From then until never

Part 4, The Macbiar School

"No pain, no gain."
-Official creed of the Macbiar magick school.

The leeches was the unfriendly nickname given to the Macbiar school that appeared after Xefef in the middle of the age of magick. It started with the realisation by Xefef that they wouldn't be around to wield power forever.
'Anything less than eternity is a waste of time,' was the line spouted by some Xefef sorcerer. Soon after that they started forcing some of the weaker apprentices to learn how to treat diseases, wounds, poisons, anything that could be a threat to a sorcerers life.

The timely appearance of the new school also made it a suitable scapegoat for the ongoing factioning of the sorcerers. The truth was the cult of one was ripping the rabies' apart — a group of Xefef sorcerers is called a rabies — and they were being manipulated into doing so by Penetralia, an ancient secret society. One would have to look hard to find a group more deserving of being manipulated than the sorcerers. Since the first time a desperate non-sorcerer came begging them to use their magick to help save their dying child, the answer has always been the same. If we help you we will have to help everyone. Nevertheless, that wasn't why Penetralia interfered in the sorcerers' business. No, they were worried about the competition for power.

Now something the Macbiar school wasn't blamed for was the Eerie rebellion, but in this case they were perhaps partly responsible. The Pish rebelled against the evermore genderless sorcerers a few years after a Macbiar advancement had produced a pill gave a superficial but painless and reversible gender-swap. Since then the number of male Xefef sorcerers had been steadily on the rise.

As this was going on the competition of the sorcerers factions had in several cases escalated into outright war. When the next magick school, Loitar, appeared they had to agree how to share Macbiar advances among all sorcerers. The right to health care was something the long lived sorcerers took very seriously, while they denied that right to non-sorcerers. The solution came in the form of the Khmur gatherings. Once every decade they would come together under a continent wide truce, to compare advances in Macbiar magick.

The advances started coming in quicker when Macbiar realised that by testing on non-sorcerers they could speed up the process. Which is why the unofficial creed of the school is: "Your pain, my gain."

With all the advances made through the ages, Macbiar have never understood why sorcerers live as long as they do. Some have postulated that it has a connection to magick itself and the curse of Thaat. They were wrong. The real reason, besides Macbiar, was Fnord and their reverse-agnosticism. Death is Fnord's reward for the virtuous, and the sorcerers rarely fit that description.