The Beast Fears Fire - The Cruelties of Man

In Crickton, people in the know understand that the real difference between magic and science is not a matter of replication (both disciplines are about roughly equally repeatable in individual workings and experiments), but an entirely different distinction.  Magic is normative and science is not.  A chemical reaction doesn't have insight into the mind and soul of the person who kicked it off, but magic knows you, and magic judges you, sometimes even if you are not interacting with it.

The cruelties were once humans.  They lived lives, sometimes with no outward show of the evil within them, sometimes with dramatic and terrible show.  Then they changed.  Magic took hold of them and turned them into monsters.  That's what we know for certain.  These monsters can be short lived or, barring violence or accident, immortal.  No one is certain if there is a guiding intelligence behind the transformation of humans into cruelties, let alone what its purpose is in doing so.  In the short term, the transformation leads to much greater and more dramatic acts of evil than a person would otherwise be able to commit.  That said, only a very few of the cruelties prove cunning and circumspect enough to last long in their new forms. 

There are six varieties of cruelty, and philosophers in every culture that has encountered them grapple with the implications of the number and the forms.  There's a sort of fuzzy consensus that there is a reason why a person becomes and ogre rather than a werewolf and that all ogres share the quality that made them ogres.  No one agrees on what those qualities are, or if the number of cruelties has some special significance.

Some people have come to view cruelties as a secondary epidemic or an opportunistic infection that followed along with the vampires, as the last two generations have given rise to more cruelties, across the continent, than any period in recorded history.  Some folks look to it as a sign that some greater cataclysm is coming or already arrived.  Transformation doesn't seem to give the cruelties any greater insight into why they have become monsters, but then, the defining feature of the cruelties, besides their monstrosity, is evil, so the reliability of their revelations leaves a lot to be desired.