The Journals of Talon Windwaltz

[Talon Windwaltz]

I don't truthfully expect anyone to read this, as it is almost impossible to read and is basically just Talon's ramblings about magic, wizards, history, and the creatures that live among us. For all intents and purposes, all of the things Talon muses about can be considered completely and utterly canon within the history of FFU. Except for the parts (which is most of it) where Talon goes 'I honestly don't know.' Well...enjoy.

[Talon Windwaltz]

Part 1 - "We were first."

I am Talon Aquilo Windwaltz, a Professor of the History of Magic at Firefox University, and also the Headmaster of the institution. These are my journals, which contain my knowledge and my musings. Now, where to begin? Firefox University is populated by many beings that are not quite human, and some that are fully human with not completely human powers. I guess the opening statement is this: wizards came first. In fact, it is my belief that all beings of mystical origin – the bloodsuckers and the lupines and even the so-called ‘half-angels’ – are the result of the misuse of human magic.

Modern wizard culture has created a ‘morality’ in magic, with the spells that have generally negative results being called ‘dark’ magic and the spells that have neutral or positive are taught in schools and accepted by society as a whole as the kind of magic that is expected to be used. But here, readers, is the truth. ‘Dark’ magic is truly no more evil than any other magic. Unless you happen to be the kind of wizard who believes in a judgmental deity, a Cruciatus curse does not necessarily have to taint a wizard’s soul anymore than your standard unlocking spell. The dark arts are extremely dangerous and difficult to handle, however. They function on one key rule: for every miracle performed, there must be a sacrifice. To bring something into the world, you must take away. Some spells, like the powerful Killing Curse, are almost paradoxical in their usage – the Killing Curse is brought into the world by sacrificing the person it kills.

Paradoxes are in fact common amongst the dark arts, as the usage of black magic echoes back to a more primitive, savage time, a time of witch doctors and shamans who thought their powers were gifts from their gods and their spirits. In these days, there were no rules of ‘dark’ and ‘light’, only the miraculous power that came from magic. The key to the dark arts wasn’t understanding what made it work, so much that it did what you needed it to. As such, in those days, wizards did things without thinking of the consequences. And as long as you followed the rule – for every miracle performed, there must be a sacrifice – the dark arts would always follow through.

When a sacrifice is not given, however, the dark arts take a bit of your soul as payment. When your soul is gone, it begins to take your humanity as well. When both are gone, it is very possible what is left is in fact a walking, talking body with no grasp of magic that hungers for the life and humanity of others and should by all accounts be dead. Perhaps this is how the first vampires came to be. As said before, there was no morality in magic in those days, and it is very possible that out of a sense of being ‘humane’, the shamans and witch doctors chose not to make sacrifices, or perhaps gave in to their own hubris and defied their gifts to their ‘gods’ (truthfully merely feeding the engine by which the dark arts function) and as a result lost their souls and their humanity. Who knows when in time this happened? Perhaps the first vampires, as horrible ancestor deities, stalked alongside the tribes of Africa at night, feasting on the blood of their descendants to try and get back that which was so crucial to their existence – that which they’d lost forever? Perhaps it was out of fear, not in search of food, that the tribes (wizards among them) spread out from the savannahs into the cradle of civilization? But the vampires were always with them. In India, and in Egypt, and in all the earliest cultures, fear of the living dead was present.

But we were there first. We always were. Wizards and witches were the ones who talked to the Gods, who traced destiny, who could spring fire from nothing and calm the savage sea. Not every culture on Earth believed in the living dead, but every culture knew us to be among them. Even today, despite our best efforts, the muggles know we are there. They can feel it. Perhaps there was a time when all mankind were wizards and witches, and perhaps most were stripped of their powers due to displeasing some kind of deity. Or perhaps we received our powers from something less benevolent. All that need be said is that we have always been there, walking alongside them, hiding in plain sight. And we are as human as they, just considerably more gifted. Whatever God created them created us too. Whatever beast they evolved from, it is from that beast that we came as well. For want of a nail, perhaps, we would be like them too, hammering and chiseling our empires from marble instead of by the grace of our great power.

