Year 850 — One Hundred and Thirty-Nine Years After the Summoning
Crius, Titan God-King
The spell had spread beyond the three Titans who had originally learned it. Ambitious dragons within the Titan territories had discovered that the life force draining could be used not just by immortals but by any dragon with sufficient magical training and sufficient hunger for power.
The result was that a new elite had begun to emerge within the Titan communities: dragons who had used the spell to extract Quintessence from others, who had accumulated enough power to position themselves above the traditional dragon hierarchies, who had begun to dominate the social and political structures of the Titan territories.
Crius had not explicitly taught the spell beyond the inner circle of immortals. But he had not prevented its spread either. What was happening was that the Titans' vision of divine authority and submission was being accelerated by the specific mechanism of Quintessence extraction. Dragons who wanted to rise within the hierarchy learned the spell. They used it. They accumulated power. They became the enforces of the god-king framework not because they believed in it but because the spell offered them the mechanism to achieve dominance.
The crossbreed dragons had almost entirely disappeared from the Titan territories by the year 850. Not through dramatic elimination but through the systematic application of the spell over a hundred and forty years. Each generation of Titan-aligned dragons had been taught that the crossbreeds represented a threat to purity, a contamination of the proper dragon hierarchy. The spell provided the mechanism for addressing that threat without the inconvenience of overt warfare.
The pixie communities were the next target.
"They should never have rejected our offer," Iapetus said, in the conversation with Crius and Coeus where the decision was being made. "They positioned themselves as independent when integration would have preserved them. Now their independence has become their extinction."
"The spell does not kill them," Coeus said, using the specific rationalization that Asmodeus had provided a hundred and thirty years earlier. "It separates them from the power that defines them. The pixies that remain after the extraction can live as mortal beings. They will not have the capacity for the magic that characterized their immortal existence, but they will continue to exist."
"Except we are extracting all of them," Crius said flatly. "Not leaving remnants. We are eliminating them as a race because they are positioned as existing outside the framework. They refused our offer. Now they will understand what refusal costs."
By the year 860, the pixie population had been reduced by eighty percent through the systematic application of the life force draining spell. By the year 900, pixies had effectively ceased to exist as a distinct race. The few survivors were scattered, their Quintessence extracted, their capacity for magic gone, their nature fundamentally transformed from what they had been.
What had begun as a spell for the accumulation of power had become a mechanism for the elimination of those who resisted the Titan framework.