A thought that's been on my mind for... nearly a year now, really. Ever since
my posts after the Elementalism books social.
I've been wondering if Dhar has a Third Secret.
...Okay, maybe that's a little game-mechanic-y. Not a secret as a trick that can be done with it, so much as an overarching purpose that informs everything it is and does. Though an overarching purpose that may imply further secret tricks.
I've theorized that the winds of magic may be equivalent to an oral tradition (or a gas flame) in how they turn the Primordial Winds into more of themselves and that Dhar may not be so elegant, nor even part of the same system. Given it's nature and seeming separation from the other winds in nature, it may
require the Chaos Moon to remember what it is. And I'm wondering if that may in fact be part of the
point.
The Four aren't exactly the sort to just win and leave it at that. If everything had gone as well as they could have possibly hoped in the Coming of Chaos then, the moment they were done and had won entirely, it strikes me that they'd absolutely start vying with each other. The same is true of Belakor for that matter--- as the most likely person to have any hand in what
Dhar is whatsoever. Given the chance he strikes me as exactly the sort to start trying to overthrow his masters, just as they would seek narrow their tetrachy and thus to overthrow each other.
So, given, a group project by four gods of ruin (and their treacherous underling,) why would we not expect it to have the Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal baked right in? Certainly it would explain why so many of the great masters of the magic were either overthrown by their students, (Vlad, Van Hal) or took strict measure to ensure they
couldn't be overthrown by lessening what they passed on. (Compare Nagash's works and his Elixir of Life to that the works and recreations of his successors, Or what we've seen of Morathi teaching lessened arts to her students.)
In this, it occurs to me, that the first secret is about how to use
Dhar to stablize itself by turning it against on itself, but the second secret is about how that control can be disrupted. Moreso, when its dense enough,
Dhar is said to let both gods and demons take physical form and walk the world. And make it something not unlike flesh and blood. The Demons are one thing, but Gods using it? That seems interesting. Different.
So, I'd like to make a proposal:
Dhar is not a wind, but the magic of
Usurpation.
Not just in the form of being a tool to subsume the winds of magic and the world entire but, by its own nature,
Dhar itself is meant to be vulnerable to that same usurpation. It would fit with so many dark wizards coming to either overthrow their masters or take great precaution against such a thing, especially when some of its greatest luminaries, Nagash, Belakor, Malekith, are usurpers themselves.
I could also see it tying into how mutations this update posits to be
Dhar Arcane marks to make further mutation only more likely.
It would also fit with what I've presumed to be
Dhar's associations with Sacrifice/Zero-Sum and coercive force. To the zero sum, the only way to attain anything is to take it from something else. If not from someone under you, then from someone either beyond you or, previously, over you, in usurpation. And to the usurper, a force of power-without-legitimacy, coercion is the only honest way of doing things.
It may even explain how the likes of the Kislev vortex works. Perhaps the Divine magic within Kislev is able to overpower
Dhar with a single tone until it is
Dhar no longer, but the Ice Magic of the witches and their divine patron. It might well explain the prophecy of Ice Magic being tainted by a male Ice Witch: Something in the process of conversion, and the way Dhar was meant to taint magic meaning that such a wielder would open it up to taint. (In which sense that prophecy wouldn't necessarily even be a vision of the future, just the architects of old realizing that "Okay, this is the weakness inherent to what we've made, that could potentially allow the thing we're purifying to break the whole system".)
It might also fit with Dhar allowing divinities to take physical form, and not just demonic ones: One divinity being able to turn Dhar into enough of their own stuff to manifest might not be an accident, but an intentional feature. Turning
Dhar into their own essence that they might gobble up as much as they could after all was done and they could war with one another sounds like the sort of thing the Chaos Gods would do.
That could explain be why the Chaos Moon was made during the destruction of the Polar Gates: Not as an accident or an afterthought, but because the conspirators may have needed something just plain
big enough that no other force could overwhelm and thus usurp it. At least, not until the Four were done with their plot-turned-conquest and could shape reality to their whim. But if Dhar might have been Chaos' attempt at a Short Victorious War, in the end that war was neither short, nor victorious.
Perhaps this is the reason those who keep
Dhar in their hearts hear prophecy of demise and foretell times of a thousand thrones.
Dhar knows the predator it is,
Dhar knows its own fate. It must feed or else it will be fed upon.
----------------------------
Also, with that
finally written, I'll clean up and present the first, more complete half of a project that's been mostly abandoned, of which that
Dhar speculation above was once the more grounded parts of the back half:
The following is theory and speculation, presented as a thesis to a hypothetical paper or tome of Sevirics and the primordial winds Mathilde might one day pen. Presumably as sequel to
The Aetheric Vitae.
The short version can be found
here.
This also one that incorporates speculation on the possible origins and ends of Dhar both as contrast to the winds of magic and because it lets me write fun prophecy of doom things. And also because, at this point, I feel like Boney gets a kick out of magic theorycrafting.
Includes footnotes via both
ABBR alt text tags and also copied down in the notes below for things that don't really fit into the format.
The Scripture Without Author1: On the Origins of the Winds of Magic and Their Nature.
From what source comes the natures of the Lores of Magic?
The Aetheric Vitae, drawn from the Aether, has no nature of its own. Instead, it is shaped by the world around it, by the magic it is exposed to, and by the thoughts of living beings. Yet, there is an issue with this simple fact: Should that Prima Material be shattered in a way that leaves it truly to it its own devices it does not boil or evaporate into the winds of magic, but rather becomes the substance of reality itself.