But the fact remains that we have not always been as good to the muggles or to each other as we should be. The Dark Arts may have been our only magic in the first days, and from those spells perhaps all the horrors of the world came forth. It may be a stretch, as blaming all the troubles of the world on one witch would be folly, but I would not be the first to suggest that the myth of ‘Pandora’ was actually about one of us. Or perhaps it may have been merely an allegory for all the evils we have done. It is, after all, well known that most of the people who began those myths were wizards trying to cover up the existence of their kind with stories of Gods and divine heroes – heroes who may very well have been wizards and witches themselves. And the Greeks were always a culture for tragedies. It is possible that by the Classical Era of Greece, witches and wizards had learned to distinguish the dangerous spells from the positive and neutral ones, and looking into myths and legends provide a hidden lesson to young wizards on how to use the power of magic responsibly.

After all, in those days it was very unlikely that were ‘magic schools’ of the kind we have now (at least, not until Plato began the Academy, and made the idea of schools popular.) Indeed, it was very likely that in those days wizards were taught in the well-known ‘master-apprentice’ relationship, with an established wizard taking in a younger boy who began to show signs of magical talent and teaching him magical power in exchange for an intense and possibly sexual relationship. (This being in a culture of pederasty, our modern taboo on such an idea really cannot apply.) Witches, on the other hand, were probably not so commonly trained in those days. Those extremely rare witches who were Seers were often coveted for their oracular power, but the common young witch who showed signs of growing magical power were often left to suffer their strange powers with no real training. In may be for this reason (among others developed mostly for anti-feminist reasons by our sexist ancestors) that ‘evil witches’ are so common in the collective mind of muggles and ‘evil wizards’ not so much. Without a knowledgeable and wise tutor to train them, young girls with magical powers would try and teach themselves the magical arts – something they couldn’t even begin to understand alone – and often fell into the simple but dangerous usage of the dark arts.

It is possible that in some cultures, entire ‘covens’ of witches flocked together to teach one another magic and ultimately came to understand that the positive and neutral magic was safer. The time period in which wizards and witches throughout Europe came to be as we are today was the Middle Ages, and most wizard history and magical breakthroughs (such as the invention of Quidditch) took place during this ‘Golden Age of Magic’ (ironically called the ‘Dark Ages’ amongst the muggles!) and most of our knowledge of the time before our Golden Age is often forgotten. This is probably because the ancient pagan faiths viewed us as helpful within the confines of their religions. We could be priests who saw the Gods, or great heroes who were gifted with the graces of divine beings…but the rise of Christianity gave nothing to us. As far as the Christians were concerned, anyone who could so much as lift a cup with magic was worth burning at the stake. We were minions of evil, and thus we huddled together, knowing ourselves to be friends and comrades, and lived amongst each other.

Despite their persecution of us, many wizards during this period of time were in fact Christian (to some degree) or at least followed their traditions. Perhaps it was the omnipresence of Christendom in Europe that led to this - what else could we be but Christian? There was only one God, everyone knew that, and knowledge of old faiths was often burned or hidden somewhere in the Vatican. Indeed, the Nostri Magi school in Rome has the largest amount of scrolls containing the history of wizards and witches (and other creatures that share our world) prior to the Golden Age of Magic. It would most likely be that institution which kept the faith in the Old Gods alive, if it weren’t for the fact that their school existed within the very same building as the foundation of the Catholic Church.

Tangent: Nostri Magi –
Nostri Magi is a name commonly used for a school of wizards that has existed within the Vatican since the rise of the Roman Republic. It is with this institution that our affirmed knowledge of the history of magic begins. “Nostri Magi” is Latin for ‘Our Wizards’ and is not truly the name of the school itself, but rather for every wizard that lives and trains within the Vatican. The wizards within the complex built upon the Vatican Hill in Rome were known as ‘vaticinators’ in the days of Rome’s great rule, and took great detail in writing down their knowledge upon long scrolls of papyrus. Often these were written in Latin, but sometimes in Greek, and they were stored away in an ancient chamber unknown even to the muggles who work within the Vatican today. These scrolls describe many things, from the personal biographies and memoirs of great wizards who dwelled within the complex’s halls, to accounts of war amongst and between pale, humanoid creatures that consumed blood for sustenance and towering wolf-men who appeared on the Campus Martius every night of the Full Moon. Indeed, some of the knowledge I possess on vampires from the Roman era comes from scrolls within the Nostri Magi.

DERP!