- Location
- Utrecht
If they drink enough fungus beer
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
There's also vanilla Chaos Trolls and Ice Trolls that seem to be Chaos plus Snow, but the Chaos-y ones don't end up as part of Waaaghs so nobody files them under greenskin.
Since Ogres are currently rarely seen west of the Dark Lands, most of the Old World only encounter vanilla Giants as part of Waaaghs, so that's where they sometimes get lumped in. Same as the Trolls, the ones that serve Marauder tribes or Beastman Warherds tend to be Chaos-corrupted and visibly different.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
There's a brief mention in White Dwarf and nowhere else to my understanding. (Though I think they also appear in Total Warhammer in some fashion)
They seem to be Goblins adapted to volcanic regions, which imparts fire effects.
Goblin Fire Kobold
Fire Kobolds are Goblins native to the volcanic Red Cloud Mountains that lie south of the Badlands and other volcanic regions around the globe.[1] Although Fire Kobolds have a greenish skin tone, they are covered in patches of deep red or orange tones. In fact, at first glance they just look...
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
If I was so inclined, it would have been reopening the romance vote instead.
Or... hmm...
Last edited:
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
It's the date for jokes, but everyone mistakes it for lying badly.
Not being burdened with the obvious fake out is probably better for everyone.
You sir , need help.
- Location
- Aotearoa
Bogans?
This standard has always bugged me, just because it never receives any kind of in-universe justification and would stand out so severely. If you were a person living in a fantasyland and you read the sentence, "The Elves, Dwarfs, and humans fought the Orcs and Goblins," you would understand it as making some kind of dire political statement, to say nothing of, for instance, "The Elves, Dwarfs, and humans all ride horses."
(Obligatory "Not your fault, this isn't serious, and it probably all made sense in the original Reikspiel" disclaimer.)
- Location
- Aotearoa
Perhaps a justification could be found in the language of the speaker/writer- where the presumption (bias) is that your own people are the default- you don't need to capitalise your own species, as they're just 'people'. So in Eltharin, it'd be written 'elves', and Humans would be capitalised.
No I don't think in Eltharin humans would be capitalized. WH Elves are racists and bigots most of the time. And the human species name would be closer to the Eldar name for the human species than anything non racist.
Turn 43 Results - 2491 - Part 5
With a few measurements of viscosity in hand, it is a straightforward affair to commission an apparatus that will drip Aethyric Vitae at steady intervals. The power stones themselves, recently arrived from Altdorf after cashing in years of accumulated Collegiate goodwill, will supply the attractive and repulsive forces necessary to separate out the Winds once the Vitae is detonated, as long as you properly space them out in a neutral environment. That leaves only the question of how that detonation will be achieved. To do so with an enchantment would add an extra variable that would throw off the proper drawing in and accumulation of the Wind the enchantment consists of on its respective power stone, and while it may be possible to account for that by altering the placement, the nine-body equations necessary to compute the proper placement would be hellish, and trial-and-error could very easily be very expensive.
Exposure to a soul? Well, you plan on being there to supervise the whole time anyway, so it's an idea you spend some time considering. After all, it may be that any size and shape that comes between a power stone and an Orb of Sorcery are equally metastable and the entire process can be left to its own devices without trouble, but it would be the height of foolishness to just assume it is so and leave the process to its own devices. The only sure facts available to you are those two points of reference, and without proof to the contrary you'll assume that the points between are just as troublesome and prone to unravelling as the points before the power stone. But that undermines itself, as the whole point of being there to supervise requires you to be, well, supervising, and quite possibly managing any unruliness, something you wouldn't be able to do if you're busy detonating every individual drop of Vitae. That, and a soul alone is not enough to detonate, it needs to be a soul with a Wind or a strong emotion running through it. A Wind-infused soul has the same problem as detonation via enchantment, while a strong emotion would be extremely challenging to sustain for a time period of days to weeks. This sends you back to the drawing board.
(While you're there, you spend more time than you care to admit frowning at your notes at the inconsistency between the uncapitalized power stone and the very firmly capitalized Orbs of Sorcery, before you're able to dismiss it as a product of the former being a readily-available staple of magical paraphernalia while the latter exists only in very small and irreplaceable numbers in the Old World, and spend a few minutes smiling at the thought that perhaps in the future Orbs will be so commonplace as to go equally uncapitalized as a result of your work here.)
You're considering commissioning a mild Wind-repelling Rune from one of Thorek's many apprentices before you realize you're overcomplicating things. A strong impact can do the job of detonation, and that is something Dwarven artifice is very capable of reliably producing. 'Strong' being quite relative - you don't need anything like the same force as a blacksmith would call for in a drop-hammer, more the sort that you might find ringing a bell on a large pendulum clock. You have some concerns about the angles involved - if the impact is coming in at an arc, then it could strike at an angle that releases the Winds with a propulsive force in one direction over the others. So, more of a pick than a hammer, and as long as it strikes the middle of the drop that should equally scatter the Winds.
