Foreword:

It was once, when I was very young, when my father had been drinking heavily and had turned the echo of his suffering upon me, and I lay outside the cottage, staring at the moonlit woods, bleeding into the dirt and nursing my four broken ribs, that I experienced a lasting and critical revelation: violence is inescapable.

This is not the self-pitying whining of a little girl. It is the first pillar of an unbreakable cosmic truth. Existence and combat are indivisible. To be, is to be at war. Against foreign armies, against your neighbor, against your rivals, against monsters or the beasts of the wood or starvation or the elements themselves. There is no true peace within this reality, no freedom from this ugly, inescapable fact but a brief and unflattering ignorance in the time between the enemy you did not believe you had swinging his axe and the blade cleaving your skull in two.

In this simple, wretched truth you may understand the nature of Evocative magic, and the reason the school of Evocation can never be withheld from a mage’s teaching, no matter her circle of study.

Evocation, the white-hot wind, the purest of sorceries, is the magic of raw creativity -- the art of forming something from nothing. But this is a misleading truth. Evocation exists solely to annihilate. As the magic of creation, it is necessarily the magic of war. To invoke it is to obliterate living things and scatter their ashes to the four winds. It is to shatter and burn and remove from existence. It has no other true application. You may debate this as much as you please within the stone tomb of your city walls, but always remember that when you call this burning gale, whatever you think your intent, it will do precisely what it was made to do. Fail to understand this and it will slip fatally from your sweating hands and murder everything you love.

I have written these passages for those, like me, who are bound to the Flame Eternal, but hope they may also be of some use to those sorcerers and scholars who take up the blade of Evocation and have some small wish to see tomorrow.

The world is beautiful and filled with wonders. And it wants to kill you.

Don’t look back.

--Clavia Ashburn of Gwynneth Isle, 130 A.R.