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some-small-mercy · 17 days ago

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Abhari Atlas - The Diamond Sea

The Kymaric Expanse (called the Well of Dreams by the League, and the Diamond Sea in Illyric atlases) is a major hub on the Grand Line and one of the largest and most populous World-Shards charted by any power. Despite the anarchic and incomplete nature of their dominion, and the partial end to their trading monopoly after the Commonwealth’s victory in the latest Armada War, it remains the heart of the Khasli colonial empire. Its blood and treasure, in fact, constitutes a large part of the League of Rhaloke’s fortunes as a whole. This essay shall describe the metaphysics and geography which define the Expanse, identify the colonies, principalities and tribes that populate it, and specify the Commonwealth’s guiding interests in the Shard.

The Illyric name for the shard refers to its near-transparent waters, referred to by many travellers as so clear and glass-like that on calm days the ocean floor seems near enough to dive down and reach - a sublime experience for those with little experience of other seas, and a deeply uncanny one for seasoned sailors or marines. The waters are defined by warm, tropical trade winds that provide safe, predictable sailing from any given port for seven months of the year while bludgeoning them with storms the remaining three.

Aside from general metaphysical stability and ease of navigation, the most salient fact to

captains charting a course through the Expanse is its sheer size - more than twice that of any single other shard on the Grand Line. Its central landmass is the size of a small continent, with two reasonably sized archipelagos that would be enough to stabilize smaller shards in their own right. The climate of the coasts and lowlands is tropical and humid, with life governed by the predictable violence of the annual storms.

The Khasali refer to the central landmass as Kayal, after the empire which once dominated it. It is dominated by two great mountain ranges - larger than any in Esher - which dramatically divide it into regions with their own wildlife, peoples, and methods of subsistence. The first runs very close to parallel with the southern coast, while the second juts out along one arm of the great semicircle of Kayal’s north, eventually becoming one of the Expanse’s two great island chains. Quite uniquely, it was among the mountains and hills of the interior, rather than the river valleys and coastal plains of the north, that native civilization began to develop. This can be credited both to the north being too verdant - so fecund that its tribes were never disciplined by hunger or scarce hunting grounds and forced to adapt some manner of civilized agriculture - and to the peculiar metaphysics of the shard, and how they have affected the native life thereof.

The pre-conquest Kayal Empire was purported to be ruled by the eternally recurring souls of the Kayal tribe’s progenitors (a triadic partnership of two kings and one queen - tentatively associated with the shard’s suns and moon). Myths contradict each other about specifics but the three legendary figures either: gave birth to, sculpted from stone and blood, or raised up from the beasts of the mountains, the first generation of the Kayal tribe. When their deaths approached, they each chose a successor from among the tribe and bid them to wed each other and, at the climax of the ceremony, feast upon the flesh of their parent-god to assume their role and station. Illyric theologians famously name these figures as the titans (fallen angels corrupted by demons of flesh and life) from their bestiaries and consider the diversity of forms the natives peoples exhibit as proof they are in fact the descendents of the monsters’ soulless pets and servitors. This seems roughly as likely as ancient monarchs actually devouring their parents whole and being possessed by them (as opposed to a mythical exaggeration of the innocent native tradition where an orphan imbibes a small amount of an adult’s blood before witnesses as a rite of adoption), but it must be admitted that there is something which requires explanation.

It is a basic law of nature that the peoples of different world shards are far more diverse in form and appearance than those native to the Centre. This is true regardless of whether those peoples are barbaric, tribal or civilized, and has only a tangential relationship with the success of efforts educating and Enlightening them. But the Kymaric Expanse is near-unique for the sheer breadth of variation present. What became the ruling peoples and aristocracy of the Kayal Empire are half again as tall (and far more powerfully built) as any explorer or merchant who has written of them, with pebble-grey skin tough enough to turn aside any edge the shard’s natives were capable of honing - and the mythology of the interior abounds with lamentation at how lessened and declined they are from the power they once held. The hardiness and powerful build common to their former subjects in the mountains and valleys of the interior might plausibly stem from the same cause, but the amphibious fishers and pearl-divers of the great central basin, the avian tribes of the northern mountain range and the myriad of different barbarian clans attested to peopling the untamed reaches of jungle and hill all seem entirely distinct.

Despite certain fantasies popular among foreign scholars, the natives are all human both in body (the need for careful analysis can be avoided by pointing to the number of Khasali adventurers who have taken native consorts and filled their colonies with their offspring) and mind (given appropriate education, the children of every tribe remain capable of learning the arts of civilization and the tenets of Enlightened philosophy). What makes the Kymaric Expanse in particular so fecund in its diversity is unknown, but its natives in any event represent rich veins of study for those scholars deriving the laws of development and civilization.

