Against the World, Part 3

I hoped by now to have a link for my appearance on Kittywumpus. No such luck. Instead, I’ll continue riffing on how I created Skaythe as an opposite-of-perfect world.

It’s part of the background that most mages are evil. It sounds too easy to just classify a whole group that way. It was important to me that I explain how that is accomplished. And, make no mistake, the mages’ evil is not something they are born with. It is purposely done to them.

First and most important, they are separated from their parents. Some of you may already know, or have figured out, that Skaythe is partly based on the Dragon Age video games. There, the Chantry (church) system takes all mage born children from their families and imprisons them in the towers of the Circle. I don’t know if the game writers themselves realized the extraordinary cruelty of this, and how devastating it would be to mage children.

As humans, our relationship with our parents is at the core of who we are. A loving family teaches children to trust — first their parents, but ultimately themselves. They learn to control their emotions and make sound decisions. Although the relationship becomes more complex as kids get older, they still retain those traits from early years. The best way to create stable citizens of any society is to keep them in their birth families.

I’m not going to go into the contemporary parallel of U.S. immigration officials separating parents from children at the border. Just do some reading on their experiences. My point will come through.

In Skaythe, mage born children are taken from their families and placed in Temple Schools, which double as orphanages and combat academies. Young mages arrive at Temple Schools traumatized and grieving. These children learn that they can never trust adults, or anyone else. They are filled with rage that they can’t control. Their decisions are rash and dangerous.

Then, they are taught to fight for everything from a new blanket to advanced training that will lead to political appointments. They are instructed in the most volatile magical energy, lethentros, which further increases their instability. More than anything else, it is the Temple Schools that turn Skaythe’s mages into the terror and the tragedy that they are.

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