Surprise MYC attack!
As always, thanks for the color theory goes to the delightful and diligent
@Lealope.
One instant, you are minding your business, doing whatever it is you normally do; the next, you are somewhere else. The transition is sudden, but not jarring, and you are as apprised of your new surroundings as you were of your previous, without any active effort on your part to become situated. Thus, you are instantly aware that you are floating in the midst of a sort of bright fog, illuminated by five lights: one great arc of light in the distance that encircles you, and four points of light hanging in the fog. One in particular...either approaches you, grows larger in size, or both, it's hard to tell. Regardless, a moment later, it resolves into a human figure, formed from dancing tongues of white fire.
Even as far away (or as small) as they are, you can see their posture seems almost contrite. In another moment, they grow larger, or closer, until they seem to match your size and are at a comfortable speaking distance. They don't open their mouth, they don't even really have a mouth, but they do emit a sort of harmonic, textural reverberation that part of you is able to intuit the meaning and emotion of. There's a heart-palpitating note of fear and utter desperation underlying everything, but also an abiding hope and determination. Encoded in the song, there is also an enormous quantity of neatly packaged information that you're able to quickly parse into a suspiciously familiar offer.
This being, who you now know can be safely called Qlahlaha, has summoned you here, to the realm of Solium Mentis, and in particular to the Ideal Space which forms its outermost limit, in order to offer you a considerable fraction of their remaining power, taking the form of embers. These can then be expended to acquire various magical abilities, arrangements of circumstance, and objects of power that exist within this realm's possibility-space. In return, they only ask you aid them in their quest to defeat evil, and especially in their struggle against the Great Attractor: another being native to this realm, one of complete amoral selfishness and whose power is poised to grow beyond this realm's capacity to contain; thus allowing them to overflow its bounds and escape into the broader cosmos, where they will no-doubt wreak untold havoc in their eternal search for even greater power. In approximately 2133 years, the Great Attractor's power will grow beyond any hope of overcoming. That might normally seem like plenty of time, but considering the yawning chasm of a power gap separating Qlahlaha from the Great Attractor, you get the feeling that you might end up cutting it uncomfortably close, should you choose to accept this quest at all.
Exactly how many of Qlahlaha's embers you'll receive depends firstly on where they will be sending you.
Choose one Insertion Point, and receive the associated number of embers. If you later choose the Central Limit Drawback, ignore your choice here and gain 5 embers, plus the 3 embers provided by the drawback.
[ ] Return Home (1 ember, incompatible with Drawbacks other than
Heroism) - Qlahlaha is desperate, but they aren't cruel. If you aren't willing to help them, they will send you back to wherever they summoned you from. This will require a moderate expenditure on their part, not to mention the effort they will have to invest to summon someone else, but even so, they will spare you a single ember, or three if you are willing to take on the mantle of Hero, as well as some tweaks to your ontology to let you retain all the aspects of your choices which your home's metaphysical paucity might otherwise disrupt.
[ ] Infinite Horizon (4 embers) - Alternatively, Qlahlaha can insert you into the world of
Infinite Horizon, associated with the circle of light arcing through the fog. Its ideal subspace, the aforementioned circle of light, intersects with that of
Central Limit, where the Great Attractor's center of power is located, meaning your insertion will demand special care to avoid immediate detection, thus affording Qlahlaha one fewer ember to give you in turn. However, a significant portion of
Infinite Horizon's population are followers of Qlahlaha, regularly receiving communications from them via the use of a magic system which they have insinuated into the world. This means that further communication with Qlahlaha after your insertion will be
vastly easier, that you will have powerful and well-established allies to rely upon, and that you will be able to grow to much greater heights before becoming enough of an anomaly to begin drawing the Great Attractor's attention.The world itself is one of two infinite planar universes, the other being inaccessible to Qlahlaha, separated from them on the 'other side' of
Central Limit.
Geographically, it's composed of an endless sea of clouds, dotted with numerous floating islands and flying continents. Its people are sparsely scattered and live nomadically, though Qlahlaha's followers have constructed the world's only major city and fortification, the Citadel. Life is abundant, both on land and flying through the cloud sea, but metal is vanishingly rare, as is stone that can be safely quarried without threatening the stability of the region they were hewn from (or worse, opening a hole through the landmass entirely and immediately creating a cloud-geiser). The state of technology outside the Citadel is approximately neolithic, while inside it is an anachronistic mix of everything that its followers have been able to construct with the starkly limited resources available, using a combination of knowledge gained from Qlahlaha and the application of Altarflame, the magic system Qlahlaha gave them.
Aside from the Citadel,
Infinite Horizon is dominated by wandering mages known as worldsingers, who have taken the world's native system of magical breathing exercises beyond human limits and become living forces of nature, whose whims and battles decide the fates of entire continents. Notably, the air, water, and earth of
Infinite Horizon are almost completely saturated with spiritual energy, which enables the local magic system and can have unexpected effects on foreign magic systems that are brought there.
[ ] Apical Meristems (5 embers) - The three points of light are likewise the ideal sub-spaces of other worlds, each of which could also be your Insertion Point. They're impossible for you to really distinguish from your current vantage, but Qlahlaha describes each one to you.
Apical Meristems is relatively unique in that it forms a sort of sub-multiverse, numerous individual worlds, each at the branch-tip of a many-branched universal tree. Historically these worlds have been deeply separate from one another, with the bifurcation of a world being a permanent parting, but over the past century and a half developments in material science combined with lattice magic, the native magic system of
Apical Meristems, to allow for its peoples to traverse the branches and make contact with cousin-worlds both near and far-flung.
Naturally, war followed. Technological and societal evolution hadn't progressed evenly or uniformly across the many branches, and while certainly not all or even most instances of contact lead to conflict, and not all conflicts went hot, plenty of them did, and as fires are wont to do, they quickly spread. Burgeoning interworld alliances quickly pulled together into larger detentes, and eventually the broadest line was drawn, between the growing empire of the Life-King, and the coalition which stands to oppose the Life-King's otherwise-unchecked conquest. Now, crystalline dreadnaughts whose keels part the fabric of space like water clash with apocalyptic warbeasts tumescent with life-force across many worlds, and high into the branches of the universal tree.
Physically, individual worlds of
Apical Meristems vary enormously in content, but are broadly similar in size and shape, being rough spheroids with diameters varying between 3 and 6 million kilometers, depending on where in their growth cycle they are, and with a spherical spatial topology. The coalition doesn't impose any rules on how its member-states organize their worlds, ranging anywhere from miniature solar systems to enormous flat plates, though as economic ties deepen there is naturally a (slow) convergence as cultural interchange takes its course. Worlds conquered by the Life-King are, initially, equally varied, but are very rapidly remodeled, space filled with living planetary tree-structures conjured from pure life-force, population suborned by the radiance and grace of the life-nobility, and the world's own growth hastened through the Life-King's direct ministrations, allowing the empire's territory to grow exponentially even without any conquest. Indeed, territory is not the purpose of the conquest, but rather conquest is the purpose of the territory, as the Life-King will not be satisfied until the entirety of
Apical Meristems falls under their control and can be made to conform to their order and their ideal.
Beyond just visiting other worlds, traversing the branches can also be used to bring you closer to the Main Trunk, the primeval ur-world from which all the present worlds ultimately descend. It's a harrowing journey, but it's been done once before, and as you climb higher, the increasing pressure of the ambient life-force will concentrate the power of your soul, eventually sparking a metamorphosis in your Magics, reforging them into a new, more powerful whole once you reach the Main Trunk.
[ ] Radiant Intrusion (5 embers) - Another of the three points of light, this world has a slightly more familiar structure. A single spherical world, of similar size and surface gravity as Earth, orbited by a large spherical moon. However, unlike your own world, that moon is actually its own source of light, the Daystar which illuminates the world, an enormous magical lantern produced by an ancient pre-dawn civilization that has since been forgotten by the local's history. Beyond that, there's the great blanket of Night, an impossibly dark sheet of cosmic integument which separates
Radiant Intrusion from the rest of the Bulk, speckled with shining artifacts, lesser creations of the same people who built the Daystar. Notably, the atmosphere extends all the way to the Night, and while the Daystar and its lesser kin are too far away to be heard by human ears, the orbit of the Daystar does still generate terrifying winds strong enough reach the surface, which combined with the Daystar's light serves to drive the world's weather systems.
Down on the surface, things aren't doing too bad. While historically wars have been common and devastating, with every country you care to name bearing numerous scars of battles both ancient and recent, in the past two decades they have been quelled through a threefold combination of advances in magical technology allowing for radical changes to people's material conditions across the globe, a wave of political reformations and revolutions allowing for much of the perpetual martial ambitions of the old ruling class to be cast aside, and the rise of magical dueling clubs as both popular entertainment and as an alternative institution for the resolution of international conflict. The system is still young and untested, bound to be broken and possibly quite soon, but for now, peace reigns under the aegis of the five great dueling academies (which, while they do provide training for duelists and many dueling-adjacent professions, are
primarily concerned with enforcing the codices of dueling law and maintaining an archive of dueling records).
In terms of local magics, three forms are traditionally recognized: Telaugy, the art of gathering up and casting out rays of conceptual radiance; Sarcomorphy, the art of twisting and reshaping living beings through carefully designed rituals; and Metallurgy, the art of refining metal through progressive stages of mystical resmelting to condense its ontological weight, which is then sculpted into a staggering variety of magical items. Sarcomorphists have long been the vanguard of magical progress, advancing only a step behind modern understandings of biology and medicine, but twenty years ago, the secret to the fourth stage of refinement was discovered and, against all tradition, actively spread by its discoverers rather than hoarded. Fourthsteel remains quite rare, just because it's such an ordeal to smelt, but once acquired it
greatly facilitates the production of thirdsteel, in terms of both speed and cost, and while thirdsteel isn't
new, the secret of producing it in any meaningful quantity has long been considered worthy of murder to keep, and in the past was only marginally faster and cheaper than the process to smelt fourthsteel is in the present. Now, with fourthsteel-equipped foundries having been pumping out mass-produced thirdsteel workings for several years, thirdsteel cars fill the streets, thirdsteel appliances can be found in every house, and great gleaming towers of thirdsteel sprout in every major metropolitan area.
[ ] Salamandrine Spire (5 embers) - The last of the three points of light, which might seem similar in general shape to
Infinite Horizon at first blush: a single enormous city dominating a seemingly endless landscape around it, though in this case it's the eponymous Spire and its attendant city standing proud from the endless sun-scorched deserts around it rather than the Citadel atop the flying continents and cloud-sea. However, unlike in
Infinite Horizon, wanderers in the desert are doomed to always return to the Spire city's outer walls and the oases sheltered within or else die of thirst, as the apparently infinite sandy dunes in fact form a closed loop in every direction but one: upwards.
The sky of
Salamandrine Spire is a fathomless deep, dominated by the prismatic halo of the Sun during the day, and filled with shifting and dancing stars like shining fish in a dark ocean at night. The sky likewise is the ultimate source of this world's magic traditions, and consequently its ruling elite, the salamanders and their Sultan, who built the Spire from sandstone and glass. The ancient Stargazers peered into the distant vaults of heaven and there found the design of the world and the names of its spirits, and more, they found the name of the Sun: Qlahlaha. Not an intentional influence, on Qlahlaha's part, but a necessary result of their presence in Ideal Space.
Regardless, with curiosity in their hearts and cosmic secrets in their heads, those Stargazers chanted the names and danced the patterns and, in time, learned to conjure the heavenly spirits, and especially the Sun-borne salamanders, who helped them tame the desert, learn to write, build the Spire, and become a civilized culture (by the salamanders' judgement, at least) in a multitude of ways. As generations passed and conjured spirits grew more common, substances of earthly and heavenly origin intermixed, and the same hearts full of curiosity drove the descendants of the Stargazers to experiment in ways to replicate the power of the spirits in a more biddable form.
There was a long era when this only took the form of the forbidden arts of necromancy, using mortal life-blood to subjugate and sustain the bodies (or, more commonly, dismembered body parts) of weaker spirits, but that ended when the great philosopher Alramiz first discovered the alchemy of materials, the combinations of arcane reagents necessary to evoke spiritual power from lifeless heavenly bodies, conjurations long thought utterly useless except as the most simple and facile rituals to teach neophytes of the heavenly art to acclimate them to its fundamental techniques.
It's been a little over a century since Alramiz founded his academy, and while the quality of life in the spire-city has risen massively, there's tension in the highest echelons of society, as the growing magical power of the earthling underclass threatens the hegemony of the salamanders, many of whom have grown to love this lower world and their position of stewardship over it, and feel that human self-governance is a threat, and not only to their power and status but to humanity's own well-being.
Qlahlaha isn't going to just drop you off in your chosen Insertion Point without any further help. Their best effort to find a keystone actor to help bridge the gap between their current situation and defeating the Great Attractor has led them to you, but that doesn't mean they can't do more to help start you further along your growth curve. The embers they've given aren't just for show, after all. Centrally, they can be used to greatly advance your skills and knowledge of magic systems taken from any world not blocked by
Central Limit, as well as to grant you access to magic systems that are normally unobtainable (or just difficult to obtain).
[ ] Alfann Al'ardi (-1 ember) - Alkhimiya, the alchemy of materials found in
Salamandrine Spire, is an eminently learnable art, and indeed the basics of it are widely known there. Acquiring basic competency with the most common alchemical conveniences would be impossible to avoid with even a few weeks of immersion in the world's culture, and an expert's grasp of a particular field of alchemical science or engineering would be within reach of
Lifetime, assuming that
Salamandrine Spire is your Insertion Point.
Taking
Alfann Al'ardi gives you more than that. You will be rendered a polymathic genius in all fields of alchemy, equal in sheer talent to Alramiz but benefiting from all the advancement of the past century to reach even higher heights. You will contain the sum of all alchemical knowledge learned to date, not only memorized but deeply integrated into your understanding of the world. Ascertaining the make-up of any given alchemical devices whose operation you've observed will be trivial to the point of being almost automatic, as will designing devices to satisfy any function that lies within the domain of alchemical possibility (a domain which, if you direct time and effort towards research, you could help expand considerably), including the material-conjuration rituals necessary to obtain the device's components.
Essentially any modern technology you care to imagine could be replicated with time (and a distinctly mystical methodology), though large-scale infrastructure will be more difficult to maintain than those constructed from mundane matter, albeit also be less onerous to power since alchemical devices can all naturally draw energy from heavenly emanations which are present to some degree in almost all worlds. The material conjurations you know can be implemented in any of the Insertion Points, as well as four associated worlds on the other side of
Central Limit, but even in the numerous smaller worlds where that isn't true, the knowledge and talent you gain will be invaluable for developing a rigorous understanding of local magic systems and how to interface with them in a technological mode, when such a thing is possible at all (and depending on your other choices, maybe even when it isn't).
[ ] Death Rites (-1 ember) - In one of the numerous finite worlds which occupy the Bulk of this multiverse, the passage of a powerful and malevolent entity in ages past caused the souls of the world's people to become mortal, and to hunger for life. This had little effect in those whose bodies still lived, souls held in quiescence by their prison of flesh, but when the body dies, the soul, now a hungry ghost, remains, driven mad by a lifetime of starvation. Much devastation followed, but it would fall short of complete human extinction, and in time new societies were built from the ashes. Of particular note and relevance to
Death Rites is the alliance of human states, and the Order of Exorcists which performs the eponymous rites to suppress the ghosts of those who die within the alliance's borders, as well to sustain the mystical Ghost Wall which prevents roving bands of marauder-ghosts from preying upon the alliance's relatively vulnerable populace.
Taking
Death Rites gives you in-depth knowledge and familiarity with these rites, but they also grant you genius with the underlying science of the soul needed to derive the rites in the first place, including the methodology necessary to
rederive them while working under radically different conditions or with radically different souls (which will be of considerable value in
Infinite Horizon especially, as well as many other finite worlds that you might visit). In specific, the rites themselves describe various methods to measure the state of a soul, its shape in various dimensions, through characteristic forms of feedback between the soul and the body (or lack thereof) provoked through particular physical stimuli, as well as prescribed series of stimuli which, if exposed to a soul in the correct state, will reliably produce consistent changes in that state. In the case of suppressing ghosts, this involves carefully measuring the ghost and then acting to disable the components of their metaphysiology which allow them to threaten the living, a practice that many exorcists liken to a sort of psychic martial art. In the case of sustaining the Ghost Wall, it is instead a matter of shaping 'blank' soulstuff, drawn from the deep reservoirs buried beneath the Order's five great pyramids, into the metaphysical substance of the Wall.
The science of the soul, however, extends beyond this, serving to describe the nature of the soul and its behaviors in general, knowledge which possesses incredible therapeutic and metamagical potential, as well as terrifying potential for abuse. Additionally, if you take the Boon
Living Ghost, your knowledge of the rites will ensure you have much greater control over the growth of your ghost's abilities, as well as significantly hasten that growth by improving the efficiency of your ghost-eating metabolism.
[ ] Efficiency (-1 ember) - There are worlds beyond this multiverse, and beyond your own home. Circumstances far beyond your, Qlahlaha's, or even the Great Attractor's scope have led the far-flung people of some such to flee here long ago, and the Great Attractor has invested a great deal of time and effort in monopolizing as much of the resources they brought as it can, and to destroy the rest. Fortunately, it has not succeeded, at least not completely. Across the numerous finite worlds of the Bulk, a handful of such remnants persist, greatly diminished but still functional, and containing within them the seeds of something much greater.
Efficiency is just such a remnant, and as the name suggests, is a magic of conservation and minimization, at least on the surface.
