Modern Magick

Royalty and Ruin: 9

Later, having peeled Ms. Goodfellow off the leg of the desk, pried my Curiosity out of her possession, and ushered her legion of new friends out of the door again (social butterfly, my pup), we were presented with one, meagre book by our new librarian friend. It was a thin thing, with anaemic white covers and a disappointing lack of heft.

'It's really not a popular topic,' said the librarian, no doubt meaning to be kind as she demolished our mission in a mere six words.

I leafed through it. It contained annotated diagrams of an ortherex parasite and its eggs and larva, plus some notes as to its preferred habitats (rocky spaces in adulthood, especially underground, and a warm, magickal body for the eggs). Young and old alike fed greedily off magickal energies, the fresher the better, which is why they tended to collect in Dells, Dales and Enclaves.

Speaking of which. 'Farringale is still an active Dell, isn't it?' I said aloud.

'You mean in the magickal sense?' asked Alban. 'It seemed to be. It's unlikely there would still be griffins living there if...' He paused, staring into space. 'Griffins,' he repeated.

'Yes?' I prompted.

'Griffins are as rare as unicorns, no?'

'At least.'

'They don't live just anywhere, do they?'

'No. I mean, it's the size of them as much as anything. They need a lot of food, and a strong magickal source, especially if they're raising young.'

'Indeed,' said Alban. 'So. Where else are there known to be griffins?'

I turned back to the librarian, but Jay was way ahead of me, already asking her for every available resource on griffins.

'And Magickal Dells,' I added. 'Especially the more powerful or unusual ones.'

I could see our credit as scholars was rising by the minute with the librarian. 'Oh, we'd have lots about that,' she enthused, and off she went.

Over the next couple of hours, our scholarly spelunkings uncovered the following nuggets of information:

1: While the Court of Farringale survived on the fifth Britain, it was not home to a colony of griffins, as ours was.

2: Griffin sightings were almost as rare on the fifth as they were in our home Britain, the sixth. But, this was not because they were rare in number. It was thought to be due to their intensely magickal nature; like unicorns, they are steeped in the stuff up to their eyeballs from birth (I paraphrase here). Not only can they bear a much closer proximity to dangerously powerful magickal energies than the rest of us, they actually thrive upon it. They need it. Ergo, griffins and unicorns both tend to populate areas in which mere humans, trolls or (arguably) lesser fae fear to tread.

3: Griffins are among the most dangerous of magickal creatures, and nobody wants to tangle with them. Whole villages have been evacuated overnight when a nesting pair of griffins made themselves at home there. But, there have also been recorded cases of griffins and other races living comfortably together without incident.

4: Related to the last point, it has sometimes been known to happen that a known magickal reservoir (a poor term, for it wrongly implies that pools of magick just lie soggily about the place, begging to be dived into, which is not at all the case; but it's the best we have got) can undergo major, and apparently spontaneous, changes. Once in a great while, a Magickal Dell simply... dies, because its reservoirs dry up. On other occasions, the opposite can happen: a nice, mild Dell with just the right flows of magick can flare up without warning, flashing from balmy to deadly in a matter of hours. If we're going to go with water analogies, it would be like the placid pond at the bottom of your garden turning into a small sea. Or perhaps a wide ocean. You may not love it if this happened, but creatures like griffins would.