Camaran outlaws the working of magic. Most outsiders read this as superstition in a nation of clockmakers. It is not superstition. It is the memory of the Volari foundries.
Around 3340 SD the republic still hired magic to do what its engines could not. A dry decade had thinned the rivers that drove the Volari pumps, the largest ironworks in Camaran, and the foundry-magisters wanted water that did not depend on the weather. A junior magistrate named Doravin Selmari signed the contract. The work went to Selvaro Mellin, a Deoric works-adept who had inscribed water-charms for the deep mines for years and never lost a crew.
Deoric is the titans' tongue, and it reshapes the world by spending life. No mortal adept speaks it whole. What Camaran's masons and miners called Deoric was a reconstruction, pieced together from worn inscriptions, with whole regions of its grammar marked uncertain by the very people who taught it. Mellin meant to bind the cost to himself, a few years off his own life for a season of water. The scoping term he used was one of the uncertain ones. He believed it meant this body. In the fuller tongue it meant this ground's living.
The command, once spoken, took its price from everyone the foundry quarter could reach.
They did not fall at once. The first morning, the draft animals in the Volari stables would not stand. By the second, the old were dying in their beds while the water rose clean and cold from the new shafts, exactly as it had been commissioned to do. On the third day the magisters understood what was paying for it and broke the inscription-stone with hammers while the well still ran. By then the wards around the foundry held something near four hundred dead, and a city that had learned at a stroke what a spoken word could cost.
The well at Volari still gives water. It is good water, cold and clean, and no one in Camaran will drink it. The houses around it stand empty by law. The republic keeps the quarter as it was found, the doors standing open and the looms still strung where the weavers left them, so that no magistrate who walks past it can ever again mistake a command for a machine.
The survivors named it the Camaran Blight, borrowing the word from old stories of the Blight of Arcanus, the cataclysm an age of the world earlier that ended the great Deoric mages. The borrowing was grief, not history. The Camaran Blight killed a few hundred people in three days in one foundry quarter and changed nothing in the wider world except a single republic's law.
That law was absolute and is still in force. Camaran wrote the practice of magic out of its statutes entirely and drew no line between the Deoric that had emptied the Volari wards and the elemental schools, which spend no life but the caster's own. The lawmakers were foundry families and grieving magistrates, not magicians, and they did not trust the distinction. Educated Camarans understand it well enough. Saying aloud that some magic is safe remains, two generations later, the surest way to end a career in the republic.
Doravin Selmari did not end his. He testified against his own signature, paid the fine the new statutes set for it, and then spent forty years making the ban the spine of Camaran's law and of his own life. He is First Consul now. The veto he cast against Echea, a gnomish magocracy of elemental casters seeking entry into the Aldriktch Trade Alliance, was the same signature he had put to the Volari contract, written the other way.