Atlantis Projects

The mythical First City of Atlantis is a dream that has inspired hundreds of generations of mages. The Diamond Orders dream of rebuilding Atlantis, although they often argue about the best way to do so. Hundreds of minor attempts have been made, the far greater portion of which were obviously doomed to failure from their very beginnings. However, a few of the efforts to rebuild Atlantis were well-organized projects that involved dozens or hundreds of mages and a deep understanding of magic and the Supernal. Some among the Seers of the Throne feared these efforts might undo the Exarchs’ work and actually bridge the Abyss. In the Seers’ records, three such attempts are recorded as having been especially close^[1].

The Isle of Santorini

The first was approximately 3,500 years ago, and took place on the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. A group of Diamond mages, belonging primarily to the Guardians of the Veil and the Silver Ladder, began a massive project involving decades of preparation and the efforts of several hundred mages from all four of the Diamond’s orders. This project also had excellent security; many Seers never learned the true nature of this project until its failure. Others attempted to infiltrate it, but only managed to obtain positions of minor importance. No records exist of any Seers ever learning the identities of the mages in charge of this project, nor could the Seers cancel or seriously derail the Santorini project.

However, this attempt ended in a truly disastrous failure, with the island of Santorini being split asunder, the Aegean Sea being swept by terrible waves and earthquakes, and the Abyss widening significantly. Like many of the Atlantean mages who were involved, almost half the Seers who had infiltrated this project died that day, and the survivors reported that many of the spells that had been designed to create and stabilize the new city either turned back on their creators or twisted wildly out of control. Two of the surviving Seers claimed to have helped disrupt these spells. Both mages also acknowledged that a colleague of theirs, who is today known only as Thea, had promised that if she could find no other way to disrupt this vast ritual, she would attempt to turn the full power of it back on herself by purposefully causing her portion of the effort to fail in a particularly terrible fashion.

No surviving mage understood the reasons for this project’s failure or how big a role the Seers played, but reports from some of the Seers who survived indicated that for a short while they feared that this effort might actually build a local bridge across the Abyss. Fortunately for the Seers, the failure of this effort seems to have made future attempts more difficult, and almost all of the mages who fully understood the plan behind this effort died or had their minds destroyed by the disaster that ended this effort.

Hyperborean Atlantis

The second major attempt to rebuild Atlantis occurred seven centuries later, on an island in middle of the North Sea. A group of Diamond mages known as the Five Kings assembled several dozen followers and attempted to transform this bleak and remote island into a new Atlantis that they referred to as Hyperborea. Before attempting to reopen a path between this land and the Supernal Realms, these mages attempted to reshape the weather to be more favorable than the island’s normally windswept and frigid climate.

With the records of the previous attempt firmly in mind, the Seers were ready. More than a dozen Seers especially skilled in Fate, Forces and Time magic altered the surrounding weather patterns so that they would respond to the Five King’s spells in a particularly violent and uncontrolled fashion. These efforts created a devastating feedback effect that caused preternaturally terrible storms to sweep down over this island. The resulting whirlwinds and waterspouts killed almost a fifth of the assembled mages and injured almost half the rest. Best of all, these mages believed that this failure was the result of their own hubris and not any efforts by the Seers. Many Seers point to this “Hyperborean Deception” as one of their crowning glories.

The Adytum

The third effort to recreate Atlantis was the most mysterious^[2]. Five centuries after the Five Kings, a group of Mysterium mages from Greece, Egypt, Persia and the rest of the Hellenistic Oikemene, who were collectively known as “The Phoenix Brethren,” worked together to create a version of Atlantis in the Shadow Realm. They called their ethereal city the Adytum. Magic forced back hungry spirits and dangerous allegory to carve an almost a thousand square miles from the Shadow wilds. Mages paved streets in the land of spirit and raised buildings, mansions, vast libraries, museums, walking gardens, speaking halls and anything else they desired on the plain they created. In the center, the mages formed a stair of thaumium, wide enough for five abreast, which lead to the physical world through enchantments the mages laid upon the stair.

Masters of Spirit bound the Shadow Realm’s inhabitants to serve the Adytum of the Mystery. Records speak of a minor god bound to watch over the entire fledgling city, to keep the spirit wilds from swallowing it up in the absence of any effort from the city’s mage inhabitants. Lesser spirits the mages bound as servants, commanding them to keep the streets and buildings in good repair and beautiful. Others were set to be guardians, librarians or anything else. The mages were not unwise: spirits bound to the streets were spirits of streets, and spirits tied to the libraries of spirits of knowledge and books. All were empowered to use their Essence and their Influences on behalf of the city or its inhabitants, and required to use their powers to maintain the city’s store of wisdom.

An enormous number of mages brought the first stage of their ambitious project to a close with the transferal or duplication of thousands upon thousands of documents into the Adytum of the Mystery. It was a campus that would begin life as a perfect library but, as the theory of perfection garnered more and more proof, it would become a center of learning for the city of mages who wouldaccrete around it.

The only real fact known about New Atlantis after this period is that the city was a failure. How the city failed is a matter of great contention, both for the modern Mysterium and, apparently, the order’s precursors. After completion of the New Atlantis, the Phoenix Brethren (who had reserved its construction to themselves) invited the rest of the order to join them in their victory. Most who sought the city never found it. Some followed directions given but still wandered through the Shadow Realm until forced to return to the material world. Others, choosing to take the stairs so thoughtfully provided by the Phoenix, could not find where the Adytum connected to the material world, despite their best efforts. Those few who found the Adytum returned to report it magnificent but empty, glorious but dangerous. The spirit wilds there, they said, were inhospitable to human life.

Some Phoenix Brethren mages reappeared. Many more did not, including the original few. The Phoenix mages who returned to the material world all suffered strange afflictions of the mind or body. Delusions of persecution were common, from an unnamed antagonist, with the mages involved displaying acute fear of all manner of mundane things. Some were weak of body, prone to Earthly illnesses and shortness of breath, others suffered from local paralysis of digits and facial muscles and still others had recurring fevers and hallucinations. No two were the same, and no mortal or magical agency managed to cure — or even accurately classify — the Phoenix Brethren’s afflictions.

All mages who succeeded in finding the location returned damaged in similar (yet unique) ways to the members of the Phoenix Brethren. After more than two decades of attempts to revive the project, caucuses began forbidding their members to seek it out. After another four decades, the last of the people cursed by New Atlantis died, and the order began keeping the event a secret, even from their own members.