The Expanse’s other rich veins are less metaphorical. Silver, emeralds and several other precious materials (though not, ironically enough, diamonds) are more abundant in the southern and interior mountains than any other shard. This, more than any other single fact, clarifies and explains the politics and commerce of the shard.

Kayal itself is of course dominated by what are called the ‘Kayal Principalities’ or ‘Successor States’ - two polite euphemisms for one of the more brutally anarchic species of subjugation humanity has yet devised. Dozens of warlords and petty kings have fought over the corpse of the Great Kayal ever since its conquest - by now those descended from Khasali conquerors are quite indistinguishable from those claiming to restore the glory of the empire, and both are wholly dependent on the Rhaloke colonies on the southern coast exchanging jewels, silver, reagents and slaves for weapons, tools and mercenaries (as well as novelties and intricate artifice of all kinds) from the Centre and other shards. The increased autonomy of those colonial ports after the end of the last Armada War has done little or nothing to improve the lot of the interior - if anything the flow of mercenaries and adventurers seeking to carve off their own cut of lucrative carrion has only grown.

The Principalities are of far more interest to most than the remainder of the continent, and so already the subject of a great many valuable studies. The remainder of the continent has been comparatively neglected for its lack of civilized states and precious metals.

The first exception to that neglect are the ferociously xenophobic barbarian clans native to the imposing eastern edge of the southern mountain range. Short in stature but hardy and resilient, it’s theorized that they are the remnants of some ancient empire in their own right - for the mountains they call home are riddled through with cyclopean tomb-complexes of a kind the Kayal show no interest in, and which are far beyond their current ability to even dream of creating. Living within the graves and temples of their ancestors, they have proven violently adept at hunting down and massacring explorers of all kinds despite their evident lack of social development. Their success is explained in large part by the remoteness and inhospitality of their mountains, and the remainder by their pretenatural understanding of the region’s unstable geology and odd faculty with primitive elemental theurgery. It has been theorized that some slumbering dragon acts as a patron god and benefactor, though all evidence for this remains circumstantial.

Less-studied are the whole assortment of barbaric clans which fill the jungles and river deltas of the northern interior, which combine remoteness and inhospitality with lack of anything so enticing as ancient tombs and lost treasures of a forgotten empire. Fascinating objects of future study, but - given the difficulties that have been encountered shaking them free of their idyll and introducing them to honest work aboard ships or on plantations - there has been limited interest in sponsoring true engagement beyond that. The untracked wilderness they call home does little to encourage this - full of poisonous plants and venomous beasts, as well as deceptively unnavigable rivers and dangerously wild spirits.

The great semicircular bay of the continent’s north offers a richer area of study, with several different tribal groups (and a nascent civilization) who engage in both commerce and war with each other running across the coastline. The most infamous of these are the tribes which dominate the north-western mountains and barrier islands - able by some combination of heritage and craft to fly with the wings of great birds (crows, bats and eagles, depending on the particular tribe), they have menaced and extracted tribute from the great bay’s other peoples for ages beyond memory. Still parochial and socially primitive, they have otherwise adopted well to changing circumstances - which is to say that they now wield stolen or scavenged pistols and steel, and ally with corsairs they offer safe harbor to, that their raids range ever-further, and that their ‘windlords’ have accumulated riches and retinues beyond the wildest dreams of any in past centuries. Despite punitive expeditions expelling them from several islands and destabilizing more than one nascent confederacy, they remain the greatest threat to civilization and commerce in general and the Commonwealth’s interests in particular in the northern Expanse.

Turning East, the grand, gentle sweep of the coastline is dotted with villages and ritual sites belonging to any of a hundred different clans and nominal confederacies. Having for centuries filled their days with fishing, pearl-diving and simple games, they are as a rule quite naive and peaceable, with little understanding of the wider world, or curiosity to explore it beyond whatever might wash up on their beach. Fortunately, that occurs with enough frequency that they are neither terrified of novelty nor unfamiliar with commerce (either through barter or, in the more advanced cases, through simple currencies such as pearls or certain species of shell).

