Unlike every other nonelemental school of magic, Chronomancy doesn't come from Toletska. Instead, it was invented on Salenzis.
In 2:1422, High Researcher Livia Sestia Cana of the Imperial Order of Mages wanted to know what time it was. She had locked herself into a windowless room with no clock, for the purposes of uninterrupted work. She could have simply exited the room and looked outside, but she knew that she would be accosted by those of lesser rank than herself wishing some insight of hers on this or that. She would have none of it. So, she ended up distracting herself from her primary work with this new task.
"At least," she would reminisce in future, "the distraction was on my own terms. And I got something out of it. More than I could say for some prattling apprentice's inane questions."
As any good researcher, Sestia Cana took copious notes, but she was rather infamous for going much too far with it, recording her every thought, no matter how fleeting or how much of a non sequitur. Students studying her work in the future would giggle at the fact that her impetus to begin - the formulation of what she would later call Chronomancy - from a base of Hydromancy was that she had to pee. Being by training a geomancer, Sestia Cana had to rely on formulaic scrolls to test this new magic, which was just as well, since she used formulae to deduce it, as well.
Beginning from Hydromancy made sense to her. The Empire used water clocks managed by hydromancers to keep accurate time into the night and on especially overcast days. Furthermore, by Sestia Cana's time, the metaphor of time 'flowing', as a river, was well known. Starting with this base of formulae for the control of liquid flow, she added on photomantic sigils referring to the positions of the sun, moon, and stars, and geomantic sigils that referred to the rotation of Maikros.+Yes, Second Age Salenzians understood the heliocentric solar system. Since the Empire came, Astronomy had always been one of the sciences most pursued by Salenzians - first in search of their lost gods, then simply out of having such a rich tradition of it.
She kept adding and adding sigils and operations, in a manner that she noted was rather recursive, until she got to the point where, after many tests, she believed she could tell the time with magic. The paper she cast this from was about 45cm2.+Not that Second Age Salenzians had anything resembling the metric system. I'm just Canadian. It used enough iss that she could only cast it for a second before reaching the known recorded limit that would anger the iss spirits. But cast it she did, and for that second, she knew the time. It was roughly 11h night+~4:00 am in terrestrial hours on the 21st of Nefarious Bandit. She actually went and looked outside to confirm, completely forgetting why she made the spell in the first place. Luckily, no apprentices were simply wandering around so close to sunrise.+They had better things to do. From there, she trimmed the formula, compressing entire circles into sigils using complex operations. She ended up having to invent some sigils, as well. When she finally got the spell down to a manageable size, the time was 3h day on the 22nd.+~8:00 am From such humble things as telling the time,+which lead to the standardization of hours across the Empire Sestia Cana and others eventually expanded this new school into other time-related matters, such as slowing and speeding up, even localized reversing. Precognition+only really useful within a few seconds, predictions start to become more and more inexact as the time gap widens, eventually becoming a fog of possibilities came soon after, expanding on that original time-telling spell. The zenith of the school of Chronomancy was the invention of time travel. The events surrounding the testing of this magic were understandably confused, but the result was the unilateral decision to implement heavy regulation of the school.
Only thirty chronomancers were permitted to practice within the whole Empire, and today, each country's mage guild sets its own number, usually around five to ten. Even then, almost never are these sanctioned chronomancers permitted to learn time travel. The secrets of that remain locked away in the main branches of only two mage guilds - the Prophan and the Igionese. However, the Black Cloaks have gotten their hands on some of the lesser chronomantic knowledge - what else they may have derived from that can only be speculated upon by Salenzians.
In 2:1422, High Researcher Livia Sestia Cana of the Imperial Order of Mages wanted to know what time it was. She had locked herself into a windowless room with no clock, for the purposes of uninterrupted work. She could have simply exited the room and looked outside, but she knew that she would be accosted by those of lesser rank than herself wishing some insight of hers on this or that. She would have none of it. So, she ended up distracting herself from her primary work with this new task.
"At least," she would reminisce in future, "the distraction was on my own terms. And I got something out of it. More than I could say for some prattling apprentice's inane questions."
As any good researcher, Sestia Cana took copious notes, but she was rather infamous for going much too far with it, recording her every thought, no matter how fleeting or how much of a non sequitur. Students studying her work in the future would giggle at the fact that her impetus to begin - the formulation of what she would later call Chronomancy - from a base of Hydromancy was that she had to pee. Being by training a geomancer, Sestia Cana had to rely on formulaic scrolls to test this new magic, which was just as well, since she used formulae to deduce it, as well.
Beginning from Hydromancy made sense to her. The Empire used water clocks managed by hydromancers to keep accurate time into the night and on especially overcast days. Furthermore, by Sestia Cana's time, the metaphor of time 'flowing', as a river, was well known. Starting with this base of formulae for the control of liquid flow, she added on photomantic sigils referring to the positions of the sun, moon, and stars, and geomantic sigils that referred to the rotation of Maikros.+Yes, Second Age Salenzians understood the heliocentric solar system. Since the Empire came, Astronomy had always been one of the sciences most pursued by Salenzians - first in search of their lost gods, then simply out of having such a rich tradition of it.
She kept adding and adding sigils and operations, in a manner that she noted was rather recursive, until she got to the point where, after many tests, she believed she could tell the time with magic. The paper she cast this from was about 45cm2.+Not that Second Age Salenzians had anything resembling the metric system. I'm just Canadian. It used enough iss that she could only cast it for a second before reaching the known recorded limit that would anger the iss spirits. But cast it she did, and for that second, she knew the time. It was roughly 11h night+~4:00 am in terrestrial hours on the 21st of Nefarious Bandit. She actually went and looked outside to confirm, completely forgetting why she made the spell in the first place. Luckily, no apprentices were simply wandering around so close to sunrise.+They had better things to do. From there, she trimmed the formula, compressing entire circles into sigils using complex operations. She ended up having to invent some sigils, as well. When she finally got the spell down to a manageable size, the time was 3h day on the 22nd.+~8:00 am From such humble things as telling the time,+which lead to the standardization of hours across the Empire Sestia Cana and others eventually expanded this new school into other time-related matters, such as slowing and speeding up, even localized reversing. Precognition+only really useful within a few seconds, predictions start to become more and more inexact as the time gap widens, eventually becoming a fog of possibilities came soon after, expanding on that original time-telling spell. The zenith of the school of Chronomancy was the invention of time travel. The events surrounding the testing of this magic were understandably confused, but the result was the unilateral decision to implement heavy regulation of the school.
Only thirty chronomancers were permitted to practice within the whole Empire, and today, each country's mage guild sets its own number, usually around five to ten. Even then, almost never are these sanctioned chronomancers permitted to learn time travel. The secrets of that remain locked away in the main branches of only two mage guilds - the Prophan and the Igionese. However, the Black Cloaks have gotten their hands on some of the lesser chronomantic knowledge - what else they may have derived from that can only be speculated upon by Salenzians.