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| - The Man Without Magic, also called the Avacur, was a man who wandered around and emerged in the public sphere in Arcaitia. He was only ever known to be an old man and no one ever knew his past or where he came from. When asked—and cornered—about his origin, he would reply paraphrastically and with rhetorical aphorisms. He travelled the land and aided people much as magi do, but he also spoke with and encouraged the people much as priests and firars do. When the authorities questioned him, disturbed by his pronouncements or concerned he was in secret a powerful wizard waiting for the right moment to unveil his might, he would debate with them briefly, leave them with puzzling questions and analogies, and then withdraw from them. (His debates are thus much studied by philosophers.)
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| abstract
| - The Man Without Magic, also called the Avacur, was a man who wandered around and emerged in the public sphere in Arcaitia. He was only ever known to be an old man and no one ever knew his past or where he came from. When asked—and cornered—about his origin, he would reply paraphrastically and with rhetorical aphorisms. He travelled the land and aided people much as magi do, but he also spoke with and encouraged the people much as priests and firars do. When the authorities questioned him, disturbed by his pronouncements or concerned he was in secret a powerful wizard waiting for the right moment to unveil his might, he would debate with them briefly, leave them with puzzling questions and analogies, and then withdraw from them. (His debates are thus much studied by philosophers.) After years of journeying—through southern Arcaitia, across northern Arcaitia, to Ashan, and even parleying with the minotaurs, the centaurs, the villages of ancient Chambrey, and even the serpent people—the greatest wizards of the land became concerned with the power that the Avacur harbored. The Council of Magi brought him before them and questioned him in an endless, arduous trial. The tested him too, to find the magic in him, and when they could find nothing—not even as much as a farmer possesses—they considered him either to be the most powerful fae they had ever encountered or a man cursed and so sentenced him to be probed by any means to find the magic in him. They put every manner of enchantment and splashed him with every kind of alchemical substance to get the magic to leap out of him in reaction, but even when they tore him open, looking, digging, pushing for his soul to manifest and lash out at them in the greatest display of spellwork they had ever seen—they found nothing. He died and when they attempted to revive him, nothing happened. He would not raise. They wanted their questions answered, but he would not raise. At this the Council knew this was a grave omen and that every one of them, those that watched and those that raised the instruments of vicious inquiry, had brought a divine curse upon them. Even a the lowest serf could be revived with magic such as theirs. And easy feat if they arrived at the body in time. But here this powerful wizard could not be raised like a common serf. Thus each magus and archmagus left the council and made his own form of penance. Some joined orders and renounced magic. Some put themselves into exile and wandered the world meaning only to do the greatest deeds for whatever people in need they met. Some hung themselves. And others yet, after leaving the gravity and fervor of the trial's display, told themselves it was precisely because he was a powerful wizard that he had enchanted himself to not be revived. At the very least, that was the one drop of magic in him. So many of the people had been moved by the Man Without Magic that they set out to commemorate him, to repeat what he had spoken, and to collect his sayings. Some of the things he had said had been so enigmatic and brusque yet had moved them them so much that they held with them only the product of the words, of that conversation, and thus there are many different versions of his words, which he, as a humble wanderer, never asked anyone to write down. There came about those then that said the Avacur had been Dionar, appearing to them, entering his field to correct the villeins caring for his demesne. They sought to reconcile this appearance with the other tales of dionaphanies. Almost all agreed that it could not have been Salma, as such a form was not in his nature, but the Lasuthians hold to this day that it was indeed Salma, come in repentence of his violation of the field.
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