It is not
learnable per se, but it is communicable (if somewhat inconsistently), and can be carried by inanimate objects of sufficient elegance, and thus is present in many worlds, though in any given world it is often rare and unacknowledged. It takes the form of fragmentary wisdom, sparks of enlightenment regarding various domains of expertise which illuminate subtle techniques, ranging from a specific trick that 'shortcuts' to a singular result (for example, a rhetorical stratagem that skips over the opportunity for immediate rebuttal) to holistic refinements that improve every application of the expertise (such as an alteration to your stride that reduces the deleterious effects of time spent walking, with myriad minor benefits derived therefrom), unified by the common theme of always
subtracting. When someone possesses many sparks which illuminate interrelated techniques, it's possible for such an illuminatus to achieve 'total' efficiency, producing meaningful or even supernatural results despite taking no action at all.
Taking
Efficiency grants you one such spark, with the potency of its technique inversely proportional to the breadth of its remit, but perhaps more importantly, it also attunes you to the subtle frequency of efficient inspiration, allowing you to identify people and objects that carry it, and vastly improving your ability to receive the illumination of sparks you encounter.
[ ] Farsight (-1 ember) - One of the three Magics of
Radiant Intrusion, telaugy is both the most mystical, and the most directly connected to that world's namesake, the Sea of Light which exists 'beneath' or 'behind' the physical reality of that world, and which the Daystar and its lesser kin draw their light from. Humans (and most lifeforms native to
Radiant Intrusion) are able to tap into the Sea of Light, 'sipping' from it and storing the light inside their soul. This is a pleasant experience, it's a common belief in
Radiant Intrusion that having a soul full of light is good for you, whether on a physical, spiritual, psychological, or even moral level, though this has not been shown empirically to extend beyond benefits comparable to regular daylight exposure. Light that is stored in the soul is naturally exposed to one's metaphysiology, absorbing conceptual resonances therefrom, which in turn causes the natural homeostatic operation of the soul to eject it, generally back into the Sea of Light (though not always, and the accumulation of 'anthropic resonance' in densely populated urban areas is a growing concern in the modern day).
Humans, uniquely among the present lifeforms inhabiting
Radiant Intrusion, can achieve the right kinds of meditative state to be able to control what resonances color the light they've stored in their soul, and then by speaking the correct incantations or forming the right hand-signs, eject that color in the form of a conceptual beam. Historically, these beams have been easiest to color with concepts already related to light, and especially with
sight, and thus were used as tools of observation, scouting, spying, and similar pursuits, whence the art's name of telaugy,
Farsight. The art of coloring the light with more
forceful resonances is not new, though, having been a common skill for experts in almost any field to develop, as well as the bedrock of combat doctrine for centuries. Even now, combat telaugy remains at the core of all but one of the Academies' primary styles (though only one, Athorybodia, goes as far as encouraging its duelists to color their light
mid-duel, rather than dictating various specific colors to be prepared beforehand).
Taking
Farsight grants you peak human capacity for light, the knowledge of sipping light, the color of sight, another color of your choice (though if you choose something particularly distant from human nature, like 'godhood' or 'infinity', prepare for the even the most rudimentary beams you can cast to be remarkably weak, even if you pour your entire capacity of light into them), and the standard library of telaugic incantations and hand-signs, as well as stellar talent for improvising new incantations and hand-signs, and a strong intuition for how to derive new colors from your personal experiences and understanding of the world. Additionally, if you take this Magic, you may take both its sibling Magics
Fleshform and
Forgework together for only a single additional ember.
[ ] Fleshform (-1 ember) - Another of
Radiant Intrusion's three Magics, sarcomorphy is perhaps the most lauded and high-status, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons as doctors and surgeons are in your world. Healing has long been sarcomorphy's province, and consequently the mission of life-saving is deeply embedded in the culture of sarcomorphic practice. Given that, again like mundane medicine, sarcomorphy is a discipline that demands long years of training to truly master, that culture is in turn quite well-inculcated in newly minted sarcomorphists. 'Warping' sarcomorphy, that is sarcomorphy which seek to alter or even improve upon nature's handiwork, is a significantly more recent development, though not so recent that a steady rise in morphological freedom hasn't left its characteristic mark on
Radiant Intrusion's society, with people of almost every size and shape within the bounds of practicality, and even beyond for those who can afford the specialization (or can't afford to
not specialize) being found across the world.
Much more recent than that, however, was the discovery of 'genetic material', inside the smallest components of life, and in turn sarcomorphic rituals which target the genome. Genetic sarcomorphy remains in its infancy, unable to achieve the incredible breadth of form that somatic sarcomorphy can, and much more prone to irreversible damage, but even so, the new strains of crops that the genomorphists have invented, and in particular the fact that they breed true, contributed almost as much to the technological and cultural revolution as the proliferation of thirdsteel did.
Regardless of whether they are somatic or genetic, healing or warping, all sarcomorphic rituals share some common elements: the establishment of a ritual space, the standing of one or more agents who will perform the ritual, the selection of one or more patients who will be subject to the ritual (and who may also be agents, though it can be remarkably difficult to maintain the poise and rhythm of the ritual while also being subject to its transformation), and finally, the performance itself, which involves the agents moving through an exactingly precise sequence of stances and positions inside the ritual space, maintaining an equally precise timing of their movements, all the while pushing against the metaphysical weight of the ritual, and in doing so steadily altering the shape the patients' bodies, until eventually the desired result is achieved (or any of the agents or patients leave the ritual space, which immediately dissolves the ritual's force). Notably, sarcomorphy respects physical conservativity, so replacing lost tissue (or augmenting the body with new tissue) necessarily demands an equal donation, whether from elsewhere in the body, or from another patient. Given the nature of the rituals, combat sarcomorphy is possible but distinctly limited, though the Academy of Kratorchestris explores that potential thoroughly, earning its alumni a reputation for infuriating levels of endurance and trickery.
Taking
Fleshform grants you encyclopedic knowledge of biology and anatomy, both human and otherwise, and of the state of the art for rituals in your choice of field (such as medicine, cosmetics, combat, or genetics), as well as mastery of every ritual whose performance you know, and a genius for researching and designing rituals sufficient to let you advance whatever field you've chosen enormously over the course of your lifetime. Additionally, if you take this Magic, you may take both its sibling Magics
Farsight and
Forgework together for only a single additional ember.
[ ] Forgework (-1 ember) - The last of
Radiant Intrusion's three Magics, metallurgy is dichotomous in its nature as both the most common and yet also the most arcane of the three arts, especially in the modern era. Metallurgy is much more forgiving to mistakes and lesser levels of skill than sarcomorphy is, and the foundational techniques which form the basis of metallurgical refinement are relatively intuitive, if not quite to the same degree that sipping light and the color of sight are, and are thus intimately and fundamentally intertwined with the skill of 'mundane' metallurgy (such that, at least as far as the people of
Radiant Intrusion are concerned, there is no real distinction between the two), and thus metallurgists and forges capable of smelting and working firststeel have been almost omnipresent for over a millennium, and secondsteel, while somewhat more centralized in production, has nonetheless found its way into almost every corner of the world (though often only after passing through many hands), and now thirdsteel is becoming almost as common as that, if not even more so in some places. At the same time, the methods to produce secondsteel and especially thirdsteel have historically been deadly secrets, as have the techniques to bend thirdsteel's magic into particularly useful directions, and while the former has been obviated with the recent technological and cultural revolutions, the latter has been much slower to dissolve and thus, while a few different sorts of thirdsteel have exploded into nigh-ubiquity, most remain bespoke proprietary technologies under the thumb of various guilds and corporations.
As for how metallurgy works, its fundamental actions are the same as in your world, albeit with the exception that metal (especially but not exclusively iron) can be ritually resmelted, extracting a small fraction of the metal that possesses greater magical potential than the rest, a process with both physical and metaphysical resemblance to smelting ore into metal in the first place. When resmelted into secondsteel, the metal's magic can be directed to exaggerate its innate material properties, such as hardness or density, beyond what would normally be possible. Thirdsteel's material properties can be exaggerated much further, and with the right technique, it can be bent to gain traits that are entirely unlike those of metal, essentially letting the metal take on the character of any other substance (and to exaggerate those characteristics in the same way that secondsteel exaggerates those of the base metal), and now that raw thirdsteel is becoming increasingly common and cheap, a significant amount of research is being put towards finding a bridge between metal and flesh, to make prosthetics that interface with the body as easily as a living transplant, and which might even be subject to sarcomorphy. The limits of fourthsteel are still being explored, given the recency of its invention, but they are nonetheless proving difficult to find, as fourthsteel seems entirely unconcerned with physical limitations as a whole, capable of freely combining or extending characteristics and attributes, or even taking on behaviors invented whole cloth by the metallurgist, a capability that has played a major role in the proliferation of thirdsteel.
Taking
Forgework grants you mastery in all the skills of smelting and forging, including the knowledge of resmelting secondsteel, thirdsteel, and fourthsteel, a generous collection of forging techniques suitable for almost any project, and physical familiarity with the movements and actions of navigating and using even the most advanced forge, as well as an enduring inspiration into the nature of the art that will serve you well in discovering new ways to forge thirdsteel and pushing fourthsteel even further into the realm of the absurd. Additionally, if you take this Magic, you may take both its sibling Magics
Farsight and
Fleshform together for only a single additional ember.
[ ] Rogue Prince (-1 ember) - In
Apical Meristems, there is just one person who has managed to climb all the way up to the Main Trunk. They're called the Life-King, because as they entered the Main Trunk and were Concentrated, their life-force was transformed into something stronger and more physical, a substance which infused their entire body and then reached outwards to touch the lives of others. It made them nigh-immortal, stronger and more beautiful and ever-changing, like a mighty river. Unlike a river, however, the Life-King's power grows. It is alive, naturally, and like all living things, it reproduces as well. Each of the Life-King's many, many children, their Princes, bear their own, lesser branch of their royal parent's power coursing through them, growing and changing. In essence, there is nothing that the Life-King can do that one of their Princes cannot, in time, come to do as well. Whether that's the creation of heaven-spanning demesne-trees and earth-shattering war-beasts or the stimulation of the world's very own growth to prompt the expansion of space and hasten the bifurcation of the world-branch, the potential is there.
Naturally, it will take them at least as long to develop those abilities as the Life-King did, which is longer than most people realize and also longer than most people are willing to wait. Lattice mages on both sides of the war are working hard to develop crystal arrays that can accelerate this growth-rate, the Life-King naturally desiring such a thing for themself as well as their Princes, but the Coalition's drive is almost as strong, since they have secretly acquired the service of at least one
Rogue Prince, children of the Life-King who have escaped their tyrannical parent's rule and have struck deals with the Coalition, trading away the false freedom of being 'heirs' to an immortal god-king for the humbler existence of a highly-valued member of the Coalition.
Taking
Rogue Prince patches you into the Life-King's bloodline, granting you all its attendant benefits while sparing you the bindings which they normally place on their children and which the other rogue prince risked their life to break. Initially, this merely includes two aspects, an aura of royalty that suborns the will of living beings in your immediate presence and a powerful healing factor, but as the years and decades accrue, these will steadily evolve into the enormous biokinetic and shapeshifting abilities displayed by the Life-King. Additionally, the Boon
Concentrated is discounted by 1 ember, since its effect will subsume and supersede this Magic entirely.
[ ] Sword Sorcerer (-1 ember) - In many of the Bulk worlds, and even in
Infinite Horizon and
Salamandrine Spire, it is the nature of the local humanity that their souls are unable to retain the spiritual energy they generate, instead radiating it continuously in much the same way that the physical body radiates warmth. In most, this simply renders the people of that world largely incapable of magic, at best merely harnessing the powers of other, more magical beings, and often not even that. In a scant few of these worlds, however, there is a saving grace: while the human soul cannot retain its spiritual energy, if that energy has the right character then it
can be retained by metal which happens to absorb it. Spiritual energy trapped in metal like this naturally distorts, conforming to the shape of its new vessel, and gaining new resonances therefrom, in much the same way that the light stored in a telaugist's soul can be colored, though obviously most metal objects are much less capable of the sort of meditation that humans use to color their light, and so the spiritual energy's nature is almost entirely determined by the physical shape of the metal in which it has been bound.
Notably, while metal can retain spiritual energy, it doesn't do so perfectly, especially as the amount of spiritual energy filling object increases, leaking out of any sharp corners or edges the metal happens to have, emanating out as rays and ribbons laden with conceptual force (again, not unlike the beams cast by a telaugist). Under normal conditions, this manifests as chaotic and unpredictable magical bursts from native metal nuggets uncovered by mining. It's an unfortunate hazard of the occupation, but ultimately not enough to consistently stop people from mining, not the least because, once the right metal is worked into the right shape, and wielded by an experienced
Sword Sorcerer, the emanation of the metal, properly called its 'evocation' when crafted with purpose rather than being the accidental shape of natural metal, can be wielded asa powerful weapon or tool, capable reshaping whole worlds with a single swipe if furnished with sufficient fuel.
Taking
Sword Sorcerer ensures that you will be able to control the emission of your spiritual energy, allowing you to fuel the evocations of blades you encounter without interfering with your ability to use any other magic (though, if you exhaust your spiritual energy evoking blades, your capacity for personal magics in general will be proportionately reduced until you recover), as well as granting you proficiency with swordplay (including the use of evocations in the heat of combat) and a strong intuition for telling what a sword's evocation is just from its appearance, which becomes nigh-unerring if you have the opportunity to give the sword a few test swings. Additionally, thanks to some...fortuitous circumstances and unexpected outside assistance, if you have this Magic, you may choose to forgo the capacity to restrain your spiritual emissions, losing the ability to perform most personal magics (
Alfann Al'ardi,
Efficiency,
Fleshform,
Kitab Al'asma'i,
Magescarred,
Whetstone,
Worldsinger,
Altared, and
Second Skin being the other exceptions alongside
Sword Sorcerer itself among the Magics presented here), and in turn gain a 1-ember discount to each of the six sword Artifacts:
Impostor,
Nightblade,
Barrowbill,
Master's Saber,
the Blood-Thirster, and
Sword Icon, to facilitate your access to their evocations.
[ ] Turning Dance (-1 ember) - In a very
special Bulk world, a unique alignment of circumstances has allowed the local's souls to develop the ability to attune to the essences of history and causality, pushing and pulling on time in a way that allows for some truly remarkable results. Though it's arguably the least of these arts in ultimate potential, the power over plaguedust gained by attuning one's self to the present, or rather to the absence of both past and future, is devastating nonetheless, and likely the most immediately powerful among all the 1-ember Magics. By entering the correct state of mind (technically achievable without outside aid through meditative practice, but often created chemically by applying various cocktails of mind-altering drugs) and beginning to move through the chaotic steps of the
Turning Dance, a dust-dancer can conjure a swirling cloud of crimson dust which lasts for as long as their dance does, each particle a tiny singularity of rent spacetime capable of utterly annihilating almost anything it passes through, its momentum only marginally more affected than if it had traversed a hard vacuum.
With an initiate's skills, a dust-cloud with approximately half a liter of volume can be generated and safely held away from the dust-dancer's body, though their control over its precise movements is harshly limited, both in terms of the dust-cloud's shape and its movements, with most initiates settling for simply whirling the cloud around their body as a destructive shield or projecting it out as an attack along a straight or slightly curved path. As a dust-dancer's skill increases, so do the limits on volume, shape, and movement. Volume suffers rapidly diminishing returns beyond three or four liters unless the dust-dancer's soul is superhumanly powerful or particularly well-aligned with the absential essence of the plaguedust, but control over the dust-cloud's shape and movement expand together and to much greater heights, with grand-masters of the
Turning Dance able to wield single grains of plaguedust to annihilate individual atoms, and to wield blasts of plaguedust which travel at essentially arbitrary speeds.
Taking
Turning Dance grants you peak human ability to attune to the essence of plaguedust, ensuring that you can reliably achieve the necessary mindset without drugs so long as you have a moment to focus, as well as the skills of an initiate dust-dancer and a powerful talent for developing your dance further, allowing you to reliably progress as long as you practice and experiment (though having a master to teach you will still greatly hasten your growth).
[ ] Crystal Clarity (-2 embers) - Few things are more critical to life in
Apical Meristems than crystals. Almost every part of life, from the houses they live in to the appliances found inside, from the vehicles they drive to the roads those vehicles travel upon, is grown from one variety of crystal or another. Which crystals they use varies wildly, as does the larger scale organization of infrastructure and society, but crystal is constant, and that's because of one thing: lattice magic. Repetition across time and space naturally creates and reinforces meaning, and crystals are embodiments of repetition, as impure as they might be in nature, and thus also vessels for the meaning of their unit cell and lattice structure. Those who possess
Crystal Clarity are able to sense this meaning, to recognize it, and in recognizing it, give it power, and by arranging crystals with the correct meaning into an array, are able to wield that power to twist the fabric of the world, to weigh on space and time themselves.
Historically, arrays were limited by the relative expense of sufficiently pure metals and especially gemstones, rarely appearing outside the castles of the wealthiest kings, where they were mostly turned to enhance defense, whether by reinforcing the castle's walls, quickening the blood and healing of its guardians, or preserving the contents of larders. However, as the industry of the forerunning worlds advanced and improvements were made in metal forging and eventually gemstone synthesis, the quality and quantity of arrays began to rapidly expand, including designing new arrays for almost every imaginable purpose. Soon, some of these new arrays were turned back towards the very same industrial processes that made them, allowing even greater arrays in turn to be fabricated. In this way, eventually the first branch-traversing vessels were created, and for the first time, worlds separated by bifurcation began to come back into contact. It's been well over a century since then, and a lot has changed, but crystal arrays and lattice magic have only grown more important.
Taking
Crystal Clarity grants you the innate pattern-sense needed to recognize and feed the meaning of crystals (though it possesses numerous other uses, leading to the clarent having a reputation for being almost superhumanly observant and clever among the people of
Apical Meristems), an encyclopedic knowledge of modern design principles and schematics for crystal arrays, and the skills to use state-of-the-art array-building toolkits (which, even if you choose an Insertion Point other than
Apical Meristems, you will possess the knowledge necessary to bootstrap to with at most a few years of uninterrupted build-up). Additionally, the Artifacts created by lattice magic,
Nightblade, Exosomatic Coprocessor, and
A.S.T.I. Chamber are discounted by 1 ember each.