The result, after an exchange of coin and a fair amount of Dwarven tinkering, is something like an orrery depicting a very orderly reimagining of the heavens: all the 'planets' the same size and evenly spaced out on the same orbit, with the 'sun' getting dripped on and tapped with a normal rock pick at regular intervals. With your calendar very firmly cleared for the coming weeks and Eike standing by to fetch anything that needs fetching, you carefully place the power stones in their circular wire holders, crank up the mainspring that powers the clockwork mechanisms that manage the dripping and the hammer, unstopper the Vitae hopper, and hold your breath.
The mechanism dry-cycles a few times as Vitae makes its way through the piping, then the first iridescent drip falls, and with a clink the rock pick impacts and detonates it. There is a small cloud of chaotic movement that quickly resolves itself into eight separate streams that weave through each other to follow the pull of the power stones. For a few moments after their birth, the nature of the Winds are still in flux, not yet fully obedient to whatever force it is that imposes the eight Winds onto the world. The Winds seem to vanish into the stones, but you know they're forming a new layer of crystallized magic, one so thin that no widely-accepted unit of measurement yet exists to describe it.
The excitement of that thought lasts about five minutes, leaving thousands more stretching before you. Your willpower begins to be tested as the drip-and-clink chorus begins to wear grooves in your consciousness. You go to war with yourself over the question of whether you'll send Eike to fetch an early lunch for you just to break the monotony, or whether that will leave an impossible stretch of time between it and dinner. Drip, clink, drip, clink, and as the power stones very very very gradually grow in size, so too does your resentment for everything going exactly as you planned it. These are the Winds of Magic! They are born of Chaos! A moment's inattention when wielding them can condemn a Wizard to fates worse than death! Why are they meekly obeying your designs for them?
Several lifetimes later, as the first day draws to a close and you allow the clockwork mechanism to wind down, you leave Eike to watch over the power stones and collapse into bed, the ghost of the drip-clink still echoing in your thoughts.
---
Somewhere before dawn the next morning, Eike wakes you and reports that Winds are seeping back out of the power stones. By her hourglass about six and a half hours have passed, which is a surprisingly manageable grace period - there are many rituals, enchantments, and, of course, the creation of power stones, where the Wizard performing them can't leave their work unattended for more than an hour or two at a time, which test the determination, focus, and sanity of any Wizard that undertakes those tasks.
You return to the orbery and resume the drip-clink to renew its echoes in the back of your mind, and are relieved to see that the boil-off of Winds ceases as new layers resume their accretion on the power stones. You'd worried that the deposition of new layers would be uneven, but a great deal of measurements with the most sensitive set of calipers to be found in the entire Karak confirms that the power stone has grown in size evenly. Perhaps each new layer of Winds forms itself in a perfect sphere, or perhaps any unevenness self-corrects as new layers fill in gaps left by those previous, but in either case that's one less concern. Between that and the daunting prospect of another day watching very nearly nothing happen, you surrender to the inevitable and have Eike bring in your notes and writing materials so you can get started with your book on the Vitae while you watch the orbery with one eye.
You search through your notes for a turn of phrase you remember liking - there it is, 'primordial Winds' - then spend some time frowning at its potential ambiguity and forming a turn of phrase that will clarify. "'As the energies of the Aethyr enter into our world'," you say aloud as you write, partially to drown out the drip-clink, "'they become the Winds'- are transformed into? reborn as? molded into? Hmm, no, 'by means and for reasons we are yet to understand, they become the Winds we are so familiar with. In the moment of that transformation, their form and nature are mutable-' no, it's not a transformation into Winds and then into Vitae, it's straight into Vitae. 'If, however, these energies are exposed to'... no, if moved into? Under certain conditions? No, this isn't a dry statement of fact, this is a Look At What I Did To This Chicken sort of paper. 'I have discovered that under proper conditions, the Aethyric energies can be made to transition instead into a hitherto unknown material-liquid phase. I have named'- dubbed? no, that implies a lack of authority, 'named this substance Aethyric Vitae...'"
Substantially more tolerable and productive days pass without the power stones doing anything unexpected, but a sort of cabin fever begins to set in as the second week draws to a close; though you've often spent longer periods secluded while engrossed in one project or another, that you did so by choice and could have freely left if you wanted to made a substantial difference. As the diameter of the power stones - if they can still properly be called them at this point - approaches those of the Orbs, you set your writing aside and refocus your attention on them, hoping there's some tangible sign that they've reached a new form. At this point it seems like there's not going to be any catastrophic failures - unless one is triggered by exceeding the size of an Orb, you suppose - but equally a failure state would be if you reach the size of an Orb but they go back to boiling off Winds after six hours, and never stop until they're back down to the size of a power stone.
