The smith-mage Touccio was unique among the Founders in ascribing his learning purely to personal observation, deep thought and hard work. Unlike Lem, who claimed to have received his knowledge through a direct and special act of divine guidance, Touccio believed that since all men are blessed with Reason, no particular or unique divine act was necessary to explain any of the innovations of man. Instructed by no teacher, no books, and no special moment of divine ephiphany, Touccio remains to this day the only truly self-taught mage the Order has ever seen. Untrained in Cholaeic magic until his middle fifties, an age at which no other individual has ever successfully cultivated the Gift, he is widely believed to have possessed more raw natural talent than any of the Founders—some claim more than anyone else in the history of the Order.
The master smith of a small hill village on the Ventrian side of the Black Mountains near to the Westmarch, Touccio was 53 years old when Aegidius and Cristofer first met him in 187. Known throughout the region for his skill as a craftsman, he had already raised two apprentices to journeyman status and despite never having married, was a solid and respected member of his community. Like most people in the region, Touccio possessed only functional literacy and had received no formal education. The only book he had ever seen was a village copy of collected Church writings from which he had been taught a few letters by the local priest as a child. He had left his home village twice in his life, both times to visit a market town some five miles away. He had also been creating enchanted objects for more than twenty years.
The enchanting of physical objects was an art lost to the Tympanians of Trismagistus' day. Magical items dated from after the Fall of the Theocracy, such as the chains used to bind Cristofer in the dungeons of Licius, were known to exist, but the principles under which they operated were unknown to the students of Trismagistus, and while Aegidius and Cristofer had taken the chains of Licius with them for future study, they had despaired of ever comprehending the secret of their manufacture. The discovery of Touccio and his object-oriented magic was therefore terribly exciting to Aegidius and Cristofer, who invited Touccio to join their magical Order and teach his skills to its other members. Touccio, in turn, was excited by the prospect of learning the spell-casting magic of the students of Trismagistus. He agreed to join their Order and left with them at once to meet their third associate, the reclusive Palenti in Abrisia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Touccio and Palenti, both of them stubborn and willful old men, did not get along. Sophisticated, aristocratic and theoretically-minded, Palenti found it difficult to accept the uneducated Touccio as a mage at all, and even when convinced that his gifts were genuine, considered him a boor and a fool. It took Cristofer and Aegidius some time to convince the two men to agree to work together, and while they eventually consented, the two were never to exist on friendly terms. Their mutual dislike led to the common Order wisdom that Manereans and Touccians, like their founders, can never be expected to get along without the moderating influence of a member of House Cristofer or Aegidius.
Touccio travelled to Evasendia with Cristofer in 188, where he continued to study Cholaeic spell-casting under Cristofer and to teach his own magical arts to others within the Order. The Order of Cholae was officially founded ten years later, in 198.
Touccio's contribution to the Order's accumulated knowledge cannot be overstated. He alone was responsible for the Order's ability to enchant physical objects, and he introduced the art of creating such items to all its other magi. Such enchanted objects had their own unique powers: they could be used by anyone, Gifted or mundane, and their use required no particular expenditure of thought or energy. This meant not only that the Order's mundane allies could now be provided with magical aid, but also that magi who were exhausted or in ill-health were no longer left magically defenseless.
Touccio also understood the nature and application of raw vis better than any other Founder, and he was capable of recognizing its presence in objects the other magi would have overlooked. He introduced the Order to the concept of preparing material objects to concentrate and bring forth their natural vis: before Touccio, magi had not considered the possiblility of hidden vis in objects and had only thought to collect those items of obvious and blatant magical power.
Touccio was also the first of the Founders to utilize the ability of certain material objects, even when not themselves magical, to enhance magical spells. In his days as a smith before he joined the Order, Touccio had kept track of the apparent ability of certain material components to strengthen enchantments, but as he was only barely literate and not theoretically-inclined, he had thought neither to keep written lists of these correspondences nor to analyze or categorize them in any way. His work here was continued by the other Founders, who preserved Touccio's knowledge in written form and extended it through theory and analysis.
The rapid expansion of the Order after 210 was only made possible by Touccio and his students, who were almost solely responsible for the research and development of new techniques and devices for locating magically-gifted youngsters.
In spite of his great contributions to the Order's understanding of magic, however, Touccio was always to be considered something less than a true mage by the other Founders. The early Order was a largely urban phenomenon; Touccio simply did not fit in. His tastes were unsophisticated, and his appreciation of High Tympanian culture extremely limited. He was never to learn to read or write with any great facility, and his heavily-accented backwater Cholaeic was a source of amusement to many of the more urbane members of the Council. Touccio was the product of a heavily Ulderlinden-influenced culture, and the Ulderlindener values he respected—humility, piety, honesty, self-reliance, perseverence, and hard work—were not those most admired by the Evasendian urbanites, while Evasendian intellectualism, in its turn, left Touccio cold: the pragmatic Touccio had a strong anti-intellectual streak which only further alienated him from the rest of the Order.
Worst of all, though, was the fact that Touccio was to prove incapable of casting magic without the aid of material aids, and he was barely able to cast spontaneous magic at all. Although later generations would recognize that his ability to learn Cholaeic magic at such an advanced age was itself indicative of extraordinary talent, the magi of the early Order had not yet come to the realization that students' ability to learn Cholaeic magic diminishes with age. The Founders therefore viewed Touccio as a kind of savant—an inadequate mage who nonetheless had one great area of extraordinary talent.
