Cone of Power
This too shall pass.
There was no immediate response; the others looked at each other warily. Mornington spoke first, shaking his head.
"There was some kind of Roman ritual. A massacre in Caledonia... a senatorial edict. What does this have to do with the patient?"
Osterley spoke, then.
"It wasn't a massacre, was it? It was one of the first times they tried to change the future."
Silvertown took her turn.
"The school of divination was new. The Cynics, the Stoics - the Hellenistic schools of philosophy came from the understanding that the future isn't as much of a mystery as we thought."
Beckton took back the thread of the story with a nod of acknowledgement.
"Emperor Hadrian was the first to try to use it in anger. The greatest Roman senator-oracles, working in concert, assembled a prophecy that his Ninth Legion would be lost in battle against the tribes of Britannia. Records of what then happened do not exist... could not be allowed to exist."
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Osterley spoke first - words tumbling out in a rush.
"Something's happened at base. Or the spell wa…
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I hope that my readers will have picked up, implicitly if not explicitly, that magic pervades this world. It is part of its everyday items, part of its politics and power structures - and here, we see that it is part of its history.
Operation Cone of Power is, in a rare departure from my normal naming convention, not a military operation. An occult group in England known as the New Forest coven claimed to have carried out this operation, which referred to a ritual to cause German High Command to be reluctant to order an invasion of England. No substantative account of the event exists.