That familiarity with commerce is due less to any virtues inherent to their own cultures and more due to the influence of one of the most fascinating peoples in the entire shard - whom the gutter press seems absolutely insistent on calling ‘sirens’. In many ways a quite primitive tribal culture, scattered across hundreds of small islets, atolls, and sheltered coves in the great northern bay, they provide little evidence of material or social sophistication. This is an environment they are extremely well-suited to, the typical adult capable of swimming for tens of kilometers with a pack or child bound to them - it is unknown whether they are truly amphibious or merely capable of holding their breath for hours, but in either case deaths by drowning seem wholly unheard of. Far more interesting, however, is their social role - aquatic nomads, they act as merchants, couriers and mediators between different coastal tribes across the whole great bay, with richly developed (and quite effective) traditions of barter and arbitrage. That a people with barely any access to (or ability to work) wood should possess the most numerous and grandest canoes on the water at the date of contact should be all the evidence required of their success in this role. The disruptions brought by contact with Central civilization were inevitable, of course, but the short-sightedness of certain officials in failing to integrate them into the new order is a mistake that will hopefully soon be revisited by the Committee for Colonial Affairs.

The only native civilization north of the barrier jungles is far to the east (and thus relatively insulated from corsair raids). Despite the paradoxically thin and easily exhausted soil that curses much of Kayal, the natives had developed a crude form of ‘slash and burn’ farming even before contact. While characteristically warlike and honour-obsessed for their level of development, a few of the larger villages proved willing and able to accept the Commonwealth’s aid - and with it now form the leading forces of a united principality. The Committee for General Enlightenment has already opened several schools dedicated to instructing their most promising children on modern agriculture, statecraft and military theory (along with, of course, the generalities of Enlightened philosophy), and a permanent embassy has created a healthy trade in all the supplies and foodsuffs needed for both Commonwealth ships and more focused plantations on their part and metal tools, weaponry, and assistance in securing more and more resilient farming land further inland on the Commonwealth’s.

The vast majority of those plantations and colonies are found in the second archipelago, larger and more widely spread than the fairly tight line of barbarian-filled barrier isles on the north-east. Scattered to the south of Kayal proper, there are over fifty islands large enough to note (and many more small atolls). Possessing far richer soil and no native populations of note, they were the first lands discovered when the sea was charted and have since been the site of several wars between colonial expeditions from every power worth noting. Between the lucrative plantations that dot many of them and the great Khasali treasure fleets that still sail south from Sethennai and Kalmeta each year, it is hardly a surprise that the archipelago is a natural breeding ground for pirates of every type - and with the end of the Armada War and the recent intrigues in the Illyric court, the infestation is worse now than at any point in living memory.

Kymeric soil has few of the unusual properties which make agriculture in other shards so unusually lucrative, but the climate and soil of those islands is still very well-suited to profitable plantation economies. The specific crops…

-Academic Rasim Kleio, ‘The Demography of the Kymaric Expanse’, composed while touring the shard before retiring from the Academy to take up a commission as the general director of the First Bank of Sethennai

#worldbuildidng #fantasy #abhari #atlas #the outer seas

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some-small-mercy · 25 days ago

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Shadows In The Cave - Threat Analysis - Dreaming Big

This is a final report on OPERATION ECHOING HYMN, successfully completed on XX/ XX/201X in the suburb of XXX, New Jersey. K-CELL, as the closest available PATRIOT Agents, operated without official support and went above and beyond the call of duty doing so. Despite some losses, K-CELL (and AGENT KEVEN in particular) acted heroically and decisively to destroy an unprecedently dangerous cult before their rituals began risking the whole neighborhood around them.

The Agents were mobilized by E-CELL through the usual channels after confused reports surfaced of a homeless man hiding dozens or hundreds of snakes in his clothing, and of those snakes attacking passersby who approached him. K-CELL is mostly located within New York, but relocated for the Operation. The lack of criminal investigation to take over or friendly assets to liaise with made investigations difficult, but K-CELL persevered. Identifying the ‘homeless man’ as a parishioner of a local strip mall church, K-CELL began surveilling its staff and attendees. Over the course of several weeks observation, K-CELL verified that one particular Thursday evening sermon was always followed by a handful of attendees falling into hours-to-days long fugue states.

Agents KEVIN, KATIE and KADE approached and attempted to interview several of these parishioners. In all cases, this proved more difficult (and dangerous) than expected. The targets were all consumed by powerful delusions, and something that occurred during the service caused those delusions to begin bleeding through into reality. Biting snakes and scorpions, liquids suddenly become disgusting and contaminated with filth, and the profusion of pus-filled, weeping sores across the bodies of anyone near the target were all observed first- or second-hand. The changes to reality ceased whenever the target was no longer able to carry on with their delusions (Agent KEVIN made the lucky discovery with the third target approached that unconsciousness also achieved this) but any damage caused by it remained.

