Falx Astartis and the Castrian Savacions

The negative reputation of the Castrian Savacions--and of the Castrian Amicitians as a whole--is in large part the legacy of one mage, Falx Astartis, whose obsessive vendetta against the magi of the cottage covenants had its roots in the early schismatics of Covenant Stony Hill.

When the magi of Plenilunium Album first learned of the collapse of the tower at Stony Hill and of Spatha's death, the Savacion Fax Lunaris, filius of Plenilunial founder Xiphias, volunteered to travel to Picantaea to help out the new covenant and to complete the training of Spatha's orphaned apprentice, later Falx Astartis. In addition to completing the training of Falx Astartis, Fax Lunaris also took on a student of his own while at Stony Hill: Julian.

Falx had never forgiven Chrysolitha and Aculeus for his first master's death, nor the other Stony Hill magi for having decided against seeking to bring Chrysolitha to justice for her negligence. When in 334 he first learned that Chrysolitha and Aculeus had, after their respective departures from Stony Hill, later reconciled and gone on to found a covenant together, the Covenant at Felchester, he was absolutely furious. Although he was still only an apprentice, he nonetheless left Stony Hill on his own to travel to Felchester, where he demanded restitution for his first master's death.

The Felcastrian magi, however, did not take him very seriously, nor would they allow him to leave their covenant unescorted. Instead, they contacted Fax Lunaris at Stony Hill to inform him that his runaway apprentice was at their covenant and to invite him to come and collect his student. Falx did not appreciate being treated like a child, and he was even less happy when the event ended up bringing about a reconciliation between the magi of the two covenants, who agreed to let the past be past and resolve their differences in the name of Plenilunial unity.

In 341, Covenant Stony Hill came under attack by the local Picantaean tribesmen, who held the magi accountable for the drought which had struck the region. The magi, who had themselves been weakened by the same drought and whose covenfolk had begun to desert them in droves, were unable to defend the covenant, and in the course of the battle, both its last remaining founder Lapilla and Fax Lunaris were killed. Fax Lunaris's second student, Julian, having witnessed the deaths of Lapilla and of his master, the dragging off of the young Touccian Smaragda, and the breaching of the covenant's walls, believed the battle to be utterly lost: he fled the field and made his way towards the only other covenant he knew anything about -- the Covenant at Felchester. There, he reported the destruction of Covenant Stony Hill and was taken in by Aculeus, who agreed to oversee the few remaining years of his magical training.

The battle, however, had not in fact been utterly lost. Falx Astartis, who had by now grown into a most formidable warrior-mage, managed to rally the last of Stony Hill's loyal retainers, repulse the tribesmen from the covenant, and rescue Smaragda from captivity. He then swore to avenge the death of his second master Fax Lunaris and spent the next three years of his life conducting a one-man war of terror against every last one of the Picantaean tribes which had been involved in the attack against the covenant.

In 345, his thirst for vengeance finally glutted, Falx returned to Cholaeic lands only to discover that his brother Julian, whom he had believed dead, was not only still alive but had also just been presented to the rest of the House as a full mage -- by Aculeus of Felchester. Furthermore, he learned that Julian had joined in Amicitian Fellowship with the filiae of Chrysolitha and Lynx, alongside whom he had just founded a new cottage covenant dedicated to the magical study of romantic love.

These revelations disgusted Falx, who considered Julian a coward and a deserter, and who thought romantic love a most unsuitably effeminate field of study for a member of his House. He demanded that his fellow Savacions unite to expel Julian from the House altogether, and he also petitioned Annalum to enforce some form of sanction on the Felcastrian founders Chrysolitha and Aculeus for their role long ago in the death of his first master, Spatha.

He was successful in neither of these attempts. Nonetheless, his efforts did serve to bring the activities of the Talchester Trio to the attention of the Order. Not very many magi had previously paid much attention to -- or in some cases even known about -- the cottage covenants, and many shared Falx's feelings about the Talcastrian magi and their scandalous field of specialization. Members of House Savacion in particular found the Castrians disgraceful, and while the House did not at that time have any mechanisms set in place which would really allow for a formal expulsion, the vast majority of its members did think that Julian's behavior brought shame upon their House, particularly when Julian himself steadfastly refused to answer any of the charges--desertion, cowardice, betrayal, filial disloyalty, effeminacy, sexual perversion, and so forth--which his critics kept levelling against him. Even those Savacion magi who thought Falx Astartis himself a blowhard and a bully were forced to agree that Julian's refusal to rise to any of these slanders was indicative of a truly shocking degree of disregard for personal honor.

From 345 on, the Castrians were subject to increasingly frequent--and increasingly provocative--acts of harassment from members of House Savacion, many of whom really only wanted to inspire a response--some response, any response--from the infuriatingly passive Julian. The Castrian Touccians, too, came under fire in this period: while the rumour that Daenae, progenetrix of the female branch of House Touccio, had once supported herself through prostitution had been floating around for some time, it was due to Falx Astartis' unceasing polemic against the Castrians that after 345, the stereotype of the promiscuous and treacherous female Touccian came to acquire full memetic status within the Order.

Matters between Falx Astartis and Julian came to something of a head in 352, shortly after the death of the Plenilunial founder Xiphias. Late that year, Xiphias' second filius Ornus privately contacted the Cristofereans of Annalum to request that Julian be counted in their records as a student of Aculeus, rather than of Fax Lunaris: on his death-bed, Ornus claimed, Xiphias had stated that he could not bear the idea that the mage who had left his first filius Fax Lunaris to die alone and unsupported on the field of battle should be accounted as one of his descendants, or as one of the descendants of his illustrious parens Aglaspis.