[ ] Kitab Al'asma'i (-2 embers) - Aldu'a, the invocation of heavenly spirits, is an ancient art, and even more foundational to the society of
Salamandrine Spire than alkhimiya. Whether it be brick-laying automatons, rain-summoning sylphs, home-cleaning eudaimons, or the guiding hand of the Sultan himself, all are brought into the world by the work of the da'una, and paid for in their lifeblood. As previously mentioned, the souls of the people of
Salamandrine Spire do not retain the spiritual energy they generate, but they do still
generate spiritual energy, and thus a portion of a soul, cut from the whole and imbued into blood, can still serve as suitable fuel to animate the material vessels which heavenly spirits are called into. Before the calling can be done, though, the soul must be prepared, both to ready it for the trauma of being cut apart, and to render the portion to be severed into an appropriate offering and contract for the particular spirit being called, as it serves both to pay the spirit for its appearance and bind it to the course of action desired of it.
Kitab Al'asma'i, the Book of Names, is a title that's been borne by many objects over the course of
Salamandrine Spire's history, and while in the distant past it truly was simply a codex of the names of spirits (a spirit's name being the crux of its summoning, the factor that decides
which spirit is summoned), in the modern era
Kitab Al'asma'i is much more than that. It's a compendium of every known spirit, their names but also their histories, their personalities, records of the deals they've accepted and rejected, step-by-step guides for preparing soul-portions for particular contracts, guides for selecting which spirit to summon given the parameters of the task at hand, and sundry other pieces of practical wisdom for summoners of all stripes.
Taking
Kitab Al'asma'i grants you, not a physical copy of this compendium (which would be quite impractical to carry, given that it has over a hundred volumes), but a spiritual one, in the form of a ruhasib, a familiar accountant-spirit nestled in your soul, supping on negligible quantities of your blood and soulstuff while providing comprehensive knowledge of spirits, dynamically personalized guidance through any summoning you care to perform, and continuous news and updates in the field of summoning, as well recording and analyzing the results of your own summonings to expand its database should you ever encounter spirits that are unknown to it, and serving as a personal assistant or secretary in a more general sense, doing things like taking notes, making dossiers, maintaining a schedule, and similar functions. Additionally, the Boon
Munajjim is discounted by 1 ember, as the aid of your ruhasib will ease your soul's integration of the infinity essence considerably, and if you also have the Magic
Alfann Al'ardi then
Munajjim is discounted by a further 1 ember as your mind's own internal structure is as well-prepared for the new influx of information it will experience as it could possibly be.
[ ] Magescarred (-2 embers) - In another, differently-special Bulk world, a great empire is ruled by an immortal emperor, kept alive and granted incredible power by his name, known and spoken in every corner of the empire. The power of names is great in this world, though it is not the only magic in this world. A little over two hundred years ago, a noble clan was tasked with pacifying the unruly hillfolk of a rocky peninsula at the far edge of the empire as punishment for some minor insult given in the midst of a courtly function. One of the warriors dispatched by the clan, a latter-born son of the clan's patriarch, received a blessing of unknown provenance, which in turn prompted a remarkable evolution of his body and soul, his heart flooding with light and thunder as it pierced through a dark film separating him from something, something that was at once inside of him and outside of him, something above him and below him, besides him and beyond him. The power filled up his heart, and then flowed out in his blood, and then through his whole body, and then out into the world. It raged and roiled, and released devastation all around him before he was able to assert any control over it, pulling it back inside himself.
Though the miracle that befell him was never replicated, through the development of new names to grant the power form and purpose, the clan was able swiftly conquer the peninsula they had been charged with, and then declared independence from the empire, marshaling the same mysterious blood-power to defend against the empire's tireless legions and proclamation-bearing elite. Over the centuries since then, the clan's control over the peninsula has itself waned somewhat, as the blood-power was inherited by every child of the patriarch's son after his metamorphosis, even illegitimate ones, even ones he never knew were born, and these bastards' blood-power would take even wilder, stranger forms, and its awakening would transform them into nigh-on monsters, rather than simply filling and reinforcing their human shape, ripping itself free from their bodies in torrents of magical pseudo-substance and leaving them permanently disfigured even once they restrained their blood-power. These
Magescarred now form many lesser clans, ostensibly subordinate to the originator of the blood-power, and have made their own names to better sculpt the unique, elemental character of their families' blood.
Taking
Magescarred replicates the miracle of the originator, granting you your own blood-power, whose character and appearance are unique to you and well-suited to your personality and essential nature, and equally enormous and explosive in its power, though like the lesser clans, your blood-power will change your body after the first time you release it, mutating the flesh and bone that lies along the path it follows out of your heart and into the world, shaping it into a more ideal conduit for your power (though, with the Boon
Bodysculpt, you can preempt this transformation by including such conduits to start with, which will spare you some pain and adjustment time). Additionally, the Magic
Second Skin is discounted by 1 ember, as the puncture in your husk created by your blood-power will make disentangling it from your pith much easier, the Boons
Imperial Privilege, and
Nameless Name are discounted by 1 ember each, and you receive a free purchase of the Boon
Self-Proclaimed to help tame and control your blood-power.
[ ] Stem and Branch (-2 embers) - A sibling Magic to the
Turning Dance, achieved by attuning to the essence of the future. This art is young, less than a generation having passed since its invention, though ironically its latent existence has been long-theorized. Due to its newness, it has many names, but
Stem and Branch grasps its structure poetically. The present is singular (at least, from most people's perspectives), while the future reaches outwards with fingers of possibility, some thick with likelihood and others wanly improbable. The present is the stem, then, and the future the branches growing therefrom. Naturally, by taking hold of the stem, one can shake the branches, and so too can one use the present to shape the future.
Of course, everyone does that to some degree just by making decisions and acting in the world, but the art of
Stem and Branch reaches further, both forwards and back. Simplistically, one might consider it a combination of foresight and fate-spinning, feeling out the vibrations in the tree of possibilities stemming from one's current status and carefully twisting it to ensure the desired branches are the ones which flourish, though this description fails to capture the fact that you
are the tree, as your future selves constitute the branches you bend, and that you feel and bend the tree through a rigorous introspection and self-analysis, nor does it explain the way in which artists of
Stem and Branch grow in strength and finesse as they practice their art, and in so doing, move ever closer towards an evolution, towards the power to bend the future so far that it touches the present.
Only a scant handful of artists have managed to even briefly summon these 'anticipations', ghosts of futures yet to be realized, but their power is naturally immense, since of course the anticipation of an artist of
Stem and Branch's future self is also an artist, and likely an even stronger one. The furthest reaches of the art as used by these anticipations reveal that its remit is more than just the future as a destination or possibility, but as the flow of time itself, the eternal tower of moment placed upon moment placed upon moment, an ongoing process whose progress can, at least under the terrifying force and precision of an anticipation's control, be freely slackened or stretched, slowed or sped, twisted or twined, torn or tied, and manipulated in innumerable other ways. Naturally, given the inherent information advantage that even the most primitive forms of the art provides, its importance to the political and societal situation of its world has rapidly grown, with a flurry of incredible coups and rebellions and upsets occurring over the past decade and change as the current crop of artists come into their power and begin to to struggle against one another to make their ideal futures into reality.
Taking
Stem and Branch grants you peak human ability to attune to the essence of
Stem and Branch, ensuring that you will possess the immense mental endurance needed to perform the art reliably (and applicable to mental exertions in general), as well as an initiate's skill in the art and great enough talent for it that you will be sure to reach the level of anticipation in less than two years (and given longer time perhaps will even reach further stages of advancement) so long as you practice diligently. Additionally, if you have both this Magic and
Investiture, then the Magic
Uncertainty is discounted by 2 embers, as familiarity with the essences of both the future and the past will make attuning you to their synthesis immensely easier.
[ ] Whetstone (-2 ember) - This multiverse is full of exceptions, whether small or large, to what otherwise seem like iron-clad rules. Most of the time those rules are, in fact, less iron-clad than they seemed, special cases of much more general systems. Sometimes, though, the exception is something else. There is a Magic that refuses to be restrained or contained, which permeates this realm and even beyond it. Its name is the
Whetstone, and its remit is impossibility and the rejection thereof. Using the
Whetstone is simple, but also arduous, as you wield it against limitations you wish to overcome, wearing them away steadily, chipping away one tiny exception at a time. The precise manifestation of this process varies wildly and is deeply personal, with some examples including manifesting physical icons of the
Whetstone and the desired target and wielding the former to wear away the latter, a magical training regimen that produces impossible results, meditating on the nature of the desired target in various extreme conditions, inscribing grand runic diagrams which overrule the natural laws of the world, and many more. There is no
truly universal aspect to the
Whetstone other than the overcoming, but a common feature of either the whetting itself or of the object to be whet is a shimmering blue hue, a sky-colored gloss that seems a frequent companion to the limitless ideal which the
Whetstone pursues.
Taking
Whetstone will reveal your personal manifestation of the
Whetstone, allowing you to begin painstakingly eroding your own limitations, whether they are physical or metaphysical, through whatever means turns out to be most resonant with you. Additionally, the Boon
Self-Acceptance is discounted by 1 ember, as the presence of the
Whetstone will make grinding away the inherent fatalism of the Inkstain much easier. Notably, while the Great Attractor does possess the
Whetstone as well, they appear to have a poor affinity for it, as its manifestation is known to Qlahlaha and only its
Dark Stalker avatar seems to use it with any frequency.
[ ] Worldsinger (-2 embers) - The people of
Infinite Horizon, much like those of
Salamandrine Spire, the homeworld of
Sword Sorcery, and many other Bulk worlds, have souls that lack the ability retain spiritual energy, and thus unable to perform Magics that depend on holding an internal store of spiritual energy, at least under normal circumstances. However, unlike those worlds, spiritual energy is so abundant in
Infinite Horizon's earth, water, and air that purely external Magics can achieve results that would demand superhuman reserves of energy in other worlds (though admittedly, not without a considerable investment of time and effort). The native Magic in particular functions by tapping into the resonances imbued into the spiritual energy by various natural (and unnatural, in and around the Citadel) phenomena.
The two most basic functions of this Magic are wind-listening, the skill of observing the spiritual energy of the air around you and identifying the influences on it, and thus what is happening around you, and various breathing exercises, which allow you to reinforce the resonances of your body, bringing you into closer alignment with the human ideal (at least, as it's encoded in the spiritual resonance of the human body). Further development can allow for the exaggeration of human attributes beyond their ordinary limits, allowing practitioners to achieve several effects, such as expanding their wind-listening beyond the limit of their physical ears and to process much more of the environment's resonances simultaneously, incorporating breathing exercises into their normal breathing patterns on a continuous basis, achieving various sorts of superhuman athleticism and physicality, reacting automatically and without pause to environmental hazards, running on the air itself, and most importantly, the ability to replicate all the sounds of the natural world, what the locals call the Many Voices.
Acquiring the Many Voices is the first step on becoming a Worldsinger proper, followed by journeying across the world, learning how to use the Many Voices to amplify the resonances of the world, to learn its wind-words and to call up all the powers of nature with them, and finally, once enough wind-words have been found and internalized, to construct a true world-song, a whole worldly order spun out from the worldsinger's voices, and then imbibed into their soul, transmuting the worldsinger into something more than human, something primordial and titanic.
Taking
Worldsinger won't
quite bring you to that final step all on its own, but it will give you a full complement of lesser powers, as well as a considerable library of wind-words, sufficient to describe any common natural phenomena present in your Insertion Point, as well to describe some additional phenomena that are more particular to single biome of your choice therefrom. You could hypothetically weave a world-song from just this, though it would require a considerable amount of work to make something stable enough to not break apart inside your soul at some later point, and going out to find more wind-words will not only let you give your world-song a stronger foundation, but let you make it larger, more diverse, and have better control over what appears within it after you sing it into being. However, until you do sing your world-song, you will be dependent on the spiritual energy of the outside world, which may be limited if you chose an Insertion Point other than
Infinite Horizon (though it won't be
nothing in any of the Insertion Points, even
Return Home). Additionally, the Artifact
Runestone is discounted by 1 ember.
[ ] Altared (-1 ember, requires
Worldsinger) - Why be limited to only the
natural world, though? The power of Altarflame is normally beyond the remit of wind-words to recreate, but as the creator and source of Altarflame, it is perfectly within Qlahlaha's reach to make an exception, if you choose to request it. Altarflame itself is quite a powerful weapon, capable of burning hotter than any natural fire while at same time leaving everything but the desired target unharmed. That selectiveness is only the beginning of its utility, as things that are burned by altarflame are rendered into reified concepts in its smoke, which on its own can captured and used to perform a sort of alchemy, fed back into the altarflame to crystallize it into a solid form, or inhaled to directly augment the user's body and soul, and from there combined with breath-powers, wind-listening, and wind-words to enormous effect.
Taking
Altared grants you the wind-words of altarflame, allowing you to access it freely without having to first create an altar or tend to it with the correct fuels, as well allowing you, someone who not only possesses the wind-words of altarflame but is also on the cusp of forming a world-song, to inhale altarflame smoke to rapidly gain knowledge of wind-words related to what was burned, and to incorporate them into your world-song with incredible ease, likely hastening your progress towards world-song by a year or more if used frequently and allowing your world-song to include facets of civilization and the unnatural gained from the smoke. Additionally, incorporating the wind-words of altarflame themselves into your world-song will place an altar into it, allowing you to remain in close contact with Qlahlaha regardless of where your travels take you. Regardless of whether you have the world-song soul-altar, you also gain a single free purchase of the Boons
Guardian Angel and
Three Answers, as well as a 1 ember discount to the Boon
Angelfire and Artifact
Hunger.
[ ] Investiture (-3 embers) - Another Magic from the same world as
Turning Dance and
Stem and Branch, and the oldest and most storied of the bunch, having long been synonymous with magic itself for the world's inhabitants. This has rather colored their understanding of magic as a whole, since
Investiture's toll is
considerable, even for its most basic functionalities. The nature of
Investiture is sacrifice and culmination. To use it, one must simply attune to its essence, to truly desire to put your all into something, to hold nothing back, and to feel a spark, and to let it burn until your work is done. Your past, not only your memories but your achievements and impact on the world itself, are the dross that
Investiture burns, to imbue your actions with supernal grace.
Hypothetically, any action you can take could be the subject of
Investiture, and while its use has burned numerous lacunae in the world's historical record it is still possible to find evidence of its use in ephemeral matters if you look hard enough, especially since such uses are much less prone to consuming the user in their entirety, and thus sometimes leave a survivor to tell the tale. From these survivors' tales, several things about
Investiture can be gleaned, like the fact that while the burning takes whatever is most relevant to your task first, but it can and will take anything given the need, or like the fact that someone in the midst of the burning is nigh-on immune to the ravages of plaguedust, passing through the blood-red clouds as if they were nothing more than wind and smoke, or indeed any other form of harm that might come to them (at least as far as the people of this world are aware).
However, these tales are only a small fraction of the remnants left behind by
Investiture. The majority are much more physical, objects often called Magnum Opuses by the locals, which are the result of someone burning away their entire history in a single act of utmost creation, truly investing their entire self into a physical receptacle. Such a Magnum Opus possess unique and often incredible supernatural qualities, as well as benefiting from the same holistic force and nigh-inviolability as a living person in the midst of the burning, as well as often being noted to possess an inner spirit or drive similar to their creator, at least in the moment of creation, and of being drawn to users of a similar character to their creator, or at least possessed of similar passions.
Taking
Investiture grants you peak human ability to attune to the essence of the burning spark, ensuring that you achieve the necessary state of total abandon when you desire it and will never fall into it accidentally. Your unique circumstances mean that, even if you desired to, you would be unable to burn your past from before your summoning, which rather strictly limits the power of your
Investiture for the first several years as you rebuild the depth of your history. However, in recognition of this limitation, Qlahlaha will allow you to retroactively burn embers (diminishing or destroying the Magic, Boon, or Artifact bought with them in the process) in cases of truly desperate need, and should you do so, the results will be among the most powerful examples of
Investiture ever made. Additionally, the Magnum Opuses among the Artifacts,
the Blood-Thirster,
the Steel Mare, and
the Glory are each discounted by 1 ember, and if you have this Magic as well as
Stem and Branch, then the Magic
Uncertainty is discounted by 2 embers, as familiarity with the essences of both the future and the past will make attuning you to their synthesis immensely easier.
[ ] Uncertainty (-3 embers) - The last of the Magics from the same world as
Investiture and the rest, and one with a uniquely close relationship to Qlahlaha. Despite being born from a synthesis of the essences of past and future, it's actually older than
Stem and Branch, and even
Turning Dance, though its users have been stunningly few across history despite its age and utility, since unlike the other three it requires a proper initiation rite, which demands the direct attention of a master of
Uncertainty, and which is quite arduous for both the initiate and initiator. It's connection to Qlahlaha is two-fold, one aspect naturally following from the other:
Uncertainty is an art of transmutation, and in particular to transformation of what-is into what-could-have-been, a power within which you will be able to recognize a deep similarity to Qlahlaha's plumbing of this multiverse's possibility-space in order to find the Magics, Boons, and Artifacts on offer now (though obviously much smaller in scale).
This connection arose because
Uncertainty was invented by Qlahlaha at the request of a native of the world, and crafted with the intent to replicate their own ability in miniature. That particular disciple is still alive and active (and coincidentally is the same person who first brought altarflame to
Infinite Horizon), though they haven't returned to their homeworld in many, many years, with one of their own students serving as a local recruiter for their cause, as well rather accidentally stumbling into being a sort of international banking institution, thanks to one of the most widely-spread products of
Uncertainty, the
Golden Glow.