But within minutes of the point you estimated, a visible change occurs - the stones keep pulling in new Winds, but they stop being absorbed by it and instead form a cloud floating around it. You shut off the drips and chase off the clouds with an effort of will, pushing them into the corners to be absorbed into the drains that keep the room neutral, and then move the stones - or the Orbs, you hope - closer to the central point and repeat the experiment, smiling at the identical clouds that form. Perhaps the dimensions of an Orb of Sorcery is an upper limit for a single discrete instance of the material-solid phase of magical energy, or perhaps some other, more exotic process is required to exceed them. You don't even have a guess as to what would dictate that size - a power stone consists of a single 'strand' of solidified magic, but what does the size of an Orb correlate to? Perhaps the Elves of Ulthuan know, perhaps they don't. But that doesn't matter right now - what matters is whether or not these hopefully-Orbs start boiling off magic in six and a half hours or not.
They don't. You smile and begin working on what is to be a strong contender for the smuggest chapter of your book.
Aethyric Vitae (1/2)
---
According to the most accepted theory, an Arcane Mark is the result of a transmutation of part of your soul into a Wind. The same theory holds that 'mutation' as most people refer to it is the same effect except with Dhar, which is given as an explanation for why the effects are so often deleterious and prone to leading to further mutation. Therefore an Arcane Mark is related but entirely distinct, both metaphysically and legally, as it is benign, non-compounding, and a further step removed from the energies of Chaos. The effect of the Arcane Mark is to influence the nature of the one marked, or to change small details about the nature of reality in the vicinity, in various ways related to the Wind's idiom. Fire burns low in your presence not because of a direct magical effect, but because the natural state of fire in your presence is to burn low.
In the Colleges, Arcane Marks are seen as inevitable and even desirable. The stated reason for this is that it is a sign that a Wizard is willing to push the limits of their ability to handle their Wind, and that justification is not without merit. The culture and structure of the Colleges are made to encourage and reward pushing your limits in the face of danger. Every Magister is someone that was given the choice between a comfortable and safe life as a Perpetual Apprentice and the dangers and unknowns of Journeying, and chose to Journey. After all, the Orders were founded by those that answered the call to arms of Magnus and Teclis during the Great War Against Chaos, and they are required to be ready to answer again when required. It's a very neat explanation. But another reason why Marks are valued is that once part of your soul consists of a Wind, you can never wield any other without being driven swiftly mad by the formation of Dhar in your soul. The Orders have their roots in secretive orders and mystery cults, and a Wizard that is still able to leave their Order and join another is one that is difficult to trust with your secrets.
For those reasons, Arcane Marks are not seen as something to hide - they are as much a, well, mark of rank as a Wizard's robes and staff. Even the more inconvenient behavioural quirks are worked around rather than suppressed, with College norms and culture and sometimes even architecture built to accommodate them. For these reasons the Collegiate literature on the subject might have tips for managing them, but almost never speak of suppressing them, even though it once must have been the norm to do so. It gets quite heated, with some books putting forward the argument that if the quirks of Wizards are so untolerated that they must be suppressed, then the continued existence of those Wizards would be next to be decided intolerable, so the ground can never be surrendered in the first place.
This attitude represents both an obstacle and a wasted opportunity, you feel. An obstacle because the wrong Arcane Mark can render the very simple spell Doppelganger useless, as the effects of many Arcane Marks would require a full-blown Illusion to conceal. And a wasted opportunity because the effects of Arcane Marks can be impressive, intimidating, and possibly even weaponizable in some circumstances. Your unruly shadow is normally no more than offputting, but if you were able to exert conscious control over it you could not only get it to behave while you're trying to pass yourself off as someone else, but also make it rather more intimidating when that's an impression you want to impart. It might also be able to get better control over your Mastery of Dread Aspect, which causes your shadow to take on a more tangible aspect and to use that to do violence to nearby enemies, and possibly nearby friends. You considered ramping your way up to testing that, but on further thought anything that you might be willing to risk destroying with your shadow would have the testing results tempted by you having consciously recognized it as it being okay for your shadow to destroy. You can't properly test whether your shadow would destroy something or someone you care about without risking something or someone you care about.
