Erage #8 Primitive Pondering

“You left your precious artifacts in that mountain?” Xi Cì asks, “Untoltelage, that seems like it is kind of hard to get to. I understand that you can’t just keep your most important belongings on you at all times, but it’s going to be a bit inconvenient to try and reach the center of that mountain.”

“That’s the idea.” Untoltelage says, “If anyone found them, they would take them. It is so much harder to take these artifacts from someone who is using them to boost their own power than it is to take it from a hard to reach place or even a group of people that are guarding them.”

Surrounding the base of the mountain are tents made of animal skins. It looks like some primitive tribal people live here. That is, of course, misleading. Describing these people in such a way would make one think that they are not much of a threat. However, such people are often greater threats than any single incredibly powerful person. These tribes may be small, but they are also groups of people that work together. A group of people with magic working together is incredibly dangerous. Usually, such groups don’t cooperate well with each other because of mistrust. But in a tribe like this, it is likely that everyone in the group grew up with each other. There will not be mistrust between tribe members. At least, not on the scale of most paranoid people of Erage.

It is also misleading to say that they are primitive. They actually have a greater level of technology than most everyone in Erage simply by default. Few others in Erage have any sort of civilization or technology. Most complex items must be conjured or imitated by magic. Forging steel is kind of a lost art, so metal weapons usually come from transmuting some woodwork into a weapon.

It is also why Xi Cì must produce her swords through magic. Where else is she going to get swords? But magic can not make everything. Or rather, it can in theory, but not practice. With enough magic, one could theoretically do anything. But no one has ever held enough magic to hope for accomplishing everything.

For example, to make the city that Untoltelage and his apprentices were born in, a group of powerful magic-wielders in number the same as the population of that city would each have to be hundreds of millennia old. Well, maybe. There have been cases of incredibly powerful individuals that have discovered secrets to using magic in a massively more effective way. The more specific your magic, the more you can use that magic before it runs out.

So it might be possible or some people to discover an incredibly specific method of producing metal, but that wouldn’t be enough to craft the city. The more that Untoltelage thinks about it, there really is no way that the city could have been produced after all civilization collapsed. The city must be ancient. A relic of a time lost, nearly unrecorded and lost to history. Because very few people write or even know how to read.

Well, in light of the city, the tribe at the base of the mountain doesn’t seem very advanced at all. Sometimes Untoltelage wonders where it all went wrong. Humans were doing so well. How could they just suddenly stop working together. It can’t be magic. Magic isn’t new. That city might not use magic now, but it probably did back before the collapse. Whatever, it doesn’t really matter. Untoltelage decides he is going to go get artifacts now.