Touccio himself was always to remain a craftsman first, and only a mage second. Insecure about his magical ability in comparison to the other Founders, he had initially refused to take on an apprentice of his own, arguing that since he was still studying under Cristofer, he was really only an apprentice himself, and stating that it was improper for the apprentice to teach as if he were a master. In 191, however, he found himself so strongly disagreeing with Cristofer's methods of training the young apprentice Sarcon that he abandoned this position to adopt the boy as his own student. Sarcon had been apprentice to a master mason before he had been discovered by the Order, and Touccio felt that the boy's training was being hampered by the bookish Cristofer's complete lack of understanding of the passions that motivate the true craftsman. Craftsmen, Touccio insisted, were different from other men, and they required a different approach to magical training.
As time went on, Touccio was to become increasingly committed to this idea: all four of his students were artisans before their induction into the Order, and Touccio took a particular personal interest in the training of all of the Order's students from the artisan classes. Indeed, there seemed to be a great deal of validity to his beliefs, for it soon was noticed that Touccio's artisan students all shared with their master not only his unusual talent with physical enchantments, but also his limitations with other types of Cholaeic magic. The Order therefore accepted without question the notion that there was a particular type of magical talent associated with the artisan classes. While the resemblance of the descendants of the other Founders to their masters was perceived as a matter of training, Touccianism quickly came to be seen as an innate and inborn state of being, a separate and unique type of Gift.
This peculiarity of the students of Touccio was Palenti's most compelling argument in defense of the formation of the Houses in 200. Touccio himself, however, while a believer in Palenti's idea, nonetheless refrained from declaring his own House out of respect for Aegidius' deep disapproval of the trend. He only founded House Touccio once the Houses had been incorporated into the structure of the Order in 201.
House Touccio was also set apart from the other Houses by the nature of Touccio's preferred training methods. Unlike the other Founders, Touccio taught his students en masse, lecturing them as a group in the giant laboratories his physical magic required. After 201, he was also to adapt the apprenticeship structure of the mundane crafts to his magical training, declaring his students "journeymen" upon their graduation to magehood, and only permitting them to consider themselves a "master" once they had completed the training of their first apprentice. Even after their graduation to magehood, Touccio's journeyman students continued to work under him in his laboratory, continuing their training even after ascension to magehood.
Only one of Touccio's students was to prove dissatisfied with this arrangement: his third filius, Licinius, struck out on his own shortly after his ascension to journeyman status, wishing to pursue his own research in solitude. Touccio supported him in this desire, and when several years later Licinius embarked on a research project with Eleanor's third student Ascia, he was a staunch defender of the young mages' right to privacy. Although generally suspicious and mistrustful of women, Touccio struck up an unlikely alliance with Eleanor in this period; the alliance came to an abrupt end, however, in 223, when both Licinius and Ascia were killed in a massive explosion. While Eleanor maintained the position that the nature of the mages' research had been their own business, Touccio spoke out in favor of an investigation into the disaster, and it was his argument which held sway on the Council.
A friend and ally of Aegidius, Touccio consistently voted with the First Speaker on the Council until the presentation of e chao omnia in 229. This work's depiction of the material world as both chaotic and demiurgic so deeply offended Touccio that, despite his respect for Aegidius and dislike of public speaking, he not only opposed Aegidius' motion to ratify e chao, but delivered a speech in opposition to the motion on the Council. His opposition, in which he defends the phenomenal world as an expression of Wisdomic order, is the only set speech Touccio ever made to the Council; its transcription is one of the very few written works ascribed to the founder extant in the Order. This disagreement ended the two Founders' friendship. Aegidius left Evasedia shortly thereafter, and the two were never to see one another again.
Apolitical and conservative, Touccio strongly disapproved of the Council's younger members' involvement in Evasendian revolutionary politics, and in the past, he had consistently sided with Aegidius in favor of forbidding magi from political engagement. When his own students caught the political fever in 230, therefore, he was deeply distressed. His attempts to forbid his filii from continuing in their involvement, however, were unsuccessful, and the members of House Touccio, by providing the revolutionary armies with enchanted weaponry, were largely responsible for the escalation of the civil war from 230 to 232.
Due to their need for smithies and vast laboratory space, the students of Touccio were the most visible of the Council's magi, and because they had been the providers of weaponry for the conflict, they were also the most hated once the people of Evasendia turned against the Order. In 232, an angry mob descended upon the Touccian laboratories and slaughtered everyone they could find there. Among the dead was Touccio himself, killed at the age of 98. He had taught four students:
- Sarcon (T2), from 191 to 200
- Magnus (T3), from 197 to 213
- Licinius (T4), from 207 to 217
- [T6], from 215 to 230
All three of Touccio's surviving filii died alongside him. Only one Touccian mage and four apprentices, all of them third generation Touccians, survived the massacre. The entirety of House Touccio descends from these four apprentices, known as the "Grandsons of Touccio."
In later Touccian iconography, Touccio is associated with the South. He is the magnetic home of the House, its lode stone and pole star, inspiring his descendants from above.