K-CELL was not able to determine what made that particular sermon the focal point of FOREIGN influence, but took decisive action to deal with the threat permanently. The assault was successful, and destroyed a far more powerful and dangerous cult than anyone had realized. As K-CELL entered the church, it was discovered to be utterly transformed from how it appeared on publicly available videos and during previous surveillance. The congregation was engaged in ecstatic worship as one of their members (not an ordained pastor, apparently picked at random from the crowd) read from the book that was the center of the FOREIGN incursion. Tragically, Agent KADE was lost in the course of the Operation - but Agent KEVIN was able to eliminate the preacher before he could finish reading a passage from the tome and complete whatever wound to reality was being cut.

The tome, along with all other religious texts and strange material found around the church, was destroyed with prejudice. The neighborhood and character of most parishioners made passing the Operation off as the result of violence among addicts easy enough Unfortunately, retrieving the preacher’s remains proved impossible. Still, it is safe to say that the Threat has been dealt with, especially after two weeks were taken to identify every known attendee of the dangerous sermons in question. K-CELL can confidently report that every member of the cult has now been dealt with, and the Threat is eradicated.

* * *

Alright, so. This is one of Mr. K’s jobs, though no clue if it’s from him or just through him. Someone shat the bed, and someone else wants things tidied up before it starts attracting flies. Maybe they have business close by they don’t want disrupted, maybe they figure they’re running out of luck and want to get some red out of the ledger before it’s time to read it, maybe it’s none of any of our fucking buisness. Options! Gossip when the work is done.

There are some sick people wandering around out there, and they’re starting to spread it. I’ve spoken with Grandmother, and it’s already fucked and getting worse and worse. People, animals, buildings, hours of the day. No, no idea where from. Don’t think Mr. K knows either, but again, not your business. Some idiot somewhere pissed all over the floor and you lucky assholes are the ones mopping it up. There’s something like a dozen broken souls out there, loose ends full of rot that’s trying to latch on to something for support before it falls apart.

Bad day for them, since falling apart is the only safe thing any of ‘em can do. Half of them are so badly off that it’s all they’re managing anyway, those you’re giving a bit of mercy. The rest would get stable if we let them - so be smart and double-tap them to be sure. Grandmother’s asked for any undamaged hands, eyes or tongues, but absolutely absolutely do not fucking get cute trying to keep those whole for the bonuses.

This is a chance for all of you to prove your balls actually dropped at some point and get your name in front of Mr. K’s eyes - or at least to get me to actually remember who you are as something other than someone’s fuckup cousin. So don’t fuck up, yeah? Great.

* * *

Good morning Brooke,

Hope you’ve had a lovely holiday season!

I’m reaching out because I have a very exciting update from our talent scouting program. As you know, promising opportunities for the Andersoon Trust to support have been a bit thin on the ground after the shakeups early last year - so I’m incredibly happy to say that we’ve identified multiple prospects already this year! As you can imagine, we’re all overjoyed with how fast the changes that you recommended are bearing fruit.

There are three live prospects at the moment - one here in California, one in Colorado, one international - but two of them are still in very early stages and might turn out to be false alarms (we’ve certainly had enough of those to get used to it). It’s the prospect in Denver that made me so excited to reach out - we’ve been working closely with them for more than two months now, and even if cultural fit and governance issues are concerns, I can say with absolute confidence that they are a real opportunity to achieve something amazing - to change the world.

They were admittedly a bit of a leap of faith - but Josh is our best talent scout because he has such an intuition for these things. I’ve already made sure the paperwork is filled out in accordance with all legal requirements, so as long as it’s Gregory handling any audits or financial reviews there shouldn’t be any problems with having started to provide support before the proposals came in (or questions about the exact legal status of the entity we’re providing the grant to).

Mr. Torres, the prospect in question, was in quite a state when Josh found him, totally incapable of interfacing with the rest of society. The level of trauma he’s survived is honestly horrifying - but just makes what he’s already achieved with our support so much more inspirational. Josh and Selena were able to get him to the point where he could move under his own power and get back into the same frame of reference as the rest of the city (and, once he was there, set him up with food, clothing, and a place to live). His memories and communication skills are both still very unstable, but from my understanding (second-hand only, of course) he was part of a new religious movement somewhere on the east coast that was destroyed by a real brutal targeted attack that occurred while he was presiding over a weekly meeting. Even he’s unclear on how he got from there to the Rockies.

