The Magicide
(1028 to 1552 CE)
The Magicide is a period in Oceanyka's secret history spanning from 1028 CE, with Oceanykan Involvement in the Chola Invasion of Srivijaya, to 1552 CE, with the bloody conclusion of the Asterist Crusades in which the former Collegiate of Magicians was razed to the ground by Morlon of Toffia. The popular violence that slowly began to manifest in 1028 CE was not organised. The first lynchings of suspected sorcerers were driven by centuries of suppressed resentment, suddenly emboldened by the realisation that the magocrats could be resisted and killed. These initial killings were indiscriminate and frequently wrong: many ordinary clevermen, and in many cases entirely non-sorcerous individuals who had simply acquired enemies, were killed in the first decades. The Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies and their Witch Hunters worked to channel this violence into something more precise, identifying genuine magocrats and Kurdaitcha for the mobs that increasingly accompanied their operations, and providing the counter-magic necessary to strip a sorcerer of their defences before the killing began.
The covert magocrats fell first and fastest, as their power was institutional and highly reliant on the masses which turned against them. Without courts to manipulate, without nobles to suborn, and without the social architecture of human deference and fear, they were simply individuals in a world that had turned violently hostile. Many attempted to flee, to regroup, to rebuild their influence in less exposed territories. The Witch Hunters followed them, as did armies of zealous lynchers. Non-magocrat realms, for the first time in centuries operating without constant sorcerous interference, provided sanctuary, intelligence, and soldiers for the purge.
The Necromancer Kings proved far more resilient. Self-sufficient, militarily formidable, and geographically retreated into the continent's deep interior, they were not dependent on human compliance and could not be broken by popular violence alone. Each had to be confronted and destroyed in a prolonged military campaign, their undead armies dismantled at enormous cost in lives. The introduction of gunpowder artillery over the later decades of the Magicide made these campaigns progressively more viable; undead soldiers who felt no fear and could not be demoralised were nonetheless destroyed by cannon fire and arquebus volley as readily as by any other means. To bring down the Lich Kings, popular continent-wide crusades were often called by the leaders of both major faiths in the continent.
The last of the Lich Kings was King Culhun, whose name was by this point already entangled with the figure of the Culhun, the folkloric demon of decay and wilful destruction in Asterism; whether the historical king adopted the name deliberately, or whether the association was imposed on him by his enemies and by subsequent religious tradition alike, is a matter historians and theologians continue to dispute. His realm covered the territory surrounding Jupiter Forest, at the heart of which lay the Ruins of the Collegiate of Magicians. He retreated ever deeper into the forest as the Magicide advanced around him, and for decades he became an almost mythological figure: the last Sorcerer monarch, holding a territory that was permanently under siege, defiant in the deep interior, surrounded by the undead corpses of those who had tried to reach him.
The final act was performed not by a general but by Morlon of Toffia, the messianic leader of the Asterist Crusades, who in 1550 CE turned the full force of his Bosphorus Crusade northward toward Jupiter Forest. The Battle of Jupiter Forest was, by all accounts, unlike any other engagement of the Magicide. Morlon was grievously wounded under circumstances that historians and religious traditions describe very differently, and King Culhun was, according to Dreamtime accounts, not killed but banished into the Dreamspace by Eingana the Rainbow Serpent. The Collegiate of Magicians was promptly razed to the ground, with special attention to its libraries and archives, which were burned with oil-fires numerous times, to be completely sure their sorcerous knowledge would be erased from history. Morlon of Toffia returned to his capital and, in the final months before his death from his wounds, dictated the Holy Reflections and the Worldly Reflections.
Legacy of the Magicide
The most enduring consequences of the Great Magocracy were not political but psychological. Nearly four centuries of covert sorcerous control, followed by five centuries of violent and frequently indiscriminate purge, produced a culture that was deeply and structurally hostile to anything it could not explain in ordinary human terms. Oceanyka's population in the post-Magicide era did not simply distrust sorcerers; they distrusted the unfamiliar, the foreign, and the inexplicable in all its forms. Folk traditions arising from this period encoded the signs of sorcerous activity into a broad vocabulary of superstition that would persist for centuries: particular plants, animals, weather patterns, and behaviours became associated with supernatural wickedness long after any specific knowledge of sorcery had been suppressed or forgotten.
The Witch Hunters did not dissolve after the last of the Lich Kings was destroyed. They evolved into a diffuse, semi-institutionalised culture of paranormal investigation and suppression embedded in different forms across Oceanykan societies. The Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies that had produced them persisted, their membership and methods adapted to a world where the threat was no longer existential but was never, in their view, entirely absent.
These are the direct antecedents of the modern Masquerade enforced in the 1960s by the Federal Special Research Division. The cultural machinery that the Magicide built, the instinct to identify, isolate, and eliminate the paranormal from public life, did not require a conspiracy to maintain itself across the intervening centuries. It required only that the Magocracy be remembered as the worst thing that had ever happened to Oceanyka. Every generation taught the next that sorcerers had once ruled the continent through shadows, had kept humanity sick and divided and diminished for nearly a millennium, and that the only answer to their return was uncompromising suppression. Despite the fact that neither the Great Magocracy nor the Magicide appear in Oceanyka's history books as serious events, but are rather described as a period of intense superstition, religious zeal and collective paranoia, cultural memory persists. Deep down, everyone knows that The Oceanykan Federation is not a country where that beyond comprehension is tolerated, and with that subconscious knowledge, comes implied consent to act through any means necessary.
Ironically, the greatest threat to the Masquerade comes not from within, but from without. The world's powers seek new knowledge to gain an advantage in the Cold War, thanks to the reckless employment of sorcery by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler during the late stages of World War II, scrubbed from the history books at great cost and peril. While both sides of the Iron Curtain understand the dangers of sorcery, and the necessity to keep it under wraps, ambition is a devilish thing, and in the aftermath of the 1958 Blackburn Incident both blocs would begin experimenting with the practical applications of Warpstone. This experimentation culminated in 1961 with the consequent detonations of the Tsar Bomba and the Thaumbombe Projekt, the former in Novaya Zemlya, and the latter in Antarctica.