429 429 Morgan Davos
Wolfe and Kira found a comfortable bench set off to the side where there was no foot traffic, and Wolfe brought the knowledge crystal out from his pocket.
“I didn’t even get a chance to check what sort of knowledge it contains, so we are both going to learn about it at the same time. Do you know much about these crystals? I’ve only seen a few of them in the past.” Wolfe asked the fluffy white Kitsune Demon beside him.
Her tails swished happily in the evening breeze, and the Demoness nodded. “I am much older than you are, so I’ve seen a number of them in the past, but nowadays, they’re almost always destroyed, with only a few fragments of their knowledge intact and many dangers involved in trying to access the damaged spells.
This one should be safe to access, especially with you here, since you have reached Rank Four, and that is likely to be stronger than the one who made the crystal, so you will be more likely to be able to overcome any traps that were built into the spells.”
Wolfe chuckled. “You’re Rank Three yourself, not exactly a small fry.”
Kira shook her head but smiled back at him. “Rank Three is a bottleneck. Your potential is high enough that you can pass it without noticing, but for the rest of us, trying to advance at all after reaching Rank Three is nearly impossible.
Even with the enhanced mana in the area, I have barely made any progress at all, and I will likely spend the rest of my life in the early stages of Rank Three, even after considering that a Kitsune is nearly impervious to the ravages of time.”
That made sense. The spells in the Lumix household had thought very highly of Rank Three, so it made sense that it would be the peak for a large portion of society.
Then there was the knowledge that the so-called Saints, the Rank Seven and Eight Magi, were so few that they were listed by name in the combat calculations that were recorded in the Lumix annals.
“Well, should we begin?” Wolfe asked, but he didn’t wait for his companion and immediately touched the crystal with a hint of mana to bring it to life.
[Welcome, Magi, to the recorded history of Morgan Davos, or as he was better known to the world, Morgan The Oathbreaker, the greatest shame that the Davos Family has ever known, and husband to Morgana the Butcher.]
Wolfe paused there. This seemed to be a recorded history of the founders of the Morgana coven, told from the point of view of a Magi who clearly held a grudge.
The Coven didn’t say anything negative about the founding, only about the fact that Morgana was despised for having married a Magi, but managed to unite the Coven behind her despite their misgivings.
That was before the war by an unknown amount of time, but it now seemed that there was more to the story.
[In the start, Morgan Davos was the youngest grandson of Saint Morgan, the Earth Saint, and Lady Morgana was a well-respected daughter of the Lumix Family, adopted as a child and raised in the lap of luxury that only the Noble Families could provide.]
The narrator definitely held a grudge, Wolfe thought. It was not just against the pair in general but against the Noble Families of the Magi.
[When they founded their fledgling Coven, the event was celebrated by the entire Continent, with representatives from every Noble Family in attendance and the Seven Kings of the Human Empires blessing their union.
Even the great Saint Ahab Carib, the Progenitor of Lightning, came to bless their union.
They established a mingled city, which they said would be a beacon of hope for the future, one where Witches and Magi would interact together with the world and one day reshape society into the sort of peaceful utopia that the Magi had always maintained for themselves.
This is the story of how the beautiful dream of Morgan Davos became a nightmare.]
Wolfe paused to look at Kira, who was staring at him in shock.
“There are more than words in here. I have been ignoring the story to search the inscriptions, and it looks like they recorded a number of spells and counterspells in the crystal. But there is a lock on them, so it seems that we will have to listen to their story before we can learn what they set aside for us.” The Demoness explained.
“That seems about right for the Magi. There is no new knowledge without a full explanation. That’s how the last Crystal that I found was as well.” Wolfe agreed.
Wolfe returned to the lecture and found that the narrator had decided to skip the little details and jump straight into what went wrong.
[Twenty years after they were married, Lady Morgana came up with a plan to achieve their dream in a single generation. She believed that criminality was genetic and that only by eliminating the genes that caused violent crime could peace reign.
Now, at that point, she was only a Rank Three Witch, and the Lumix Family advisors were staunchly against the notion that bloodlines could be irredeemable, as Lady Morgana insisted.
At first, her husband was the voice of reason, and he insisted that there should be a way to eliminate the propensity for violence from the three major intelligent species, freeing them from their animalistic roots and bringing peace to the world naturally.
Nobody knows when that changed, but in the start, their research on genetics and social modification was published and lauded by the Witches.
They made great strides in the fields of genetics, cured dozens of diseases, and the Morgana Coven was rapidly becoming the most respected medical institution on the planet.
But those glory days wouldn’t last. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that there was no genetic cure for violence. Humanity had already evolved past the domination of their animalistic instincts.
What they realized was that the violence of the intelligent species was innate to the nature of free will. Given free will, there were always going to be those who chose violence and crime.
The Magi overcame that with discipline, meditation and a strict cultural norm of absolute pacifism. But that did not sit well with Lady Morgana. She believed that there should be a better way.
In a single night, it seems to this narrator that everything changed.
The Fifth of the Seven Kings had grown jealous of the Morgana Coven’s success, and he sent an envoy to the Coven to demand their firstborn daughter’s hand in marriage to his son, allying the two sides through a treaty that greatly favoured his Kingdom and would make the Morgana Coven a vassal state to his lineage.
Morgan Davos did not take the demand well, for their daughter was the light of his eye. What followed was the beginning of the downfall of his reputation and, with it, our Davos Family.]
Wolfe smiled to himself. He could only imagine how poorly that demand would have gone over.
He didn’t know what the personality of the Magi known as Morgan Davos was like, but if someone had shown up to the Noxus Family and demanded a daughter’s hand in marriage with a deal that would make the entire Family vassals to another, it would almost definitely have ended in immediate bloodshed.