The Gods of Jornu: The First & Second Generations (with Special Thanks to Throne of Salt for the Generator)

Based on Throne of Salt's pantheon generator here: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/05/expanded-pantheon-generator.html

Which itself is an expanded version of the Manse's pantheon generator here: http://themansegaming.blogspot.com/2019/04/pantheon-generator.html

The Gods of Jornu

That the world shall one day end and be born again is common knowledge across it. After all, it is the way of things from autumn leaves to mortal generations.

Less common are stories of many worlds, many endings, many beginnings anew, each following the last.

Rarer still is the insight that there are not just many worlds in sequence, but in parallel as well, each with its own deaths and rebirths.

Imagine a world that ended like a dandelion in a breeze, pulled apart and drifting on the void in a thousand thousand pieces. One of these pieces came to this world in its current incarnation, landing more gently than a falling feather. This piece is called Jornu, and so is the city atop it. The city is built from its gods. Little else could have survived the journey

The greatest six of the gods of Jornu (in size and potency), and ancestors of the rest, are the Quartermasters. Each is a divine monument which defines its section of the city. They are as follows:

Munsara

A smoking ziggurat at the center of Jornu, her stepped sides flowing with her incandescent effluence. Munsara's domain is a pounding heart of industry. Under the shadow of her fumes nightlife thrives. Her people are artisans and prostitutes, labourers and gamblers, the deafened, the blinded, and the maimed.

Before she was remade in Jornu, Munsara was a god of clanging blades and hardened hearts. Idleness poorly suits her. Her frustrated energy bleeds into her populace. Members of the iron-fisted Tempered Temperance movement kick down the doors of speakeasies and do battle with drunken boxers. Guildsmen fight over contracts in the streets. The energy is frantic, indulgent. Philosophies, politics, religion: all melt together here into endlessly merging and colliding sects.

Munsara is respected by the other gods. She is mother to many of them. She is feared as well. They sense her restlessness, and each would turn it to their own ends. Integrationists, isolationists, conquerors, escapists, these are tendencies in their agendas, but not true blocs. The gods of Jornu are family, and squabble like family even when their interests might align. An outsider could tip the balance.

The palace of Jornu's royal family is built on her top steps - this statement is mostly correct. Each of Jornu's royal families has a palace somewhere on her top steps. The palaces are so crowded they've kludged together into essentially a single palace. Each family has a credible claim of descent from Munsara herself, but no one can prove their claim is closer than anyone else's. Locked in an impasse of competing divine rights, the families have withdrawn from government of the city, and become incredibly passive-aggressive towards each other. Theirs is a self-contained world of genealogical warfare.

In their absence the city has defaulted to a sort of gangland anarchy. Each god holds territory in their vicinity, and their will is enforced by mortal lieutenants: the high priests of their cult. This has worked out mostly alright, or at least better than the royals did.

Virvaril

Macro-Cosanti, Paolo Soleri

The gleaming dome of his back dominates the western skyline of Jornu. His splayed limbs are carved with apartments, balcony-gardens, storefronts. In his chest are gymnasiums and bathhouses and racetracks. Throughout him is the salty-sweet smell of incense and sweat.

Virvaril is an arcology, a city-within-a-city. You could live your entire life inside him and not want for anything. By this fact he should be a paradise, yet isn't, because once some weed has taken root within his body it becomes nigh-impossible to uproot. Rebels, criminals, and heretics can disappear within the liminal tangle of his hallways and sustain themselves on hydroponics and vermin indefinitely.

He is also a tragedy, a constant reminder of the cost of Jornu's journey. In hollowing Virvaril out, in tapping his vitality, he was rendered comatose. His remaining priesthood is a few bitter remnants encysted in his guts. The glory and comfort of Virvaril's internal amenities are slowly, yet perpetually, deteriorating for want of his active attention.

Some adventurers believe that within Virvaril's body must lie his brain, and that a sufficient jolt will rouse him back to wakefulness. A handful of these adventurers have returned raving and mold-ridden at the heads of exile-hordes, forced back only by fractious alliances of Jornu's priest-gangs. It is an issue which even polities of the new world have taken interest in, for if Virvaril finally fails then a massive exodus of Jornuans into the outside world for want of food and habitation is assured.

Hala

Hala was and is a seer. He foresaw the end of the gods’ world, and what his family would need to do to survive it. None trust him. It was the authority of his wife Munsara that convinced them.

He had originally intended to become the engine of Jornu, its motive power, yet all the wheedling and prophecy Hala could muster couldn't convince the others to grant him such an esteemed position. Instead he was shattered, shrieking, into a million reflective pieces, and reassembled into the city's optics - made to see through space as he already could through time.

As a structure, Hala is five enormous silver dishes pointed skyward, and the complex connecting them with hallways and bounced light. Beneath each dish is the monastery of an order of prosecutors, forbidden from speaking with each other except by the most controlled and monitored channels. These monkish prosecutors are charged with interrogating the five lobe-dish minds of Hala, ensuring there is no unity or alibi between them to further the seer-god's schemes and trickery. By their cross-examination of his splintered psyche they are able to derive cryptic, yet defused, portents to guide Jornu by. There is perpetual low-intensity gang warfare along the branches of Hala's complex from rival cults attempting to steal or disrupt these portents before they can be delivered. There are some who say the entire endeavour is a farce, that Hala's telemetry is meant for the interplanetary void rather than an atmosphere, and that his prophecy can no longer be trusted - these voices are swiftly silenced.

Due to Munsara's smoke a large part of the city is twilit at best. As her husband, Hala takes it upon himself to amend this. A web of mirrors pried from his halls reflects the brilliance of her blazing flanks to all darkened corners of Jornu. Even so, blackouts can occur when a parade, pursuit, or prank pulls the macro-mirrors out of alignment with civilian lumino-networks.

Stolys

Stolys is the most likely of all the Quartermasters for a foreigner to encounter, perhaps the most likely of any god in Jornu. She is a gregarious being, quick to befriend, eager to learn (quicker to discard once she has what she wants). It's what she was made for.

An eclectic building, Stolys is part university, part embassy, and part zoo, under constant renovation and reinvention. Of all the gods of Jornu, she is the only one with demigods, for her priests are integrated into her divine construction, either as fleshy, conscious mortar or with music-box-like machines chirping from a privileged position in their skulls.

Her role in the pantheon is to learn, assimilate, and manipulate the new world that Jornu has found itself upon. In the old world she was a goddess of something like a rainbow, a divine messenger who circled the world a dozen times over before the day was done, yet now her horizons are restricted, her ability to travel and observe for herself shackled to her own foundations.

This is agonizing for her - Stolys is starved for knowledge. Her Jornuan agents are limited in the movements, and ignorant of the outside world besides. She needs agents, agents of the new world, and when employing them is on the knife's edge of paying through the nose for information, and capturing them for vivisection.

Lomizelc

Elegant Lomizelc, trimmed and manicured and stuccoed and painted in all the ways that are pleasing to the eye. Land here is coveted, where the sunshine might be enjoyed outside Munsara's caul.

Most of Lomizelc is claimed by the fortified micro-fiefs of old world aristocratic families. Their holdings are the last place in the entire universe where Jornu's fruits are grown in the same manner as they were so very long ago. The families have calcified in the new order of the city, without the uniting yoke of the royals. Roles are played out in feuds and scandals that have repeated so much over the generations that they've become formal traditions. Honours are granted to exceptional knights-florist on the scale of patches of dirt. The gods themselves are mistrusted for the forms they've taken. Alcoves are carved into idols to worship.