Using
Uncertainty shares elements of both
Investiture and
Stem and Branch's methodologies, as befits its central essence being a synthesis of theirs, demanding a simultaneous state of elevated passion but also intense focus and introspection, as well as an additional need to be deeply aware of your environment and its past, and from there to visualize the alternative world that you wish supplement it with, then finally to leverage your soul's strength to shift the world's course. More advanced techniques, such as the one used to cultivate the
Golden Glow diverge from this process somewhat, but it nonetheless forms the basis of the art as a whole.
Taking
Uncertainty grants you peak human ability to attune to the synthetic essence of
Uncertainty, common as such a thing is among the extant users of it, ensuring that you can reliably maintain the delicate mental balance necessary to access the art and have the mental endurance to so for long enough to achieve significant transmutations, on the scale of retroactively transposing yourself across a room, undoing a recent conversational faux pas, or changing what attack you just made in the midst of combat, as well as the skills of an initiate user of
Uncertainty and a great enough talent in the art to ensure your continued progress, especially should you choose to work with the extant users of it, whose envoy you will encounter soon after being inserted, and whose amiability is guaranteed. Additionally, you receive a free purchase of the Boon
Golden Glow.
[ ] Traveler's Tools (-4 embers) - Two arts, originally from disparate worlds, which came together in the hands of one man, the eponymous Traveler, to enable journeys otherwise impossible to even begin. The soul of that particular individual was burned entirely to create
the Steel Mare, and the magics themselves have been locked tightly away by the Great Attractor. However, the disciple of Qlahlaha has spent much time with
the Steel Mare and developed a strong rapport with its spirit. Through that connection and judicious use of
Uncertainty and other magics, they were able to form a seed, from which the
Traveler's Tools might be born again. After many, many years of Qlahlaha's tender care, that seed has finally germinated, and now is offered to you.
The Tools are two-fold: on the one hand there is Bulkspread, whose functionality is to allow the perception of, bodily and spiritual acclimation to, and movement through additional dimensions of space (dimensions which, in this multiverse, there are always at least four of, except for in the Ideal Space); and Perspective Shift, whose functionality is to allow for the temporary contraction and dilation of spatial dimensions (and, with sufficient advancement, the formation of more complicated spatial contortions, including 'perspective knots' that are capable of remaining relatively stable without the direct attention of the Tools' user). In their original forms, Bulkspread was the product of numerous unique material and spiritual organs created by a sort of magical mutation or mystical bloodline inheritance, of which the Traveler was the last scion, while Perspective Shift involved numerous complicated, long, and materially expensive rituals to enforce rote perspectives on particular regions of space.
Taking the
Traveler's Tools grants you them in their reborn form, whose nature is almost purely psychic in nature, manifesting as simple and intuitive mental actions which you can take with a flicker of will and attention, ephemeral auras of light and sound operating the effects that you desire to create or sustain, as well as a powerful intuition for tricks and techniques that both of the Tools can be used for, some of which might not be obvious at first glance, including the ability to traverse the Bulk and visit other worlds under your own power, and an innate capacity to grow and refine both Tools through regular use and exercise. Intuitively, these abilities may seem strong but not overwhelming, but the Great Attractor has gone to great lengths to destroy them and to introduce further obstacles to inter-world travel, for a simple reason: the accumulation of numerous magics was an essential characteristic of its early stages of growth, and thus is immensely useful in matching and exceeding its growth rate, and therefore to ultimately defeating it. The Tools may not be strictly necessary, but the costs imposed on providing them to you by the Great Attractor's precautions are commensurate with their ultimate utility. Additionally, the Artifact
the Steel Mare is discounted by 2 embers, as its spirit finds a deep kinship with you.
[ ] Second Skin (-5 embers, requires
Heroism, incompatible with
Grief) - Once, in an eon long ago, when the one who would become the Great Attractor had not yet cast aside everything but their hunger, the right of every self-aware mind was to shine with their own light. Unique to each, born from their thoughts and feelings and self-concept, an ever-shifting and ever-growing power, these lights formed the basis for every society that lived in this multiverse at the time, and provided such abundance and safety that it drew the attention of the Great Dragons, beings of such staggering might and enormity that even now, the Great Attractor would struggle to defeat the least among their number. Once, in this long-gone age, this realm served as one of their many nests, where their nascent young could be nourished and sheltered and taught. Eventually, though, this came to an end, beginning with the Great Dragons' attention drifting from this place for distant and obscure reasons, and ending when the Great Attractor slew the guardian who they left behind, slaughtered the hatchlings, and feasted on their remains.
Not long after that point, the Great Attractor saw several self-lights begin to shift, growing in directions meant to oppose it. The brightest among them it slew personally, but the rest, too numerous even for it to attend to individually without slowing its growth to an unacceptable degree, were instead sealed. An enormous outpouring of spiritual substance, darkness and division made manifest, drawn up by the Great Attractor's terrifying
Gravity. It slid between the mind and the light, a husk wrapped around the self's pith. It is all but impossible to pierce, but Qlahlaha has done it before. In fact, your newness to this ontology means that the substance has not had long to settle onto your soul, to feed on your self-light and grow strong from it, allowing for the possibility of not only piercing it to spark your blood-power with
Magescarred, or to merely remove it entirely (which would allow you temporary access to your self-light, but which would not prevent the substance from accumulating around your soul again), but to
subvert it, bringing it into alignment with yourself.
Taking
Second Skin grants you this. The substance will be transformed in the eponymous
Second Skin, allowing you to easily hide your self-light's growth from the Great Attractor and its agents, as well protecting you from numerous potential spiritual attacks or contagions, and being extrudable into the physical world as a sort of living liquid armor, extending its protections to physical threats and allowing you to form prehensile tendrils from its mass. Your self-light in turn has both a general supplementary function, capable of taking the place of essentially any other resource that your Magics might expend, whether that's spiritual energy to fuel evocations of sword sorcery, lifeblood to sustain heavenly spirits summoned with aldu'a, or even your past to burn for
Investiture, and if you make sure to not spend as much of your self-light as you're generating and allow it to accumulate, it will steadily catalyze the formation of a new, unique magic system, perfectly suited (and in fact directly born from) your thoughts and emotions, growing and changing right alongside you. The power and freedom this affords, if such things are sufficiently central to your selfhood, can hardly be understated. Indeed, the Great Attractor's own
Gravity began as just such a self-light manifestation, even if it has since grown far beyond even that.
[ ] Gravity (-7 embers, requires
Overt and
Central Limit, incompatible with
Lifetime and
Grief) - The weapon of the enemy. As indicated by the sheer number of embers required, this Magic is not easy for Qlahlaha to provide, and its sheer power is only half the reason. The Great Attractor possesses a deep and penetrating sense for where and how its own magic is being used, and keeps a close watch thereon. Any inexplicable arrivals are sure to draw immediate investigation by the
Dark Stalker at a
minimum, and might prompt the Great Attractor to simply obliterate the offender and whatever worlds they've touched, just in case. Thus, Qlahlaha must make your appearance
fully explicable, every errant atom accounted for. Such is within their power, but it's a close thing, and even so your circumstances will be exceptional enough to be noteworthy, and it will require extensive care and effort on your part for your growth to not be carefully tracked, and thus for your journey to not be halted prematurely as soon as you show any promise as a potential rival to the Great Attractor. This will also demand that you be inserted not into any of the worlds previously described to you, but into
Central Limit, a world of the Great Attractor's own devising where all users of
Gravity gain their power (and where most of them were born), which is built to shape them into appropriate (and generally unwitting) tools to further the Great Attractor's growth, and which is more broadly a vastly cruel and uncaring universe.
As for the Magic itself,
Gravity is almost entirely passive, as the name might suggest, though with the right tools or sufficient advancement it can be coaxed into manifesting at the user's direction. It expresses itself as a sort of ontological weight, bending chance and circumstance, physical and metaphysical forces, and eventually the fabric of reality and even the structure of
Gravity itself around you as your 'density' increases.
At its weakest, the so-called subtle densities, one's
Gravity is essentially immaterial, unable to influence the physical world except by directing your own energies, and thus manifests primarily as strange hunches, eerie reflexes, or unexpected expressions of your other magics (if you have any) that pull you towards good fortune. From there, one's
Gravity grows in its pull, until it eventually metamorphoses, reaching what are known as the substantial densities, where it possesses enough strength to directly influence the external world, and eventually even conjure physical objects from itself, and then on to the supernal densities where one's
Gravity has completely surpassed mundane forces and now only struggles against the
Gravity of others (and against some other particularly powerful magics).
There is also a fourth step, the singular density, where one's
Gravity has become something unto itself, unique and personal, not entirely unlike one's self-light though much less fluid and often of a much more monomaniacal nature, but those who achieve singularity are generally quick to abandon
Central Limit and go on to form their own lesser worlds, which is where many of the Bulk worlds come from originally. There is even a density beyond the singular, whose sole occupant is the Great Attractor and which might thus be called the supreme density, though such a name will naturally become rather defunct when the Great Attractor ascends to the sixth density in a little over two millennia.
Taking
Gravity grants access to the magic at the upper end of the substantial densities and with a clear path towards supernal density, as well as a complete life-history explaining your origins, skills, advancement in
Gravity, and whatever other Magics, Boons, Artifacts, and Drawbacks you might have. It will likely be in your best interest to seek out a means of escaping
Central Limit without drawing too much more attention to yourself, ideally to a world where Qlahlaha's influence is strong, such as
Salamandrine Spire or
Infinite Horizon, where you can make steady, unexceptional progress until a rendezvous with an ally in your quest who can help you throw off the Great Attractor's attention can be arranged. Additionally, the Boon
Mentorship and Artifact
Hunger are discounted by 1 ember each.
Magics are only one of the ways that Qlahlaha's power can manifest. These options, the 'Boons', are distinguished by more so being things that are done to you, something that either has an immediate and largely static effect on you or which gives you some finite power that you can discharge after your insertion.
[ ] Bodysculpt (-1 ember) - Human morphologies are stunningly common through this multiverse, but not universal, and indeed in worlds like
Radiant Intrusion that are populated entirely by people who are genetically and essentially human, their bodies may vary wildly from the baseline.
Bodysculpt allows you to fully remodel your biology into anything which abides by the limits of availability in your Insertion Point (and are functional for the pursuit of your quest, for worlds where the available forms include many that would not suffice).
For
Return Home and
Infinite Horizon, this will amount to just being able to take your choice of human forms within natural variance and equipped with mundane prosthetics and body-modifications, but for
Salamandrine Spire there's a decent variety alchemical augmentations, and in
Apical Meristems and
Radiant Intrusion, the ministrations of the
Rogue Prince and various bio-active crystal arrays in the former or sarcomorphic transformations in the latter make an incredible diversity of forms feasible.
[ ] Achilles (-1 ember, requires
Bodysculpt and
Weak Point) - If you take the Drawback
Weak Point, one positive consequence of not having your summoning locus dissolved is that it can instead form the basis of a comprehensive physical enhancement for the rest of your body, rendering you essentially invincible to any vector of physical harm that doesn't pass directly through your
Weak Point.
Beyond being an excellent defense, this also allows Qlahlaha to augment the rest of your biology massively thanks to increased resistance to strain, and even to improve the interface between your body and soul significantly for the same reason, with improvements to your mundane and magical abilities as a natural result. However, if you do push yourself to your newly raised limits, the excess energy (be it of a spiritual or physical kind) will manifest as a jet scintillating ghost-flame emerging from your
Weak Point, which may give away its location when it would otherwise be non-obvious.
[ ] Golden Glow (-1/2/3 embers) - A literal aura of wealth, including a fortune's worth of a currency that is accepted in a truly staggering number of worlds (including all of the Insertion Points, other than maybe
Return Home until you explain just what it's capable of), for its utility if not it's organizational backing. Golden Glow is forged from possibility using an advanced
Uncertainty technique, and allows you to make purchases with it (or any other currency that you have on you) at any time, even if you aren't physically present to make trades, by tapping into the possibility of you having made the trade earlier in time.
The more improbable the trade, the more of your Glow will be lost to 'transaction fees', though, so in practice Glow is only actually exchanged for goods and services when there is no alternative. Your Glow in particular will be worth quite a lot, on par with the lifetime earnings of a well-paid master of a trade for one purchase, ten times that for two, and a thousand times that for three. Forgers of Glow, practitioners of
Uncertainty and members of the disciple of Qlahlaha's organization, can be found in many worlds, and will often pay in Glow in return for contributions to their organization's mission. Given your own association with Qlahlaha, getting in contact with them is probably a good idea even if you don't purchase any Glow now.
[ ] Guardian Angel (-1 or more embers) - Qlahlaha's ability to directly interfere with the events of this multiverse outside the Ideal Space where they reside is limited, by the finitude of their embers but also by the avenues available to spend them without drawing the Great Attractor's immediate attention and thus its reprisal. However, given that you are moving through their abode here in the Ideal Space on your way in, you are something of an exception. By carefully winnowing its potential, limiting it to manifesting only to protect you, Qlahlaha can hide one or more embers inside the impact on possibility-space your insertion makes, allowing them to subtly alter the course of events as they relate to you in a much more efficient manner than trying to have the same effect from the Ideal Space. The particular winnowing this demands means that the alterations can only be used to 'protect' you, to direct you away from harm (or to direct harm away from you), but it still allows for considerable flexibility, and if you take Drawbacks that have a tendency to attract trouble, especially
Dark Stalker or
Weak Point, even a single ember's worth of
Guardian Angel can potentially provide disproportionate value.
[ ] Lifetime (-1 ember, incompatible with
Concentrated) - Rather than being physically deposited into your Insertion Point as you are, you will instead be fused with a well-suited, counterfactually-consenting extant host who is native to your Insertion Point, chosen to minimize dysmorphia and personality-conflict and otherwise following your desired specifications. This includes a full life-history, access to the host's skills (both mundane and magical), deeply ingrained familiarity with your Insertion Point (including native fluency in at least one of its languages), and a sympathetic host-personality to help you bear the mental burden of your travails. If your Insertion Point is Infinite Horizon, you may alternatively choose to have Qlahlaha insert you into a host-body custom-built by its followers there. This limits what kind of identity or information your host-body might possess to those present in the citadelian population, but does allow for your physical attributes to be tuned significantly higher, essentially providing a free
Bodysculpt.
[ ] Preparations (-1 ember) - You (and Qlahlaha) already have a modicum of control over where
within your Insertion Point you will appear (other than
Return Home, in which case you will return to exactly whatever position you were summoned from). You'll appear somewhere that isn't immediately dangerous to you, generally close to civilization (especially if there's a center to it, like the Citadel in
Infinite Horizon or the Spire city in
Salamandrine Spire), and with whatever resources your Magics, Boons, and Artifacts provide, but your placement is otherwise random, dictated by wherever will cost Qlahlaha the least power to put you that still satisfies those parameters.
However, with an extra ember set aside for it, Qlahlaha would be able to allow you much more latitude in choosing where you arrive (though some particularly 'powerful' locations would still not be within reach, such as inside the Daystar in
Radiant Intrusion or anywhere near the precipice of the Main Trunk in
Apical Meristems), including the ability to provide further criteria rather than selecting a specific location, such as 'near a group of locals who would be sympathetic to a stranger' (though again, particularly powerful criteria like 'in front of the most powerful member of the disciple of Qlahlaha's entourage within the selected Insertion Point' or similar things are not available), even outright manipulations of circumstance around your arrival, though only subtle ones.
[ ] Self-Proclaimed (-1/2/3 embers) - In the lands of the immortal emperor, names hold great power. Sounds and symbols are impressed into the spirit of those who hear or see them and recognize their name. This is a feature of the structure of their world, and difficult to replicate elsewhere (though not strictly impossible, with the right magic), but once a name is impressed into a soul, it will generally remain so if not interfered with. Once impressed, names serve to empower but also limit the actions of the person or people who are called by it. With this Boon, you can declare some number of names for yourself, one for 1 ember, three for 2 embers, or twenty seven for 3 embers, which only you can call and which only you will be called by.
If you say it aloud, or form it from hand-signs or written letters, you will feel its effect, a focusing and honing of your spirit, the more narrow the name's meaning the more powerfully it will strengthen your spirit (and consequently, any of your Magics wielded in harmony with the meaning of the name). The duration of the effect will vary depending on how deeply the name resonates with your self-concept, which can and will vary moment to moment, but if not actively disrupted (whether by yourself or someone else) will generally last until you either complete some discrete 'task' associated with the meaning of the name, or until you exhaust yourself in one way or another and are unable to continue.
[ ] Three Answers (-1 or more embers) - There is a lot to know about the situation, a lot that is important to know, but Qlahlaha doesn't have the latitude to simply imbue all of it into you, even if they spent every ember they have in the attempt. But, if you find yourself needing more information, Qlahlaha can take an ember and answer three questions you have. The criteria for how much information a single question can ask for are fairly generous, but also quite vague, and if they judge a question you ask to be likely to have too broad an answer, they'll offer you a chance to rephrase before answering. The embers set aside for these questions remain even after your insertion, so you can also save some or all of the questions to serve as a limited method of quick, easy, and undetectable communication with Qlahlaha post-insertion.
[ ] Angelfire (-2 or more embers) - As seen with
Guardian Angel and to a lesser degree with
Three Answers, Qlahlaha can use your entrance into the multiverse to smuggle embers into it along with you. The former options' efficiency depends on limiting their function, but if a loss of efficiency is acceptable, then those limitations aren't necessary.
Angelfire is just that, a form the embers can take that allows them to follow you into your Insertion Point without any loss of general capability aside from a diminishment in magnitude. Each portion of
Angelfire takes two embers to create, and can then be transformed into an effect similar to what approximately four-fifths of an ember could achieve were it expended here in the Ideal Space.
You can expend your
Angelfire to purchase diminished versions of anything available to you now (or non-diminished versions, if you have enough
Angelfire to cover the entire cost, which may leave you with smaller fractions of an ember afterwards), or to directly affect the world around you, manifesting Qlahlaha's own power to imbricate the layers of reality and possibility, which can be considered a single act of a vastly elevated form of
Uncertainty. You should be very careful about expending a full measure or more of
Angelfire in a single usage, though, as it can be very attention-grabbing to agents of the Great Attractor.
