The theft of the divine secrets by the wicked Mage-King of Amathus
Welcome to Soul Jars! In the city-state of Amathus, Galáteia awakens millennia after her death in a new artificial body and with no memory. A magical soul from the ancient imperial family, she is bound to serve her creator, given a knife and pointed towards a rival's tower... Come explore this new world with her!
Introduction to the story | Galáteia | Soul Jars | Novella upcoming
Introduction to the story | Galáteia | Soul Jars | Novella upcoming
Table of Contents
The Mages-Kings of Amathus have stolen from the gods the secrets of how to wield terrible and awe-inspiring magic, for how else to explain them being propelled from the kings of a humble city-state to the rulers of a continent-spanning empire?
To see what modern-days people of Amathus make of the legend told by their enemies, see:
When the gods created the world, they made the continent of Aetokos the most prosperous and beautiful of all places on Earth, and its people were their favourites. In thanks for this wonderful gift, the gods were offered their devotion and worship.
Yet overtime, the good people of Aetokos became wicked and and failed to give to the gods the worship that was their due. This preoccupied the gods very much and led to many debates between them regarding whether they should all be smitten and civilisation restarted from scratch or if the situation was still salvageable.
Worse among all the people of Aetokos were those of the city-state of Amathus, and worse among all of Amathus was its Mage-King. So big was his arrogance and ambitious that he had come to the idea of stealing from the god themselves to establish himself as first among all mortals, as something even beyond mortality.
In order to facilitate this evil scheme, the Mage-King secretly encouraged the wicked behaviour of the people of Aetokos, while outwardly appearing disapproving and repentant. This won him the favour of the gods, and, at his own suggestion, he was invited to their domain so that they could consult his experience with the simple minds of Aetokos.
Thanks to this ruse, the Mage-King was able to go through the protections of the godly domain and to stand inside the divine workshops. There, he stole the secrets of many wonderful designs, and once he was sent back to the mortal realm, he hurried to reproduce as much as he could remember. However, because he was a mere man, his memory was not able to encompass all of the divine plans. And because of his wickedness, he further twisted many of the devices so that he could use them in his nefarious plans.
Of course, the gods noticed what was happening. Their outrage at the betrayal and the theft was beyond measure. However, the cleverest and cold-headed of them all stop them from exacting immediate retaliation and convinced the rest of them that such an offence was worthy of much more suffering.
And so, the Mage-King was given the illusion of success and allowed to conquer many territory. Yet, his actions had cursed him and all of his line, as well as all of Amathus. The Mage-King himself suffered from terrible physical deformations and only died at a very old age after much suffering.
However, his main punishment and that of his descendants was only discovered much later, after several generations had been equally affected: their souls would never know any peace in the afterlife. There, the gods gathered them and subjected them to horrific sufferings and humiliations worthy of their crime, and to this day and to the end of the world, this continues.
When they discovered their fate, the Mages-Kings descendants formed a plan: they invented an evil procedure to trap their own souls in a jar after their death to bind them to the mortal realm, and they built an enormous mausoleum complex below Amathus to protect them.
Under the illusion of this success, they continued their conquest and established an evil empire. And for two millennia, they were allowed to last, until the gods all agreed that the people of Aetokos had renounced their wicked ways and sufficiently repented for their acts. Only then was the line of Mages-Kings finally allowed end and their empire to fall.
To this day, the gods have left their souls to their tormented rest in their mausoleum of Amathus, ready to unleash them on Aetokos should its people fall in their devotion again. Yet, when the world will end, all souls will return to the godly domain...
Illustration in a children book about the legend of the evil Mage-King and the importance of giving proper worship to the gods by AmélieIS
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It's cool that you were able to tie this into the official challenge, and link so many other articles from your world! I like the cautionary nature of the tale, very on brand for the inspiration coming from a greek story/culture standpoint: Don't mess with the gods.
Thanks! And thanks for organising this challenge, it came just on time for me XD I mentioned briefly the legend in my challenge article, and this was just the right motivation I needed to get this written rather than skip everything XD At first I thought I would just plainly tell the story, but I got inspired with telling it from the POV of enemies instead, and this makes a nice conclusion indeed :D