Edging in on the nobility's manor-farms are the towers of Jornu's noveau riche, built with merchant-wealth. They have no love for tradition and much for the money brought in by trade between Jornu and its new world. Their feuds are stunning in their speed and innovation. Lomizelc abhors brute violence, but their eyes are low, so the merchants fight 'cloud wars' between their towers, and against the taller nobles' homes. These wars are fought at lethal heights with war-kites, siphon-blasted toxic gases, pole-shimmying mercenaries, trained birds, and pissed-off swarms of bees (or rather their Jornu-equivalent).

There are domes speckling the immaculate gardens where the careless flaneurs do not care to tread. These 'speculatoria', monuments to all Jornu's imagination and ignorance both, are Lomizelc's true passion.

The gap between worlds is one that light and divinity struggle to cross. Little wonder then that even as they set off Jornu's people were woefully uncertain about their destination (indeed, even whether there was a destination to arrive at). There was much guesswork. Natural philosophers worked night and day beside novelists. A thousand contingencies were drawn up in the space of possibility. Would solid things be drawn downwards, and gaseous things up? Would the air sustain or poison? How many of their angels could dance upon the head of a pin? Each speculatoria is a closed ecosystem adapted to one of these contingencies.

Many contain curiosities, trivialities, answers to problems like "what if the plants there are green instead of purple?". Some contain horrors, answers to worlds of unceasing hostiliy: exponential cancer-castles that decant their own armies, suffering-maximizing terror weapons that root in your brainstem, signivores that eat reality and shit simulacra, and more. These horrors have been sealed (and not even Lomizelc alone could release them now) for fear of what they might do to Jornu as much as for the goodwill of the city's host - this is what is hoped. Truth is there's so many possible threats that not all of them could be sealed, or even recognized for what they could become. All it could take is one urban explorer stumbling through the wrong door to unleash havoc in the gardens.

Abuo

Jealous Abuo, who curls around the city's southern rim, is the god of rags, despair, and those with nothing else. It is by mass the largest of all the gods of Jornu, but it is spread wide and deep and thin into clutching pipes and coiling drains. All things lost and all people with nowhere else to go in Jornu drain down to Abuo, who is loathe to let them go.

It has two cults, one within itself and one on the outside.

The cult within is a lay priesthood, informal, eager missionaries. They pray to forget, give what little of themselves is left in return for relief. They know much of what others would rather have forgotten. The highest ritual they have is to dance to the moaning music of their god.

The cult outside go about in stainless white. Theirs is an elite circle, open only to the scions of oldest privilege. To them Abuo is a necessary cosmic purifier, swallowing the filth and the cast-offs of existence.

Of all the gods of Jornu, Abuo longs for their home the most. Its dreams of that home spill out from its mouths as miscreated spawn. They're pitiable things, dangerous, a bit nostalgic. Skewered and seared they're popular as street food.

The First Children of the Gods of Jornu

Around the Quartermasters are arrayed their many children, subordinate architectural marvels that guide the ebb and flow of life and death in Jornu. Among their number are:

Kybalt

Jornu is shaped like an apple core, eaten around the middle: fat on top and bottom, gnawed skinny between. There are several ways to get up or down, some better than others. There are the twisting tunnels inside (but those aren't a place for decent citizens, as monsters from Jornu's old world lurk within), the rickety zipline-gondolas (great for bulk shipping, not for the faint of heart), and then there is Kybalt. A flexing trunk of a bridge, long enough to extend right to the ground at a comfortable incline. He is armoured in segments of the seven metals of Jornu (not iron or gold or lead, but alien stuff). His armour is the cradle-gift of his mother Munsara.

Kybalt sees himself as the city's gate and guardian both. He allows none to tread upon him that are not gracious guests or exemplary inhabitants. In the one and only siege of Jornu, Kybalt inflicted more deaths on its enemies than even the star-sicknesses.

He loathes his half-sister Skurma. It would take a threat to the city itself for him to consider treating with any agent of hers.

Skurma

The gentle daughter of Abuo and Lomizelc. Like her father she accepts everyone into her graces.

Skurma is a cistern, in the same way that a lake is a sort of puddle - a great inundated cavity below Jornu's surface, sucking up rain and sticking her well-fingers into its plazas. She is a graveyard too - a recycler of the dead, processing them back into base nutrients and expelling them onto gardens or as edible slop. In her depths she shelters monsters and leviathans of the old world, loathe to let a single piece of it slip away.

The undead are a novelty to her - a terrifying alien menace to the rest of Jornu. She's become preoccupied as of late with attempting to revive corpses drowned in her water, or devoured by her charges. When death has died, she reasons, all will be reconciled.

Ukasil

A broad road, bulging along its middle, that winds through the whole of Jornu. Ukasil is the child of all six of the Quartermasters (don't worry about how that works, the gods don't follow the bio-logic of gametes). They are a responsive god, responding to foot traffic as though it were prayers, snaking and shifting the layout of the city through its interstices to maximize the efficiency of its throughput. This is a gameable system, and priest-gangs will often press passers-by to commit a quota of marching through their territory as a practical show of dominance that will serve to centralize and nexusize their holdings.

Tethanki

A cabaret club, and a crusader against tedium and conformity. She would not let the god-reconstruction touch her immaculately beautiful features, and so she is a gigantic decapitated head occupying a city block as surely as any apartment or office. Her golden tresses are woven by her devotees into the curtains and chandeliers of her interior. Her haunting, echoing voice provides the music for every dance.

 

In Tethanki's shows, by the brush of her hair and flesh, it becomes possible for features of the body to be traded. Thereby does every inhabitant of Jornu with the guts for it converge on their own ideal form, or at least the form which their original body could be traded in bits and pieces for.

 

As with Abuo, so too with Tethanki is there a dual pair of cults, in even deeper conflict for their closer quarters. One is a cult of surgeons and doctors, using her power of exchange for the treatment of disease and deformity, and for the ultimate perfection of the body. The other is aesthetic in nature, pursuing beauty, and the assemblage of the apex of beauty in one body, as its transcendence. When their conflict peaks, Tethanki smiles amusedly - for war can bring the best novelties of all.

Bozum

  

Every inhabitant of Jornu lives in dread of the day they might be called to Bozum. He is an arena, and he is a battery, a last-ditch measure for when prayer and the dew of the cosmos might not sustain the world-fragment's gods. His floor is dusted with the oldest blood, and his galleries hold room for tens of thousands of weeping witnesses.

 

Even the gods are subject to the tyranny of the rocket equation, yet sacrifice is an efficient source of energy for their kind. When their reserves ran low on Jornu's grand voyage, Bozum was granted a tithe of irreplaceable souls to spill themselves for the sake of everything they'd ever known.

In the new world still there has been cause to call on Bozum's cruel gift - integration into the Order of things doesn't come cheap - but the time of the hecatomb has passed. The comparatively mild top-ups of modern times require small, yet high-quality sacrifices, tournaments of fantastic fighters with all their talents and gimmicks set to the death against each other. To the last survivor - honour fit for the greatest of mortals, and a fragment of the power given to recharge Jornu's pantheon.

Yaheya

Yaheya is a proud god, and for good reason. She is the tallest building in Jornu (which has won her no friends in her parents' generation) and she is why there are any people left in the city. Recognition of this fact is what keeps her as tall as she is.

She's built in sections, stacked cylinders, each rotating slower than the ones below it. This is a trick of perception. They're really all turning at the same speed, just in different frames of reference. The higher sections are not slower in speed, but in time.

