Garden Historical Database

Entry H/01:

The Origin of the Sorceress

"Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,

So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.

If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,

I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,

And will let the dead go up to eat the living

And the dead will outnumber the living!"

The Unmaking of the Hero Gilgamesh: Tablet VI, 6th Stanza.*

*Queen Ishtar of Uruk is commonly believed to be the oldest written depiction of a Sorceress, with these cuneiform tablets dated to more than 24,000 years old.

The Sorceress is commonly known as a woman of incredible magical power, who often uses it to inflict suffering on others. They have existed for all of written history and seem to defy all established laws of physics according to their capricious whims. This has led to them being worshipped and vilified depending on the circumstances of the times, and much of their true origins are impossible to separate from their mythology.

Most lore pertaining to the Sorceresses states that they are directly related to the Great Hyne, that he imbued women with this power as a way of hiding himself away from a vengeful Human race who had rebelled against their creator. While corroborating religious texts is a goal that is too difficult and contentious for us to do, it seems apparent that the powers of the Sorceress come from outside of the natural world.

The Biology of the Sorceress

Most assume that a Sorceress is merely a woman with extraordinary magical talent, attributing their powers to a vague mysticism or minor genetic variance. The truth of the matter is that Sorceresses are biologically distinct from baseline Humans, despite the fact that they receive their powers after birth and no evidence suggests that pre-Sorceresses are in any way not Human. There is also the fact that Sorceresses cannot naturally interbreed with Humans, and must pass on their powers to other women in order to die when wounded or passing more than a century in age.

Sorceresses are taxonomically referred to Homo Sapiens Vicissitudo and classed as a distinct sub-species of Humanity by biologists. There is fierce debate in some circles as to whether Sorceresses should even be considered biologically related to Humans at all, as they are not genetically obliged to take what we would consider a Human form.

The body of a Sorceress is in a state of constant flux seemingly determined by their mental state, meaning that they can change the shape of their musculature or bone structure by thought alone. Our best example of what this entails can be found in the Materia Medica, a 600-year-old surgical text still referred to by modern students as a cornerstone of contemporary medicine.

The author (Shennon Ba'at of Centra) describes being ordered to perform a vivisection upon the dying Sorceress Ephebalah as she was suffering from seizures resulting from her 'extended communion with the watching spirits' (now believed to be one of the first examples of brain damage caused by overuse of GF).

Shennon describes the operation thusly:

"The incision primaris was made below the stomach, in the hopes of alleviating the Sorceress' convulsions by a purging of the liver.

Upon opening the abdomic cavity, we discovered to our horror that the Sorceress possessed nothing we could recognise as a liver. The inner cavities of the Sorceress were in constant motion, twists and knots of flesh sliding over one another like eels in a pond.

No digestive organs could be found, and the flesh within seemed to be serving no purpose we could recognise. Investigating further we could not locate the Sorceress' lungs, heart or stomach.

We were left with little choice but to seal the incision and continue to observe her condition externally."

A Human woman with no heart, stomach or liver is commonly referred to as a 'corpse' in medical parlance, yet the Sorceress appeared to be fully alive (if incapacitated) at the time. She never regained consciousness and died more than eight days later when a serving girl got too close to her and unwittingly became a conduit for the Sorceress' powers.

Shennon Ba'at requested the right to perform an autopsy, and the newly crowned Sorceress Caltheae consented. Ephebalah's autopsy revealed a perfectly normal set of organs belonging to a healthy middle-aged woman. No trace of what he referred to as 'riotous undulations of mindful tissue' could be found. Ba'at could not confirm his suspicions as the serving girl-turned-Queen of Centra could not be convinced to go under the knife herself (the most effective anaesthetic available at the time was a quick hand, so nobody questioned her reticence).

More substantive studies have been difficult to find, as Sorceresses are naturally secretive and aren't particularly inclined to respect any authority but their own. It has been confirmed that live Sorceresses can temporarily survive attacks that would otherwise result in an instantaneous death, so we can assume that a lack of concrete organs is a consistent feature of Sorceress physiology.

