At first, there were a few who, whilst outwardly normal, began to manifest strange abilities in their extreme youth, such as the ability to set fire to objects, or to levitate themselves above the ground. Many of these gifted individuals were killed as abominations and affronts to nature in the more puritanically fundamentalist communes. The forces of natural selection, aided by human rejection, played endless games of chance, using the lives of hapless sports and mutants as playing tokens. Most of these sports were sacrificed on the altars of new religious fundamentalism.

However, as more useful talents came to light, such as the ability to divine water in the desert, to see and delineate areas of high radiation and to cause the clouds to part or the rain to fall, these mutants became ever more highly prized and their practitioners were accorded high status, as religious strictures were thrown aside.

The most successful magic-users were protected from the harsh working conditions of the fields and were protected by their communities, although still shunned by the genetically "normal". Thus those with the gift survived and throve, their genes protected and strengthened by breeding with other gifted people who were their only real friends.

As the townships grew in affluence and wealth and magic became more accepted, the first guilds of magic sprang up to seek out and to foster the powers and sleights that might reside within the populace. Education and prosperity began to flower anew, and the spate of deformed children and stillbirths steadily decreased as the remaining breeding stock of humanity was slowly and painfully whittled down to the most hardy and resourceful individuals. Magic never became commonplace, but it became a valuable resource in the pursuit of the rebirth of Civilisation. Technology was but a dim memory, but it remained a source of hatred; a phantom with which to frighten fractious children.