So there's no better way to start than to just start trying to flex parts of your soul until you find a part that changes what your shadow is doing. Flexing a part of the soul might sound like nonsense to most humans, but to be a Wizard requires an ability to perform fine manipulations with the soul. Put like that, and it might sound very straightforward. But though it is understood that magic is performed by the soul, any actual details of that, or any other theorized role the soul might play in day-to-day life, are rather elusive. The thing about observing or experimenting on the human soul is that most of the time the body is in the way, and if that isn't the case then it's usually trying to make a one-way trip and interfering with that is rather frowned upon. Technically the Amethyst Order has ways of getting around that that aren't even particularly sacrilegious, but the Amethyst Order lives in the shadow cast by Necromancy and do their best not to invite further comparisons. Other Orders might be willing to flirt with low-to-moderate blasphemy if nobody's looking and the results seem like they would be interesting, but the Amethyst Order either sets loftier standards or keeps the results to themselves. So you're basically starting from scratch here.
[Attempting soul contortionism: Learning, 66+29=95.]
The first major stumbling block is that instead of going about its business, your shadow responds to your attention by looking at you in what is somehow a quizzical manner. You can't really tell if what you're doing is causing it to act different when it's not doing anything in particular. What stops this from being a stumbling block is that it causes you to think deeper about how it undeniably reacts to what at least part of you is consciously thinking, and after a day of going about your other business and making a mental note in the back of your mind about what your shadow is doing without giving it your full attention, you begin to form a hypothesis about exactly how it turns your thoughts into its action. You'd previously considered that your shadow might be manifesting your curiosity, except it seems stubbornly uninterested in your experiments, which is when your curiosity should be most engaged. What it seems to actually be manifesting is your unrealized curiosity, a sliver of attention that turns itself to wherever the rest of your attention isn't and likely won't be. It will always ignore the biggest mystery in the room because the rest of your attention is going to be on that mystery - what it occupies itself with is that which you've judged to be slightly curious but unworthy of further investigation. It is drawn to the question that will not be asked. Fitting for a manifestation of immersion in the Grey Wind, that which gathers around questions but is dissipated by answers.
Doublethink, then. All you have to do is look at something and hold foremost in your mind a sense of curiosity and a resolution to not investigate something further and, in theory, your shadow should turn its attention to that thing, which will look near enough to your shadow doing what a shadow normally does. Simple enough in theory for someone versed in Grey Order mindfulness techniques.
Your shadow seems to disagree, as after you carefully prepare your concentration and begin to mold your conscious attention into the desired shape, your shadow reacts by turning to face you and staying that way until you stop. After glaring back at it, you try running through other mindfulness manipulations and confirm that the shadow is only reacting to the one directed specifically at it, which makes sense. It's hard to trick something from the inside of your own soul. That does, however, give you one useful tool: the ability to freeze your shadow in place by getting it to stare at you. You practice positioning yourself in a room so that your shadow is in a dimmer corner and then drawing its attention to you until you can do so easily and spend a few days practicing that, before turning your attention to a more involved crack at the problem.
[Consciousness manipulation: Learning, 19+29+10(Room of Serenity)=58.]
Over a few days, you construct a mental technique for quickly and consciously reorganizing your priorities to exclude something, then turn your attention to other matters while periodically practising it. The idea is to do so until it becomes so habitual that it becomes just something you do, rather than something that is mentally linked to your shadow, and then once it no longer has shadow associations you can do so on demand to keep your shadow in check without having to consciously think about it. The tricky part is that the way to check if it's working is to see what your shadow is doing. It's not just deliberately not thinking about something, it's doing so while checking on the thing you're not thinking about. If you didn't have another part of your soul that has no connections to your shadow handy, the problem might have defeated you entirely, and you might have had to discard the attempt before you start having actual effects on your normal mental state from yanking the chain on your own consciousness so frequently.
Under Wolf's bored but obedient scrutiny, you go through the motions of your day while only thinking about your shadow with the part of your mind that resides within Wolf. What most of you resolutely ignores but part of you notices is that there's a part of your routine where your shadow stops moving according to its whims and just seems to 'drift' in the direction of its natural position: when you've just fumbled one of the attempts and are recentering yourself to prepare to try again. It seems that when your conscious mind is completely clear - a completeness you're only capable of because the part of it that is actually telling it to clear itself and checking whether it has done so is not actually within that body - the shadow's animus disappears and the shadow itself drifts back into its normal, natural position.
With a put-upon sigh from Wolf, you work with him on practising slipping into that mindset during your day-to-day, and then on trying to do things while maintaining it. What you quickly discover is that certain tasks that require no actual attention whatsoever can be done while maintaining this mindset and therefore your more natural shadow. Walking, brushing your hair, nodding along to someone talking to you without actually listening, paging through a book without actually reading it, and going through your sword drills all prove compatible with maintaining the stillness of your shadow. But you can't actually do anything that requires attention, focus, or decision-making without your shadow returning to its normal habits.
Between the two useful techniques, you haven't achieved anywhere near conscious control of your shadow, but you can keep it in check for situations where its independent nature would reveal your identity. It's not as good a result as you hoped, but for an experiment on something with a body count, it definitely could have had worse results.
