Europe lies in ruins after the devastating and bloody war of the beginning of the century. But this is not the Europe that we are used to seeing on maps, and not the war that we read about in textbooks. On the ruins of disparate European monarchies, magicians create their own single state, the Magisterium. People are building transcontinental liners and huge ships, developing production, and for this everyone and everyone needs not oil, as one might think, but absolute - materialized grace that drives trains and golems, on which refrigerators and artifacts work.