At the moment he’s focusing on his own recovery, and forcing himself to relieve those very difficult memories for more details or anything that could be used to check the status of his former comrades would be too dangerous for him.

From what Selena has been able to say around patient-client confidentiality, that recovery hasn’t been easy, but Josh was entirely correct - Mr. Torres is already a lucid (and waking) dreamer on a level that conventional science considers impossible, and we have not come close to probing the limits of his abilities.

* * *

The Agents of K-CELL are all seasoned veterans, with AGENT KHALID having taken part in six distinct operations across his career with XXXX. So it should be taken incredibly seriously that no Agent involved had ever seen a THREAT as obviously supernatural or dangerous to the sanctity of reality as a whole than what was encountered disrupting the ritual at the heart of ECHOING HYMNAL.

The FOREIGN energies were blatant and impossible to dismiss, and caused permanent, obvious physical changes to the world without needing to work through some insane or possessed victim. The book the preacher read from was clearly the linchpin of the THREAT, with every word he spoke in an unknown and probably FOREIGN language causing noticeable physical damage to the preacher, and obvious changes to the world around them. When K-CELL intervened, the baptismal font had been filled with what seemed to be blood, and parishioners were pulling forearm-sized leeches from it to offer their own flesh to. As the cell attacked (thankfully equipped with light military small arms sourced via non-traditional methods), several of those leeches instead burrowed into the stomach cavity or rib cage of the parishioner holding them. The blood was then spilled across the floor and wasp-like insects flew out of it en mass. Individual agent reports become unclear and contradictory from that point, but it is clear things continued to escalate. It was only when Agent KEVIN used an unorthodox technique acquired from a FRIENDLY asset in a previous OPERATION and submerged the preacher into the baptismal blood (from which he struggled as if drowning before sinking and vanishing entirely) that the building stopped shifting and the air quality returned to normal. At which point dealing with the remaining parishioners who had not fled through the suddenly-unblocked door became simple.

No member of K-CELL is clear on just what sort of FOREIGN THREAT was behind this, but it’s an obvious shift and escalation from the isolated, feral cultists and addicts touched by some FOREIGN corruption that have been the real physical menace behind every human-based THREAT the Cell has encountered before. That K-CELL went above and beyond in destroying the THREAT does not mean that this shouldn’t be taken seriously going forward.

* * *

Mr. K wasn’t exactly talkative, but Grandmother says it’s a dream plague. Something’s got into them that’s too big for whatever’s left of their brains to hold, and now it's leaking out. Gets worse when they get worked up or scared, so the fact that half of them are just rushing to drink, smoke or shoot themselves into comas to deal with it is a blessing. Don’t fucking waste it.

What leaks out? Blood, sweat and piss, same as anyone else.

No, fine, fuck you yes it was funny. But watch the poor fucks less than shadows, puddles and dark corners around them. Especially puddles. Stuff’ll start crawling, slithering and flying out of them. Most of it’s only real enough to scare the shit out of you, but she says some might dig in enough to bite. None of you are dumb enough to need a warning not to let the fucking things bite you? Great.

If they’re wearing heavy clothing, something like snakes might be hiding in them, so don’t get close unless you’re very sure there’s nothing moving. Grab a facemask and put it on if there’s any kind of haze or smoke in the air. And - and I swear to fucking god I hope none of you idiots need to be told this either - do not keep or use anything that was actually on one of their bodies. Mr. K wants belongings for his friends if you can bag ‘em and bring ‘em without touching skin or staying around the corpse too long. He’d also pay a nice little bonus for any of those snakes or other creepy shit that manifests, if they stick around once the guy creating them is dead - but again, don’t get too greedy to live. If you can’t handle and store ‘em safely, there’s a funeral home run by a friend of ours whose cremator will be taking the bodies, it can take everything else on them too.

This is shit work for shitheads, but that doesn’t mean you can fuck around on it. Some idiot already did, and Grandmother says whatever all these poor assholes were part of was shattered and all of them with it. Now instead of one giant weed burrowing through all their dreams it’s a hundred roots starting to rot in the soil. You can call putting them down your good deed for the year.

* * *

Despite his traumatic experiences, and the significant help with physical, emotional and mental reconstruction he has required since, Mr. Torres still has a connection to something beautiful. A whole new paradigm, a vision of reality that’s so much more vital and vivid than the modern hegemonic ideal. It’s a perspective on history, on religion, and the basic facts of biology that seem entirely incompatible with our own - the goal of his religious practice on the East Coast was communal visualization and actualization, imagining ways that our world and this idea of alien potential could overlap and coexist with each other, and then doing what they could to make them real.

