In the years immediately following the Crimson Convergence, as the newly transformed Folkwynd began spreading across Criozevan, one family discovered that their reshaping by the red star’s light was unlike any other. Where the Convergence gave most Folkwynd outward powers — magic to cast, abilities to wield — this family’s transformation was inward and invisible. They did not gain a power so much as a hunger.
The ability — recorded in the sealed Goldhelm royal archive as the Devourer power — works passively and without intent. In its dormant state it is a slow ambient drain: magic users in proximity to a Devourer find their abilities imperceptibly weakening over time, their reserves depleting faster than they should. The Devourer feels nothing. The victim feels only a creeping loss they cannot explain. Under emotional extremity in the carrier — grief, fear, anger, love — the drain becomes acute and potentially lethal to a magic user’s power. In the worst cases, a magic user drained completely never recovers their abilities. In some recorded instances, they did not survive the loss at all.
The founders did not discover this ability through study. They discovered it through grief. The first confirmed catastrophe: a young woman in the founding family fell in love with a Folkwynd mage. Over the course of a year, without either of them knowing why, she drained him to nothing. He died ordinary — his power gone, his body hollowed by its absence. She understood what she had done only after it was too late. Other losses followed. The pattern became undeniable. The surrounding Folkwynd communities, watching magic users weaken and die near this family without explanation, began to fear and then hunt them.
They fled. Not in arrogance — in shame. The northeastern peninsula, surrounded on most sides by ocean and separated from the continent by water barriers, offered isolation. The anti-magic ban was their first act of governance: if no one in the kingdom uses magic, no one can be drained. Holotech was developed over generations precisely to replace magic in all its practical functions — healing, defense, communication, industry — so that no citizen would ever need to be a magic user, and therefore no citizen would ever be at risk from their rulers.
The kingdom was designed, from its very foundation, to make the royal family’s power irrelevant.
It worked, for centuries. But founding shame does not stay buried. Political leaders across generations found the ban convenient for reasons beyond its original purpose: control, isolationism, the manufacture of racial superiority. The archive was sealed. The true history was reclassified, then forgotten. What began as we must protect you from us became we are above those who need magic. The guilt calcified into ideology. The wound became a weapon.
A single inscription remains above the sealed archive door in old Solaran, which no living Goldhelm scholar has correctly translated. It reads: “We left so that you would live.”
No living person currently knows the full history. King Aldric does not know it. Lady Isolde does not know it. The only individual with reason to suspect the truth is Anton — and what he has pieced together, and why, is a matter of ongoing investigation by the Crimson Rooks.