Domain: Awakening

Light! A bright, omnipresent white fire with no beginning and no end. As if at the beginning of time, at the creation of the world... There seemed to be nothing else but him. How long did he reign? A moment? Forever? Is unknown. But now he began to lose his strength and began to fade slowly, confidently. After a while, the light went out and was replaced by darkness. The first sounds were heard. Rustling and creaking. Unreliable vision from sleep, slightly accustomed to the darkness, formed a picture: long, uneven black horizontal pillars with appendages go into the distance, into the boundless dark gray nothingness. The pillars swayed as if in the wind... No, it's the trees that rise into the cloudy night sky! He's lying on the ground... He...

Who is he?

With the realization of himself as a person, pain rolled over. A searing flash went through the whole body, leaving a heavy echo. Everything that could hurt hurt, it seemed, even the hair... Hair... They are quite long, both on the head and on the face... Cold. If it were not for the clothes, dense and sound to the touch, then a person who has been lying in the night forest for an unknown amount of time could freeze and die in his sleep. He tried to move, through the pain and dizziness, every movement was difficult. To the left, something light is lying on the dark, cold grass. A hat. It looks like a medical one. The man examined and felt himself better. He felt very bad, but every moment the feeling of reality returned, his mind cleared up, he began to slowly understand who he was and what was happening around him. The clothes look like a long-skirted white doctor's jacket. On the pages of newspapers and magazines, it is in such that scientists are portrayed. Warm sweater, trousers, boots... It was hard to see in the dark, but the jacket gleamed dimly with silver geometric patterns embroidered on white fabric in a number of places. A cold metal cylinder the thickness of a thumb and the length of two index fingers hangs from a belt on a buckle. The man slowly moved from a recumbent to a sitting position and carefully put a cap on his head. He adjusted the strands of shoulder-length hair so that they did not fall over his eyes. It seems that he is a strong man of medium height and at least middle-aged. He was afraid that he had lost his memory, but no, memories trickled into consciousness in a thin stream, and before his eyes, obscuring the night forest with an ephemeral film, vivid images of what he had experienced appeared. It's like it was only yesterday. He clearly remembered the following. His name is Ivan Andreevich Titov, nickname Negat. However, he has not been addressed by name for a very long time, in the environment where he comes from, this is not accepted. He is an archive employee and a temporary teacher of magical science at the Azgorod Academy, the center of magic of the Russian Ethereal Domain... What? Magicians? In the Soviet Union? It seemed terribly ridiculous, as if his real memories had been replaced by a satirical feuilleton about drunks from a humorous magazine. But there were no other memories!.. Surely he hadn't gone mad? Ivan whispered a few of the most forgettable examples from the multiplication table and counted how many hectares in a plot of 39 by 65 kilometers. He succeeded. There's nothing wrong with his head, only it hurts like hell... He hadn't been drinking. And then how did he find himself in the forest far from everything, but almost without things? Memories helpfully suggested that he not only never drank alcohol and did not smoke (this is not welcome among Covenant magicians), but that something much more terrible is happening now. It's 1990 on the street. There is a war going on. The War of Magical Domains, which Russian (Soviet, it does not matter) magicians confidently lose, hardly holding the defense in their last fortress. The Union is experiencing a large-scale systemic crisis, threatening a coup d'etat and a new civil war, worse than after the Revolution. The magicians of the Russian domain, spitting on the Non-Interference Agreement, began a full-scale invasion into the life and politics of Soviet society, in a desperate attempt to save it from collapse. It was for this that more than half of all other Domains of the Earth declared a holy magical war on Rosdomen, five years ago, in 1985. Ivan is an experienced enchanter, to put it simply, an engineer-inventor of magical devices, and now he should not be lying in the forest somewhere. Oh no! He is now obliged, together with the rest of the Soviet magicians who survived the war, to stand in defense of the Citadel of Azgorod, in the Sverdlovsk Region, in the mountains of the Ivdelsky district. A vast foothill fortress that does not give itself away from the outside, as if from fairy tales about dwarves, majestic and impregnable. For more than two years, Ivan has lived almost continuously there, in one of the deepest levels, in the central hall of the Ether distribution, and from there, together with a group of younger students, he managed the work of protective magical stationary installations. Azgorod is under siege. Large forces of enemy magicians, using their opportunities for cross-border movement and disguise from ordinary people, tried to break through the defense and impose their conditions of continued existence on Soviet magicians. Extremely unprofitable and humiliating conditions, as it is easy to understand. Although, by that time, the magicians of Rosdomen had already lost the opportunity to seriously influence politics and only very limited acted on the Union authorities through agents from ordinary people in high positions. It was enough for the enemy magicians to simply continue to hold the siege, which could last at least forever. And, to tell the truth, without these very protective magical installations, Azgorod would have been captured long ago. There have always been a shortage of magicians in Rosdomen who directly control the Ether, but Russian enchanters have always been among the best. These protective installations were a great achievement of the Domain. These aggregates created powerful ethereal barriers and space-distorting fields, even a trained detachment of the best combat magicians could not pass through them - it is more difficult than breaking through the thickness of the Ural granite with one pickaxe in hand. So far, these magical machines have saved Rosdomen from the final defeat, but no one will say for sure what will happen tomorrow... The existence of Rosdomain and other Domains is known in the State Security Committee (KGB), the American CIA, the British MI6 and other major secret services in the world. Since the Revolution, an unspoken agreement on indirect cooperation and mutual non-interference has been concluded between Rosdomen and the Soviet special services. Realizing the importance of the Domain, the security officers honestly tried to help, despite the fact that they had other problems to the brim, especially in recent extremely difficult years. Despite their vast experience and strength in traditional covert operations, they could not do much against magicians- people endowed with superpowers. But, nevertheless, the security officers were able to make it very difficult for enemy magicians to move freely. In particular, thanks to them, Azgorod is still alive...

