Science:

Science, the bright twin of magick, was once the hefty sum of progress across thousands of years. It was rebellion against the unknowable, the act of shaping wonder with a steady hand over generations until it became but one piece of the next revolutionary craft. During The Lost Ages it was divine, the torch that lit the darkness before the first spell was ever cast. Alchemists brewed cures that could halt death itself, engineers bound steam and lightning to their will, shipwrights built vessels that sailed the oceans and skies. It was an age when reason was tested, and invention was unparalleled. Then came The Great Schism, where every bright mind and all they had built became just another corpse to pick clean. Research burned to ash, factories were gutted for metal for swords and shields, scholars were enslaved for their skill sets or cannibalized when times grew thin. Of all science's former brilliance, little remains but mere fragments, broken lenses, dead engines, yellowed schematics that no one living can decipher. Yet what scraps survived still serve as lifelines for a world eating itself to death. The Scholar's Guild scours ruins for artifacts of lost genius, paying by the pound for rusted cogs and shards of glass, hoping one day to rebuild what was once considered ordinary. The last working Locomotives sputter across the realm like dying gods, carriages clatter where automobiles once roared. Brewmasters try their trembling hands at medicines whose recipes outlived their ingredients. Each rediscovery like Necromancy, coaxing life from the corpse of our former lands.

Still, every light in this new age burns at both ends. What is reclaimed is rarely what it seems, and what works too well often kills its wielder faster than failure would. The cracked stone streets are littered with examples of this, rifles that misfire and tear their owners apart, tinctures that promise vigor but rot the gums to bone, engines that run once, magnificently, before exploding into molten ruin. Scientists today call it innovation, trial and error. The common folk call it suicidal, a large reason many elect to labor away their years instead of chasing lost technologies buried in the woods; Fear some misunderstood piece of ancient equipment will send them to the gods before it ever lines their pockets, is a feeling only fools are a stranger to. Yet many are desperate, desperate for anything to ease Everwealthy life's great many pains; And the more the desperate cling to science, the more it seems to bite back, punishing the hands that reach for it. Charlatans prey upon this hunger, selling “miracle tonics” and “electrical elixirs” that do little but empty purses and fill graves. Still, to this day, for all its very real dangers, the world cannot seem to let it go. To abandon science entirely would be to surrender to magick alone, and Everwealth's bloody history knows far too well how fickle that mistress can be. So the tinkerers tinker, the inventors burn, and the scholars dig through dust and corpses alike, convinced that somewhere beneath the soot, wonder waits for a world foolish enough to trust it again. Science endures, yes, like a dying man too proud to collapse, promising salvation while its miracles rot the hands that touch them. And the people, desperate and dazzled, keep touching anyway.