I know you’re a busy woman and this is all very granular and in-the-weeds from your perspective. But I think this is a project with real potential - a vision of a world without veils, where people by the billions live in vital connection with both the life around them and the vastness of the universe around them. And, more importantly, a proven way to make it real. With the right nurturing, guidance and support, this could really work!

Unfortunately, the material Mr. Torres’ religious practices were based around were destroyed before he came to our attention. Combined with the trauma he’s still recovering from our window into his world is blurry and vague. It’s only now - and only with the Trust’s continuing funding and support - that he will be able to begin forming a new community in Boulder and exploring the possibilities offered by the new environment and local culture.

I’d be happy to provide more information you might be interested in, and any concerns you have will be taken very seriously. But otherwise, we’ve set him up on his own feet, and Josh has set himself up as our point of contact and is already managing the grant application and funding process on his behalf. With any luck, Mr. Torres will be able to begin his transformative work in earnest by the end of Q3.

We’re looking at the start of something great here, I know it.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

All the best,

Alexandra Collwood

Grant Manager, Anderson Heritage Trust

#worldbuildidng #urban fantasy/horror #shadows in the cave #cults and conspiracies #humanity's euthanasia

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some-small-mercy · 1 month ago

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Abhari Atlas - An Introduction to the Outer Seas

When the Celestial Host cast down and butchered the Arch-Demons of the lower depths and from them made Creation, they did not do so with a single mind, or in a single effort. The Inner World upon which you and I walk is perfectly formed, and aligned with every principle of True and Beauty - it is for this reason that the Great Gods of Heaven believed it a suitable home for the sublime Order of man and spirit we know as civilization. Make no mistake, I am no Godsemeren pollyanna - the Inner World is replete with heresy and witchcraft, with demons and apostates and every other horror. But it is full, too, of honor and beauty, of loyalty and piety, and of all the countless Glories which obedience to the Chain of Being and true Religion allow.

But the Inner - or, as I have elsewhere argued it should be more rightly called, the Higher - World was the Celestial Divines’ masterwork, not their first attempt. In ages past, the learned and pious believed that it was built upon the ruins of these previous efforts, and it was from this imperfection that the taint of demology and witchcraft first seeped into the world. I am loathe to contradict such august and ancient sources, but in our modern age this has been proven false - the prototypes and failed attempts at the creation of the World were not destroyed or built over, they were instead cast down and hidden away, or put by the Heavens to some lesser purpose suitable to their failings and what virtues they had.

There is a great diversity among the nations and the peoples of the Higher World and so the first service provided by a study of the Outer Seas is a contrast by which their similarities might be seen. They are all, for example, human, born imbued with a mortal soul and an honoured place in the Chain of Being. Thus, it is only through sin or tragedy that their form becomes misshapen or corrupted - this is not the case for the greater part of the creatures whose crude facsimiles of government and culture populate most Outer Seas. Not all, of course - some come close to the perfection of the Higher World, their peoples only barely distinguishable from our own. Others are earlier and less finished prototypes, or else abandoned due to some fundamental corruption or flaw, and their natives the same. Yet others were the prisons of great Titans or other fallen Angels, and even if they were once filled with true humanity, ages of capricious interference and corruption have left their descendents weakened or deformed in some manner, either in body or soul. They are not demons, or even goblins, but obvious signs of this inhumanity in visage or bearing, and hereditary tendencies to some particular corruption, abound. It is for these reasons and more that no Outer Sea has produced true Civilization or true Religion on its own, and none have proved capable of equalling the achievements or resisting the arms of the Higher World without the open support of another fully human power (however corrupt it might be).

It was through just that corruption that the Outer Seas were first discovered - for who but warlocks and apostates would ever cut their way through the skein of the world into the abyss beyond, without any surety that there was a solitary thing to be found? Yet the piety and virtue of the Hierarch then ruling in Imir was soon rewarded with a method of invoking the grace and power of Heaven and its Sublime Will which opened the way for the World-Empire’s own ships. The methods and engines are closely guarded trade secrets of the relevant guilds and orders, but in any case require great ocean-going vessels and occulted prayers and rites that are in every case beyond the means of any lacking the genius of true humanity.

