“The magic had run out seventeen years ago and people were only now admitting…”

Existing wands, scrolls, and glyph-stones had still held their remaining charges until used, but no longer could anyone cast spells, much less create new ones. An entire generation of children had since been born into a world without true mages, only users of potent yet increasingly rare magic items. But it would be the older generations, the ones who'd survived the Final Mage War, who'd have the most trouble adjusting to a new reality.

It was a terrible thing to have tasted power and then have it snatched away. Some went mad in wild pursuit of it, giving mind and body and soul up to the search for the lost magic - all in vain.

They had been so close to harnessing that magic for themselves, but it was not meant to be. Instead, they would be doomed to look upon the chosen and be powerless to claim it for their own.

As they gazed upon cold failure, and saw the fortune that should be theirs in the grasp of others, resentment grew. Ambition burned within with renewed purpose: to reclaim what was theirs by right.

A plummeting, deep palpitation took the ground. Breaking free of all the fears and nightmares of the realm. This was it. The moment where the battalion would fall into the the depths of our great Goddess. Though then, in that moment of a thought came the breaking of the soil. The pull of the greenery. It wasn't movement of destruction but a migration toward creation.