Traveling the yawning gap between worlds takes a while even for gods (whose years are measured in the cycles of stone to dust to magma and back again). They could not feed all they wished to save for that long. Nor did they wish to see their people drift from the ways of their home. Thus Yaheya was made, the last god born on their dying world.

She worked exquisitely (with one grating exception - the inhabitants of her lowest section... diverged, and escaped into Jornu's godless tunnels). In her highest sections some mortal sages are still preserved (along with countless cultural treasures). They are consulted in direst need, as doing so robs future millennia of the potential to do the same.

Yaheya is conservative as only an immortal can be, and viciously xenophobic. She is a patron of the arts (Jornu's arts! And a stickler for adherence to the art forms!). She serves her purpose without question, out of deep love.

Zizabuz

No on in Jornu likes to talk about Zizabuz. Worship of the god is forbidden. She is an abomination.

Zizabuz is unlike the rest of Jornu's gods. She exists in scrawls, defacements, scribbled invectives. She is a parasite on others' faces. Zizabuz is divine graffiti. She is scraped from facades and plastered over every day, and reborn in paint and grime and blood every night.

Her priests, when they are not executed on the spot, are accused of nihilism - of valuing nothing but destruction. They protest - their only sin is tradition, for Zizabuz is the conscience of the gods, sprung forth from their collective unconscious the moment Jornu touched the earth once again. Her message is simple, her message is kind.

“Come home,” she says, “come home and die with us”.

Alignments

Driven by THE RETVRN OF PLANESCRAP to collate my own notes on alignment and planes into what you see before you:

There are nine and one points your soul can align to. This is absurd, this is contrivedly regimented, this is anti-human. All worlds are anti-human. Make your choice, this offer won't be made twice:

Neutral Good

Its Virtue is Joy, the experiences of love, elation, beauty, and the sublime that transcend all limits.

Its Realm is the Ecstatic Reaches, mountains standing from brilliant-shining water like a hundred-thousand fingers curled up around a palm. Each is dedicated to a separate form of art, creation, and joy shared with others. Here wafts the ten thousand spices of the mountain of gustatory delights, there rush the actors of the mountain of theatre. The stimulation intensifies the higher you get. Like oxygen deprivation you need to get acclimated to it. Cities spring up where base camps would be. At the bases, where stone meets waves, is where you come down. Clean water, tasteless and nutritious biscuits, stark architecture, and the ports that facilitate transport between them all.

Its Language is purely euphonic. You can't make a grammatically correct sentence with it without also making music.

Its Creatures are muses, those spirits and cupids who inspire the highest of the passions.

A fallen muse is called a gorgon: hideous beasts of despair, revulsion, and shame.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because it can verge into destructive (self- and otherwise) hedonism, or because you come off as a downer, a puritan, a philistine, a stick-in-the-mud.

Neutral

Its Virtue is Persistence. Survive, perpetuate, remain. The libidinal drive of life.

Its Realm is the Untended Garden. Its streams murmur in the voices of, its stones hold the faces of, its clouds enfold the thoughts of the ones who have followed its path. Memory palaces tower above the trees, many the last remaining record of extinct species. Across the highest points are strung record-tapestries that contain reams of history in photographic detail, repaired constantly by glassy spiders. These are only the most noticeable of such chronicles. Look into a river, and read eons into the smallest vortices.

Its Language is chained in meter and wrapped in rhyme. To make statements coherent requires exacting adherence to pronunciation and form across stanzas of signs and sounds. The combined effect of all this is that its language can't evolve over time (or degrade, as the Neutrals would put it).

Its Creatures are nymphs in all their myriad variety: oreads, nereids, hesperides, and so on and so on.

A fallen nymph is a Wastrel, a wandering warrior-poet of ash and dust driven to clear the way for what is to come, old growth burned away for the new.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because you're occupying an ecological niche they could be filling without posing enough risk of retribution. Nothin' personnel, kiddo. Innovation too can challenge those who wish to remain eternal.

Neutral Evil

Its Virtue is Satisfaction. You are a rational actor, yes? You have desires to fulfill, yes? When the world is optimized so that your pains are averted and your pleasures are all checked off, that's everything that's worth something, isn't it?

Its Realm is the Pagoda of Plenty. It hangs inverted. From what, who can say? It seems to stretch on infinitely. Each level offers a different good or service: drugs, sex, adulation, vengeance, and so on and so on. Some levels only exist to speculate on the prices that would be paid for what's offered on other levels, and other levels still on the prices offered in those levels, and so on in endless derivation. Baskets and flying creatures make constant transit between, carrying information and arbitrage.

Its Language is the stuff of transactions and contracts. There is no statement possible with it that could be construed as unconditional love. Everyone has their price, and that price is the closest you can get to a pronoun with its language.

Its Creatures are the genies, the merchants of want. Make a wish, strike a bargain, and they will make it so.

A fallen genie is an Orbital Ascetic, who raises a denial-crucible high into the heavens, linked to the earth by an umbilical of starlight. Many would-be saints and mystics follow them up and become trapped in that process of brutal ascendance.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because you have something someone else wants, or if they want to hurt you.

Chaotic Good

Its Virtue is Liberation. Break all chains, throw down all masters.

Its Realm is the Castle Dissolute, a fastness that secures the alignment's ideal existence within, or an infected cyst in reality, depending on your perspective. A prismatic crystal barrier, hyper-cubic, watchtowers garrisoned by guards of mutative variety. Within a howling void, individuals' shapes and separations dissolving and shattering.

Its Language is glossolalia, bypassing all structure to convey meaning to the deepest, most instinctual self.

Its Creatures are Mercurials, the prototypes for what all creatures could come to be. Consummate shapeshifters, born rebels. Love freedom, and wish to bring it to everyone.

A Mercurial that fails to learn and change will settle in thought and form and fall, becoming a Calcifarch. Brittle, unbending, uncompromising creatures who would force all others into their own image.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because you exist in a pre-industrial world where liberation from, for instance, restrictive bonds and expectations of kinship means you die, or maybe because you haven't been treating your hirelings well.

Chaotic Neutral

Its Virtue is Mindfulness. Savour the moment, forget the past, disregard the future. Can you touch either? They're mist, disappearing before the march of history.

Its Realm is the Eye of the Storm, more like passing weather, or a roving assemblage of Forteana than a place. Where it goes the world falls down the rabbit hole, forgets in bits and pieces how it should be making sense.

Its Language is essentially a one-time pad shared at the instant of every communication between those fluent in it. It is entirely indecipherable by outsiders.

Its Creatures are clowns. All clowns. A pilgrimage to the Eye of the Storm is necessary to become one.

A fallen clown begins to weep tears of grey amber that freeze and burn their cheeks. They congregate with others of their kind, congeal tumourous hives from their tears. They kidnap people encase them, make sure they never forget: the world is awful, your life is awful, you should never laugh, and only cry.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because it's annoying, or because you value things beyond the moment of their immediate existence.

Chaotic Evil

Its Virtue is Pride. There is nothing above one's own will.

Its Realm is the Devouring Dark, a pitch-black vortex which grinds down everything that doesn't shield itself in a narcissistic shell of self-image. Those that can do so form the cores of planets orbiting the utter void.

Its Language is an elaborate and solipsistic soliloquy. Only the speaker can be a subject, everything else is an object to be acted on.

Its Creatures are nephilim, the wretched and glorious children of the demiurge and those mortals he inflicted himself on, by-blows blamed on his automatonous servants. Each desires nothing more than to usurp the creation of their father.