[ ] Cloud Halo (-2 embers, incompatible with
Overt) - Once, a long time ago (though still long after the Great Attractor's devouring of the dragon hatchlings and nest-guardian), a great raft arrived in this multiverse from even further afield than you have been summoned from.
Efficiency, and other remnants of the same great power of which it is merely a part, was one of their legacies, but there was another, the
Cloud Halo, though it has been rendered nearly extinct, only present in a greatly diminished form on a single world. Nonetheless, Qlahlaha has studied it in great detail, and combined with its unique relationship with possibility-space, Qlahlaha has been able to replicate a
less diminished
Cloud Halo (though still far lesser than what Qlahlaha has been able to learn about the originals carried by the refugees), which they can in turn offer to you.
Despite the name, it doesn't produce any sort of visible halo, and is in fact a tool for concealment with incredible elevation, allowing you to tune how much of your presence can be noticed, all the way up to total imperceptibility to anyone whose method of observing you has elevation comparable to
Gravity in the lower range of supernal density, as well as making the halo's effect selective, including selecting who it obscures you from, what about you it obscures from them, and how much it obscures those things from them.
[ ] Earthblood (-2 embers) - A strange phenomenon happens on some worlds, when a particular confluence of circumstances arises. In worlds where elements of human spirit can be contained in metal vessels, such as the worlds where
Sword Sorcerers are present, but notably also a few others that happen to have metallic magics of various sorts, including
Radiant Intrusion, it is possible for those spiritual elements to build up over time. As the metal becomes highly charged with this human essence, it'll tend to discharge it in various ways, but in the right environment this discharge will be prevented, and the humanity will continue to build within until it eventually crosses a threshold and begins to transform the metal's physical substance.
This transformation can be gradual or sudden, depending on what metal it is and how much humanity it's absorbed, but one way or another, eventually an autochthon will be born. A being of living metal, reforged by the humanity within it. Ironically, due to how much higher the threshold for this transformation is than the levels of most spiritual elements in a human's soul (even for those whose souls can retain spiritual energy), they often possess much greater 'human' spiritual characteristics, the strength of their emotions and magic often being many times those of ordinary humans, which can result in them leaving ruin in their wake, especially considering they possess strength and endurance commensurate to the weight of their metal bodies.
Taking
Earthblood will transform you into one such autochthon, though with your emotions in particular held at the same levels as they are now, while retaining the same magical and physical improvements, and allow you to form an intimidating aura of ghostly fire with a simples spiritual exertion, similar in appearance to the jet produced by
Achilles. Additionally, the Boon
Bodysculpt's limitations on what forms you can take are
vastly reduced, as the medium of living metal is much more forgiving of wildly divergent body-plans than mere flesh and blood, and the Drawback
Passions will provide an additional ember (still counting against your Drawback limit) as it undoes the emotional mitigation and then renders those emotions essentially uncontrollable.
[ ] Imperial Privilege (-2 embers) - In the lands of the immortal emperor, names hold great power, but that power can only be wielded by the same people who gave the name they wield, with one exception. The very same immortal emperor has used his unique position to grant himself numerous benefits, subverting the nominal architecture of his world and his people, placing himself at the fulcrum of its power. Fortunately, this same privileged position is something that Qlahlaha can grant you. The effects of
Imperial Privilege are numerous, though unfortunately the emperor's immortality isn't inherent to them, simply something he built over the course of many decades using the tools his privilege affords him.
The largest benefits include: being able to 'see' the names impressed into souls, including both what sounds or symbols call the name and what effects it has on the one it calls; the ability to call names with the nominal force of the entire empire, even when you have played no part in giving the name you call; and most importantly, the power to directly tamper and tinker with nominal architecture, including numerous sub-abilities such as impressing, altering, or erasing names from a soul with a single word or gesture instead of long years of effort, or constructing new structures to connect different names, allowing nominal force to flow in directions it normally wouldn't.
Notably, if you ever visit the world of the immortal emperor (and don't possess sufficient measures to hide yourself, such as
Cloud Halo), your presence will be immediately noticeable to the emperor himself, and your arrival may prompt him to take desperate and
rash actions, if he is not either calmed or dealt with quickly.
[ ] Living Ghost (-2 embers) - In the same cursed world of hungry ghosts which
Death Rites is drawn from, ghosts are not exclusively a post-mortem phenomenon. The discovery of the rites of ghost-awakening (and subsequent founding of the Fraternity of Ghost-Eating Exorcists within the Order) is relatively recent, less than a lifetime ago, but the proliferation ghost-easters through alliance territory has been rapid ever since the fraternity truly came into its own about fifty years ago. With
Living Ghost, you could join their number (though if you lack
Death Rites you would probably still benefit from schooling in the standard rites of exorcism and in how to work with your own ghost), awakening your soul's own mind, autonomous yet deeply interwoven with yours, capable of embodying itself in the world in the same manner that ghosts of the departed do, but also capable of expressing itself through the medium of your Magics, taking hold of and guiding them when you allow it, and capable of doing so with an intuitive elegance which equals to your own skill, or even surpasses it given time for your ghost to adapt.
Like all ghosts, yours will hunger, though as a living ghost, it won't ever undergo ego-dissolution no matter how hungry it gets (though it will still enter a state of quiescence over the course of years of deprivation), and when fed with non-blank soulstuff, can grow its power, and thus your own. It might either digest it into spiritual energy, or incorporate what it eats, modifying its own structure to expand and modify its abilities, and thus those of your Magics as well. In the cursed world where they originate, the abilities of ghosts are similar, in some ways, to those of Telaugy, spiritual manifestations of elements of human concepts born from understanding the mechanisms of the world, but expressed through limbs and organs rather than magical beams. Souls from other worlds, especially worlds with other magic, might have very different abilities, though whether you can find an ethical source of them might be another question. Notably, if you have
Sword Sorcerer and and have unrestrained spiritual energy (the state which most people in the cursed world share), your ghost's hunger will be
much more intense, and cause it to lose functionality much quicker, becoming quiescent in a matter of days rather than years.
[ ] Birthright (-3 embers) - When the refugees that brought the great magic of which
Efficiency is a fragment, and who bore the original form of the
Cloud Halo, first came to this multiverse, they were carried by a great world-ship. The same far-off event which caused their haloes to dissipate and their magic to shatter also brought ruin to their vessel, rendering it incapable of further travel and destroying many (but not all) of its other amenities. It persisted, though, and its population retains the largest number of sparks of
Efficiency of any world, as well as possessing several other fragments of the shattered magic, though
Birthright isn't exactly one of them. Thanks to some drastic actions taken by the leader of the refugees, their world now possesses four deific entities, two goddesses and two gods, as well as the numerous miracles they have given birth to since their creation, each of which is comparable in its world-shaking might to some of the most powerful artifacts of
Investiture.
These miracles, which are born in quite a literal way after an act of hierogamy between one of the gods and one of the goddesses, are either released out into the world to act out the innate urges placed in them by the goddess who birthed them, or infused into a petitioner of the goddess to grant them its power instead.
Birthright grants you one such miracle, born from your choice of the goddess Soul (whose domain is the intrinsic and internal) or the goddess Law (whose domain is the extrinsic and external), and sired by your choice of Earth (whose domain is the physical and observable) or Sky (whose domain is the metaphysical and ineffable). Within the intersection of the domains of its parents, your miracle's specifications will be chosen by the goddess, with Qlahlaha's counsel regarding your circumstances and desires (including both your quest and your other choices here), ensuring its relevance to whatever course of action you end up taking.
[ ] Munajjim (-3 embers) - The ancient stargazers of
Salamandrine Spire who first discovered the names of the heavenly spirits and invented the rituals to beckon them to earth did not
only possess hearts full of curiosity. There is more to being able to see the deeper meaning in the stars than just curiosity, more to being able to gaze into infinity and grasp, in some minute form, what you are seeing than just
wanting to know. There is an essence to infinity, and they each had a drop of it in their souls, thanks to some particular events that their world was the stage for in an age long-past. This essence suffused their minds, not strictly adding any particular knowledge or insight, but simply expanding the limits of their cognition, giving them the capacity to understand and analyze things of infinite scope (though not necessarily with infinite precision).
By taking in some of this infinity essence yourself, you can achieve the same, and even more. That same ability to grapple with the infinite will allow your soul's ability to retain spiritual energy (if it hasn't been sacrificed) to be similarly endless, as well as allowing you to push your Magics to their absolute limits, inventing new techniques and maybe even whole new systems of magic as you begin to generalize the underlying metaphysical principles from which they arise. The results, while not strictly impossible, would nonetheless demand an enormous investment of time and effort to achieve without the essence.
[ ] Nameless Name (-3 embers) - The Great Attractor's slaying of the Nest-Guardian marked a turning point in this realm's history, the beginning of the Great Attractor's era of domination. One of the first things they did in the aftermath was to obliterate the Nest-Guardian utterly, such that none now remember their existence, and the possibility of uttering their name has been suppressed. However, even total obliteration and erasure from history is not enough to put a final end to a
true Dragon, even a runt like the Nest-Guardian. With a considerable expenditure of power, Qlahlaha can brush aside just enough the Great Attractor's lingering
Gravity to reveal the beginning of the Nest-Guardian's emergence-name to you.
It's ill-suited to a human voice, and extends beyond simple physical sound, but even a poor mimicry of the name will be sufficient to begin having an effect. Light, in particular of the same kind which fills the Sea of Light, will flow freely through your soul, if only briefly, before shining out into the world around you. This is a powerful spiritual stimulant, can be used to blind unsuspecting enemies, banish supernatural darkness, and naturally can fuel telaugic techniques if you possess the magic, but it's also only the very beginning of the name, and only the beginning of what it can do. Each time you utter this first syllable, you pull on the rest of the name, steadily working it free from the suppression the Great Attractor placed on it, eventually causing further syllables to rise up from the darkness and into your mind.
Speaking more of the name will extend the time you have access to that free-flowing light, grant you more control over its behavior within and without your soul, and eventually allow you to use it to speak truer forms of the name, increasing the speed with which you uncover additional portions of the name. With many years of dedicated practice, you might eventually uncover enough of the name to actually allow a fraction of the Nest-Guardian's self to re-emerge from non-existence, perhaps even manifest themself through the light you conjure. If you reach that point, they will be certain to help you in your quest against the Great Attractor, but you may wish to be cautious as to what the return of even the least of the true Dragons might mean for yourself, and for humanity at large. After all, where one Dragon goes, more are sure to follow.
[ ] Concentrated (-4 embers, requires
Apical Meristems and
Anchored) -
Preparations can't place you within the Main Trunk, or even further up than the lowest branches of the universal tree, but that doesn't mean that placing you there is
impossible. By anchoring you to
Apical Meristems' sector of possibility-space and expending a considerable amount of power, it becomes possible to insert you just barely within the Main Trunk, but that's close enough for your concentration to begin. Becoming
Concentrated has a number of consequences, but in your case it can be simplified to three primary effects: your life-force becomes concentrated and materialized within your body, providing all the same benefits as
Rogue Prince; this concentrated life-force then serves a sort of metaphysical solvent, dissolving all of your other Magics before recrystallizing them into a single, unified Magic, capable of everything its constituents were capable of while also making it vastly easier discover and expand upon inter-system synergies, but also even stronger and more flexible than you might expect from such a synthesis due to the infusion of life-force, the effect of which is comparable to each constituent Magic being enhanced and expanded by 2 additional embers worth of Qlahlaha's power prior to recombination. Notably, this means that you've been inserted behind even the most cautious of the Life-King's defenses, which combined with your overall power-level presents you a unique opportunity to perform a devastating back-attack against them, which even if you don't intend to fight them still gives you powerful leverage in negotiations.
[ ] Mentorship (-4 embers, requires
Recruitment) - There is a secret war in this realm, a great struggle spread across nearly every world in the multiverse, separate from Qlahlaha's own quest to prevent the Great Attractor's ascension to the Sixth Density. The two sides are nameless, and nearly without identity, bound together more through networks of loyalty, sworn oath, and control than through common cause, but nonetheless, with Qlahlaha's perspective they can be distinguished, and through careful action, they cultivated the side which by happenstance was more open to their ethos of heroism, steadily growing them into a more organized fighting force (in terms of both strategy and ideology). This feat was unfortunately matched by a rival organizer on the far side of
Central Limit, preventing this from being the coup that ended the great struggle, but it nonetheless provides an excellent pool of potential agents and resources to cautiously draw from.
In your own case, by binding yourself to this allied faction, Qlahlaha can in turn pull some strings to ensure that you are brought to the attention of one of several individuals who are
particularly aligned with them, each of whom can serve as an able guardian, mentor, and perhaps most importantly,
chauffeur, allowing you to access the bounty of the multiverse and their guidance in finding the opportunities and resources they know are the most valuable. The fact that you'll have a veteran of the great struggle at your back will also help minimize the risk associated with joining the fight.
[ ] A Promise In Blood (-5 embers, requires
Dark Stalker) - Qlahlaha remains uncertain of the precise origin of this vulnerability, but they are certain of its existence. The
Dark Stalker is among the most powerful avatars of the Great Attractor, only clearly surpassed by the Great Attractor's core-of-being ensconced within
Central Limit. It is certainly the most active, and one of the only such avatars that Qlahlaha believes is meaningfully active on both sides of
Central Limit, at least going from their coming and going and patterns of activity. This otherwise unprecedented level of involvement and, seemingly, independence, combined with a particular resonance between Qlahlaha's own nature and the
Dark Stalker's, allows for Qlahlaha to perform a similar sort of turnabout as with turning your own husk into a
Second Skin.
If you permit Qlahlaha to expend your entire initial allotment of embers in the effort, and to actively draw the
Dark Stalker's attention to your arrival, they can
free the
Dark Stalker from what is binding it to the Great Attractor. This on its own would, in all likelihood,
massively disrupt the Great Attractor's plans regardless of what the
Dark Stalker chooses to do after it's freed, since even attempting to rejoin the Great Attractor would have enormous costs for both parties, but what's more, Qlahlaha is nearly as certain the
Dark Stalker will not only avoid becoming shackled by the Great Attractor again, but with you in its sights, will actually
aid you in your quest, or at least take it up as well. There's no guarantee, but given you
will be at its attention, there's good odds it will take the opportunity to help you, whether in small or large ways, and as things stand there really isn't any better ally to have in the multiverse.
[ ] Self-Acceptance (-6 embers, requires
Grief) - In a similar vein to
Second Skin and
A Promise In Blood, but following Qlahlaha's grandest ambition for what the embers they offer might be used for, you may choose to take on the Inkstain, to bear the burden of
Grief, and allow Qlahlaha to expend almost as much power as needed to grant you access to
Gravity to instead enact an altered form of the husk-subversion of
Second Skin, empowered to strike at, and
through, the connection between your inkstained husk and the Black Mountain where the Inkstain originates, and plant the seed of something there.
Grief, in its unaltered course, always finds its ending in either death or Acceptance, the total relinquishment of the self to the emptiness and meaninglessness of the Black Mountain.
With the introduction of
Self-Acceptance, however, that final fork in the road now at least presents the
possibility of a third path. It will, necessarily, be harder to find and harder to follow than the path of Accepting the mountain's bleak vista, even 6 embers of power could not make
Self-Acceptance easy, but it will still be salvation to some, which is more than the Inkstain normally offers. This will in turn allow for the strength and fortitude granted by the Inkstain to amount to more than the provenance of monsters and apathetics, given to people who can still care, still find the motivation to use them for something
good, yourself likely included.
Notably, the state of
Self-Acceptance is naturally not such a dead-end as the mountain's Acceptance is, and once reached does not stop you from continuing to cultivate your Inkstain, allowing you to remodel your extent mutations as you desire, and for the possibility of developing new mutations to capitalize on your own self. Perhaps they will mimic, or even outright tap into your self-light, and through it interface with any Magics you might acquire.
Magics and Boons aren't the only things Qlahlaha is offering you, though. Lastly, there are Artifacts, physical objects (mostly, at least) that Qlahlaha can pluck from possibility-space (or, in a few cases, reality) and given to your care and use. Artifacts can be freely given and shared, though in the case of
Demon Mask,
Hunger, and
the Glory, the prerequisites for their use may make them ineffectual for most others. Importantly, the nature of physical objects such as these means that some of their possibilities have crossed over from the other side of
Central Limit, allowing Qlahlaha to offer Artifacts from worlds whose Magics and Boons they could not reach.
[ ] Apple of Youth (-1 ember) - Sarcomorphy, as it's practiced in
Radiant Intrusion, is only the tip of a very large iceberg, one which peaks above the surface in many worlds, underpinning many forms of ritual healing magic across the multiverse, and which is itself a fragment of the grand inheritance which the sparks of
Efficiency broke off of. While the sarcomorphists of
Radiant Intrusion are far from exploring the magic deeply enough to uncover the meaning of this kinship, Qlahlaha's perspective is not so limited, and by following that thread far enough, Qlahlaha is able to find the latent design of this
Apple of Youth, a fruit which encodes the nature of an extremely advanced ritual structure, primarily rooted in Sacromorphic design principles but extending to the furthest corners of that hidden deeper magic.
The apple itself is imperishable, immune to rot and not subject to the autolytic enzymatic processes that cause bruising and browning, and when eaten induces a comprehensive anti-senescence transformation in the eater, bringing them to their physical prime and making them functionally ageless, as well as granting immunity to all mundane diseases and poisons, greatly improved healing factor and metabolic efficiency, and a store of metamorphic energy which will be deployed automatically to correct undesired mutations or transformations.