Unnatural Shadow: Your shadow has a mind of its own, moving around to inspect its surroundings and coil around things and people it takes a liking to. This is, needless to say, very unnerving. Can be mostly quelled to seem normal to casual observers if focused on.
- Happy April Fools!
- The joke is that this is just a normal and quest-canonical update about two things that could be seen as having potentially disastrous consequences, but actually turned out fine. I don't actually like most April Fools stuff, especially as part of something episodic where the April Fools content came at the expense of just continuing the thing.
Exposure to a soul? Well, you plan on being there to supervise the whole time anyway, so it's an idea you spend some time considering. After all, it may be that any size and shape that comes between a power stone and an Orb of Sorcery are equally metastable and the entire process can be left to its own devices without trouble, but it would be the height of foolishness to just assume it is so and leave the process to its own devices. The only sure facts available to you are those two points of reference, and without proof to the contrary you'll assume that the points between are just as troublesome and prone to unravelling as the points before the power stone. But that undermines itself, as the whole point of being there to supervise requires you to be, well, supervising, and quite possibly managing any unruliness, something you wouldn't be able to do if you're busy detonating every individual drop of Vitae. That, and a soul alone is not enough to detonate, it needs to be a soul with a Wind or a strong emotion running through it. A Wind-infused soul has the same problem as detonation via enchantment, while a strong emotion would be extremely challenging to sustain for a time period of days to weeks. This sends you back to the drawing board.
(While you're there, you spend more time than you care to admit frowning at your notes at the inconsistency between the uncapitalized power stone and the very firmly capitalized Orbs of Sorcery, before you're able to dismiss it as a product of the former being a readily-available staple of magical paraphernalia while the latter exists only in very small and irreplaceable numbers in the Old World, and spend a few minutes smiling at the thought that perhaps in the future Orbs will be so commonplace as to go equally uncapitalized as a result of your work here.)
You're considering commissioning a mild Wind-repelling Rune from one of Thorek's many apprentices before you realize you're overcomplicating things. A strong impact can do the job of detonation, and that is something Dwarven artifice is very capable of reliably producing. 'Strong' being quite relative - you don't need anything like the same force as a blacksmith would call for in a drop-hammer, more the sort that you might find ringing a bell on a large pendulum clock. You have some concerns about the angles involved - if the impact is coming in at an arc, then it could strike at an angle that releases the Winds with a propulsive force in one direction over the others. So, more of a pick than a hammer, and as long as it strikes the middle of the drop that should equally scatter the Winds.
The result, after an exchange of coin and a fair amount of Dwarven tinkering, is something like an orrery depicting a very orderly reimagining of the heavens: all the 'planets' the same size and evenly spaced out on the same orbit, with the 'sun' getting dripped on and tapped with a normal rock pick at regular intervals. With your calendar very firmly cleared for the coming weeks and Eike standing by to fetch anything that needs fetching, you carefully place the power stones in their circular wire holders, crank up the mainspring that powers the clockwork mechanisms that manage the dripping and the hammer, unstopper the Vitae hopper, and hold your breath.
The mechanism dry-cycles a few times as Vitae makes its way through the piping, then the first iridescent drip falls, and with a clink the rock pick impacts and detonates it. There is a small cloud of chaotic movement that quickly resolves itself into eight separate streams that weave through each other to follow the pull of the power stones. For a few moments after their birth, the nature of the Winds are still in flux, not yet fully obedient to whatever force it is that imposes the eight Winds onto the world. The Winds seem to vanish into the stones, but you know they're forming a new layer of crystallized magic, one so thin that no widely-accepted unit of measurement yet exists to describe it.
The excitement of that thought lasts about five minutes, leaving thousands more stretching before you. Your willpower begins to be tested as the drip-and-clink chorus begins to wear grooves in your consciousness. You go to war with yourself over the question of whether you'll send Eike to fetch an early lunch for you just to break the monotony, or whether that will leave an impossible stretch of time between it and dinner. Drip, clink, drip, clink, and as the power stones very very very gradually grow in size, so too does your resentment for everything going exactly as you planned it. These are the Winds of Magic! They are born of Chaos! A moment's inattention when wielding them can condemn a Wizard to fates worse than death! Why are they meekly obeying your designs for them?
Several lifetimes later, as the first day draws to a close and you allow the clockwork mechanism to wind down, you leave Eike to watch over the power stones and collapse into bed, the ghost of the drip-clink still echoing in your thoughts.
---
Somewhere before dawn the next morning, Eike wakes you and reports that Winds are seeping back out of the power stones. By her hourglass about six and a half hours have passed, which is a surprisingly manageable grace period - there are many rituals, enchantments, and, of course, the creation of power stones, where the Wizard performing them can't leave their work unattended for more than an hour or two at a time, which test the determination, focus, and sanity of any Wizard that undertakes those tasks.
