“So, can you get back if it took three of them to send you here?”

Urasmian smiled smugly again. “My two sort of relatives are not as strong as me, and it needed both of them to attack me with combat spells to overcome my shield. Then the third person, Drexos, was the one who managed to stun me once my shield went down. Even though the stun spell didn’t work properly, it was enough to keep me befuddled. Otherwise, I could have disrupted their spell or even killed them.”

He paused and sneered. “Definitely killed them. Ungrateful scum. I gave them the chance to become sorcerers as well, giving them a lot of training, and this is how they repay me!”

Jason considered this information and noticed something.

“You gave them the chance to be sorcerers? How?”

Urasmian grinned. “Ah. With no magic here, you don’t know, do you? Ha!”

This seemed to amuse him. He studied Jason for a moment and then smiled.

“Well, the story goes like this. Some three and a half thousand years ago, on the island of Theru, there was a plant used locally for chewing. It had a limited waking dream effect.” Jason understood he meant it was mildly hallucinogenic. “Then, one day, it was discovered that boiling the leaves briefly made them into a good purgative that helped heal stomach upsets quite well. Most people were violently ill after drinking the stuff but almost always recovered from the original illness within a day or two. The story goes that when one of the local Keftios nobles fell deathly ill, his wife started boiling some of the leaves but was interrupted, and the leaves boiled for nearly two hours. Their servant, who was tasked with refilling the pot with water, continued on with that task, mindlessly following the last instructions of the mistress while the mistress was otherwise engaged. Because her husband was so ill and she was feeling poorly herself, she decided that both of them needed to drink the concoction regardless. Both she and her husband became violently ill, and she died. Her husband, however, recovered after being sick and weak for many days, and his name was Drathmios. The broth that killed his wife made him the first sorcerer.”

 “Three and half thousand years is a long time for such a record to exist,” Jason stated carefully.

Being a history major, he could think of very few stories from fifteen hundred BC that had come down as clear as that. Some official things, such as the tablets of Hammurabi, had survived it was true, but most stories had devolved into the mythical and the very unlikely, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Urasmian sighed. “It is part of the training in learning the language of the Keftios that the account of the founding of Sorcery must be studied. The Keftios had a large empire in the middle sea, and the advent of magic provoked a civil war between the government and that first sorcerer, Drathmios, along with the small band of warriors which he had raised. He swept ashore on Keftu, where they found that none could stand against his magic, and he conquered the empire. But that success was short-lived because soon after, the island of Theru exploded, and a giant wave swept over most of Keftu. It is assumed Drathmios was asleep at the time, like most of the people on Keftu, and drowned. The warrior Eumanix happened to be on high ground with a pot containing a cutting from the magical plant, and this allowed magic to survive. The explosion obliterated all the other sources of the plant, which grew solely on Theru. He wrote the first account and passed it on to his successors.”