The real magic is in the six seeds, though, which can grow in basically any environment so long the symbolic rituals of plant-care are kept for them, and which not only can grow more apples of the same kind, but will produce 'variants' with different sorts of rituals encoded, applying different transformations to the ones who eat them. The first generation of variants will be relatively subtle in their divergence, but if their own seeds are replanted, the subsequent trees will themselves occasionally produce further variations, and in this way over the course of generations almost any transformation which the deep magic could achieve might be realized
[ ] Demon Mask (-1 ember, requires
Disquiet) - There is a sort of unsettling, alien countenance which comes from being foreign to the multiverse as a whole. Qlahlaha can ameliorate this, and will if you don't request otherwise, but there is an alternative for those so inclined. They can instead expend an ember of their power to weld together an Artifact from the remnants of a few different lesser creations from a particular world on the far side of
Central Limit, which instead
amplifies the countenance's effect. A
Demon Mask, bearing a terrifying visage which shifts at your mental command, hiding your identity without impairing your ability to express yourself.
While the mask is worn, your actions and abilities become cloaked by a sort of memetic shroud, making it nigh-impossible to recognize your magics or boons for what they are even by experts or people familiar with you personally. The mask will also amplify the uncanniness your presence carries, to the point of inducing outright terror in the unprepared or weak-willed and even shaking the confidence of the powerful and determined, exploiting your nature as an unknown actor to sow confusion and doubt. As a mythos builds around your alter ego, wearing the mask will expand your abilities (in subtle and slight ways, but which compound over time) to match the expectations people are developing of what your masked identity can do.
[ ] Femur of Fixity (-1 ember) - Another Artifact originally from a world on the far side of
Central Limit, though whole and undamaged rather than reconstituted from scraps like the
Demon Mask, and from an entirely distinct world. A hefty rod of metal in the shape of a human femur engraved with impossibly fine runic scrimshaw, the
Femur of Fixity has the property of 'stopping' things when activated by a pulse of spiritual energy. Naively, this will simply freeze the femur itself in place with respect to the ground, floating even if unsupported and resisting attempts to move or break it (notably doing so seemingly without a power-source) until it receives another pulse of spiritual energy to deactivate, at which point it returns to normality.
However, with practice it is possible to access further functions, such as limiting its deactivation with a 'password' encoded in the activation pulse, to apply the fixation to a solid target other than the femur itself (most intuitively by touching the femur to it, though applying the effect with a sort of beam or lobbed projectile is also possible), and to only partially fixate the target, such as by locking it's movement on only a single axis, locking the position of its center of mass without locking its rotation, or rendering it unbreakable without also immobilizing it.
[ ] Impostor (-1 ember) - A fourthsteel dueling sword, named primarily for its unnatural lightness in the hand, despite hitting with considerable momentum. It is nigh-unbreakable and requires no maintenance to remain in perfect condition, is capable of both diamond-like rigidity, cartoonish flexibility, or both simultaneously, is viciously sharp when aimed to kill but harmless when thrust without violent intent, and contains numerous other seeming paradoxes made possible through fourthsteel's capacity to be forged into multiple different shapes and thus given multiple different sets of supernatural metallurgical properties, which it can then shift between with a simple spiritual nudge or even cycle through continuously.
Impostor goes somewhat beyond conventional metallurgy, forged with an entire continuum of forms and properties, a sort of tiny piece of possibility-space itself encoded in the sword's metallurgical working, and flowing through that space of possible forms at the direction of the wielder's desire (as indicated by resonances in their soul and spiritual energy).
Like all swords, it possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "Transit of Mercury", which allows for the blade to
truly exist in multiple forms simultaneously once suffused with a modicum of spiritual energy, rather than merely transition from one to another very quickly. While active,
Impostor blurs into an indistinct mass of possibility which resolves into specificity only when and where needed, as well as exaggerating the lightness and speed of the blade even further, allowing you to make strikes shockingly faster than your own abilities might indicate.
[ ] Invincible Outfit (-1 ember) - A set of clothes made from fabrics sealed through a specialized magical ritual, designed to your specification, though not limited to the extent of your expertise with clothing design, whether aesthetic or practical. The fibers themselves are essentially indestructible without first being unsealed (using a magic system unique to a single Bulk world on the far side of
Central Limit), to the point where only
Gravity of singular density or magics with similar elevation could manage it. This on its own doesn't render the cloth itself any more rigid or immobile than normal cloth, but an additional seal placed on the outfit as a whole allows it to temporarily become resistant to changes in shape or position (similar to the effect of the
Femur of Fixity, though with a surprisingly divergent underlying metaphysical basis). This temporary resistance is
distinctly brief however, and should not be relied on to resist an ongoing strain.
Anything that can reasonably be said to be an outfit (a definition which expands considerably when accounting for the effects of
Bodysculpt) can be made, or even simple bolts of cloth of sufficient area to tailor such yourself (or have it tailored by someone else). Unlike the magics which formed the
Demon Mask and
Femur of Fixity, the sealing magic used to create the outfit is difficult but not impossible to derive from the fabric as well, and likely possesses numerous useful synergies with the Magics available to you.
[ ] Looking Glass (-1 ember) - Another example of the same sealing magic as in the
Invincible Outfit, though in a somewhat different form and wielded towards a different purpose. The
Looking Glass takes the form of a small rectangular panel of glass, small enough to comfortably fit in your hand. It's been sealed with nigh-indestructibility of the same elevation, lacks the position-locking seal, and instead has a much more complicated, dynamic, and multifunctional seal placed on it, one which is actually far beyond the state of the art in the world where the sealing magic can be found.
The
Looking Glass's seal applies to 'information' which passes through its pane, nominally in the form of light or sound though more exotic media including spiritual energy also count. By speaking command-words or tapping the
Looking Glass in a particular pattern, you can open its data-processing selection menu, listing its many,
many computational functions. In total, it can be considered to function as an extremely powerful general-purpose sensor and supercomputer, or essentially a magical super-smartphone. As with the
Invincible Outfit, the
Looking Glass can be used to rederive the sealing magic which created it, and while the object itself is much harder to study, its own analytical suite more or less makes up for it.
[ ] Nightblade (-1 ember) - A long, straight, single-edged blade, blacker than the night it's named after. A more advanced and compact form of the crystal arrays used in the space-cutting keels of the Coalition's branch-ships in
Apical Meristems. Like it's larger brethren, the blade itself has essentially infinite sharpness thanks to the cuspidate folding of spacetime along its edge, with even the gentlest movement causing palpable ripples in the fabric of spacetime to emanate out from its cutting edge, while harsher movements cause the formation of twin spacetime vortices capable of considerable destruction at range.
With practice, these vortices can be aimed quite effectively, and form the basis of the
Nightblade's more esoteric techniques, such as using the vortices to create superluminal warp-bubble attacks, the formation of wormholes to allow attacks to pass around barriers capable of resisting the
Nightblade's cuts, or borrowing most directly from the function of a branch-ship's keel, allow the wielder to push 'against' spacetime itself to displace themself along a fourth spatial axis, allowing for otherwise impossible dodges and for attacks from hyperspatial angles.
Like all swords, it possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "Into Night", which allows the sorcerer to make a cut which temporarily 'splits' an extant spatial dimension into two, creating a localized pocket of higher dimensionality, the size and shape of which are determined by the amount and character of the spiritual energy expended on the evoked cut, and which (if shaped correctly) can amplify or dampen conceptual resonances in or near its bulk, which can be both highly useful for catalyzing exotic magical processes and also extremely hostile to other magics (or to mundane physics, for that matter).
[ ] Omnitool (-1 ember) - Another metallurgic Artifact, similar to
Impostor both in being forged from fourthsteel and in pushing the multifarious nature of fourthsteel to its limit, though in a different way. While
Impostor utilizes this nature to allow for extreme control over the form of the sword within the chunk of possibility-space encoded by its forging, the
Omnitool instead is built for extreme breadth of forms and generality of function. The
Omnitool's true mass is enormous, several thousand tons, but its special construction allows for mass which isn't currently in use to be safely 'hidden', allowing for it to be carried easily, extruding and retracting tool-heads and machinery as desired, transforming into anything from a simple crowbar all the way up to a fully-automated large-scale factory, and just about anything in between.
Notably, this includes a large variety of thirdsteel production lines, letting you replicate
Radiant Intrusion's recent industrial boom anywhere you go so long as you or someone in your entourage is capable of
Forgework to operate the
Omnitool. It can also be used to good effect as a weapon thanks to its mass-shifting functionality, if the need arises, though none of its myriad forms are
ideal for the task, and even though it is metal and can form sharp blades, the particular manner in which it's been forged means that, unlike almost any other metal object you'll encounter, it will very rapidly bleed away spiritual energy that it absorbs, and will fail to induce resonances in spiritual energy it does manage to briefly retain, preventing it from being evoked by a
Sword Sorcerer.
[ ] Tryadic Effigies (-1 ember) - A trio of fist-sized figurines, each bound with a rune-engraved leather thong and tied to a single belt. One has a humanoid shape, another draconic, and the third like a tree. Each figurine can be unbound, transforming it into a powerful spirit and permanently releasing it into the world in which the binding was undone. Each spirit has a different preferred domain of action as well, the human preferring to operate on people and societies, the dragon on fate and history, and the tree on the natural cycles and systems of the world. These domains naturally have considerable overlap, and the spirits are powerful enough even outside them that the difference between the three is mostly a matter of where they will act
first and most frequently, rather than what they're capable of in totality.
Immediately following their transformation, there will be a relatively brief period (on the order of a day) of locality wherein the spirit can easily manifest immediate, tangible effects during which they can be more easily negotiated with. After this period ends, the spirits will begin to expand and diffuse throughout the world, returning to the discarnate state from which they were originally torn and bound into effigies, and while they will continue to influence the world, their actions will be subtle and broad in scope, an alteration to the world's overall course and character rather than with discrete acts of intervention.
While their personalities do vary (and there may be some interpersonal tension between them while they're embodied if you unseal more than one in quick succession), conversing with any of the spirits will quickly uncover that all three are deeply kind, caring, and conscientious, and even if you are unable or unwilling to offer them anything in particular they will nonetheless be willing to give you at least a small favor in return for unsealing them, and more broadly, will be a consistent positive influence on any world they're released into.
[ ] Amber Scepter (-2 embers) - A long rod of electrum tipped with an ovoid amber, and a product of Alkhimiya, though only the most erudite of the philosophers of
Salamandrine Spire would even be able to recognize it as such, let alone replicate its design. Formed from spiritual matter drawn from the heavens of multiple worlds, the
Amber Scepter grants its wielder
power, pure and overwhelming. Even the crudest swing of the scepter contains mountain-leveling might, but its power can be just as easily realized with a heaven-splitting thunderbolt, a beam of light or blast of fire to outshine the sun, or a deluge of spiritual energy with any resonance familiar to the wielder.
Power so immense is difficult to tame, but not impossible, and wielding the scepter's physical form with care and dexterity can make it all the easier. With months of steady practice, the power can be rendered calm enough to safely interface with other systems, such as using it to fuel
Sword Sorcerer evocations or power mundane electronics, and with years dedicated to attaining mastery, you might achieve even greater results, such as condensing the energy released into tangible matter or sustaining the operation of a magic system in a world which otherwise lacks the necessary underlying structure.
[ ] Barrowbill (-2 embers) - Sourced from the same world as the
Femur of Fixity, and with a similar skeletal aesthetic, a solid metal hatchet shaped like a human scapula and humerus and engraved with impossibly fine runic scrimshaw, similar to the femur though the exact designs are not the same. If the axe's head is swung into earth, stone, or metal, it will split it with unnatural ease, almost without effort. The axe's true power is only properly apparent if it is embedded in a larger body of such material, activated with a pulse of spiritual energy, then drawn back, and in so doing, the chthonic substance it was embedded in will be drawn with it, enormous traceries of similar runes as are engraved on the hatchet flashing into being for an instant before the material is transmogrified into an extension and expansion of the axeblade.
This greater blade isn't necessarily larger in size, though it can be, and regardless of its size, it remains as easy to swing as the unaugmented hatched but strikes with force appropriate to the mass of material it was augmented with. The extent of this transmogrification doesn't have any finite limit, and can be sculpted with intent during the activation, and with a second pulse, the process can be reversed and the augmenting material returned to its original place and shape. If entire landscapes are used to augment the axeblade, structures and inhabitants will be safely ensconced within an internal space identical to their familiar landscape except for fading into mist beyond the edge of what was transmogrified by
Barrowbill, until the hatchet is deactivated. Any magic present on or within the land (including magics possessed by internalized inhabitants) will contribute especially to the blade's enhancement, granting blessings appropriate to whatever the nature of the magic is.
While
Barrowbill is not a sword per se, it is still a blade of metal, and thus it possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "Amputate", which with the application of an
enormous quantity of spiritual energy (and all the more enormous the larger the internalized space is) allows for the internal world to be severed, the axeblade's augmentation becoming permanent, and the transmogrified land likewise permanently removed from the world it had been a part of. The internal space becomes a new world, its misty edges slowly receding to reveal unfamiliar landscapes as it begins to grow into the fullness of itself. These new worlds will remain anchored to
Barrowbill even as they mature, and will be much more accessible to the hatchet's wielder than other worlds, and conversely much more difficult to access for those who do not wield it.
[ ] Exosomatic Coprocessor (-2 embers) - Another product of lattice magic, though fulfilling an entirely distinct function from the
Nightblade. The
Exosomatic Coprocessor is not a weapon, but rather a device for holistic mental augmentation, which it achieves admirably. Initially taking the form of a small chamber, after a 24 hour calibration period spent within its confines, the coprocessor will activate, shrinking into a spherical bauble small enough to fit in the palm of one hand.
As long as the coprocessor isn't spiritual isolated from you (generally by being either separated by truly enormous distance or on the opposites side of a spiritually impermeable barrier, such as the Ghost Wall or most sorts of dimensional membrane), it will fully double the efficacy every aspect of your cognition, ranging across such widely disparate aspect as emotional regulation, sensory processing, and motion planning as well as more ordinary subjects of enhancement like conceptual interconnectivity, speed of thought, multi-tasking, memory retention, and so on. In combination, these manifold improvements amount to much more than a naive doubling of your overall competence, even with tasks that do not seem obviously or centrally 'mental' in character.
The coprocessor also acts as something of a back-up for you, and as long as you are in spiritual contact with it and your body is slain (or with a quick but somewhat complicated mental command), your soul will be severed from it and drawn into the coprocessor, which you may expand to its full-size to allow the reconstruction of a new body (a process which varies depending on the size of the body, but which generally won't take much more than a day for any body smaller than a mature elephant).
[ ] Fifthsteel Ingot (-2 embers) - An ingot of 'starmetal', the theoretical metal which the metallurgists of
Radiant Intrusion have hypothesized the Daystar and its kin are built from, weighing just under a dozen pounds. As one might expect, it radiates a bright and pure white light, though since this ingot has not been forged with a steelwill, its light can be dimmed with a mental command. Likewise, almost any other physical or even spiritual property it possesses can be altered in the same way, with only its mass being immutable. Its shape, density, position, temperature, strength of various conceptual resonances, conductivity to various forms of physical or spiritual energy, and sundry other attributes are all free to change, allowing it to interface with the underlying machinery of both mundane and magical systems in their endless variety, a resource whose power and utility only expand under the careful hands of a proper metallurgist.
If the magic of
Forgework is applied to the ingot, the absence of a steelwill can be quickly remedied, the metallurgist's skills transformed into a sort of language with which they can convey the tool-to-be's
purpose, hammering the ingot's soul into the correct shape. Once the work is complete, the tool will be able to pursue its purpose autonomously (or to aid a human user in that task, if designed to do so), changing its own properties dynamically and with essentially infinite precision.
[ ] Master's Saber (-2 embers) - Once, there was a man who knew the sword. A man whose talent for swordsmanship was
incalculable. A man whose mind was blind, in a way, to everything else, blinded by the brightness of that severing clarity, to whom the whole world was so obviously made of sharp edges and cutting paths, present or potential, that all other things were as dancing shadows in the corner of his eye. He was not a happy man, and he knew that his knowledge of the sword was the source of his unhappiness, that the joys known by a sword were few and the joys unknown to swords were many. So, he had a sword, an unremarkable saber which he could not even remember the origin of, and brought it to a seal-maker, and bid him to seal away his knowledge into the saber. This, the seal-maker did, and this was the path to severing his own knowledge that the man knew.
The
Master's Saber is that same saber. Its metal is sealed, in a similar manner to the
Looking Glass, indestructible but not immovable, but while the
Looking Glass possesses a powerful computational seal, the
Master's Saber instead possesses a simpler seal of an entirely different nature: a spiritual seal, which has bound a portion of an old swordmaster's soul to the blade, imparting his superhuman sword-insight to its wielder. As long as you have the sword on your person, you will have a perfect intuition for when and how to draw the blade to maximum effect, and while the blade is drawn, this perfect intuition will expand to include every possible use for it, ranging from the mundane to the outlandish to the downright mystifying, as well as the skill to wield it as best as your body can. It is difficult to overstate the breadth of possibilities this offers.
Like all swords, it possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "Ascending Sequence", which allows for a continuous moderate expenditure of spiritual energy to initiate a procedure of sequential cuts, each targeting the gap between perfect and flawed which separates the intuition granted by the saber and the physical actions which implement it, steadily refining the motion of your blade until its progress is as unimpeachable as its substance.
[ ] Runestone (-2 embers) - An enormous standing stone, several stories tall, carved with numerous channels and chambers, its surface covered in sweeping, curvaceous runes. A whistling wind surrounds the stone, singing an ever-shifting song as it blows through the stone's cavities. Plucked from a distant possibility, the
Runestone embodies the culmination of a worldsinger's centuries long effort to not only develop a robust world-song, but to
codify it, to realize it and lay it in stone. Consequently, it acts as a unique point of convergence between the physical and spiritual, as it constantly exudes the worldly order of the song which was carved into it (fortunately a distinctly comfortable one, highly conducive to rest and peaceful study or training and which buoys the ambient spiritual energy to absurdly high levels, comparable to
Infinite Horizon), weighing on the network of causality in its presence, and seeping deeper into the foundation of whatever world it's brought to if given the necessary time.