You return to the orbery and resume the drip-clink to renew its echoes in the back of your mind, and are relieved to see that the boil-off of Winds ceases as new layers resume their accretion on the power stones. You'd worried that the deposition of new layers would be uneven, but a great deal of measurements with the most sensitive set of calipers to be found in the entire Karak confirms that the power stone has grown in size evenly. Perhaps each new layer of Winds forms itself in a perfect sphere, or perhaps any unevenness self-corrects as new layers fill in gaps left by those previous, but in either case that's one less concern. Between that and the daunting prospect of another day watching very nearly nothing happen, you surrender to the inevitable and have Eike bring in your notes and writing materials so you can get started with your book on the Vitae while you watch the orbery with one eye.
You search through your notes for a turn of phrase you remember liking - there it is, 'primordial Winds' - then spend some time frowning at its potential ambiguity and forming a turn of phrase that will clarify. "'As the energies of the Aethyr enter into our world'," you say aloud as you write, partially to drown out the drip-clink, "'they become the Winds'- are transformed into? reborn as? molded into? Hmm, no, 'by means and for reasons we are yet to understand, they become the Winds we are so familiar with. In the moment of that transformation, their form and nature are mutable-' no, it's not a transformation into Winds and then into Vitae, it's straight into Vitae. 'If, however, these energies are exposed to'... no, if moved into? Under certain conditions? No, this isn't a dry statement of fact, this is a Look At What I Did To This Chicken sort of paper. 'I have discovered that under proper conditions, the Aethyric energies can be made to transition instead into a hitherto unknown material-liquid phase. I have named'- dubbed? no, that implies a lack of authority, 'named this substance Aethyric Vitae...'"
Substantially more tolerable and productive days pass without the power stones doing anything unexpected, but a sort of cabin fever begins to set in as the second week draws to a close; though you've often spent longer periods secluded while engrossed in one project or another, that you did so by choice and could have freely left if you wanted to made a substantial difference. As the diameter of the power stones - if they can still properly be called them at this point - approaches those of the Orbs, you set your writing aside and refocus your attention on them, hoping there's some tangible sign that they've reached a new form. At this point it seems like there's not going to be any catastrophic failures - unless one is triggered by exceeding the size of an Orb, you suppose - but equally a failure state would be if you reach the size of an Orb but they go back to boiling off Winds after six hours, and never stop until they're back down to the size of a power stone.
But within minutes of the point you estimated, a visible change occurs - the stones keep pulling in new Winds, but they stop being absorbed by it and instead form a cloud floating around it. You shut off the drips and chase off the clouds with an effort of will, pushing them into the corners to be absorbed into the drains that keep the room neutral, and then move the stones - or the Orbs, you hope - closer to the central point and repeat the experiment, smiling at the identical clouds that form. Perhaps the dimensions of an Orb of Sorcery is an upper limit for a single discrete instance of the material-solid phase of magical energy, or perhaps some other, more exotic process is required to exceed them. You don't even have a guess as to what would dictate that size - a power stone consists of a single 'strand' of solidified magic, but what does the size of an Orb correlate to? Perhaps the Elves of Ulthuan know, perhaps they don't. But that doesn't matter right now - what matters is whether or not these hopefully-Orbs start boiling off magic in six and a half hours or not.
They don't. You smile and begin working on what is to be a strong contender for the smuggest chapter of your book.
Aethyric Vitae (1/2)
---
According to the most accepted theory, an Arcane Mark is the result of a transmutation of part of your soul into a Wind. The same theory holds that 'mutation' as most people refer to it is the same effect except with Dhar, which is given as an explanation for why the effects are so often deleterious and prone to leading to further mutation. Therefore an Arcane Mark is related but entirely distinct, both metaphysically and legally, as it is benign, non-compounding, and a further step removed from the energies of Chaos. The effect of the Arcane Mark is to influence the nature of the one marked, or to change small details about the nature of reality in the vicinity, in various ways related to the Wind's idiom. Fire burns low in your presence not because of a direct magical effect, but because the natural state of fire in your presence is to burn low.
In the Colleges, Arcane Marks are seen as inevitable and even desirable. The stated reason for this is that it is a sign that a Wizard is willing to push the limits of their ability to handle their Wind, and that justification is not without merit. The culture and structure of the Colleges are made to encourage and reward pushing your limits in the face of danger. Every Magister is someone that was given the choice between a comfortable and safe life as a Perpetual Apprentice and the dangers and unknowns of Journeying, and chose to Journey. After all, the Orders were founded by those that answered the call to arms of Magnus and Teclis during the Great War Against Chaos, and they are required to be ready to answer again when required. It's a very neat explanation. But another reason why Marks are valued is that once part of your soul consists of a Wind, you can never wield any other without being driven swiftly mad by the formation of Dhar in your soul. The Orders have their roots in secretive orders and mystery cults, and a Wizard that is still able to leave their Order and join another is one that is difficult to trust with your secrets.
