The No-Longer Druid

         Candar the druid walked quietly on the site of a long finished battle.
         “I was once a king, a warrior, a general, a healer and at a time the greatest of Druids,” he muses quietly. He wears simple brown homespun cloth and carrries no weapon but a warped old staff, no fit trappings for someone who was once a king. Candar smiles at the regrowing forest, for he himself had scorched the field with his Druid fire many years ago during the battle. He is alone, though he could have a score of knights escorting him if he chose and the forest seems to roar around his ears as he walks through it, almost as if the trees remember that the simple grey headed man was once a fantastic sorcerer that had wielded the druid fire against them.
         “The poor forest,” The old druid sighs as he caresses a bent and twisted old oak. “Yes, I was so cruel, if only I had known, if only I had known. Now, I have given up the magic that caused such destruction.” More than given up, he had eliminated it. His had been the hand that spurned magic from the Earth. He had once been so awesomely powerful, yet now. . .
         “Gior, calcis mortem” He mutters half heartedly, and not a spark comes from his fingers. The choice to give away magic was right, or so it seemed. Now there were no longer mad sorcerers demanding tribute or fiendish dragons pillaging villages. The incredible force of wizardry had shaped the world for more than five thousand years and it had destroyed countless lives. Magic was gone, and with it the twisted witches in their swamps, the mischievous gnomes in their burrows, and with it the corrupt order of Druids.
         The order had been corrupted and prohibitive, straining against progress and keeping knowledge to itself. The Druids had done everything to keep magic out of the wrong hands, and yet never suspected that those hands were their own. Yet, they had done good too, and maybe they were not all bad. The Druids had kept the quarrels of the nobility away from the common folk, and had often prevented disaster through their foresight. Still, knowledge had belonged to the people and that had shown by the toppling of the Order. Now that corruption was gone.
         Candar notices that he can no longer feel his toes, and looks down to see that they are fading. The departure of Magic had taken with it all the magic from the Druids and slowly they had faded away. Now it was happening to him.
         The old Druid kept on walking, his eyes looking around him at the beauty of the land around him. Magic was gone and that had created a void. What the villagers would once call in a wizard to do, they now had to do themselves. They created sawmills to cut their wood, and catapults to decimate their enemies. Technology and Machinery had taken the place of magic, and it was no better.
         “Have we learned anything?” Candar cries to the trees and animals around him. The roar of the insects seems to give a definite answer, not the one he would have prefered to hear. Candar leaves the pleasant valley, mourning the loss of magic, not because of the loss itself, but because of what had filled the void he had created. He moved on, traversing what had once been his kingdom, going through the villages and healing what he could. Eventually the fading finished him as he followed a dusty road onto the next city, and thus ended the last of the Magic-carriers and the last of the Druids.