The Sorceress Perdita of Dollet famously wandered the wilds for two days after an earthquake with a caved-in skull, dropping dead on the outskirts of a nearby village after being discovered by the female schoolteacher who inherited her power. Her loyal retainer Benthos Achton described her as 'relatively lucid' the whole time but obsessed with finding a female, obeying a need which seemed to override all others.

These anecdotes demonstrate the inhuman nature of the Sorceress adequately but do little to answer the question of where they come from of how they do what they do.

Sorceresses of Historical Note:

The Sorceress Ishtar:

Commonly depicted as the Mother of Sorceresses by those cultures who tell of her, Ishtar is believed to have lived in ancient Centra around 26,000 years ago. She is most famous for her role in The Unmaking of the Hero Gilgamesh, the oldest known written story.

She was pledged to the High King Gilgamesh, who refused to take her as a bride as he was obsessed with the injustice of death. His anger at the prospect of oblivion caused him to seek out the Great Hyne and demand that he remove the spectre of death from the world.

Ishtar was said to be so wounded by Gilgamesh's disdain for her that she petitioned the Great Hyne to help her take her vengeance against him. Gilgamesh eventually chased the Great Hyne from the world, but not before Ishtar's wish was granted.

The story says that Gilgamesh and Ishtar are fated to fight each other for all eternity until Hyne returns, but archaeological evidence has led modern historians to believe that Ishtar died at some time between the telling of the story and the formation of the modern Kashkabald Desert nearly 1500 years later.

The Sorceress Ghidorah:

While the legend of the Sorceress often portrays them as being possessed of an almost supernatural beauty, there are notable exceptions. The Sorceress Ghidorah (also known as The False Hyne or She Who Is Many) is perhaps the most striking. Stories of this terrible being are mostly taken from oral histories and traditions collected from the area now known as Western Galbadia.

According to local folklore Ghidorah was said to be a vicious and cruel woman who ritually killed and consumed the powers of the other Sorceresses of her time, changing her form to that of a terrible monster.

Eventually the stories say that she was so sated on human flesh that she fell into a deep sleep, lasting long enough for the townsfolk to cover her sleeping body with a great mountain, trapping her forever. Other stories have them separating her home from the mainland, turning it into an island. One particularly fanciful story says that her entire kingdom was forced to the bottom of the ocean by a freak storm caused by the sleeping Sorceress' own nightmares.

Cave paintings supposedly depicting the Sorceress often portray a monstrously large and winged serpent, often sitting in the middle of a blackened hurricane. Some portrayals depict her with more than one head, possibly a reference to her defeated rivals.

The Sorceress Nimue:

While there are many Sorceresses whose histories are clouded in myth, the story of Nimue is informative as it highlights one of the key reasons these mystical women are so greatly feared.

The story of Nimue comes from ancient Balamb and has been a part of local folklore for nearly 5,000 years.

The story goes that Nimue ruled the entire island in ways no more or less cruel than any other Sorceress of the era, showing a great affinity for water magic that ensured bountiful fishing and fertile fields for many years.

She supposedly ruled for 100 years before she felt the urge all Sorceresses feel to seek out a replacement. Rather than succumb to her fate she instead went into a murderous rage, ordering all women on the island to be killed. Her soldiers (fearful of her wrath) followed her evil commands to the letter. Aided by her perverted magical powers they embarked on a terrible purge, drowning girls and women of all ages as their Sorceress commanded.

The legends state that it was the Sorceress' holy Knight Oisin himself who defeated Nimue, cutting her body into distinct pieces and burying them all across Balamb. The legends state that Nimue's spirit remained within each part, and the place her head was buried was so tainted by her rage that it became the famous Balamb Fire Cavern.

Modern geologists state that the Fire Cavern is a naturally occurring magma chamber, but Balamb locals (SeeD trainees not withstanding) avoid the Cavern at all costs.

Nimue's disquieting legacy is the realisation that Sorceresses are only loosely bound to mortality by their urge to seek out a new host for their powers. They do not visibly age or wither and are only kept from true Immortality by an instinct that Nimue could apparently disregard with sheer force of will.

