:: a wiki project
The purpose of the Mage Council is to control the use of magic in Sartorias-deles in order to better human life. The control of Firesticks has been the council's most visible action for centuries.
Since recorded history, there has been a power struggle between governments that prefer total autonomy and the Mage Council.
In the earliest days, only women belonged to the Mage Council. Women were the first to recognize that the world humans had come to included other sentient life forms, and to discover access to magic. The early Council’s decisions have had a huge impact on the development of society on Sartorias-deles. For example, one of the most deeply guarded secrets of that council was the systematic purge of sexual predators. This was impelled, not just by collective anger (though that played a significant role), but also by the drive to keep humanity from being expunged altogether by the world's indigenous sentient beings, whose first introduction to the concept of evil came into the world with the humans. Only the Mage Council now knows just how close humans came to being perceived as vermin and eradicated from the world; the early mages strove to rectify the ills they were aware of.
By the time men joined the Council its main purpose was already the betterment of human life. After the Fall of Old Sartor, the Council was as dead as its members, but it was reformed by surviving minor mages who embarked on the centuries-long quest to recover what had been lost. For most of those early centuries just maintaining the basic Spells was about all that could be done. As the potential of magic slowly regenerated and old knowledge was painfully reconstructed, eventually magic could accomplish more.[1]