The year was 1871 and the Queen was Victoria.
It was 1871 and few were suspecting that anything would be different about this year, bar the usual; a Dickensian prolix could have described the mood. Many babies were born and their talents were measured; many babies were found to have talent, and most of them, it was known, would be disappointingly short-changed.
In 1871, it was very, very vital that the new magicians have a measurable stock of the trade. For in that year, and the year before that, and the decade, century, millennia before that, two brothers were loose?not just on London, but the world?and they slaughtered, they maimed, they worked to earn their own profits through whatever unscrupulous means they could.
It was a well-known fact that they were French, born sometime in the early 1700s, into a country where the development of advanced economic and agricultural techniques were so stifled that a bushel of seed yielded only five bushels of wheat, to the English farmer?s till of a whole field. To be born poor was to generally stay poor?and to be poor was a condemnation to ill health, ill fortunes, and misery as butter for the (scarce) daily bread. In the future, France cursed its own history for having had created the brothers; the rest of the world concurred. Certainly, they didn?t know if it was their world that the brothers had been born in; did it matter? The foggy, weird otherness of the multi-world concept was hazy. As far as the people knew, they had only the mocking accounts of the two brothers as evidence (God only knows how reliable that is!) and in any event, their own France had had a very rough time of it in that era, and the revolution it led to was violent indeed. Even if the brothers had been born in another France, their own France would have bred the same results. A philosopher might argue that some good came out of this two-man reign of terror: by 1850, battling poverty was a key agenda of any country. It still existed, but by God, no one wanted to see a repeat of the brother magicians. Large funds went to humanitarian causes, and larger still was the hunt for any talented child who was born into poverty.
Never again, was the global chorus.
(Curiously, the general practice of magickry received more vilification than ever by 1871. It wasn?t quite the same as the witch-burnings and tortures of the dark ages, but public resentment was high).
But who were these brothers? And how, how on earth, could two long-dead men from almost two centuries ago exert such a terrific presence in the world of the 1870s?
Well, they weren?t dead; there?s the start of it. The younger brother was Thierry Henri Bordelon, highly visible in public records and history books because he cared to be. He was proud, arrogant, and a show-off; reputable sources also thought his company fair, at least until he showed his violent side. Thierry killed easily; provocation was only sometimes necessary. The older brother was smaller and slender, with a quiet, cautious manner. People didn?t like him so easily, but he was more practical and less rash. If Thierry was bold and vibrant, then the older brother, Jean-L?andre (a lion of a man), was all the more cunning and survivalist. The Bordelons were not immortal, despite their ageless historical and future presences.
In the world that these terrified citizens inhabited, magic was common but unpredictable, scarce, and weak. For the Bordelons, magic was easy to use. Thus, they were uniquely powerful. Thierry travelled through time and within the space of a world, whilst L?andre (it is said) could travel between other worlds. They cut a bloody trail of thievery, murder, and terror through the annals of history for no other purpose, it seems, than to avoid the poverty of their 1700s French peasantry. There came to be agencies for the regulation of magic, but if your enemies were two men who could leave the planet entirely or who could change history to suit their goals?what kind of idiot would be so stupidly bold as to challenge them? It was an exercise in impossibility. No, those agencies subsisted on petty policing of other magicians who were not so deadly, and on discovering new talent.
That is why we began this prologue at 1871. In that year, a baby boy was born with magic, just a little magic. By the time he was four, he could travel from Manchester to Scotland by force of will. By the time of his maturity?whole worlds were open to him. No more needs to be said on the matter, because this story is not centered on that boy (who could not, after all, stop both the Bordelons?with much help, he dispatched Thierry). Indeed, much of the world just described will be less than extraordinary in what shall happen. Rather, this is about the events around the boy and the companions of his who?really and truly?did end the reign of the last Bordelon brother.
Specific details to come. A highly selective RP intended to be a private collaborative effort. Preferably, interested people will PM me and the co-writer(s) before posting here. Please be understanding if I decline; it isn't personal at all, but we're going to be quite persnickety since it's intended to be a closed affair. :)
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