Sorry this is late people:


“The destruction of Theru combined with the damage to Keftu and the death of Drathmios left an opening for the people of Hellandu, who swarmed the island and overthrew what was left of the Keftios government. Eumanix decided to avoid contesting the invasion and moved to Rhodu, where he began testing the broth on people. Most simply became various degrees of ill. It really does make a good purgative. Perhaps two or three in a hundred died, but he found a daughter of a local healer who developed magic. She was only in her teens at the time, but she knew the language of the Keftios, her family being part Keftios, and he taught her the basics of magic as were known at that point using his remembered observance of Drathmios.”

He paused and studied Jason. “The Book of Sorcery ends there, but he wrote down many of the spells Drathmios developed and which are studied to this day by students of magic. In fact, it is traditional that once a student has mastered the letters of the language of the Keftios, then his first task is to transcribe his own copy of the Book of Sorcery.”

Jason shook his head in amazement. Both at the magic stuff, he still wasn’t entirely convinced about, but also at how texts could not only last that long but be faithfully copied time after time.

“I find it interesting that this information has lasted for so long unchanged. Not many stories have come down to us in this world from so long ago without many mythological additions to the point where it is hard to tell what is based on fact and what is a total fabrication.”

Urasmian nodded. “Apart from the Book of Sorcery, it is much the same in my world. We have many tales of famous sorcerers and sorceresses and the fantastic deeds they accomplished, the ferocious monsters they fought or in some cases, made, and such. A lot of the stories are simple fabrications, although many have a kernel of truth. Then again, many describe real events, exaggerated or conflated with other events but at this distance, it is very hard to discern the truth of any of them. Very often, the time they were supposed to have happened is contradicted by some other version of the tale, or indeed, by some other tale that told of something else happening at the time of the first tale. Of course, the observed results of some of the tales lend a certain verisimilitude to this one or that one. The dragons living in the Stoney Mountains to the east of Shcathor come to mind quite forcibly.”

“Dragons?” The word translated in his head as dragons anyway.

“Yes. They are large flying lizards that were created, so the story goes, by Horanios the Terrible as a dying curse upon Emperor Huan when the Huan armies overran the territory claimed by Horanios, and the three court wizards of Huan overwhelmed him. According to the historian Petrocales, who traveled to the court of the descendent of Huan about three hundred years after the event, that is how dragons came to be. The story goes that Horanios had a collection of lizards and bats, and he somehow used magic as he was dying to merge the two types of beasts together and thus created the dragons. How true the story is, at three hundred years remove, anyone’s guess, but Petrocales went out of his way to check the sources of the stories he recorded. I have copies of a couple of his scrolls in my library.”