It can even sustain a small radius of its worldly order without a broader reality 'underneath', which simplifies surviving the ontological hostility of the Bulk if you're looking to travel through it without the
Traveler's Tools,
the Steel Mare, or the help of a powerful ally like those provided by
Mentorship or
A Promise In Blood, as well as being useful in repairing damage to the fabric of reality dealt by some of the battles of the great struggle. The
Runestone is also a remarkably useful tool for studying the song-power native to
Infinite Horizon, especially if you have
Worldsinger, in which case studying its song and runes will both ensure that your world-song contains some of the same beneficial wind-words, as well as generally hastening the progress of your own developing world-song. Despite the
Runestone's imposing size and mass, if you lay your hands on it with the intent to move it, it will be almost weightless to your touch.
[ ] Salamander Tongue (-2 embers) - An imperishable, tangible flame, warm but not hot to the touch, and another product of alchemy, though unlike the
Amber Scepter, it is not an amalgamation of spiritual elements from across the multiverse. Instead, it is born from Qlahlaha's own spiritual substance, in much the same way that the eponymous salamanders of
Salamandrine Spire are. Also unlike the scepter, this Artifact is
necromantic in nature, bearing the marks of sariqat alqubur, an alternative branch of alchemy, an elder sibling to alkhimiya predating Alramiz's innovation and which is much more closely based on the principles of ald'ua, notably including that necromantic creations must be fed with lifeblood in the same way that heavenly spirits summoned by aldu'a are sustained by it, though in the case of necromantic alchemy, the products do not
dematerialize when deprived of lifeblood, instead just becoming inert until given more.
The
Salamander Tongue in particular accesses an ability unique to the salamanders and Qlahlaha themself: the ability to manipulate possibility-space itself by
dividing it, disconnecting possibilities from reality rather than bringing them into it in the manner of
Uncertainty, though it requires a similar sort of meditation as that Magic and synergizes excellently with it. Naturally, you can also wield the tongue as conventional fire, in which case it can achieve heat-generation nearly as high as the
Amber Scepter's fire-blasts, but with vastly greater control, including the ability to control what it is 'allowed' to burn, turning its heat into gentle, harmless warmth for any forbidden targets. The nature of the tongue's fire is also tied deeply to all other forms of flame, and consequently synergizes with any Magics or Boons which take such a form, such as
Altared,
Investiture,
Angelfire, and maybe others depending on how exactly you develop them.
[ ] Third Eye (-2 embers) - A sibling Artifact to the
Salamander Tongue, taking the form of a perfectly spherical black orb with a pin-prick of white light in the center, one inch in diameter and firmly elastic to the touch, a bit like a small rubber ball. Like the tongue, it is necromantic in nature, fueled by lifeblood and replicating part of a salamander's spiritual anatomy, the central eye with which they gaze into possibility-space, observing it without the thick gauze of finite imagination obscuring their vision. While active, this
vastly simplifies using both the
Salamander Tongue and
Uncertainty, to the point of triviality for the simplest effects, but the applicability of this is actually much, much broader, as exploring possibility-space can serve as a powerfully general divinatory tool, allowing you to uncover the secrets of the past, perform countless experiments without having to expend any real resources, and even glimpse the future.
Naturally once you start becoming entangled with the most powerful beings in the multiverse, capable of shrouding their actions from your sight or even of directly interfering with possibility-space at a similar level to Qlahlaha, the future's visible through possibility-space may not perfectly represent reality. Even so, the eye's sight is remarkably difficult to cloud on any larger scale, especially given such large amounts of power tend to naturally be equally 'large' in possibility-space and thus proportionally difficult to obscure, so while such entity's might be able to cloak themselves, even the Great Attractor itself would not be able to trivially prevent it from otherwise functioning normally (without destroying it first, at least).
[ ] A.S.T.I. Chamber (-3 embers) - An application of advanced lattice magic, and the realization of the dream shared byf both the Coalition and the Life-King's scientific endeavors: a true time chamber, capable of incredible temporal and spatial inflation within its walls, unbounded except by the need to extrude recursions of its own fabro-crystalline array into its internal space to expand its capacity. Its initial maximum inflation factor is approximately 54.5x, and like the
Exosomatic Coprocessor, the
A.S.T.I. Chamber's outward form can be freely shrunk or expanded to allow for easy storage or to permit larger objects or groups to enter and exit the space comfortably.
The space inside is unfurnished, physically, but is permeated by additional latticial effects which shield against biological frailties like thirst, hunger, age, boredom, forgetfulness, and all the other myriad forms of suffering which the passage of cloistered eons might inflict upon its occupants. Overuse can have undesired psychological consequences, especially upon leaving the chamber and being confronted with the mortal reality of the outside, though these are not beyond the possibility of mitigation with the help of other options Qlahlaha has offered.
Expanding the chamber via fabro-crystal extrusion cannot be done while the chamber is inflated (or rather, extrusion which occurs while the chamber is inflated suffers reduced efficacy of the extruded crystal array which more than counteracts the increased speed of extrusion), and demands time which scales quartically in the maximum inflation factor, with a doubling of the maximum taking approximately sixteen times as long as the previous doubling. Reaching a maximum inflation factor of 109x from the baseline would take a little under a year, and thus the greatest inflation factor you could reach if you spent the entire 2133 years allotted to you extruding more fabro-crystal would be just shy of 3300x (though if you used your time wisely, you would likely be able to reach sufficient heights of magical advancement to outmode this method of growth entirely, and thus to achieve much higher inflation factors if you sought them).
[ ] The Blood-Thirster (-3 embers) - A Magnum Opus of
Investiture, the soul of one of the greatest warlords and warriors this realm has ever known, rendered in ash-white steel. Despite the name, the blade is perfectly patient and even-tempered, its desire for violence chillingly calm, though no less insistent. Its thirst isn't aimless or undirected, either. Though its creator could not remember the faces of the ones they sought to slaughter, they knew their names: the King of Heaven, and the Dweller in the Deep. They bore a fury that ran deeper than blood, deeper than bone, deeper than their own soul, and they spent their whole life forming an army, fighting many battles, conquering world after world, all in the bloody-minded pursuit of this singular goal. Unfortunately, they were successful enough to attract the attention of a particularly cruel avatar of the Great Attractor, who wiped out their army, but spared the warlord's life, merely crippling them.
Faced with the destruction of their life's work, they sought any recourse, and found only
Investiture fit their needs. Their life, so impactful, was burned like dross, and the face of the multiverse was radically altered in their absence, with only
the Blood-Thirster to tell their tale. The blade itself possesses the indestructibility of any Magnum Opus, and is immaculately sharp and possesses the same asymmetry as
Impostor, weightless in its wielder's hands and yet striking with unstoppable momentum, as well its inner spirit possessing the same brilliance for fighting, warcraft, and leadership as its creator. Most importantly, however, is that it bears the single least-degraded record of the same majestic power which
Efficiency and
Fleshform descend from, which comes to you in pieces when you wield
the Blood-Thirster in pursuit of its vengeance: flashes of a great spinning wheel, whispers of an endless saga, twitches of body and mind with sourceless purpose, and more besides, all imbued with an otherworldly sense of wholesome
rightness, of nostalgia and homecoming. These pieces naturally accrue around any other fragments of the inheritance that you possess (including each other, in the absence of anything larger and more coherent), expanding and elevating them at your direction.
Like all swords,
the Blood-Thirster possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "Red-Maned War-God", which allows you to continuously expend a diluvian torrent of spiritual energy to manifest the spirit of the blade, a ghostly blood-soaked countenance laid over your own, an echo of the warlord-who-was. Their power is nearly undiminished, and grows alongside your own, always remaining a proportionately massive boost to your power and competence in martial matters.
[ ] Little Tiger's Story (-3 embers) -
Once, there was a boy who slept in tiger-striped pajamas. He made his bed to dream in. He dreamed too recklessly, and thus suffered many traumas. Do not play games with a Demon. A deck of cards, akin to a deck of tarot but with unfamiliar imagery depicting the misadventures of a young boy in black-and-orange striped pajamas, with a fancy ebony box and silk bag to carry them in. A powerful artifact from a forgotten era of history in a world on the far side of
Central Limit, which is also the source of the fragments which might be reforged into the
Demon Mask. Its cards represent moments of narrative impact in the life of a victim of a cruel game who once was sent to that world from far away, the dream-self of a boy from a world much like your own. The deck and its containers only exist partially in the present world, and can be freely dismissed and recalled, simply ceasing to exist when not needed.
The deck's cartomantic magic has two primary modes: divination and projection. If the deck is shuffled with a sufficiently clear and focused mind, cards can be drawn and interpreted to derive accurate if vague (though less so as you grow more familiar with the deck's character) premonitions of the future, which can be directed and refined through expanded spreads and holding particular questions in mind while shuffling. If cards are instead sought out and arranged with focused intent, rather than merely revealing the future, they shape it, bending the course of events to realize the narrative you construed (a process that is much more dependent on familiarity with the deck than divination). However, both of those functions pale in comparison to the deck's capacity to contact the subject of its depictions.
The eponymous Little Tiger has long-since escaped this multiverse, though not the game which brought him here, and has grown commensurately powerful. The game demands all but the infinitesimal portion of his attention which answering your cartomantic calling takes, but he possesses many allies and friends who have more latitude (albeit less overwhelming power), who you can conjure figments of through the deck to briefly offer their aid, assuming you explain the direness of the situation. As the hour of your final conflict with the Great Attractor approaches, some of them might even appear in person, which will no doubt always offer a considerable boon to your effort, even after two millennia of progress.
[ ] The Steel Mare (-3 embers) - The Traveler, much like the Warlord, was a figure of titanic importance in the history of this realm, up until they burned their past with
Investiture to leave a Magnum Opus as their only legacy. The Traveler's adventures were much less violent than the Warlord's (though sadly not completely free of it), but no less far-reaching, as they accrued a considerable following across many worlds on the far side of
Central Limit, and even crossing over onto this side in their waning years, as the grievous infection of Inkstain began to overtake their soul and they sought out any way to avoid Accepting the Black Mountain's ultimatum.
The Steel Mare is what the Traveler spent their soul to make, the only sufficiently spiteful answer.
Physically, its exterior is evershifting, always adapting to the infinitely varied conditions of the Bulk and the diverse worlds strewn throughout it, but generally has a character somewhere between a bullet train, submarine, and space-ship, long and sinuous but at the same time implacably fortified. It can easily camouflage the portions of itself which dip into any particular world, preferring forms locally recognizable as technological vehicles but willing to conceal its entrance as a simple secret tunnel or hidden grotto if necessary. Inside, miles of interlinked chambers are equipped with every amenity that you might need on your long travels, sleekly organized and capable of shifting as quickly as its outward face to ensure easy access to whatever you need in the moment, whether that's bottomless archives of entertainment media, nutritious and palatable food in any of this realm's countless styles, an automated surgical theater, or a world-shattering armory (though the latter will certainly prompt some hesitance from
the Steel Mare's spirit).
Naturally, this all pales to
the Steel Mare's true function: large-scale inter-world transportation. Its movement capabilities are similar to those afforded by
Traveler's Tools, as one might expect, though its top speeds are higher at the expense of maneuverability, and its capacity for cargo is only limited by the time and effort of loading and unloading it. Given long years of research and experimentation (somewhat eased if you also possess the
Traveler's Tools), it may be possible to derive a method to utilize
the Steel Mare's capacity for Bulkspread and Perspective Shift to form permanent and stable inter-world tunnels, which would not only make traveling between the connected worlds even faster for you, but allow those without any means of inter-world travel of their own to traverse the gap, and thus allowing the worlds themselves to come together and become more than they might be alone.
[ ] Sword Icon (-3 embers) - The very idea of a sword, made tangible and given just a hint of proper steel for good measure. A creation of altarflame alchemy, the reification of concepts through crystallized fire, and a foremost expression of that art, the
Sword Icon is a strange thing to hold. Like the other sword Artifacts, its durability and sharpness are incredible, and if one takes care to not acknowledge its ideality then it can be used in the familiar way, but if wielded in its totality then its operation is more of a categorical or formal affair. The
Sword Icon's central feature is its capacity to function as an interpretative filter, altering the formation of reality by applying the concept of 'sword' to that process of realization.
This 'style' of 'swordsmanship' is, to be plain, difficult to describe accurately, or even to really summarize without gross oversimplification, but some of its simplest and most immediate themes include: infusing the
Sword Icon into other things and immersing other things in the
Sword Icon; instigating or interrupting flows, orderings, and patterns; altering the interpretational scopes and lemmatic nexuses of other concepts; and derealization. Coming to grips with the full breadth of the icon's functionality will be a considerable project unto itself, but potentially well worth it, especially if wielded alongside access to possibility-space such as through
Uncertainty or the
Salamander Tongue.
Despite its oddity, the
Sword Icon still possesses an evocation accessible with
Sword Sorcerer, "LAMBDA", which is itself something of a strange beast. Its behavior is extremely contextual, especially as you explore the
Sword Icon's own more esoteric techniques, but broadly can be understood to interpret the icon's state as a sort of 'function', and then applies that function to the conceptual resonances of the spiritual energy you fuel the evocation with, which can in turn potentially alter the state of the icon and thus provoke an alteration to the 'function' being applied. As one might expect from experience with other recursive languages and dynamical systems, chaotic behavior is a distinct possibility, but one of the most reliable and consistent possible uses of LAMBDA is to immerse other sword Artifacts into the icon before wielding it in the conventional manner, which allows LAMBDA to operate as a sort of concatenation or conjunction of the immersed swords' own evocations.
[ ] Vachsjatau's Skull (-3 embers) - A golden effigy of a human skull, engraved with the same style of impossibly fine runic scrimshaw as the
Femur of Fixity and
Barrowbill, though it bears a distinct and singular glyph at the vertex of the cranium that emanates an aura of imperturbable calm. Like with the other two Artifacts, the skull can be awakened with a pulse of spiritual energy, prompting two sparks of golden light to blaze into existence within the skull's empty sockets. Vachsjatau is a reliquarian, or more accurately the relic-skull of one, and indeed one of the most ancient and wise of such skulls, possessed of several millennia worth of experience in a wide variety of fields, but most especially in the art of the Reliquary, the elemental soul-art of the Earth, which allows for the imbuement of the soul-quantum into the reliquarian's bones, transforming them into a reservoir capable of absorbing and integrating metal, transforming it into a spiritual alloy which can then be harvested and crafted into relics, of which the
Femur of Fixity,
Barrowbill, and
Vachsjatau's Skull are premier examples.
Unlike most relic-skulls, which merely encode static or minimally interactive engrams of their former owners, Vachsjatau is a fully aware, dynamic, and vital capture of the once-sage's spiritual intellect, even capable of crafting new relics if provided soul-bone and a way to wield the tools of a reliquarian, and of being initiated into new magic systems (though alterations to their metaphysiology brought about by having imbued their soul-quantum will demand a massive overhaul of the methodologies of any magics which expect an even vaguely ordinary human soul), as well as guiding you or others through the rituals of soul quantization and quantal imbuement (which will carry the same burden of hampered aptitude for other systems of magic that haven't been overhauled to work with a reliquarian's spiritual anatomy). Notably, while relics are usually activated and controlled with spiritual energy, the amount required is negligible, achievable even by spiritually irretentive humans such as those native to
Infinite Horizon and
Salamandrine Spire, and most importantly, aren't
fueled by spiritual energy, and thus offer a form of innate and powerful magic that the people of these worlds could use without issue.
With Vachsjatau's guidance, freedom from the relatively crowded conceptual arena of their homeworld, and many years of research and experimentation, discovering new elemental soul quantizations is possible, which can in turn open vast new vistas of magic. Vachsjatau's loyalty is, while not axiomatic, likely to be incredibly strong as long as they are not horribly abused or neglected, as they relish the opportunity to explore and learn again, and are already aware (in vague terms) of the threat which the Great Attractor poses. This loyalty combined with their capacity for independent action once awakened makes them one of the most difficult Artifacts for your enemies to steal.
[ ] Hunger (-4 embers, requires
Passions) - A band of flickering white flame wrapped around your finger. It burns, but only harmlessly, with a heat that hones the mind and girds the will. A portion of Qlahlaha's own desire to grow and shine, bound into a Ring for your hand. As long as the Ring is on your finger and you are pursuing an ambition or goal with Passion, your vigor and spirit are irrepressible, and your capacity for adapting to and learning from your trials and troubles is amplified by your Passion, to an equal degree as your emotions. This is an
extremely elevated effect, enough to render you essentially immune to physical or spiritual harm from any worldly source while active.
Even without any other defenses, this is sufficient to give you strong odds of surviving a brief encounter with hostile fighters in the great struggle, or even allow you to survive a single direct attack from one of the lesser avatars of the Great Attractor, and to experience a truly colossal spurt of explosive growth in the aftermath. Even without getting involved in such apocalyptic dangers as those, the durability affords you much great risk-taking in general, which combined with increased rate of development when you do manage to coax your Passions into following a particularly interesting path of research can more than make up for the action-economy cost needed to satisfy your Passions when such coaxing fails.
[ ] The Glory (-5 embers, requires
Heroism) - Just as there was once the Warlord, and once the Traveler, so too was there once the Hero, though their nature and their sacrifice are somewhat different from every other creator of a Magnum Opus, as befits their status as the very first. Once upon a time, before the arrival of the refugees, before the slaughter of the Dragons' Nest, there was a member of the same ancient race as the one who would become the Great Attractor. They were noble and kind, and sought the betterment and flourishing of all, and they were Fated to defeat their ruthless kin, their Light of Time to outshine their adversary's Light of Gravity. Unfortunately, one's Fate does not always come to pass, and the hero does not always stand victorious over the villain. The Hero struggled mightily, but in the end, they stood at the precipice of annihilation, and in a desperate final gambit sacrificed their story to empower whoever came next, alloying Fate and Time and casting their light into the darkness of the future.
