the Black Mountain, where they were to ambush and destroy a coven of warlocks. The ambush worked so well, in fact, that the warlocks fought back with far more recklessness than they otherwise would have. The Tchung did not grace us with the specifics of the battle that destroyed the Tchung warriors, or what happened to the warlocks afterwards. It is assumed by most that whatever happened left no survivors to tell the story. Tchung scouts who later ascended the Black Mountain, found the charred remains of the coven's experiments and reported on the silence that covers the area. This was also the expedition that led to the discovery of the area's curse. The Tchung scouts all immediately infected by the curse left behind by these warlocks. First, the victim will go deaf, then mute, then blind, then they will lose the ability to walk, before eventually succumbing to catatonia, and finally, death, all in the span of 48 hours. After the initial scouts lost the ability to speak and recognized the signs of a curse, the credulous warriors sprang into action. They were cast off within fifteen minutes. The Tchung monarchs quickly forbade any travel to the mountain, and later, to the island. The Tchung Empire kept meticulous records throughout their nation's life, and it is only thanks to the dogged scrubbing of all historical records by the Historical Revival that we know about them at all. After the battle at the Point of Silence, the Empire had very little more to say on the subject of necromancy, and indeed, they didn't even see fit to name the warlocks of Black Mountain. They went on to have a long and prosperous civilization that lasted for at least another thousand years. Though the Tchung Kingdom has long since sunk beneath the waves, sailors from all walks of life still universally avoid the nameless island with the flat, blackened peak, though most of them would not be able to tell you why.

Type

Island