The methods by which Outer Seas are charted are occulted, but their organization is obvious and clear, arranged in harmonious alignment such that their cosmic distance to the Higher World and the ease with which they can be reached mirrors the severity of their flaws and corruption. Thus the Pearl Sea, one of the nearest and first-charted, is almost indistinguishable from the heartlands of the Empire, and its populace - once winnowed in the Crusade that won it - so close to full humanity to be as worthy of the name as a great many peasants along the Empire’s other marches and borderlands. Thus also, though less happily, the Onyx Sea where the Celmean League’s colonies and daughter-cities have recruited from and interbred with the existing populace so eagerly with no loss of skill or vigor - and where under the Lord Regent’s Tyranny the Empire’s own holdings were lost entirely in one disastrous war after another.

Most Seas are not so blessed of course. Arrayed in an astral orrery, they spiral out, descending from the Higher World and growing more unfinished and flawed in perfect sequence. The remainder that are so close to true reality that a layman would not notice the difference are so small and marginal as to not be worth contesting the claims other principalities have made on them. The next great prizes are middling seas, obviously unfinished and dangerous to both body and soul to sail, yet full of riches and opportunity for glory that explain why the Gods Above allowed mortal eyes to chart the course to them. Here are the great prisons and blasphemous ateliers of Titan and Fae, the kingdoms of oxen walking on two hooves and birds conversing wholly through the fractured words of their long-dead trainers. This, then, is the land where legends and fortunes are made, and where treasure fleets and privateer squadrons sail for under every flag. They are also, as a whole, the theaters within which civilized powers now compete to outdo each other in colonial glory, and where each struggles to put the native creatures encountered to their most beneficial purpose. The rare examples where the creatures have not yet been brought to heel by one power or another - the cavern-dwelling clans of the Iron Sea, mostly famously - remain so by the combination of unusually belligerent and untrusting natives and a lack of treasures to justify the cost.

At an even further remove are the Seas so primitive and distant from the Divine Plan that the dangers yet outweigh the riches and revelations they offer. Thus, the Starlit Sea, where there is neither dawn nor moon nor horizon, and the stars above are reflected by the glittering heralds of ruin beneath the waves. Thus the Whispering Depths, where any wind can be bought only with the sacrifice of a mortal soul whose breath might move it - and whose voice and secrets then taunt any who hear them for a year and a day. Thus, most of all, the Abyss itself, as dark and depthless as any entrance to Perdition, whose waters swallow ship and swimmer alike.

In the remainder of this treatise, then, I shall focus my efforts on those middling seas, and most specifically on the demi- and in-humans creatures which call them home and which must be truly brought to heel for the Empire’s banner to settle itself in their lands…

-A Discourse on the Higher and Lower Seas, by Brother Adrien of the Poor Fellows of the Sacred Pyre. Despite his later censure for Hierocratic sympathies the work remains a standard reference throughout the Holy Illyrin Empire

#worldbuildidng #fantasy #abhari #atlas #pure ideology

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some-small-mercy · 1 month ago

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Oh that you!

Some random, some obscure jokes or references that happened to come to mind as I write? So like, SANGUINE OCHRE is just 'bloody shade (of paint)'. AUSTERE FRIAR is a reference to Savonarola (early modern Florentine religious figure, famously organized 'bonfire of the vanities', including many paintings). AVIAN TRILL I don't actually remember.

Shadows in the Cave - Threat Analysis - Victims of the Art

THREAT SANGUINE OCHRE is the most dangerous confirmed FOREIGN agent of the 21st century encountered to date. Despite seeming to be a one-man operation with no real funding or material support, his creations spread dangerous FOREIGN influence across several states before he was hunted down and destroyed - and have only continued to do so since. The entire file is proof positive of what B-CELL has been saying for years: SANGUINE OCHRE was not the results of mindless or bestial incursions, or of an American exploiting dangerous power for his own gain. He was a knowing enemy agent, facilitating an organized conspiracy from ABROAD in spreading its influence across the United States for unknown, nefarious purposes.

Given the events of OPERATION AVIAN TRILL, more than a decade after his execution, this clearly remains a more urgent strategic threat than A-CELL has been led to believe by conventional reports. To remedy this, B-CELL has prepared the following overview on SANGUINE OCHRE, his creations, PATRIOT efforts to contain or destroy them, and the damage he is still causing to this day. While this is technically outside the Cell’s area of focus, it is hoped that this will help inform decision-making and resource-allocation going forward.

As well as a traitor, SANGUINE OCHRE was (unsurprisingly) an artist. An apparent life-long failure, he left few traces; either personal or digital. Despite the complete lack of fame or influence, six of his paintings have been discovered across the United States, often with no clear explanation as to how their current owners came into possession of them. This is not necessarily surprising, as each of these paintings is a dangerous weapon in its own right. Everything he touched is saturated with FOREIGN energies, and carefully designed to be antithetical to human life and sanity.