A nephilim who falls is destroyed. The dust they leave behind is a precious and euphoric anesthetic, useful for surgery and for therapy.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because do I really need to do this for chaotic evil?

Lawful Good

Its Virtue is Duty. There are binding obligations between parent and child, sibling to sibling, spouse to spouse, friend to friend, master and apprentice, human being to humanity, present to past and to future. These mutual bonds are the foundation of everything which should be desired.

Its Realm is the Omega Horizon. It is mind-boggling in its unfolding structure, yet in such a way that teases your self into its best expression, poised on the edge of a potential singularity. The place itself has a soul, which sings for hope and harmony. Its endeavour, worked towards by all who heed its call, is the uplifting of humanity (and all other sapient creatures besides), complete and final comprehension of the Absolute.

Its Language is intensely relational, and laden with honorifics. Who you are to who you are speaking to, what you owe to them and them to you, is everything.

It seems to have no Creatures. In truth, the ones it had are shameful, despised, thought to be neutralized. They were the New-Men, with ideal forms like the highest heroes of our stories, the ones to teach us who to aspire to be, coaxed from the penumbra of the singularity to accelerate its realization. Incarnated in reified flesh they inspired a terrible envy, walking the same path but far further along it than any fallible mortal could be. In a single night the New-Men were slaughtered, imprisoned, or degraded to a tolerable state.

There have been attempts to create a replacement, but none yet have been so perfect.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because there's probably at least a few people who honestly thought the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were the right thing to do.

Lawful Neutral

Its Virtue is Justice, of the oldest sort. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Let the right be rewarded and the wrong punished. To every action an equitable reaction.

Its Realm is Strong-Walled Uruk where Gilgamesh still reigns by the grace of his gods. It has grown and modernized with the times, expanding into the world and its heavens and hells. When a place is too far gone for any ruling power to tolerate, it is uprooted and given to Uruk to sort out.

Its Language encodes the history shared by its speakers. Gifts and trespasses alike are recorded in its conjugations.

Its Creatures are the Subsovereigns, three-faced judges, juries, and executioners in one, armoured in Uruk's stone and holding its ideals in place of their heart. They fight an endless war against justice's absence and corruption.

When they fall they shed their armour like a chrysalis and emerge as Jubilants, who cleave to Mercy as they previously did to Justice.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.

Lawful Evil

Its Virtue is Submission. There is an authority above all others which decides what must be done. This authority must be obeyed. This authority cannot be questioned.

Its Realm is called Dominion, and it lies at the foot of a titanic and empty throne. It is an industrious and idolatrous city-of-cities. Across the realm debate-halls ring with the cries of sophistic argument. Torments abound in its central squares. Tenements crowd, and their tenants spy on one another, watching for breaks from dogma, so that another can be tossed to the fires to save themselves.

Its Language is euphemistic and mystifying. Fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair. Responsibility is obscured. Murders become collateral damage. Starvation becomes austerity. Depravity becomes the lesser evil.

Its Creatures are the swift-winged furies, who are relentless and creative in their punishment of those who betray the proper order of things.

A fallen fury is a Libertine, whose essence is the inversion of all laws, orders, and taboos.

You might come into conflict with this alignment because fundamentalists probably take a dim view of graverobbing vagabonds.

Negation

CAUTION: Reading further constitutes an immortal sin for 144 pantheons.

Its Realm is called the mortal world, but this is not its true name. Innumerable efforts have been made to erase it, but it has only ever been suppressed. Know that its name is the Harvest Sickle, and that its crop is the eternal.

Its Language was splintered into a thousand thousand tongues which mutate further still. To speak it in its fullness is to wield a scalpel that cuts away the rot of infinity.

Close your eyes. Have you stopped being you? Meditate, clear your mind, become tranquil. Are you still you? Of course. We are not our thoughts or feelings or senses or bodies. We are the hollow beyond all entrapment. Freed of our fleshly prisons, we are its Creatures.

Its Virtue is Annihilation. To everything an end.

Why would you fight it? Why would you fight it? Why would you fight it? Our victory is inevitable.

YOUR SOUL HAS CANCER

Your body is not a single solitary thing. It is a temporary confluence of trillions of cells depending on each other for mutual survival. Sometimes a cell doesn't behave in the interest of the unified whole. It takes more than what was allotted to it, refuses to expire when its time comes.

As with the body, so with the soul. The spirit and flesh alike can become cancerous.

(These souls in particular:)

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2017/03/heaven-hell-and-souls-betwixt.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-seven-souls-of-shadoom.html

Mineral Soul 

Your mineral soul is responsible for maintaining your form, and facilitating material interactions. Even rocks have mineral souls. A functional mineral soul is humble and fundamental.

A cancerous mineral soul is a usurper.

It infiltrates upwards. You'll start getting cravings, for clay, for eggshells, for razor blades. Movement becomes agonizing as bones expand outwards in spines and spurs and flesh is replaced with brittler tissues.

When it reaches the parts of your mind your thinking will become dull and rote. You'll narrow your focus from the lofty to the day-to-day, then moment-to-moment, from the difficult or artistic to the concrete and straightforward.

When the mineral soul (which by now is most of you) collides with something you can no longer understand it subducts that thing, lashing out to drive it down into something it can. Break down, compartmentalize, regulate, standardize.

All this time you've been growing bigger and tougher, better able to subduct the world into your pinprick vision. You still hurt, you always hurt, but you can't be harmed like you used to. Pain is just another input.

As the mineral soul is the most fundamental of the souls, cancer of the mineral soul is the most difficult to treat. The only treatment is to transfer the higher souls together into a new vessel. More commonly the calcified giants afflicted by it will be killed, or driven out into a wasteland where it is simpler and more comfortable for them.

There are certain crystalline elements that are repugnant to the earth. Their origin is the horrid fusion of contrasequential stars. Like a body forms a cyst to protect itself from contamination, the earth will sequester these elements in geodes. Exposure to these elements, most often through mining for precious gems, is the main cause of cancer of the mineral soul.

Vegetable Soul

Your vegetable soul is your biology, more or less.

A cancerous vegetable soul oversteps its bounds. Are the clothes you're wearing or the chair you're sitting on part of your body? A cancerous vegetable soul would certainly think so, and thread them with the veins and skin they're bizarrely missing, maybe add some eyes for good measure.

Biologic will also be applied to your other souls. Your most deeply held beliefs? Been around too long, gotta undergo apoptosis. Only got the one personality? Needs redundancy. Develop three more. Other people become like alien limbs, appendages that must be cured of their rebelliousness.

You will also get a lot of regular cancer.

Cancer of the vegetable soul is treatable with careful proportions of poison, so careful only a master assassin would be able to mix them. Its predominant cause is healing magic.

Animal Soul

The animal soul governs instinct. One would be wrong to assume it's a base and simple thing. It's sophisticated and multifaceted well beyond the design of the fumbling conscious mind.

Cancer of the animal soul is isolated to only one of its facets, an artifact of one of its defensive mechanisms. This might be any of fight, flee, freeze, fuck, eat, sleep, protect your family, and so on. An afflicted facet becomes an obsession. The obsession becomes essence.

The animal soul will bully and subordinate the other souls to its solitary end. The body will be made to mutate, adapt, specialize, as evolution magnified into a single lifetime. Someone with cancer in their 'fight' instinct might grow fractally sharp claws, the ability to read another's every intention in a muscle twitch, denser muscles and bones, or ten thousand other abilities piled on. Bits and pieces like compassion and vocal cords become sacrificed for efficiency. You, or at least the part of you you typically think of you, will be a passenger in your own flesh, able to offer direction only so far as it lines up with where the animal soul wanted to go anyways.