What, then, writes the Lores of Magic and Divine, if not reality itself?
Who authors the lore of the Hedge? The folk and wise of the hedge do. Through long tradition their ways and rites have become deeply ingrained in the lore they wield.
Who authors the
lores of the Divine?2 The divinities themselves. Whether by those gods we gladly call our friends, allies, and patrons or by those who we are sworn to oppose, the power is written by the divine, and the divine shape it to their nature.
Who authors the lore of the Elements? Through conceptual resonance, It is written upon earthbound magic by the world itself, though weakly enough that it may be overwritten by the Lores of
Sevir. This, I think, is the key, for if
Sevir can write upon another magic to make that magic into itself, perhaps that is all it has ever done.
Who, then authors the lore of winds and why are the lores of
Sevir, so separate and more seemly elemental in comparison to the other lores? The winds themselves are both lore and source of
Sevir: A scripture without author.
A legend passed down by the storytellers of a village or copied by scribes through the ages may be retold forever, for as long as the tradition remains unbroken. So too do the winds of magic write themselves unto the Aethyr that enters reality for so long as the wind of magic shall blow.
It is possible once these winds had a first author who gave them the elements, mysticisms and cardinal associations of each wind. Certainly the
Accounts of the Dragons of Caledor speak of great machines.3 Whatever or whoever once was are lost to memory and history. They did not bind themselves into their creation, and their creation grew beyond them. Whatever authors the winds once had or never had, they no longer have nor need.
Notably where
Dhar turns the substance of the Aethyr into only
Dhar, and reality becomes only more reality, when
Ulgu encounters the raw stuff of the Aether it writes not only
Ulgu, but its kin in
Sevir:
Ghyran, Aqshy, Chamon, Shyish, Ghur, Azyr, and
Hysh.
That opposition and contrast of the winds is seemingly so inherent to the winds that each one will bring its kin winds forth when it could instead have replicated itself eightfold more. The winds of magic may not touch, but neither were they meant to exist alone. The scriptures of
Sevir are not eightfold, but one.
Perhaps this is why the winds demand as much or more of their practitioners as any diety does of their most zealous of faithful.
In a thing that must define both itself and its kin utterly, every tenet must be written in full, and every code of practice must be engraved in every act.4
A diety can look out for themselves, the winds of magic must rely upon their own steadfast nature and so that nature must be spoken long and loud.
To say that the scriptures of Sevir are without author, then, is as much poetry as fact. They have as many authors as thinking beings who recite them, and it is for this fact precisely that no force can truly claim the authority to control them.
But just because the scriptures are so complete does not mean they are immutable. In the story retold through generations each teller may add their own focus and embellishment to the tale.
We of the Colleges do not merely wield the winds of Sevir: We welcome them into our being to reshape our souls, and so by years and decades
we become the living incarnations of our chosen wind; In becoming beings of the winds, the winds also becomes of us.5 When we write upon the substance of magic with our spellcraft our loves and joys, our knowledge and understanding of the world and of Sevir are so also written. Whether by mastery known only to us or by spell codified and passed down to our students and colleagues perhaps we are reshaping of the winds to our own nature.
It is said that when a spell reaches the point of battle magic, it remembers where it came from. Perhaps this is why is so dangerous and difficult to control, even to the greatest of us. Battle magic may simply be the point where the winds of magic becomes less that which reads the scripture of Sevir, and more the scribe.
This is also why spells that seek to push the boundaries of what is possible are most easily created as battle magics.
Should one seek to pen their own tale in the lores of
Sevir, it must either resonate with what is already told, or be writ large and loud enough to form new magic.
All Sevir is one art. It's complexity ensures that no one being could ever claim control over all of it. But that does not mean that none have ever tried.
By what author comes
Dhar?
[snip
Dhar section and prophecies of the End of
Dhar]
--------------------------
AN: This is somewhat hampered by being conjecture where a collegiate paper or book would have experiments and citation to back itself up, alas.
Footnotes:
1: Even from the very title, this is posed as an answer to the lines of inquiry pose by Cython and Panoramia. The winds are not gods themselves. Rather, if they compare to a faith, they are more akin to something like Bhuddism where the most important thing isn't any amount of divinity behind it, but the lessons it contains. Really though, the best fit is an oral tradition, it's just that spelling that out outright didn't feel like it fit into Mathilde's frame of reference.
2: It's questionable whether Mathilde would actually include anything on divine magic in a work like this post Truth or Faith update, but this feels like an important part of the argument while being reasonably general about it. Plus subtly laying groundwork for the idea that not only is
Sevir not the same as divine magic, it
also isn't Elementalism
or Hedgecraft. Nor, as will come up later, is
Dhar a true wind of magic, however much it may try to look like one.
3"The great machines begin to fail and the energies they were supposed to harness began to pour into the world, and the Ruinous Powers began to mould those energies - but the machines were more clever than they expected, as most of the energies were transformed by their passage into the world into forms that followed their own natures, rather than the orders of the Ruinous Powers. "
4: An answer specifically to Cython: It is precisely
because the winds are scripture, rather than diety that the winds imbue the seeming-Zeal Cython once spoke of.
5 [The Living Incarnation: L.M. Johann (Gold), 2497]
6 A point here I'm not sure how to raise is where the thoughts and emotions of living beings come into it. My current theory is that the emotions of living beings would probably cause Sevir as a result of Old One meddling.
