There was a land, long ago, that had been scoured of magic.

It is strange to say, it is strange to believe, but there it was: a world without runes, without sigils and even without potions.

How did this happen? How it usually happens. With a decision by one man...

Even though magic has been dead for a century, Edric, an old student of Clover Academy wants to convince his professor Sorrel that he's rediscovered it.

Sorrel, however, wants to convince Edric that the magic he's performing is all in his mind.

Written by: Jonathan Cohen

Narrated by: Joe Cruz

A Faustian Nonsense production.

To read the full transcript for this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/a-plague-of-reason

Content warnings: mentions of homophobia, murder

Transcript

There was a land, long ago, that had been scoured of magic.

It is strange to say, it is strange to believe, but there it was: a world without runes, without sigils and even without potions.

And yet the sun and moon continued to rise, and the rains fell and the crops grew. Nothing lay beyond the vale they called reality, except for more reality.

How did this happen? How it usually happens. With a decision by one man.

That man saw mages and witches and warlocks grow strong and powerful across the land. He witnessed wars between armies with magic in their ranks, laying waste to entire castles and even mountains. And he decided that this would end.

The man stirred fear and anger and hatred in the breasts of his fellow men and women, and one night – when the mages and witches and warlocks slept the sleep of the magical – they slaughtered them and their families. All of them: men, women and yes, children. In the books and scrolls that came to be written, this great day was known as the Restoration.

There was a School at the northernmost tip of the land that stood in a field of clover, and so it was called the Clover Academy. Before the Restoration, the Clover Academy had taught flight and invisibility and fireballs, and all manner of spells. After the Restoration, the instructors started teaching how to read and write glyphs, how to tell which plants were edible and which were not, and how to cure those with maladies of the heart and the mind. The miraculous blinding light of magic was replaced with the constant warm illumination of science.

And a hundred years passed. It is always a century, or a millennium before anything momentous occurs, for the gods like round numbers, just as we do. 

Great wet flakes of snow fell in spirals around the Clover Academy. In a chilly turret that student wizards had once used to unleash their magical projectiles upon the commons, a portly man in professor’s robes opened the small door and let a younger man in.

The portly man’s name was Sorrel, and he had taught physical sciences at the Academy for the last twenty years. He had the spectacles and narrow eyes of a scholar who had spent too much time reading by the light of a flickering candle. The young man, thin and so tall that he had to duck under the transom to enter, was named Edric. He had been Sorrel’s student eight years earlier. He wore no spectacles, and his eyes were clear, but the years had already begun to etch lines of intellect into his forehead.

And now I step back in silence, for it is their words that tell this story, not mine.

“It has been a long time,” Sorrel said, and settled his frame into the leather hide-covered chair behind his desk. “I received your letter.”

Edric nodded, head bobbing up and down atop a long neck. “Good, good,” he replied, then nothing.

Sorrel knew the ways of students – and former students. How they...