The Sorceress Temuj:

Temuj (known as Chinghiz Khanoum to most historians) was a Sorceress born in relative poverty, one girl among many in a small nomadic tribe. She is believed to be the daughter of a chieftain, though there is little in the way of conclusive historical evidence to pin down exactly who her parents were. Temuj's tribe were a very small and somewhat unimportant group for the time, and she appears to have come by her Sorceress-hood via a random interaction with a roaming vagrant.

Sorceresses often lived solitary lives in Temuj's society and were thus often absent from any clan records. Therefore, we have no effective way of tracing her lineage from a magical standpoint. It would appear that Temuj spent at least two years hiding her newfound powers so as to avoid being cast out from the clan. She was known as a canny political thinker and seems to have found her way into a position of leadership before the knowledge of her abilities was made known.

Indeed, many historians state that Temuj was unique among Sorceresses simply for the fact that she endeavoured to use her powers as little as possible. She instead relied on political intrigues and limited scale conflicts with nearby clans to increase her standing.

By the time of her legendary alliance with the Mercenary King Artos of Krem, she had already absorbed more than 40 local clans into her own. She focused on utterly destroying their individual identities by executing all clan leadership and forcibly separating families into discrete camps organised by gender, with children being raised in the Female camps and soldiers being trained in the Male ones.

While such practices may seem barbarous by modern standards, they were actually considered rather lenient by the standards of the day.

Her magical abilities were only rarely called upon in actual combat, and then only under tightly controlled situations that allowed crucial political figures within her army to be reminded of her power. She used this to cultivate a series of firm alliances among her generals, all of whom knew that any daughters they had might inherit the Khanoum's power. Eventually she was succeeded by the Sorceress Vorem, thus beginning the Centran tradition of the Sorceress' Right to Rule, a tradition that persisted until the Empire's eventual collapse.

The Sorceress Athelia:

Centra's last Monarch, the Sorceress Athelia was a product of the Eternal Empire's deeply ingrained class structure. She had been groomed to receive her powers from infancy, and was told time and again that she was the apex of all Human life.

It is little wonder that she ended up believing this herself.

She was not an overly cruel or unjust ruler, no more than any other at the time. In fact Athelia was known for her supreme disinterest in the administrative functions of her nation, preferring instead her own studies mixed with a rigorous social calendar. She was also an avid collector of Guardian Forces, creating a rotating cadre of 'Court Summoners' to ensure that she herself did not suffer adverse effects from extended GF use.

Her ultimate fate is unknown, but she is believed to have been killed in the Lunar Cry that destroyed the Centran Empire.

What small historical accounts remain imply that in the months preceding the Cry, Sorceress Athelia had retired from public view to a hidden laboratory somewhere in the Central Wilds to perform some sort of magical experiment. Frankly the quality of information pertaining to Centra's last days is vague and chiefly anecdotal, leaving the fate of Centra's last Sorceress as little more than baseless speculation on the part of modern historians.

The Sorceress Adel:

The 'Red Witch of Esthar' had most of the records pertaining to her early life destroyed upon seizing control of the state, but historians believe she was born in the immediate aftermath of the Lunar Cry which devastated Centra and even did some structural damage to Esthar itself. This tumultuous event became the catalyst for a wave of political dissident movements which would further destabilise the fragile peace that had persisted in Esthar for several decades.

At the time, Esthar had a ruling council of elites selected for their technological, financial and industrial contributions to the fledgling Mega-City. While in theory this Technocratic system was supposed to ensure that decisions were made by those most qualified to make them, in practice it merely created an entrenched upper class of increasingly wealthy people who mostly used said power for their own personal enrichment.

It was in this atmosphere of discontent that the young Adel grew up, eventually finding her way into one of the local political movements as an agitator and enforcer. Her first real appearance in Estharian politics was as a lieutenant in the Kyuto Unionised Workers Party, working directly under the group's leader Klatchko Volkov.

Surviving members of the group describe Adel as utterly unphased by any request made of her, up to and including violence or terror. She seemed to possess little in the way of scruples or ethical considerations and was frequently called upon to be the Party's 'problem solver'. Given the fractious and often violent atmosphere of the time, her profound capacity for violence was commonly employed and gave the KUWP a reputation for extremism and thuggery among the more established political blocs.