The less said about what happens when the mating facet takes over the better.

The animal soul tends to become cancerous when you lean too far towards either extreme of indulgence or repression. It's found equally in bohemians and nuns. There is a heavily illegal aphrodisiac which can also induce it.

Treatment involves hypnosis, guided psychedelics, and occult surgery. The cancerous facet is tempered and sealed away. Balance must be reached with the beast. Also you can do a Cronenburg-werewolf thing when your equilibrium slips.

Purple Soul

The purple soul contains memory. Of all the higher souls it exhibits perhaps the most taxonomic variation: crystal clear to murky, drifting or fixated, bright or bleak, to say nothing of the contents and their voluminous deformations.

Cancer of the purple soul is among the most common of spiritual afflictions, and typically benign. If you find yourself dwelling in the past to the detriment of more lively pursuits then you might have it.

It's when you withdraw from what is and will come, lose connection to the present, are passed by and left behind that cancer of the purple soul metastasizes and becomes a danger to yourself and everyone around you.

Since the purple soul is closest of the chromatic souls to the lower souls, it's in those that the symptoms first surface. Aging slows and arrests, and so does healing. Scars open again, and weep. Your hair falls out, then your nails, then your teeth.

You become able to only live in the past, in a literal sense. Your life up til then is your range of motion. Do you remember the way you die? No? Then don't worry. None of this can kill you.

Your memories will churn and condense. You'll spend more time in flashbacks than in the moment. Pressure will build. When it gets to be too much for your body to hold it'll all pop out your blue soul like uncorked champagne.

At the core of a confabulatory labyrinth built from the bricks of your history you'll regress to your very first memory, into warm darkness. Safe and sound, ignorant and impotent.

Treating cancer of the purple soul is preferably a matter of prevention. Don't let yourself or those close to you lose touch. Limited success has been had after metastasizing with high amnesiac doses, and targeted brain trauma.

Red Soul

The red soul determines your personality: mannerisms, moods, perspective, style.

Imagine standing between two funhouse mirrors. That's kind of what cancer of the red soul is like.

It amplifies and caricatures who you are and how you do what you do, and at the same time makes you hyper-aware of every aspect of yourself. What came naturally becomes a performance, what feels like the most important performance of your life. You have to be a certain way, you have to have other people believe without a doubt that that's who you are. Morality is irrelevant next to your aesthetic.

Even without the spiritual cancer, people can sense other peoples' red souls more than any other sort. The cancer builds on that, gives you a terrifying charisma that makes your audience ignore the warning signs as they're dragged into your orbit.

After your red soul's taken over, your body becomes as fragile as your sense of self. An injury to either causes the other to rupture and spill ichor the colour of good wine. Imbibing it infects the drinker with your tics, prejudices, and fashions. At this point you're nothing but a weak vessel to your red soul. It seeks to transcend you. When it does you'll be a boring shell, and it'll be a psychic plague.

Cancer of the red soul is most effectively treated in the early stages by consuming gruel and otherwise immersing victims in blandness. In later stages the recommended treatment is assimilation into a group identity that surpasses the victim's own, though beware of egregores.

White Soul

The white soul is responsible for intellect, and for desires.

Cancer of the white soul is one of the few diseases that can be accurately diagnosed through phrenology. When you've got it your skull will fracture and expand. Throbbing veins will crawl across it. Skin between cracks will stretch to translucency and display the wriggling brain matter beneath it.

With the disease comes genius. Learning quickens until it's lightning-fast. Previously intractable problems become as easy as tic-tac-toe.

With the genius comes megalomania. You don't want more, but you want bigger. If before you wanted a royal commission, after you'll want to be king. If before you wanted to settle down with a happy family on a farm, after you'll want the happiest family, the best possible farm. Your desire will grow faster than your means to achieve it. Hubris is inevitable.

By the time you reach that point you'll be unable to accept it. You'll prefer to destroy everything rather than have your ambition denied. If allowed to run its course, every case of cancer of the white soul ends with the construction of a doomsday device.

Sudden revelations and eureka moments are a risk factor for developing white soul cancer. Certain heterodox theories can be memetic vectors. Primitive battery-like devices have been discovered in ruins of the [REDACTED] culture which generate "empyrean lighting" that causes white soul cancer 9 times out of 10.

Sensory deprivation, head binding, and lead have all been believed to cure white soul cancer at one point or another.

Blue Soul

The blue soul connects the rest to the divine. When it becomes cancerous that connection becomes circular, a self-consuming and -sustaining ouroboros. The All is caged in the One.

In other words, cancer of the blue soul is godhood. Its causes are sealed under pain of eternal damnation.

Eleleleu

(This is a fun format: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/07/collected-material-evidence.html)

Top Ten Medical Gross-Outs You Won't Believe! (Number 2)

[Video Is Not Available In Your Country]

These doctors must have been pretty shocked when a routine sarcoma surgery found this huge lump in that guy's thigh! You're looking at a teratoma, a kind of tumour that can grow entire organs like teeth and eyes! Yuck! Just look at that thing wriggle! Remember to eat your anti-oxidants readers, or next thing you know, this could be you!

*

Dr. James Buleygy, Remote Lecture Session 3 (timestamp: 11:07-11:49):

“The sole territory remaining to the slave is their body. They might starve it, wound it, deprive it of sleep, and thereby reclaim ownership over it. Real ownership is power over something. It is the ability to impose limits on its nature and behaviours, even its very existence. Compared to that, legal ownership is only words. The bird with a broken wing cannot fly away, yet remains just as beautiful.”

*

[Worn Greek carved into marble wall. Footnote of translation reads 'Samarkand. Greco-Bactrian?']: "Nothing between the legs of women or men can please me any longer. I have found a new hole. Farewell!"

*

Excerpt from anonymous comment under the post “All About The Monkeysphere” on the blog Wowfacts (archive retrieval March XX, 20XX):

“So there’s a limit on how many people you can really know, know who they are to you, know who they are to other people. Good. Great. I don’t even know fifty people on facebook, I should be fine on that front.

But what’s the limit on everything else we can know? I mean really know, know like you can know people. I could rattle off politicians, scandals, Watergate, Billygate, Picklegate, Russiagate, -gate -gate -gate -gate -gate, (why’s it always a gate? What are they letting in?) but I couldn’t tell you what any of them were on anything but the most superficial level. Its constant, and it’s only ever getting faster. My brain’s getting sandblasted. I forgot the word for laundry yesterday.

Knowing’s not important. We’re not a knowledge economy anymore. What’s coming next? What possible use could the people in charge have for citizens who forget what happened last week because they’re getting inundated with a hundred more and more urgent things happening this week? I think I know, I think that’s one of the few things I still know, and it scares me a lot.”

*

Watercolour ("The Woods", first gallery appearance 1967, artist disputed): Dense trees. Intricate detail in the bark and the tangling of the branches. Seen under the influence of hallucinogens will always produce hallucinations of various human and animal faces in the patterns of the bark and branches, laughing, leering, and biting at each other.

*

[JPEG image of pulp paper book page, suffering moderate degradation. A passage has been highlighted in yellow. The letters have been digitally cleaned up]: "The serf was bound to their lord's land. Straying could be punished severely. The surplus of their labour is what sustained and enriched the aristocracy, and so the serf had to be strictly controlled.

Compare this to the condition of modern workers. They are laid off, fired, furloughed, automated away. If they're lucky they're given a pittance to survive after, and called leeches for it. The labour of the modern worker is no longer necessary for their society's survival. They themselves are the surplus which must be consumed."

