Something That I Wrote To Flesh Out My Worldbuilding, And That I'm Really Proud Of! So Here

something that I wrote to flesh out my worldbuilding, and that I'm really proud of! so here

A failed experiment

A historical documentation essay by Lady Xanthe Nylia- 208

While most people know that fisicana magic is banned in public sectors by the crown, the reason as to why is unknown. Using the testimony of a very dear friend of mine (which will be published in a separate article) and deep research into the royal library, I plan to bring to light why this powerful, and seemingly benign magic has been banned. It starts with experiments, and those experiments started with dragons.

Dragons are a race of creatures that can be described in many ways, majestic, powerful, existentially terrifying. To most people, very, very dead. Dragons had been hunted to extinction by elves a millennia ago, Their heads were used as a symbol of status and power, Their scales and fur were woven and stitched into royal finery. The traditions of hunting dragons had existed for centuries, and it wasn’t sustainable.

Thus, dragons were reduced to mere myth, the only things left of them being the stories written down in journals, and the various trophies that were collected over the years.

This was not an acceptable concept to some people. These people were of unsound mind and believed themselves to be gods. You could see why they thought that way, with their talent for fisicana magic giving them the ability to manipulate the forms of others to their own will.

These people, called the sallow mages, quickly grew in infamy. They were the whitewashed ghosts of the night that parents warned their children about at bedtime. Stories of the sallows spread through small towns like the warning winds of an upcoming storm.

These stories consisted of kidnappings, torture and brutal murder. However, there were still rules put forth in order to avoid the sallow mages; be home before dark and never walk alone.

The vault was what the sallow mages called their workspaces, all of them being connected by isolated and heavily protected tunnels. The actual workspaces were found by the militia in several coastal cities between Trigid and Vulre. The individual vaults contained dozens of holding cells, each of them were full. Each holding cell held 2-3 individuals, all hosting draconic features.

Some prisoners didn’t have that many unnatural changes, just elongated dragon ears and smooth spikes. Some prisoners had a moderate amount of features, with feathered frills, scaly backs, webbed fingers, or the majestic and powerful wings of air dragons and fire dragons. A few prisoners, however, were horrifically changed. 

They had the vertebrae of their spines pulled apart, and their skin stretched in order to accommodate the large size and many legs of the earth dragons. A few fire dragon hybrids had jaws that were more scar tissue than flesh, due to repeatedly biting into their own mouths with their fangs due to their inexperience and lack of control. One air dragon hybrid had their legs permanently fused together as if someone pasted the inside of their legs with glue and stuck them together. They didn’t receive wings, leaving them to crawl on the ground like a snake, ripping out patches of their newly grown feathers and exposing raw, incredibly sensitive skin.

The examples I listed above were the result of repetitive use of the fisicana  magic. The repeated molding and reforming of the prisoners' bodies had left them brittle, causing them to (metaphorically) break. The transformations were no longer stable, and the more extreme the transformation, the more volatile it was. They fell apart, leaving the prisoners half formed amalgamations of dragons and humans that were in long term, crippling pain.

After the “Vault” was found on the 39th of Grecis 201, most of the newly created dragon hybrids were offered physical therapy to undo what the sallow mages did to them. Some took the offer, others kept their changes and learned to live with them, however, those few with drastic changes had no choice in whether or not they wanted to keep their changes, out of fear that any more tampering would damage their bodies further.

These famous Dragon Rebirth experiments are the reason the crown heavily screens and restricts mages that use the fisicana branch of magic. These insane Sallow Mages took an innocent, and sometimes even helpful, tool and turned it into an instrument of horror.