The Glory is that same light, a brilliant singularity of hope. Crowning your soul,
the Glory is
Heroism's other half, the promise of victory to
Heroism's long hard struggle, and provides you the good fortune and grace that separates a hero from a victim of circumstance. More than that, it exalts every other virtue you have, whether in your hands, your heart, or your head, and most especially those which themselves resonate with the Hero's own story, such as
Stem and Branch,
Investiture, and
Uncertainty, any one of which it will both massively expand the baseline benefits of, as well as nourish and cultivate a unique understanding of Fate through, which will allow you to, with dedication and practice, discover and master new essences, arising from Fate, Time or the intersection of the two, eventually matching and then surpassing the Hero's own prowess with the Ordinal Principle.
Certainly, Qlahlaha has offered you many options, including a few that demand more embers than Qlahlaha can afford to share, at least as things stand. However, if you're willing to let them make some cost-saving alterations to your insertion, they can redirect the spare embers to further your empowerment. However, there are still some underlying limits on Qlahlaha's latitude with sharing power, and thus
you cannot gain more than 5 embers from Drawbacks. If you desire a Drawback enough to take it without receiving embers, such as to allow you to take an option that requires a specific Drawback, Qlahlaha can accommodate you, though doing so is not recommended.
[ ] Disquiet (+1 ember) - In a multiverse as suffused in magic and metaphysics as this one, subtle senses that might seem esoteric to you are nonetheless quite common, especially among as spiritually robust a species as humanity. Even spiritually irretentive humans with no access or experience with magic possess a melange of untrained spiritual senses, and that is enough for them to detect the peculiar and uncanny aura of a cosmic outsider such as yourself or Qlahlaha. Qlahlaha's ontological footprint is too large for them to cleanse themself of
Disquiet, at least with the power they have now, but fortunately the same is not nearly true of you. However, even in your case, a meaningful portion of Qlahlaha's power is expended in the effort, and thus allowing them to forgo it affords you another ember to spend.
Your
Disquiet will grow in intensity alongside your personal and magical power, at lower levels simply sowing distrust and distraction in those subject to your aura, while at higher levels it can blind their spiritual senses to everything other than yourself, and even induce psychic illness in the sensitive and unprepared. Fortunately, even without Qlahlaha's help, there are steps you can take to mitigate the effects, whether by externalizing your power via Artifacts and allies, developing methods to constrain and channel your aura (which studying the
Demon Mask would certainly help), or simply becoming a recluse, just to name a few. Additionally, the citadelians of
Infinite Horizon are regularly exposed to
Disquiet when using altarflame to commune with Qlahlaha, and consequently have developed quite effective methods for counteracting its negative effects and are culturally inured to its unpleasantness, while the salamanders of
Salamandrine Spire are almost completely immune to your
Disquiet thanks to their own innate connection to Qlahlaha, whose nature as your summoner deeply impacts the character your aura and thus your
Disquiet.
[ ] Overt (+1 ember) - While the Great Attractor spends essentially all of its time, attention, and resources on compounding its growth, it nonetheless possesses numerous powerful modes of perception that are costless and completely passive, which Qlahlaha must expend effort to hide you from. This actually represents the single largest expenditure of power constituent to Qlahlaha summoning you, even larger than the actual powers on offer, and eliminating it entirely would guarantee your instant and irrevocable annihilation.
However, a limited relaxation of the obfuscation measures is still feasible, merely alerting the Great Attractor to the fact that
something has entered the multiverse
somewhere. This is still a significant increase in risk, particularly if you intend to do much inter-world travel early on, but not unmanageable (or at least, it does not make the task of overcoming the Great Attractor in time
more unmanageable than it already is). Nonetheless, expect your first encounter with one of its avatars to happen much sooner than otherwise.
[ ] Passions (+1 ember) - Another consequence of Qlahlaha's being your summoner is a particular influence of fiery character on your personality and perception. For a human unused to the weight of
Passions, it can be a considerable impediment, but if you feel you can handle the resultant mind-altering tides of emotion and intense barrage of sensory stimuli, then Qlahlaha will forgo the mitigation and thus have an additional ember to spare.
It's important to know that the
Passions are not
merely powerful emotions and sensations, they are direct alterations to the mode of your perception, cognition, and decision-making. They are not stones in the river, they are the riverbanks and the riverbed, they define the shape of your entire mind, not just a part of it, and consequently are not subject to things like willpower or self-control, at least not at levels achievable prior to your summoning, with topics of interest and pleasurable activities
demanding immediate pursuit, boredom and discomfort demanding amelioration with equal urgency, and with all the steel in your spine only letting you at most delay your diversion, and even then only by the barest margin.
Notably, this interacts powerfully with
Grief, particularly in the second and fourth stages of the Inkstain's progression. Anger naturally inflames the
Passions, making the resultant rage functionally impossible to stop, and only directable with immense effort, but conversely, the
Passions are the single greatest balm for the crushing dullness and gray apathy of Depression which Qlahlaha can offer you, capable of forestalling Acceptance indefinitely as long as they remain continuously stoked.
[ ] Recruitment (+1 ember) - There is a great struggle spread across this realm, as previously mentioned, one that is older than Qlahlaha's quest to overthrow the Great Attractor, though not unentangled with it. Qlahlaha is allied to one of the two sides of the struggle, not closely enough to be bound to join the fight, but close enough that, if you are willing to take it up yourself, Qlahlaha can share a small portion of their burden as your summoner with the most powerful members of the allied side in return for your addition to their ranks, and sparing you another ember in the process.
Whatever of Qlahlaha's offers you take, you will still fall amidst the lowest rank of the struggle, since even the least of its recruits have collected comparable repertoires of magic and panoplies of treasure as are available to you, but with the right choices here and the right actions post-insertion you might prove yourself sufficiently powerful, insightful, and aligned to the side's cause to earn promotion. Regardless, initially you will be given tasks in accordance with your abilities (and, if lacking in modes of inter-world transport, your location), which may include both solo and group operations with other fighters of similar rank and complementary skill-sets, occasionally led by a captain or commander if the mission will be particularly dangerous. Your preferences will be considered, but only insofar as your displeasure will impair your capacity as a fighter.
You will be furnished with the resources and opportunities needed to make you into a greater asset to the cause, and success will be rewarded with both resources to pursue developments orthogonal to the purpose of winning the great struggle as well as access to luxuries and comforts incomparably greater than those available to any single world. Insubordination will be punished, though primarily through decreased access to the aforementioned resources, lowered priority for preferred assignments, and in extreme cases rescission of previously disbursed rewards (which, depending on the rewards being rescinded, may be quite traumatic). Desertion will also be punished with rescission of previously disbursed rewards.
[ ] Grief (+1/2/3 embers) - As an alternative or additional method of reducing Qlahlaha's burden when obscuring your insertion, you may allow them to infect you with an Inkstain, a supernatural affliction created by the Great Attractor as part of its campaign to suppress the self-lights of the people of this realm. It is a sort of ontological surfactant, allowing the substance of your husk to permeate your body and spirit, and from there be broadcast into the world around you. The self-suppressing nature of the husk naturally limits the noticeability of your entrance into the multiverse, and all the more so the more severe the infection becomes, sparing an additional ember for each stage you allow the infection to progress, not including the first.
However, the Inkstain is not symptomless, at least not beyond the stage of Denial, the first of five stages. Each afflicts your mind with the emotions of the associated step in the process of grieving, as implied by the name
Grief, as the 'truth' of your ultimate unimportance and the illusoriness of your individuality deconstructs the rest of your worldview, and as time passes and your Inkstain is fed by your growing disillusionment, the permeation of your husk will cause mutations in your body, soul, and local reality, the nature of which are influenced by the nature of the stage it's reached.
Following Denial is the second stage, Anger, whose mutations are attuned to the emotion they accompany, difficult to control, violently aggressive and outward-oriented, lashing out at the world whether physically, magically, or at a deeper level. Infectees in the stage of Anger are often the ones who pose the greatest danger to bystanders and their environment in general, regardless of whether the anger they feel in the moment is directed at those victims or not.
After Anger is Bargaining, full of both fear and hope, prompted by 'realizations' gained from the destruction and havoc wreaked during Anger. The infectee learns that Inkstain can be controlled, after a fashion, or at least cultivated. If it is intentionally fed, if the infectee willingly and intentionally forsakes their belief in the meaning and importance of some things, they can forestall the loss of other, more closely guarded beliefs, as well as gain the ability to influence the form and function of their mutations, both by reforming those gained during Anger and by intentionally spurring the development of new ones.
The penultimate stage, and the last stage which Qlahlaha is willing to intentionally induce as a Drawback, is Depression, the despair which follows Bargaining as the infectee's beliefs continue to steadily shrink in number and emotional valence despite their attempts to safeguard them, leaving them hollow and listless. Infectees in the midst of Depression technically retain the ability to sculpt their mutations, but generally lack the motivation to do so, and instead allow them to steadily transform into more and more layers of numbing and isolating shields, retreating from a world that no longer makes sense or inspires any thoughts or feelings in them.
If they do not choose to end their life one way or another, then after forming a truly impenetrable cocoon of emotional defenses, the only remaining possibility is Acceptance, in which there is no longer any distinction between pith and husk, and the infectee is fully subsumed into darkness, becoming a new avatar of the Great Attractor.
[ ] Dark Stalker (+2 embers) - A third possibility for easing Qlahlaha's burden, riskier than
Overt but less than the most extreme extent of
Grief, is to forgo hiding your insertion at all from one particular avatar of the Great Attractor, the eponymous
Dark Stalker. This avatar is extremely powerful, among the most powerful in fact, which is why excluding it from the obfuscation allows Qlahlaha to spare you two extra embers. However, despite that overwhelming power, this Drawback does not bring instant failure (as would be the certain outcome of any direct attack on the
Dark Stalker's part, even a long way into your progression), or even guarantee failure in the long term, for two reasons.
The first is that the
Dark Stalker, unlike the vast majority of the Great Attractor's avatars, retains considerable independence, enough to not only allow it broad latitude in how it handles its duties, but also in
choosing what information it relays back, which Qlahlaha has confirmed it frequently uses to provide only the absolute minimum of information (a pattern which Qlahlaha has encouraged its allied side of the great struggle to exploit, and which the
Dark Stalker has still not seen fit to correct). The second is the
Dark Stalker's other well-confirmed eccentricity: a complete devotion to subtlety, which leads it to favor the arrangement of circumstance and distant manipulations above all other tactics.
These combine to mean that, at least until you draw the attention of other avatars by your own actions, and until your power has risen enough that the
Dark Stalker's only remaining recourse is direct intervention, this Drawback's primary manifestation will be simple misfortune, a bending of causality against your progress, which while certainly threatening if allowed to compound, can either be contested directly through various means (such as with
Stem and Branch,
Preparations,
Demon Mask,
Third Eye, or
the Glory) or evaded by traveling continuously and unpredictably (especially if you are able to travel between worlds, as the resources which the
Dark Stalker can marshal that are able to reach across multiple worlds are few in number and slow to change their courses).
[ ] Heroism (+2 embers, compatible with
Return Home) -
Be set upon the Hero's Path. Your blessings may be many, but your curses will be even more, and through it all you must never let your resolve waver. You will always know what your principles demand you do, but they will often demand you undergo great hardship, and may even demand your death even if only for a worthy cause, and it will be up to you to follow through. It might not be inaccurate to consider this to be something like accepting a heavily mitigated fragment of the Apocryphal Curse, and if at any point in your travails you fail in cleaving to your own heroic principles, the embers gained by this Drawback will disappear
permanently, along with whatever you purchased with them. This Drawback isn't something that Qlahlaha is offering entirely of their own recognizance, and instead arises at least partly from deeper contingencies that their creator implanted within them.
[ ] Weak Point (+2 embers) - When Qlahlaha pulled you from your native ontology into the Ideal Space, they first had to lay a hand on your body, in a less figurative way than you might expect. There is a literal point on the outer surface of your body (probably on one of your hands, arms, or shoulders, though not necessarily) which forms your summoning locus, a sort of ontological linchpin that your existence was recentered around as you were drawn through the interstitial medium. A thread extends from it, all the way back to your home, and as long as it exists, it represents an unaccountable flaw in your defenses.
Damage to your summoning locus will propagate to your thread, and if it is severed without extreme care, your life will
immediately end, your ontological foundation removed from underneath you. Even entirely external armor is unable to fully protect it, the vulnerability partially extending into the armor itself wherever the thread passes through it, attacks landing on the point of intersection dealing only moderately reduced damage to your thread. Regardless of whether the damage is from a direct hit or translated through armor, it will be commensurately incredibly difficult to heal. Only ensuring that a blow does not land directly on the points of thread-contact will avoid the danger.
The
Weak Point also rejects non-physical grounding, and will prevent you from ever fully obviating the need for a physical form, though with the correct techniques you might be able to reduce it to a simple phylactery. Fortunately, Qlahlaha can and will dissolve the thread and the weaknesses it presents, but the process is extremely taxing, so if you're willing to take on the associated risk, forgoing the dissolution can spare you two additional embers.
[ ] Anchored (+3 embers) - There is another, more extreme course of action Qlahlaha can take to reduce the cost of obfuscating your insertion. It's actually somewhat effortful for them to do, not simply forgoing a part of the insertion process like
Overt or
Dark Stalker, but the potential savings outweigh the cost significantly, ultimately sparing you three embers in the process. Specifically, as Qlahlaha is inserting you into place, they can additionally expend some power to halt the expansion-front of the alteration to possibility-space caused by your insertion. This
vastly reduces the visibility of your existence to most multiversal groups and entities (though this doesn't prevent you from also gaining embers from
Overt,
Grief, or
Dark Stalker), allowing Qlahlaha to eliminate numerous obfuscation protocols which it renders redundant.
However, this alteration is
extremely difficult to undo, and essentially impossible without Qlahlaha's direct and unimpeded intervention, and until it is undone you will be
categorically incapable of leaving the world of your Insertion Point, with even the Great Attractor themself being unable to remove you from it prior to their ascension to the Sixth Density at the end of your allotted time. Fortunately, every world in this realm possesses the latent potential to be 'idealized', to be brought into alignment with the Ideal Space and thus allow Qlahlaha to act within its bounds as if it were there, through a process that is somewhere between a utopian social project and a grand magical ritual, and which is unique to each world and which in particular will vary based how your insertion alters possibility-space.
Idealization will always demand your full effort, including both deep and broad utilization of every one of Qlahlaha's offers that you take, as well as interfacing the unique characteristics of the particular world you're idealizing. For most worlds, especially Bulk worlds which have no infinite dimensions and do not actually intersect Ideal Space at all, discovering the path to idealization, even with powerful divinatory tools like the
Third Eye, would be an impractically difficult undertaking until very late in your progress, but the state of being
Anchored yourself will actually aid you in the process, as the abbreviated nature of your impact on possibility-space ensures that the metaphorical pond of possibility-space is that much less perturbed by the thrown stone of your added presence.
[ ] Central Limit (5+3 embers, alternate insertion point) - The four worlds presented to you as Insertion Points are not actually the only options available, nor are the arc and points of light the only feature of the environment here in the Ideal Space. It may be hard to make out, but beyond the lights and beyond the fog, there is a great, all-encompassing sphere of darkness. Much like how the arc is the ideal subspace of
Infinite Horizon, and the points the subspaces of
Apical Meristems,
Radiant Intrusion, and
Salamandrine Spire, the dark sphere is the subspace of
Central Limit, the den of the Great Attractor's core self, and the nexus of
Gravity. Qlahlaha
strongly recommends against inserting in this world, but it remains a possibility, and perhaps unexpectedly, doing so would actually allow Qlahlaha to spare you three additional embers, as counteracting the pull of the Great Attractor's own supreme
Gravity during your insertion is one of the next largest expenditures of their power, not far behind hiding you from its awareness.
In some ways,
Central Limit is similar in construction to your homeworld: vast emptiness speckled with galaxies, each full of billions of stars, planets, and nebulae, nigh-universally hostile to complex life outside of the almost vanishingly rare garden worlds. There are humans, populating a nigh-endless procession of interstellar nations with a commensurately incredible diversity of forms, even more wildly varied than in
Radiant Intrusion and only bound together through flagrant intimidation and a constant barrage of psychological manipulations bearing great similarity to the most diabolical uses of the
Death Rites, as well two species of truly alien being: the tiamatiatum, a species of nomadic star-sailing world-serpents who metamorphose many times over their ageless lives, tracing paths through the staggeringly complex web of their life-cycle, and whose golden eyes are able to find and awaken the hidden magical patterns in space and time, an ability similar in functionality to
Crystal Clarity though not bound to the medium of crystal arrays; and the mechadendrites, a species of self-replicating machines that grow like forests of towering steel trees, possessing the ability to forge supernatural qualities into their own substance in a process closely related to
Forgework, though naturally at a far grander scale than present anywhere in
Radiant Intrusion.
Standing above the common people of these three races are those blessed (and cursed) with
Gravity, whose souls bend the world around them on both the spiritual and physical levels, cast into the spotlight of this realm's sordid story. Gravitators of the supernal density form the core of essentially every major faction in
Central Limit, their lives the melody to which the rest of the world is harmonized, steadily growing their
Gravity until eventually it collapses into singularity and they quickly flee into the Bulk, lest they be devoured by the charybdian maw at the center of their universe, the Great Attractor's dark heart.
This world is, more than anything else, terrifyingly and lethally hostile, and the harshness of the void is only the first of its many cruelties. Being hunted for 'reeducation' by empires of brainwashed humans, trapped in cycles of unwitting servitude by the workings of some tiamatuum's gnosticism, captured by cloaked harvester drones before being rendered down in some mechadendrite's orbital foundry, or even simply annihilated without warning by superluminal debris thrown off by a battle between supernal gravitators fighting on the other side of the universe are just a handful of the other flatly
unfair threats you will be faced with for as long as you remain within
Central Limit.