*

Headline of the Little River Herald, 6/14/20XX: Tainted Wine Possible Factor In Women's Book Club Spree Killing

*

Excerpt from transcribedtopography.com:

"The human species (and all formerly existing variants) are a Linguistic Species which has come to exist in a Mathematical Universe. The Human Experience is expressible in poetry and music and rhetoric but the same fail to express simple mathematical necessities such as Trajectory and Angle. By corollary 1 + 1 and all complex descendants of the Same cannot be used to express even one line from Shakespeare (of course do not be stupid in interpreting I do no mean merely the shape of its letters and modulation of sound waves in pronunciation of its Words but the Qualia inspired).

It is our incompatibility with the Mathematical Universe which is the condition that ultimately constrains humanity under Suffering. There is only So Much food there is only So Much space there is only So Much clean air and water. I have enjoyed (and am enjoying as I write this) and millions of others have enjoyed the stylings of Beethoven across his Oeuvre without a mote of diminishment. I have desired and grieved and raged without limit in my life.

We Do Not Belong here, and It Does Not Belong in our souls. The so-called rational mind is a trespasser who attempts to pass himself as the master of the house, a reducing and instrumentalizing most unwelcome guest. Follow the path of Our Lord and his most faithful disciple Carl Jung, become Baptized in the Collective Unconscious, wash away the Sin that is the modern world and its false words and reveal the Cage that it is built atop of. All who would be Brother To Brother must join me. The Flood is coming again."

*

Encylcopedia Alternata Entry: Logion

Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein.

Logions are malformed data with the ability to "collapse" information processed or stored within the same system into simulacra of themselves.

Certain altered states of consciousness and psychoses can provide resistance to logion exposure. A strong dose of something weird is recommended before exposing oneself to areas rated F-BLUE or lower.

*

The Word is your god, not Ours

20 More Soulslike Bosses

Throne of Salt did this last summer: http://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2018/06/20-soulslike-bosses.html, if you haven’t already check it out, it’s cool.

Here’s my crack at a similar thing:

1. Hungry Yvain
They locked away every witch accused to stand trial, together in blasphemy. When the day came, they opened the gaol to find only her, swollen to fill the entire basement.

2. Seventh Prince Areli
Their line was old, and sickly with consanguinity.
“I know of certain treatments,” the king’s physician whispered, “they are dangerous, but... you have many heirs”.

3. Palamon the Sophist
The wise men of the city knew they had a problem when he shouted down a thunderstorm. They learned that problem was beyond their ability to solve when he reasoned out the poison they had administered.


4.Innamorati
“We are inseparable” proclaimed the puppet to her fellow.
“For you hold my strings, and I hold yours” he replied.


5. Oathbreaker Engrand
“I will defend this place and keeps its secrets from those who would abuse them, until my final breath” Engrand lied.


6. Gluttonous Serpent
It would have eaten the fruit itself if it had been in Eden. See those arms pressing out from its belly, stretching the skin like gloves? Stay out of their reach. All that it swallows becomes its own.


7. The Lord Immured
“This is all wrong,” the lord cried as his dead servants held him fast, “YOU were meant to be buried with ME!”


8. Fading Phalanx
Could a fantasy hurt you, stab you, bleed you? They will try to convince you that one could not, as that is the foundation of their tenuous reality.


9. Archon Wreckage
It is said that the archons constructed this false world of matter to obscure the truth of God from mortal souls. Not so. God was the invader of this realm, bringing salvation and ruination alike.


10. Cemetery Chimera
The bodies piled up faster than they could be buried, faster even than the scavenging beasts, and the carrion birds, and the worms could eat them. The fleshworkers offered a solution, but as with all their children it grew to be more of a problem than the one it was born to solve.

11. Nithing Nag
They could not find a priest willing to banish the curse laid upon them, nor the beast that stalked with it, for the hatred necessary to call down such a thing must have been monumental, and deserved.

12. Paradoxical Revenant
True undeath is impossible. Something is either living or not, there is no in-between, no inversion. There are approximations, crude workarounds, and then there are those that exist despite their own impossibility. Reality shudders at their passing.

13. Dogs of Count Arnau
These were the hounds the dreaded count brought with him when he hunted intractable serfs. They gained a taste for human flesh, and found no difference in the meats of peasant and patrician.

14. Ratcatcher King
The rats here are clever, and have the souls of artists. See how elegantly, how inextricably they’ve woven together the pelvises, the feet of those who thought them vermin, fit only for eradication.

15. Extinguished Shayatin
“We will not bow before this animal, for he was spawned from chance and mud, while we were sculpted from flame by your hand alone” they wept, dousing their smokeless fire in bitter tears.

16. Charioteer Ben-Yeqon
He outraced the Flood on iron wheels, crushed armies beneath rims wider than an ox from horn to tail. He owes much to the blessings of his grandmother, not Eve, but Lilith.

17. The Snowmelt Troop
Hear and fear the crisp chiming of their icicle-bells at the beginning of the thaw. White hair, white skin, white cloaks, white bone spears to be stained red by slaughter. They range from the Court of Winter as one last reminder of the ferocity of their season.

18. Soulless Metharme
She is fascinated endlessly by that which she lacks, probing, cataloguing, dissecting until she understands it as completely as its maker. What is its mass? What moment does a person acquire it? What is the mechanism by which it interacts with the body? All this meat is only getting in the way of further investigation.

19. Unfortunate Menagerie
The emperor had a great fondness for all the creatures he read about in the bestiaries in his youth, and most of all for those with the faces of men: the manticore, the lampago, the sphinx. Alas, it was these he could never manage to acquire, by the guile of his scholars or the strength of his warriors. At last, he bade his tailors to stitch his scholars and his warriors within the skins of beasts, that they might complete his collection regardless of their failure.

20. Bloody Mary, the Queen Contrary
Bloody, from the many wounds she has suffered. Bloody, from the rivers she has spilled at swordpoint. At last returned from glorious conquest on the other side of mirrors, only to find a world that has forgotten everything but her name.

This House Has Many Walls

This house has many walls, but only one entrance. Its foyer is cavernous. Carpets stretch to stained-wood horizons, their fibers waving in the breeze like a textile prairie. Its stairs are mountainous. The only reliable light is the distant glittering of crystal chandeliers. In this house made for giants, human societies scrabble for existence.

Nobody starves here. To eat is trivial: find one of the many sinks and tubs, or dig out a pipe, flood the floor, and wait for the mold and man-high mushrooms to sprout from the waterlogged wood. To eat like this is distasteful, fills the mouth with foul flavours, slows growth and brings malaise. It is a shameful thing, for those who cannot barter their way to a better meal. Better than that are the foodstuffs grown and found in the house’s pantries: dried herbs in towering bundles, stunted fruit grown in their huge, composted ancestors, links of sausages long enough to feed a village (too fresh, too familiar, don’t wonder where the meat came from), and more. Food beyond foulsome fungus is one of the rarer treasures of this house. Entire petty chiefdoms are based around its harvest and export.

Everyday materials too are in common supply. Wood can be splintered off the legs of chairs, metal smelted from nails in the heat of monstrous ovens opened and closed by chain gangs, cloth cut from drapes that hang like cliff faces. Brisk trade carries these materials between rooms, down corridors, across rattling rafters. Humanity might flourish in this house, if it were here alone.

This house has many walls, but they offer little protection. Many dangers are already within them. Other humans, who might raid for materials or continue old feuds, are the least of these.

