On the Twin Kingdoms
Neither Tutaria nor Vetitoria acknowledges this document as accurate. This is perhaps the strongest evidence of its accuracy.
Two kingdoms sit side by side in the south, and the people call them the twin kingdoms, because the story says they were founded by twin brothers.
The story says the younger brother fell in love with magic. Not the small magics of hearth and harvest, the deep kind. The kind that creates more questions than answers them.
The story says the older brother watched, and warned, and pleaded. That magic is not for mortals to hold. That he could see something in his brother changing.
The younger brother would not listen. So the brothers parted. The younger founded a place where he could study freely. The older founded a place sworn to stand against everything his brother loved.
They fought. Not once. For years. There are fields between the two kingdoms where nothing grows, and the old folk say those are the places the brothers' armies met.
In the end, the older brother killed the younger with his own hands. The account that survives gives him one sentence, spoken over the body: better to die a man than live as a monster.
Whether the younger brother was becoming a monster, no one can say. Only one brother walked away, and it is his account we have.
Tutaria remembers the older brother as the Great Preserver. Vetitoria remembers the younger as the Grandfather of Magic. Neither kingdom remembers their names. Perhaps they were struck from the records. Perhaps grief does not keep such things.
The kingdoms are amicable now. They trade. They marry. Their borders have not moved in two hundred years.
And in Vetitoria, it is said, the studying never stopped. It only went quiet.