> Greentext

This actually makes for a great sci-fi writing prompt! TLDR: I started writing cause I was bored, and stuff got out of hand.

Long ago, humanity discovered the element Obscurium with the innate ability of capturing and holding lightning. Ancient sculptors discovered a series of runes that, when carved into slabs of the element, allowed them to manipulate the lightning. Cults of Wizards developed, focused on creating ever more complex spells with the runes. Different cults saw beauty in different classes of spells: The Sages developed practices to imbue the stones with memory, and developed complex architectures to store and retrieve any information at a whim, giving them the power of shaping humanities collective memory. The battle hardened Order of Warlocks trained for years to become proficient in manipulating enormous amounts of data, creating spells that could solve any practical problem in seconds. It is said that some warlocks even claimed capable of imbuing the stones with an artificial soul. The more proletarian Order of Sorcerers believed the magic of the stones should be available to all, and created interactive artworks that allowed the non-initiated to communicate with the stones, and feel some of their power.

While these cults gained much power, they remained beholden to two small groupings. One was a group of Hermit scroll compilers, who dedicated their lives to the discovery of new runes, and the creation of translation scrolls that translated wizards' spells into the language of the runes. These were loosely organised in the Order of Scrolls. The other was the Order of Sculpting Monks, whose monasteries were the only places where lightning could be harvested, and runes could be carved into the stones with the required precision.

For many years after the discovery of Obscurium, humanity prospered. The conflict beholden "Nation States" of old gradually dissolved as the global Orders gained power and kept each other in balance. The first major conflict occurred when a monastery of the Sculpting Monks broke with established doctrine. For years, the Monks had worked to carve ever more complex and specialised runes into their slabs, but the monastery of the far eastern island of Taketomi had begun simplifying their slabs, creating dense meshes of simple runes. These dense meshes gave the slabs fascinating Azure-Red-Magenta colour patterns, giving them the name ARM's.

The global head of the Order of Sculptors, seated at the Monastery of Intelaken called this out as heresy, and claimed "These Simpleton slabs will be forgotten in the archives of the Sages". However, soon some of the Hermit scroll Compilers had written translation scrolls for the new ARM's, and even promoted them to the wizard cults as GNU's (Genuinely Necessary Utilities). The wizards discovered that the new, simplified slabs required far less energy, allowing them to perform more powerful spells before reaching exhaustion.

Seeing this, the Intelaken Monastery proclaimed the Monks of Taketomi as excommunicated. They used their vast monetary funds, and were capable of the nigh impossible task of bribing a few of the Hermits of the Order of Scrolls to write scrolls dedicated only to their slabs, and only providing the scrolls to paying wizards, thereby breaking their oath to provide humanity with Free, Outstanding Scroll Stuff.

With tensions rising, the Wizarding cults began to fracture, unable to decide who to support. Some wizards saw the magic of the stones as their birthright, and supported the provision of scrolls to only a select few. Others, especially many members of the Order of Sorcerers, fought to make the power of Obscurium available to all. However, the Order of Sorcerers knew that their true power was in creating intuitive and beautiful structures that made it possible to use the spells developed by the Warlocks and Sages, and that alone, their power was fleeting. They also knew that laymen were largely unaware of this, and as tensions were rising they began to seek allies among the laymen to support them in the conflict they saw on the horizon.

What the Sorcerers didn't anticipate was that in the fracturing power-base of the global Orders, some of the "Nation States" of old, ruled by laymen, which had long since been replaced by the global Orders of Wizards, Hermits and Monks, began to re-emerge. With tensions at a peak, the re-emergent Nation State of Miklagarðr on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean launched a surprise attack on the Monastery of Taketomi. They had recruited a break-out band of Warlocks to infiltrate the archives of the Sages on Taketomi. The Warlocks attempted to extract the secret to the ARM's, but were countered by powerful shuffling spells, making the archives unreadable to them. However, in the final moments before their destruction, the leader of the band, known only by his battle-name Strostrup the Bear, cast a corruption spell, destroying the archives.

With their archives destroyed, the Monks of Taketomi could no longer manufacture the GNU ARM's, and chaos ensued....