To Become a Mage:
These notes should not exist. What follows is usually spoken only in low voices from master to apprentice, and even then only after years of testing. But if you have found these pages, you likely already walk too near the line to be dissuaded.
Never share these details with anyone affiliated with any temple.
To become a mage, two things are required.
First: a white crystal focus, what we call an hithkazi crystal. They are always the same general shape—long, slightly twisting prisms—with a milky-white, almost translucent body. You will know them by the fine cracks spiderwebbing through their length. They are found only where vharin (aether, if you prefer the priest’s term) pools thickest: high passes, deep caverns, places of power.
Second: a getzikar; a soul-gem. These are silver in hue, softer to the touch than ordinary stone, and far rarer than hithkazi. They appear, so far as we can tell, at random in the world, though they are most often discovered in mountains near my people’s halls or in forests close to wood-aelvar settlements. When they can be found with any regularity, they make a dependable trade good to humans mages for their apprentices.
To attune, the apprentice must keep the soul-gem on their person and remain near the chosen hithkazi crystal for several days, constantly thinking about it. The getzikar is psycho-reactive: it begins to weave a sympathetic link between the bearer’s soul and the cracked focus. You will know the connection has formed when you can feel the crystal’s presence as clearly as you might feel a hand on your shoulder, even with eyes closed.
Then comes the true trial. The apprentice must will the focus to cleanse and heal itself while still carrying the soul-gem. Under that directed intent, the getzikar begins to dissolve, its substance flowing into the cracks of the hithkazi and filling them. In doing so, it tears free a fragment of the caster’s own soul and binds it into the crystal… if the process completes.
This is the most dangerous moment. The pain is beyond any ordinary wound, worse even than what priests endure when they burn themselves out channeling their so-called aether. Many do not survive it. Success on the first attempt is, at best, even odds. Those of stronger will, with purer soul-gems and the ability to hold to their desire, to mend and purify the crystal above all else, even the mage’s own life; through the agony are the ones who live to call themselves mages.
This is one reason aelvar so rarely choose this path, though, to be sure, it is common among aelvar that live in human lands. We aelvar may live a thousand years; what sane aelv would accept a one-in-two chance of death simply to gain an art we were not born to, unless it were for the good of our people? The odds improve with each additional hithkazi bound, and with the quality of the getzikar used; but the first forging of that bond is always a wager with one’s entire remaining life. But binding to too many crystals has its own risks. See my prior notes on Vamlychts.
Where this process comes from, I do not know. Records pre-Binding reveal nothing but tales of so-called twin/double-bonding that are formed using a so-called “li’sélior’júrel,” meaning “great blessed/beloved soul-bond/bound.” Based on context, I believe the appropriate translation is “great blessed soul-bond.” What this is, I do not know. Nor do I know what they bound themselves to, though twin/double-bonding makes me believe it was a two-stage bonding process. How that would work, again, I have no answers. The earliest record of the modern process, according to my late master, mentor, and great, great uncle, Zyr’Sueli Vess’Lothen, is near ninety millennia old, several millennia after the first records of that world-changing cataclysm. I will continue my research into the ancients as I search the world, and will provide more notes if I am able to learn anything new.
