"“If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.”"
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The Circle of the Broken Sword was founded to solve a single problem: the end of the world.
It is said, though the origin is dubious and the script on the prophecy looks far more recent than the centuries back from which it is said to have come, that mages would bring about armageddon, one way or the other. The Circle did not tell the people that they were the head of the snake, wishing on ghosts to bring their talents into being. They did not mention that they were mages, themselves, or at least their most respected members were, behind closed doors.
Though it should be obvious. Who enchants their collars? How does anyone come to discover that to blind the third eye will seal a person, body and soul? Who speaks into the churches with the voice of God? If there is a god on earth that is privy to their goings-on it is not the just and benevolent one of which they speak, that much is for certain.
Jask was born in the dead of winter, with three eyes as red as the blooded snow on the days of sacrifice. He had not been met by the love of a mother or the proud but stern face of his father--the room of his birth was full of apprehension, a silence so thick it choked, and and the grim, pale, bleak faces of a couple already in mourning. It was bad luck to give birth to a child with a third eye, a mage, the harbingers of the apocalypse. His mother had smiled, though it was feeble and shaking, but Jask had known. Jask had always known he was a thing to be feared.
The Circle would say they gave him a chance, that even as a child he had been unruly, wild,
dangerous, as if all the magic within and without him had driven him mad before he had turned a year. He had felt the whispering in him since the week after his birth, a voice that asked his name, who he was, what he thought of his parents. It had smiled at him in a way that his parents never quite could, in a way that the Circle outright refused. Everywhere he went Jask was met with scorn and distrust, and he had turned that scorn and distrust first on the voice in his heart and then on himself.
But the voice only grew louder, and louder, until his first birthday, when Jask was asked to choose: to be blinded, or to die. He had chosen death, strangled by his fear of himself and his magic and the voice that now screamed at him as he cowered in the dark corners of his heart. His mother had been the one to say
no, let my son live. He deserves to live. Jask had not agreed. He still does not agree.
(On the day of their choice each young mage is given, if they choose to live in silence and servitude to the Circle, a black leather collar in the style of a snake eating its own tail. These collars erase a person's magic whole cloth, both physically and conceptually. Some have suggested that they might be mind control devices, giving the mages at the head of the church the ability to hand down punishment as if by divine intervention, to turn an already blinded troublemaker into a devout and god-fearing thing, believing that their suffering comes not from mundane hatred but from their deity itself.)
(But the Circle of the Broken Sword would never torture their congregation, no matter how dangerous they are--right?)
The blinding is painful, unbearably so, but it fades into a sort of throbbing numbness and then to the stillness of a snow-covered field, and the cold on one too. For the first time Jask felt holy silence, and
became holy silence. He had cried. He had cried when they fastened the collar around his neck. He had cried when they gave him his robes, clean and red and smooth, and he had hugged them close.
He has not cried since.