Ornus had kept his request a private one out of concern for Plenilunial unity: the Castrian covenants were by now considered descendants of Plenilunium Album and part of the overall Plenilunial movement. Somehow, though, the story got out, and it was immediately taken up by Falx Astartis and his colleagues at Covenant Ad Vim Per Veritatem, who loudly took up Ornus' request and also spread the story throughout the Order.

Strangely enough, while accusations of cowardice, desertion, effeminacy and an unhealthy addiction to cunnilingus had all left Julian cold, the accusation of filial disloyalty finally hit home. He protested this censure indignantly, pointing out that he had in fact served eleven of his fifteen years of apprenticeship under Fax Lunaris; that unlike his foster-brother Falx Astartis, he had actually been apprenticed by Fax Lunaris, rather than simply adopted by him; that he had been fighting right at his parens' side when he had died; and furthermore, that he had even avenged his parens' death, as he had slain the Picantaean who had killed his parens before he had left the field of battle. He also pointed out that his parens himself had not had any problems with either Aculeus or the Felcastrians, that he had been a Plenilunial; and claimed that Falx's undying obsession on this point was actually revealing him for precisely what he really was -- not a Xiphian at all, but a child of Spatha, a Cuniculan.

Falx Astartis, who in spite of only having been a one year apprentice when his first master Spatha had died had always insisted on being reckoned as Spatha's son, now changed his tune, insisting to all and sundry that he was Fax Lunaris' only true filius and tirelessly petitioning the rest of the Order to acknowledge that Julian had no legitimate claim to descent from Aglaspis and Xiphias.

As the date of the release of Annalum's 358 vicesimus annus approached, this debate grew increasingly heated, and the rhetoric of the parties on both sides of the dispute increasingly vitriolic. To large extent, of course, the dispute was merely a stand-in, a sublimation. It served as a focal point for the rising tensions between the Plenilunials and the Opponents of the Dawn, a point of contention at safe remove from the real question of whether or not the Manerean Peace of 340 would hold. Sublimation or not, though, many within House Savacion in particular took it very seriously indeed, and for some time this point of genealogy would serve as a political shibboleth: whether one considered Julian--and later on, his descendants--Xiphians or Triatalans was understood to speak volumes about ones political affiliations within the Order as a whole.

The Annalum Cristofereans chose in the end to straddle the fence on the issue: the 358 vicesimus annus lists Julian of Talchester as a filius of both Aculeus and Fax Lunaris, and Falx Astartis as a filius of both Fax Lunaris and Spatha. By the time of the document's actual publication, however, the issue had come to seem considerably less pressing: the Second Manerean Schism had begun; it was clear that the Manerean Peace was not going to hold; and even the obsessive Falx Astartis considered the Dawn diabolists a somewhat more important cause for his concern than the Amicitians of the cottage covenants. He was a vocal supporter of war with Prima Lux and was among the magi who travelled to the Dawn to fight the Schism War. In the face of mage war, the enmity between the Castrian Amicitians and Falx Astartis and his conservative allies was for a time laid aside.

It reerupted anew, however, in 368, when Julian presented his first filius Duncan to House Savacion. In this year, Falx and a coalition of conservative Savacion magi attempted to challenge the recognition of Amicitian-raised students as members of House Savacion at all. While Falx's personal grudge against the Castrian Amicitians obviously played some part in this action, it was primarily motivated by conservative anger over the Cholaeic Amnesty and the rise to power of the Plenilunial Elementalists: all of the Order's Amicitian Savacions had at this time either converted to Plenilunial Elementalism or been in some way connected to the imposition of the Cholaeic Amnesty on the Order in 365.

In spite of the conservative Savacions' success in badly humiliating several Amicitians at the gauntlet of 368, though, they were not able to lead the House as a whole to support their cause: by now, the Plenilunials were quickly rising to a position of hegemony within the Order; even within conservative House Savacion, the traditionalists were no longer in the majority, and the attack on the Amicitians primarily served only to harm Falx's reputation in the House. His efforts at the gauntlet of 368 were seen as bullying and mean-spirited by many, and his obsession with the Castrians as a whole as carping, tiresome, and even somewhat humorously petty.

When even after his failure to discredit the Castrians in 368 Falx persisted in waging a war of harassment against them--in 373, he embroiled the magi of his home covenant of Ad Vim Per Veritatem in a conflict that none of the rest of its magi really wanted with the hermetic future founders of the Covenant at Morchester; in 381, he again involved them in a territorial dispute with the new covenant--even his former allies at Ad Vim turned against him, eventually forbidding him to have anything at all to do with any of the magi of the Westmarch. When in 378 his own student Anguis Proditor became himself a convert to Castrian Amicitianism, there was quite a bit of unbecoming snickering in the Order--and by no means all of it was coming from the Plenilunials.

By the time of the Savacion House restructure of 424, the question had more or less been settled by default: the death of Mulus in the Mille Lacus Incident of 420 had left Anguis Proditor and his students the only surviving line of descent from Falx Astartis -- and the only other descendants of Xiphias consisted of the descendants of Oscularis, leader of the diabolist Last Hope Conspiracy, all but one of whom was dead, and the last disgraced. Nonetheless, when Anguis Proditor was named Dux of the newly-formed Gens Amicitia in 424, he made a point of formally declaring that the descendants of Julian were to be henceforth considered members of the Xiphian lineage. By then, there was nobody left alive who had any particular interest in disputing the point.

Nonetheless, Falx Astartis' legacy lives on: the negative reputation of the Castrian Savacions and the female Touccian branch, the Daughters of Daenae, are both largely the result of his decades of criticism, polemic, and outright rumour-mongering directed against the magi of the cottage covenants.