So, there is a war going on, comrades are dying in battles with enemies, and he is lying around somewhere, with a wild headache and a million unanswered questions. With enemies... And they managed to start this idiotic war! Was it really impossible to come to an agreement somehow!? It would seem that adult gray-haired people from both sides, live apart from the worldly bustle, they will not be fooled by propaganda from which the head of the simpletons blows off... but come on- they rested like sheep at a wedding!.. That's who won from it? Many people died on both sides, the elite of the magical community, the best specialists who could open new horizons in the magical sciences and arts, and instead... Their souls have uselessly dissolved into the Ether.Not so long ago, he corresponded with familiar wizards from the British and German Domains, even met them personally, he traveled to Innsbruck and Inverness to them through a system of Portals and hosted them in Azgorod in the Urals. Together they thought over the issue of improving the World Portal System, creating new, previously unseen magical machines. They discussed the possibility of using magical sciences for parallel exploration of outer space! He was invited to lectures on the system of magical devices autonomous from the carrier and the potential for teaching magical disciplines to ordinary people... Yes, it was forbidden to teach simpletons by the Covenant, but discussion of the very possibility and methods was not forbidden... Foreign colleagues respectfully addressed Ivan as "Herr Negat" and "Mr. Negatus" and he sincerely reciprocated them... and now what? A feud for the ages? Yes, the relationship of Domains was far from ideal before, there were always enough contradictions and reasons for conflicts, but everyone understood that it was better to be friends badly than to have a great fight... Our magicians also screwed up big. Was it worth it to violate such a serious contract, one of the fundamental ones in the magical community? Even ambitious and rather selfish Britons did not break the Covenant when their empire was collapsing!.. Have all these direct interventions in the politics and public life of the Union produced at least some positive results? But some of our Soviet mages even managed to appear on television and in the press! An unheard-of thing! Shame!.. Brother Silentius especially distinguished himself with his remotely charged water via television... There are a lot of unique personalities among mages , each with his own strangeness, but there is a shortage of normal, disciplined people. So this loser, taking advantage of the opportunity, instead of a really useful thing, earned cheap popularity among simpletons. Well, you can't charge water through televisions, the effect will be negligible, for any serious change in the properties of water, you need the personal presence of a magician!.. Rumor has it that Brother Silentius defected to the enemy camp, because he continued to delight viewers with his revelations both after the start of the war and after the siege, and at the same time was in good health. Or maybe the magicians of other Domains saw perfectly well that in search of fame he was unwittingly engaged in sabotage on the scale of the whole country and therefore they did not interfere with him? However, these are just rumors.

Anyway, since the beginning of the war, the Community has been saved from disclosure mainly by the presence of a crowd of all kinds of charlatans. They serve as a wonderful veil to preserve the secret of the existence of true magicians on Earth. Behind the streams of fakes and newspaper ducks, it became almost impossible to see the manifestations of real phenomena.

But magic has never been a miracle. It's just a tool available to a select few with innate abilities. It is based on the use of Ether. Space, matter and energy are formed directly from time, Ether is a phase state between the forms of being. The mind of man and some other intelligent beings is a natural converter of Ether. Alas, the power of our brain is only enough to transform Ether into immaterial mental images. But occasionally people are born who are able to physically use the Ether and turn it into matter and energy. Since ancient times, such people have accidentally discovered unusual abilities in themselves, but, unable to explain them correctly, they sought to develop them on a whim. They became shamans, witches, druids, chaotic magicians, even founders and priests of religions. In that distant time, magic was practiced as an art. As a science, it began to develop only in the autumn of the Middle Ages, closer to the Renaissance, and the concept of Ether was discovered only at the end of the 19th century. Magic developed along with the rest of the natural sciences and took over a lot from them, and the magicians themselves were not a secret organization at all for most of their history as they are now. Ordinary people knew about magicians, but because of friction with religion and its adherents, magicians were forced not to advertise their activities, but their services were consistently used by the powerful of this world. Alas, any attempts by magical societies to legalize officially ended the same way-the church was pushing, the people were scared, the authorities were trying to get rid of the problem, another Inquisition appeared and drove the magicians into a corner again. And with the rapid development of progress, when a mere mortal man with a revolver became no less dangerous than a combat magician, the Community realized that it was time to forget the old feuds, unite and properly conceal themselves, otherwise sooner or later ordinary people who have become very powerful can destroy magicians if they once consider them the source of their problems. Soon the magical communities came up with the very ideas that later gave rise to the Covenant. The Covenant itself was formed in Paris, in the spring of 1798. It approved the charter, formed Domains and delimited their territories, in accordance with the largest historical civilizational areas of the Earth. There, in Paris, the Ecumenical Magic Cathedral also settled - the main platform for solving international magical issues, disputes and problems.