For those reasons, Arcane Marks are not seen as something to hide - they are as much a, well, mark of rank as a Wizard's robes and staff. Even the more inconvenient behavioural quirks are worked around rather than suppressed, with College norms and culture and sometimes even architecture built to accommodate them. For these reasons the Collegiate literature on the subject might have tips for managing them, but almost never speak of suppressing them, even though it once must have been the norm to do so. It gets quite heated, with some books putting forward the argument that if the quirks of Wizards are so untolerated that they must be suppressed, then the continued existence of those Wizards would be next to be decided intolerable, so the ground can never be surrendered in the first place.
This attitude represents both an obstacle and a wasted opportunity, you feel. An obstacle because the wrong Arcane Mark can render the very simple spell Doppelganger useless, as the effects of many Arcane Marks would require a full-blown Illusion to conceal. And a wasted opportunity because the effects of Arcane Marks can be impressive, intimidating, and possibly even weaponizable in some circumstances. Your unruly shadow is normally no more than offputting, but if you were able to exert conscious control over it you could not only get it to behave while you're trying to pass yourself off as someone else, but also make it rather more intimidating when that's an impression you want to impart. It might also be able to get better control over your Mastery of Dread Aspect, which causes your shadow to take on a more tangible aspect and to use that to do violence to nearby enemies, and possibly nearby friends. You considered ramping your way up to testing that, but on further thought anything that you might be willing to risk destroying with your shadow would have the testing results tempted by you having consciously recognized it as it being okay for your shadow to destroy. You can't properly test whether your shadow would destroy something or someone you care about without risking something or someone you care about.
So there's no better way to start than to just start trying to flex parts of your soul until you find a part that changes what your shadow is doing. Flexing a part of the soul might sound like nonsense to most humans, but to be a Wizard requires an ability to perform fine manipulations with the soul. Put like that, and it might sound very straightforward. But though it is understood that magic is performed by the soul, any actual details of that, or any other theorized role the soul might play in day-to-day life, are rather elusive. The thing about observing or experimenting on the human soul is that most of the time the body is in the way, and if that isn't the case then it's usually trying to make a one-way trip and interfering with that is rather frowned upon. Technically the Amethyst Order has ways of getting around that that aren't even particularly sacrilegious, but the Amethyst Order lives in the shadow cast by Necromancy and do their best not to invite further comparisons. Other Orders might be willing to flirt with low-to-moderate blasphemy if nobody's looking and the results seem like they would be interesting, but the Amethyst Order either sets loftier standards or keeps the results to themselves. So you're basically starting from scratch here.
[Attempting soul contortionism: Learning, 66+29=95.]
The first major stumbling block is that instead of going about its business, your shadow responds to your attention by looking at you in what is somehow a quizzical manner. You can't really tell if what you're doing is causing it to act different when it's not doing anything in particular. What stops this from being a stumbling block is that it causes you to think deeper about how it undeniably reacts to what at least part of you is consciously thinking, and after a day of going about your other business and making a mental note in the back of your mind about what your shadow is doing without giving it your full attention, you begin to form a hypothesis about exactly how it turns your thoughts into its action. You'd previously considered that your shadow might be manifesting your curiosity, except it seems stubbornly uninterested in your experiments, which is when your curiosity should be most engaged. What it seems to actually be manifesting is your unrealized curiosity, a sliver of attention that turns itself to wherever the rest of your attention isn't and likely won't be. It will always ignore the biggest mystery in the room because the rest of your attention is going to be on that mystery - what it occupies itself with is that which you've judged to be slightly curious but unworthy of further investigation. It is drawn to the question that will not be asked. Fitting for a manifestation of immersion in the Grey Wind, that which gathers around questions but is dissipated by answers.
Doublethink, then. All you have to do is look at something and hold foremost in your mind a sense of curiosity and a resolution to not investigate something further and, in theory, your shadow should turn its attention to that thing, which will look near enough to your shadow doing what a shadow normally does. Simple enough in theory for someone versed in Grey Order mindfulness techniques.
Your shadow seems to disagree, as after you carefully prepare your concentration and begin to mold your conscious attention into the desired shape, your shadow reacts by turning to face you and staying that way until you stop. After glaring back at it, you try running through other mindfulness manipulations and confirm that the shadow is only reacting to the one directed specifically at it, which makes sense. It's hard to trick something from the inside of your own soul. That does, however, give you one useful tool: the ability to freeze your shadow in place by getting it to stare at you. You practice positioning yourself in a room so that your shadow is in a dimmer corner and then drawing its attention to you until you can do so easily and spend a few days practicing that, before turning your attention to a more involved crack at the problem.