Indeed, they likely would have remained a small-time revolutionary cadre swept away with time were it not for Adel's untimely ascension to Sorceresshood. She and a collection of party-members broke into the estate of Shedar Unas, then the Minister for Non-Industrial Infrastructure. Unknown to anyone but top-ranking members of the Government at the time, Unas was in fact a Sorceress who had chosen to keep her powers hidden from the public at large.

Somehow Adel managed to kill Unas in her own home and was amazed to find herself the conduit for the dying Sorceress' powers. There are no survivors who can speak to what happened next, but Adel destroyed the entire Mansion in a devastating magical explosion and returned to Kyuto triumphant. Within a month she had assumed control of the KUWP and dramatically increased their activities. Converting the political cadres into terrorist cells seems to have been Adel's primary concern, and indeed this seems to have been taken up enthusiastically by many of the Party members.

She began planning wide-spread terror attacks against military and police targets, using them as a cover to personally assassinate key members of the Government with her newfound powers. While the public were concerned with Adel's methods, discontent with the government was so high that as long as she kept targeting government buildings and military checkpoints, she enjoyed high public support.

It is believed that there was at least one more Sorceress living among the societal elite, as Adel's powers seemed to grow enormously over the next year. She destablilised the government sufficiently that the ruling council was forced by an increasingly bitter public to resign in disgrace. Those who were intelligent enough to flee the country were mostly left alone, but those who attempted to remain in Esthar often found themselves 'remanded into custody' on fabricated charges and never seen again.

After more than two years of struggle Adel crowned herself as Esthar's sole ruler, ensuring that there were no political bodies with enough power to contest her claim. It was only then that the people of Esthar would know what a poor deal they were getting, as the Sorceress' newly formed Secret Police (led by KUWP members who had shown extreme loyalty to her) began cracking down on all other political organisations, silencing the press and dismantling what few anti-corruption bureaus might have enough power to watch her affairs too closely.

Despite being a despot through and through, Adel did not throw away something that she could use if necessary. Many of the engineers, scientists and industrialists who had once made up the Societal Elite were allowed to remain alive, placed under permanent house arrest and ordered to continue their work for Esthar. Many of the KUWP members she had worked closely with found themselves heading up newly formed government agencies. Knowing Adel's capacity for violence more intimately than most, they worked to fulfil her will as closely as possible so as to avoid her wrath.

Adel ruled Esthar in this fashion for decades, creating whole generations of people who had little to no knowledge of the outside world. They were thoroughly indoctrinated by Adel's ever-present state media service, little more than a propaganda network compared to foreign sources (which were banned within Esthar).

In spite of all this, the people of Esthar did not work especially hard to protest against this state of affairs, and probably would have remained happy to continue under Adel's rule had it not been for the series of events that culminated in the First Sorceress War.

It seems that at some point Adel became obsessed with the idea of cultivating a successor that would both inherit her power and enshrine her legacy. To this end she embarked on a campaign of utter terror within her own nation, enacting mass kidnappings of female children across the nation and subjecting them to 'testing' and experimentation. After five long years of horror, she started sending the Estharian military out into the wider world in search of more 'candidates'.

This sparked open war with every other major power, and in the first six months Esthar's gains were undeniable. While they were uninterested in taking and holding territory, they dramatically outmatched the standing militaries of Trabia, Dollet and Galbadia. This state of affairs would continue until the Galbadian Republic provided emergency powers to then Secretary of Defense Vinzer Deling which necessitated a significant upscaling of the Galbadian military response.

The Republic quickly found itself subsumed by Deling's military junta, and Galbadia was soon able to mount semi-effective counter attacks that forced Esthar to adopt different tactics.

As Esthar's military spent more time away from home, the political situation within the state began to become fractious. The same political climate that had allowed Adel's KUWP to gain power gave rise to dozens of resistance movements broadly following the same templates.

Many of the technological engines of the state ended up secretly contributing to the resistance in one form or another. By the end of her reign, Adel's government had been so co-opted by Resistance members that the Sorceress Memorial (a machine specifically designed to trap Sorceresses) was financed by Esthar's own Military Black Budget. It was sold to Adel as a conduit for enhanced testing and evaluation of prospective Legacy candidates, and it was this aspect that lured her into the machine that would eventually be known as Adel's Tomb.

