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The purpose of the Mage Council is to control the use of magic in Sartorias-deles in order to better human life. The control of Firesticks has been the council's most visible action for centuries.
Since recorded history, there has been a power struggle between governments that prefer total autonomy and the Mage Council.
In the earliest days, only women belonged to the Mage Council. Women were the first to recognize that the world humans had come to included other sentient life forms, and to discover access to magic. The early Council’s decisions have had a huge impact on the development of society on Sartorias-deles. For example, one of the most deeply guarded secrets of that council was the systematic purge of sexual predators. This was impelled, not just by collective anger (though that played a significant role), but also by the drive to keep humanity from being expunged altogether by the world's indigenous sentient beings, whose first introduction to the concept of evil came into the world with the humans. Only the Mage Council now knows just how close humans came to being perceived as vermin and eradicated from the world; the early mages strove to rectify the ills they were aware of.
By the time men joined the Council its main purpose was already the betterment of human life. After the Fall of Old Sartor, the Council was as dead as its members, but it was reformed by surviving minor mages who embarked on the centuries-long quest to recover what had been lost. For most of those early centuries just maintaining the basic Spells was about all that could be done. As the potential of magic slowly regenerated and old knowledge was painfully reconstructed, eventually magic could accomplish more.[1]
Magic Training over the centuries evolved through several permutations, with the Mage Council (or Magic Council) in Sartor attempting to control training of mages. To an extent it worked, with the cooperation of governments everywhere except on Toar, or Skyhaven. The tension between rulers and mages was skillfully used by the Council to promise trained mages who were oath-sworn not to interfere in governments. If a government hired mages to see to water purification, bridge and building reinforcement, etc, the Council-schooled mages were guaranteed to be competent, oath-sworn, with oversight from other mages. They were expensive, but largely problem-free.
However, anyone who could get hold of a magic book and who didn't destroy themselves in the process of learning could become a mage, and some of these had ambitions of exactly the sorts both monarchs and the Council deplored. Norsunder tended to find most, but not all.
Some kingdoms dealt with the problem by forbidding any magery, except for warrior-escorted Council mages who would proceed through the kingdom doing renewal spells at regular intervals. Others were put to death on discovery.
Some kings, like the Chwahir and others, studied magic themselves.
Toar's magic community continued to exist apart from the other mage communities, interfering very seldom outside that continent, so they were largely ignored, save for diplomatic visits and conferences.
As for the Mage Council, gradually two schools evolved, one in the north at Bereth Ferian, and the one in the south was now called the Sartoran Mage Council. The needs in the north were different than those of the south. The two schools existed in a king of armed alliance, until Sartor vanished, with most of the Mage Council. Bereth Ferian's mage school then became the dominant training center. Sartor re-emerged finding that the world still respected their long traditions, but were sending their young north to be trained. And there were great mages, such as Tsauderei, and Erai-Yanya of Roth Drael, and Mondros the Mystery, who owed no allegiance to anyone. Bereth Ferian knew them all, approved of them, so Sartor perforce had to accept these powerful independents.
This was the state of the mage-trained world