[Consciousness manipulation: Learning, 19+29+10(Room of Serenity)=58.]
Over a few days, you construct a mental technique for quickly and consciously reorganizing your priorities to exclude something, then turn your attention to other matters while periodically practising it. The idea is to do so until it becomes so habitual that it becomes just something you do, rather than something that is mentally linked to your shadow, and then once it no longer has shadow associations you can do so on demand to keep your shadow in check without having to consciously think about it. The tricky part is that the way to check if it's working is to see what your shadow is doing. It's not just deliberately not thinking about something, it's doing so while checking on the thing you're not thinking about. If you didn't have another part of your soul that has no connections to your shadow handy, the problem might have defeated you entirely, and you might have had to discard the attempt before you start having actual effects on your normal mental state from yanking the chain on your own consciousness so frequently.
Under Wolf's bored but obedient scrutiny, you go through the motions of your day while only thinking about your shadow with the part of your mind that resides within Wolf. What most of you resolutely ignores but part of you notices is that there's a part of your routine where your shadow stops moving according to its whims and just seems to 'drift' in the direction of its natural position: when you've just fumbled one of the attempts and are recentering yourself to prepare to try again. It seems that when your conscious mind is completely clear - a completeness you're only capable of because the part of it that is actually telling it to clear itself and checking whether it has done so is not actually within that body - the shadow's animus disappears and the shadow itself drifts back into its normal, natural position.
With a put-upon sigh from Wolf, you work with him on practising slipping into that mindset during your day-to-day, and then on trying to do things while maintaining it. What you quickly discover is that certain tasks that require no actual attention whatsoever can be done while maintaining this mindset and therefore your more natural shadow. Walking, brushing your hair, nodding along to someone talking to you without actually listening, paging through a book without actually reading it, and going through your sword drills all prove compatible with maintaining the stillness of your shadow. But you can't actually do anything that requires attention, focus, or decision-making without your shadow returning to its normal habits.
Between the two useful techniques, you haven't achieved anywhere near conscious control of your shadow, but you can keep it in check for situations where its independent nature would reveal your identity. It's not as good a result as you hoped, but for an experiment on something with a body count, it definitely could have had worse results.
Unnatural Shadow: Your shadow has a mind of its own, moving around to inspect its surroundings and coil around things and people it takes a liking to. This is, needless to say, very unnerving. Can be mostly quelled to seem normal to casual observers if focused on.
- Happy April Fools!
- The joke is that this is just a normal and quest-canonical update about two things that could be seen as having potentially disastrous consequences, but actually turned out fine. I don't actually like most April Fools stuff, especially as part of something episodic where the April Fools content came at the expense of just continuing the thing.
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K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
The elder species can be pretty dismissive of humans (like the dwarvish word for human meaning shoddy), but I don't think elves would call humans ape.
- Location
- France
Currently trying to figure out which part of the update is the April's Fools.
EDIT: Also, great update! I enjoyed reading Mathilde's struggles against boredom and against bad word choice.
She can't make the shadow even more useful as an extra limb, which is a shame, but being able to hide it remains useful. I hope we'll have options to improve this later, because the "against casual observers" line sounds like something which will come back to bite her later.
EDIT: Also, great update! I enjoyed reading Mathilde's struggles against boredom and against bad word choice.
She can't make the shadow even more useful as an extra limb, which is a shame, but being able to hide it remains useful. I hope we'll have options to improve this later, because the "against casual observers" line sounds like something which will come back to bite her later.
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- Location
- Somewhere on Earth
Check for invisitext.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Does that work on mobile? I highlighted the whole post and didn't see anything.
Or is the joke us looking for a joke that isn't there?
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Oh, so all three of the actions we took involved flexing, I get why this is one unit now.
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
It's right at the bottom, in the author's note:
Most of that was just me turning my process of figuring out how that sentence would go into dialogue. I didn't even intend for her to end up not using the turn of phrase she (and I) went to the trouble of looking up.
- Location
- S.E.A
Orbs of Sorcery are actually Quantum.
Mathilde is experimenting with Quantum Magic.
- Location
- Detroit, Michigan
I like that Mathilde's shadow gets an attitude with her and just glares at her as if to say "Do you mind? I'm trying to be flighty, here!"
Also the start of the Orb creation was great.
Mathilde: At last, new Orbs! Start the machine!
<boredom sets in immediately>
Mathilde: I've made a terrible mistake.
Also the start of the Orb creation was great.
Mathilde: At last, new Orbs! Start the machine!
<boredom sets in immediately>
Mathilde: I've made a terrible mistake.