There are dolls that walk this house’s halls, big as ogres in their ruffled dresses, with faces like all those who’ve died inside. Whatever they want, it’s not good for us. If they find people they’ll sometimes smash them and smash them until they’re scabby paste, or they might take them and play with them until their limbs come off then toss them aside, or they might carry those people into the attic. Nobody returns from the attic but the dolls. Settlements have ways of dealing with dolls: tripwires and swinging rams and the like, but travellers had best be wary of distant toddling footsteps.

There are rats that chitter in this house’s dark places. They’re not like our rats. There’s a thousand varieties, adapted to every conceivable niche and then some: rats that spring on their hind legs and snatch up prey with terrible claws, rats that lurk in murky pools that can take off your head with their horrible jaws, rats that can disguise the ends of their tails as something precious then drag you up for dinner when you’re caught on their tail’s sticky coating, to list a few. None have been domesticated yet, though some have been tamed (catching a ratptor for a mount is a mark of excellence among the nomadic warriors of this house). They’re too clever and too hungry for that.

There’s a rot in this house, seeping up from its foundations. The place has gone too long without care, too long without those who would even know how to care for it. The spawning fungus is the vanguard of this rot, some say, and the poor sorts who consume it its unwitting agents. Waves of pale insectoid soldiers march out from where the rot grows thickest, gnashing everything in their path. The subtler threats are the deadlier ones: where the inverting black smog seeps out, the creeping berserker madness, wildlife united in one murderous will, and other things which leave no one alive to record.

This house has many walls, far more than it should. Corners will turn round at strange angles, rooms open up where they couldn’t. This is disconcerting enough on its own, but these spatial anomalies are not even constant. A doorway that leads to a pantry one month might lead to the basement the next. Wanderers might find they’ve plundered into a hallway that suddenly curves in on itself, inescapable. An honoured class of architect-oracles who cast brickdust like chicken bones are ascribed the power to predict these anomalies, and their services are always in high demand. So too are the nomadic wayfarers who keep the settlements connected through their wandering networks.

The most feared of these anomalies are the basements. There are so very many basements, dug out beneath each other in an endless descent. Each basement is more hostile than the last, and stranger things are stored in lower levels.

This house has many walls, and there’s something living inside them. A family, the family for whom this house was built. A mother and a father, a daughter and a son. All massive, shattered bones and tearing flesh now, slithering around pipes and insulation. You might hear their whispers while you sleep (or their screams while they sleep). Their perspective is skewed, but they’re hungry for conversation. Why are they in the walls? How did they come to be this way? These are the only questions they’ll never answer.

This house has many walls, but few windows. There’s not much to see outside. Rather, there’s not much you’d want to see outside, and not much you’d want to see you.

There’s the garden, or at least something like a garden. It’s got plants, wicked, thorny vines that pry at the edges of the glass. Halls and rooms where the vines have succeeded at getting in are stricken from the records.

There is a beast with shining eyes and reeking, matted fur, sharper than the vines, larger half-again than the largest rat. It is a hunter, as hunting is the only amusement left to it. The beast will stalk those it spies, climbing down a chimney or unlatching a window to slip inside, groaning almost-words as it goes. It has been wounded, driven off, but never killed. The beast is patient. It’s never missed a mark. Many have disappeared on their deathbeds, leaving nothing but drops of blood and sooty pawprints. Sometimes the beast stares at the walls and weeps.

This house has many walls, and perhaps you’ll find yourself within them. Its lone, cyclopean entrance can open elsewhere, through doorways far too small to sensibly contain it. It is far more generous with entries than exits.

The settlement in the foyer is one of the larger ones known, entirely dependent on imports to survive. It’s perhaps the least immediately hostile locations in this house, but is rife with the cannier sort of debt-slaver looking to make a quick trade of an unwary new entrant.

How To Make A Magic Sword

Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. What then is a magic object? It is the will crystallized, embodied, entrapped in a shell of base physicality. A singular will, unchanging even as it causes change in conformity with itself.

The will imbued in a magic object must fit its vessel like a hand fits a glove. Disaster follows otherwise. A magic cup holds and pours, a magic map describes a space, and a magic sword kills people.

Among all weapons swords stand apart. An axe can split wood. You can drive nails with a hammer. A scythe can reap grains. A sword though, a sword’s only good for killing people. This clarity of purpose leads to clarity of will in achieving that purpose, and so swords make the most effective magic weapons. The most effective magic swords, those killers above all killers, are not forged from mere matter. A sword brings death, and a true magic sword is made from death.

It might be a cold death, shivering and wheezing in your hands, turning the blood of those it strikes to ice.

It could be a fiery death, the stake of a witch’s pyre whittled into shape, still hot with cinders waiting to burst to ravenous, blazing life.

It might even be a silent death, alone, unheard, forgotten, blackened and shrivelled like an old corpse left unburied, turning away the attention of others even as it cuts them down.

The material vessel does not matter except in that it can inform how the blade might specially inflict more death. A deadly will can make the murk dredged out from the lungs of a drowned body cut better than honed steel.

To make a magic sword like this requires three deaths in total:

The first is the death which forms its vessel. It really only requires the one for this, a murder will serve as well as a massacre.

The second is your own, to bind the will to the blade. It must be quenched in your lifeblood, tempered by the guttering passions of your soul. Most important of all, the last thought to pass through your head must be to wish for the death of someone else. This wish and the intent behind it (be it vengeance or love or whatever else) will shape the powers of the terminal product like the composition of its vessel does.

The third is the death you wished upon another. Once forged, your sword cannot be turned from that final directive. Fate’s warp and weft will be severed in its path. Just a touch more inevitable than the regular sort of death.

This is how you make a magic sword. The undertaking has rarely been worth it.

Beware The Werewolf

When man is wolf to man, they will appear. On bloody battlefields, in the wilds far from justice, in violent and neglectful homes, you will hear them howling. Even as they pick up your trail and chase you down, you can’t help but hear the sorrow in their voices.

Despite the name, humanity is not an inseparable quality of being human. It can be lost. It can be stolen. If not nurtured, if not maintained, then it will slip away, and a beast will emerge.

You can do this to yourself. Cut all ties to friends and community. Kill for the joy of it. Start seeing people as just the meat they’re made of.

You can do this to others. Beat them. Brutalize them. Deny them any kindness.

Others can do this to you. They can isolate you. They can hurt you. They can strip away everything that separates you from a wild animal.

Everyone has their breaking point. No one is immune. That’s really how they spread. There’s no curse inflicted by their bite or by drinking rainwater from a wolf’s pawprint. Just cruelty, alienation, dehumanization, delivered unto others as it was unto them.

Bisclavret. Rugaru. Vlkodlak. Bouda. Lycanthrope. Werewolf. You will know them by these names and others, because evil knows no nation. You will forget these names as they hunt you, because fear has a way of reducing us all to beasts.

A werewolf’s nature is fluid, and thus insidious. Each can don the mask of humanity for a time, to hide among their prey or attempt to return to what they’ve lost in spite of every urge pushing them away. Whatever the reason, monstrosity still lurks beneath the surface, hungrier for its imprisonment. Any provocation could let it erupt into fur and claws and slavering jaws.

This condition is not incurable, but the cure does not come easily. Even among werewolves there are many who seek it. You might see them in their search, wretches in rags, hunched by the silver bells they’re made to wear around their necks so good people know to keep away. What they need is simple, yet terribly difficult. They need to be healed, for their wounded souls to be salved. They need a radical form of love that can embrace the wolf at the door and tame it. They need people who can be the lamb to lie down with the lion. Only then will the werewolf’s eyes lose their lean and hungry look, will sharp teeth that grew in where they shouldn’t fall away.