While she spent nearly 20 years held in orbit in a technologically induced coma, Adel was briefly returned to Esthar in the closing days of the Second Sorceress War, where she was successfully killed by an elite SeeD strike team.

The Sorceress Edea:

Edea Kramer is known to the world at large as the instigator of the Second Sorceress War, as a power-hungry dictator who orchestrated a military campaign responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

For SeeD however, her history requires more nuance.

Edea Kramer came by her powers in at the age of five and her parents advised her (like many Sorceresses of her time) to live as quietly as possible. Sorceresses living alongside Adel were at risk, either at the hands of a vengeful public or possibly as a potential source of power for Adel herself. She currently lives in Southern Centra (precise location redacted for security purposes) but travelled extensively in youth, meeting Cid Kramer when he was working at a refugee centre in Eastern Galbadia. The two of them worked closely together organising supplies and housing for people displaced by the War, with Cid acting as a teacher for the camp's children.

Eventually they realised that the reason the war had been especially brutal was due to Adel's pathological need to seek out the perfect replacement. In essence, the Sorceress was the problem, not the soldiers. Edea saw the need for an organisation specifically trained and prepared to neutralise Sorceress-level threats, and that traditional nation states were unable to provide one.

As the war came to a close, Cid and Edea began forming the Garden Organisation, a training ground for beyond-elite soldiers of fortune that would sustain the Gardens in preparation for the day that they could embark on their true mission as an Anti-Sorceress Task Force.

Following the conclusion of the Second Sorceress War, it has become clear that Edea's instinct was correct. While her own legacy has been tainted by the intervention of [REDACTED], Garden acknowledges the immense debt it owes her. The Sorceress has since given up her powers and retired to a life of seclusion, her location kept hidden to the world and guarded from outsiders by the White SeeDs.

The Sorceress Rinoa:

The path to becoming a Sorceress is rarely predictable, and the world's only (known) living Sorceress did not willingly take on the responsibility. She was a civilian under the protection of SeeD who came into possession of the Sorceress Edea's power during the pivotal 'Battle of the Gardens'. As most Sorceresses only pass on their power upon their deaths, the process by which Rinoa Leonhart (then Heartilly) took on the mantle of the Sorceress caused her to fall into a coma for some time, awakening only after the Lunar Cry.

How much of her medical trauma was due to the transference of powers is impossible to gauge given the intervention of [REDACTED], but she has agreed to act as a research subject for SeeD medical staff looking to learn more about Sorceresses.

Her SeeD obligations are purposely kept to a minimum though, as she holds political office as the Galbadian Senator for Timber and the surrounding territories. As a political figure she tries to play down her Sorceresshood as much as possible, leading some commentators to teasingly refer to her as 'The Soft-Power Sorceress'.

Her main political aspiration is the full independence of Timber and its surrounding territories, an issue that often causes her to lock horns with other Senators who hope to keep the territorial gains made by Vinzer Deling.

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The Sorceress Ultimicia:

The Chief Architect of Time Compression, a catastrophic folding of all linear time into a single unchanging moment bringing an end to all life as we know it. The data we have on her is frankly precious little, and what is available is mostly supposition and anecdotal evidence as given by the SeeD team that killed her.

We know that she will be born at some point in the future, and that she will successfully conquer the world (including SeeD) before turning her sights towards Time Compression. While her motivations cannot be ascertained, the sheer magical power needed to perform such a feat would be nearly incalculable. The SeeD strike team that travelled to her domain reported having to fight and kill multiple Sorceresses as they went. It is unclear as to whether these were living Sorceresses working as subordinates of Ultimicia, or merely fragments of her own power.

As Sorceresses rarely coexist or collaborate in any way without the stronger killing the weaker, we believe that Ultimicia may have absorbed the latent power of all living Sorceresses in her time, using them to fuel her own Time-based magic. Some have even speculated that the true effect of Time Compression was to absorb the power of every Sorceress in all time periods, creating a sort of Ur-Sorceress Entity.

While reports from the SeeDs who killed her describe some truly awe-inspiring displays of power, it seems unlikely that Ultimicia was truly capable of such strength, or at best that she was incapable of utilising this power fully.

After all, they did come back to tell the tale.