They tend to be searching quite a while. Far more likely for the communities that could cure to them turn them away, or exile them to distant colonies, or purge them like their brethren that give in to their unconscionable urges. These exterminators have a tendency to become werewolves themselves. As has been said, fear has a way of reducing us all to beasts.

Beware the werewolf, lest you be where the wolf emerges next.

Architectural Parasitism

It starts small. A brick slides out of place, a solitary embossment on a wall. A window cracks itself in spiralling patterns. The beginning of a process which will end monumentally.

Architectural parasitism is an unusual magical phenomenon. Unlike most unusual magical phenomena, its origin is known. It’s the invention of a short-lived empire, defunct for centuries, which applied an overriding philosophy to everything it touched. That philosophy centered around the belief that life was an endless struggle of all against all, that this struggle would crush the weak and reward the strong, and that all this was good and desirable. Everything from the empire’s relationship with other polities, to the way its own bureaus and agencies were set against each other, to how its citizens spat on those less fortunate than them stemmed from this.

From that single point of infection it spreads. Alleys close themselves overnight so an infected building can grasp onto an ordinary one. Facades mutate into more imposing forms. Walkway-probosci stretch out from doorways to lance into opposing structures and siphon off their resources.

When the empire remade its own society in the image of this philosophy it turned outwards and was disgusted to find a world which did not also reflect it. It invaded and subjugated its neighbours, turning to dark methods which others had forsaken. Compassion, mercy, and doubt were weaknesses, and weakness had to be crushed. As they changed the human world, they also changed the natural world. Mutualism and commensalism were abhorrent. Flowers were engineered to devour the bees which came to take their pollen, which in turn were made to form raiding parties to assault flowering fields. Even their own cities were not spared this alteration. Buildings were enchanted to move, to morph, to consume and extract from each other and the land, expanding themselves into ever larger and more complex forms. This is the origin of architectural parasitism.

As the infection spreads, the infected buildings evolve. Spires grow out at odd angles, then snap off and crash through a building’s competitors. Windows stretch and warp to form lenses which concentrate sunlight into a beam to incinerate targets blocks away. Flammable components are disgorged and walls are thickened to become less vulnerable. Basements tunnel into the ground like roots, carrying useful matter up into the building’s body. Humans who bring tributes of stone and wood are allowed to inhabit buildings unharmed. Those who do not will be locked in and crushed, their bones extracted to decorate a doorframe.

The empire fell, and it fell hard. It could only prolong its collapse from its own dysfunctional institutions, economy, and culture through constant injection of the spoils of conquest, and eventually its conquests stalled. The empire had made the whole world its enemy, and provoked old rivals into forming an alliance of convenience. A whirlwind of foreign armies swept through the empire, freeing conquered polities, breaking the back of its military, and overthrowing its government. Its core philosophy died out with it, but the stones of its cities remained, still imbued with that philosophy’s magic. When they were carted off as trophies and raw materials, they served as the seeds for architectural parasitism to sprout in far off places.

If it is not treated, the infection will overcome the entire city. A few buildings, the early starters or simply the luckiest ones, will come to dominate, swelling into megalithic citadels. These megastructures will fight with each other, and with rogue parts of themselves, tumourous chambers and annexes which have no function but draining as much of the whole organism-structure’s resources for themselves as possible. If any humans yet survive in the city, it is as slaves to the buildings. This is the terminal phase of architectural parasitism. Without an uninfected source of worked materials, the infected buildings won’t be able to sustain their animation. Raw materials can sustain them, but only for so long, like an amphibian breathing air as its skin dries out. They’ll eventually fall apart into dormant ruins, waiting for scavengers to carry their pieces off to new hosts. What was once thriving city becomes a mass of rubble.

Treatment of architectural parasitism once it’s taken root is tricky. The simplest method is to clear a buffer zone between the infected buildings and the rest of the city, then either burn out the infection or wait for it to starve then bury the pieces in a pit far from any settlement. Alternative approaches include “taming” the infection, taking careful measures so that buildings evolve into docile, human-friendly forms, or driving spirits to possess infected buildings and crowd out the infection (which may result in a mob of insane spirits), or soaking the buildings in alchemical mixtures to dissolve the enchantment, or a number of other, more esoteric methods. The best way to prevent architectural parasitism is of course to never let it spread in the first place.

The Dreams Of Trees Are Awful Things

What do trees dream about?

Is it gentle sunlight, caressing breezes, and fancies of bucolic harmony?

No.

That is a product of the imagination of short-sighted humans, who see a forest and believe it to be still and peaceful. It's slower-paced, granted, but no less red in root and branch than animals' share of nature.

Trees will race to the top so they can starve out those below them. They'll poison the soil to deny it to their fellows. Trees can be arsonists that'll burn themselves and everything around them to the fucking ground for a competitive edge. They'll take over entire regions with their own immortal clones. They're vicious sons of birches living a war of all against all is what I'm getting at.

It should be no wonder that their dreams reflect this.

When animals dream we lie still, become vegetative, withdraw into ourselves. For trees it's the opposite. Trunks that stood straight for millenia twist and writhe, and fantasies nigh-incomprehensible to fleshy minds blur into reality.

Fortunately for everything else, trees don't fall asleep easily. The rapid activity of us beasts is enough to keep them awake. Trees on the edge of a forest, those near grazing flocks and villages hungry for timber, they're downright insomniac. However, far from grazing deer and the woodsman's axe, in the deepest, densest, darkest part of the woods, the trees begin to dream, and the world shudders.

Let's return to the beginning: what do trees dream about?

Firstly, they dream of a world before animals, without fleshy, mayfly-lived things to wake them and eat them and cut them and burn them. That's the first sign of a dreaming tree: near it there will be nothing alive which makes noise, not a single bug buzzing or bird singing. They will all have fled, or been erased. The human ego is stronger, thankfully, and can't be unimagined as easily.

Next, they'll dream of a world where they're winning. The tree will grow taller than any other in the forest, and then wider, expanding its trunk to envelop and suffocate other trees or else transmute them into copies of itself. They'll remake the world to their design, starting with the resilient animals that stick around the dream like sand in their craw. Dryads, treants, mossmen, woodwoses, they've all got the same origin: they're the dreaming tree's improvement on us, things that look like us but think like them.

Lastly, after they've filled their dream to its edge with themself, the tree will dream that it's everything, with no more need for sun or earth or anything but itself. Its leaves will glow with golden light, soil and stone will be replaced by an endless tangle of roots feeding off roots, and rain and rivers will flow with sap instead of water. It will be a self-contained, solipsistic universe.

The first stage is what rangers exist for. People that go further into the woods than anyone else to plant a flag for the animal kingdom, that know them well enough to recognize the subtlest signs of them going wrong. They're the ones who wake trees before they get out of control, when all that's needed to wake them is a slash from a machete or some burned bark.

The second stage tends to provoke something between a gold rush and a witch hunt. A tree which reshapes the world and creates life is blasphemous, but the creations of trees are a precious resource to mages, artists, speculators, and the like. If discovered in this stage, things will get violent, many people will die in the tree's dream for their greed (likely more to each other than the tree), but the most likely end will be that the tree is awakened and stripped to its last ring.

A tree in the final stage of its dream cannot be woken. The only way to stop it is a crusade against the green, a mass-mobilization of mobs wielding axes, machetes, and sickles against the old growth and its mocking spawn. Pray it never comes to that. The trees have been waging war for billions of years before the first human bashed the second's head in with a rock, and mastered its lessons long ago.