Including bystanders and collateral damage, SANGUINE OCHRE is responsible for over two hundred deaths across America. A number that is still rising.

* * *

The Townsend Collection is maintained by Velos Antiquities’ Managing Partner for purposes of scholarship and experimentation. Rather than acting as a middleman for a client commission or assembling a collection for speculative purposes, the Company thus has a direct, first-party interest in acquiring and preserving pieces of the collection - something that factors and agents should keep in mind when determining their own priorities.

Edward Townsend (1987-2013) hailed from a middle-class Boston family, but was troubled by mental instability and misfortune from his adolescence until his own tragic ending. Leaving university in the nadir of the 2008 Financial Crisis, his last years were dominated by a spiral into crippling agoraphobia and poverty - yet it was precisely during this period that his artistic production reached his zenith. Never working through any established dealers or galleries, he sold his works at local flea markets, or else gifted them to improbable friends made online. He is believed to have completed at least a dozen works in this period before perishing in an electrical fire which consumed the building he was then living in.

The collection is of interest not because of any biographical detail of their creator but due to the works themselves. While the danger and intensity varies, each Townsend is a Hypergeometrically active object. Which would make each of them an intriguing potential acquisition in its own right, but what makes the collection unique is that each Townsend is active in distinct (often contradictory or mutually exclusive) ways - quite extraordinary, for the work of one man without education or support.

The Managing Partner thus has a standing order out for any discovered Townsends - including a significant fee payable to the agent who acquires and transports them. What follows is a summary of the Company’s file on traits shared by known Townsends and endorsed best practices for their safe acquisition and handling. Consider them high-level targets of opportunity, should you encounter the trail of one.

* * *

We theorize that the three pieces in question are, despite the dramatic differences in style and effect, actually the work of a single artist; one possessed of truly uncommon vision and insight. An outsider artist par excellence, their work illustrates ways of reaching across cultural and epistemological paradigms, allowing true connection and understanding in precisely the ways that the Anderson Heritage Trust is dedicated to encouraging. We hope you will find that the funding proposal that follows is, despite the expense, wholly in line with the Trust’s strategic plan for the next five years; we also hope you will agree that it represents a rare opportunity to advance the dream of a more open and connected world, and one that should not be allowed to pass untaken.

The three works of art in question were discovered by various friends of the Arts across the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest over the last year, though their true provenance remains sadly unknown. Each is a masterpiece in empathy and forced perspective, inviting (if not insisting) the audience view the world through alien eyes and consider their lives, indeed the sum total of human civilization, from perspectives drastically divergent from their own.

The effect is dramatic; for the properly prepared it can even said to be transformative, whereas for some sensitive and unprepared viewer have found it to be disturbing and even traumatic; something which had undoubtedly led to the tragic destruction or neglect of similar works at the hands of caretakers without the proper background and education. It is for exactly this reason that we propose the construction of a carefully curated exhibition of these and similarly affecting outsider art, where they can be properly appreciated in an environment that encourages the most significant and least traumatic audience experience.

* * *

PATRIOT Agents first encountered SANGUINE OCHRE in 20XX, when M-CELL became involved in what became OPERATION ASPHALT ARCADIA. That said, the connection between hypnotic graffiti brainwashing (and spreading across) members of a Mid-Atlantic street gang and OCHRE was only discovered well after the fact. It was only in 20XX when K-CELL located and destroyed two more traditional paintings in the same Boston neighborhood that their common source was traced back. OPERATION AUSTERE FRIAR was the result.

Elements of K-CELL acted decisively to terminate SANGUINE OCHRE and any accomplices. OCHRE was destroyed, but in every other way the operation should have been a sign that this was not the work of one more insane or self-interested FOREIGN agent. The confrontation ended in an inferno that destroyed the entire building, killing all present PATRIOT Agents and eliminating any evidence of OCHRE’s enablers or distribution methods. K-CELL nonetheless considered the mission a success, and the file was closed without review for several years.

That was how long it took for L-CELL to encounter one of his paintings. On the other end of the country, with no possible way a failed artist’s worthless painting could have ended up as the mural on a nightclub’s bathroom wall. Destroying it thoroughly enough to prevent any reconstruction took a ‘gas main explosion’ that destroyed the entire building, with significant collateral damage. It was only after the fact, and after L-CELL had expended weeks and precious resources tearing through potential cultists who might have been responsible, that the artist’s signature was analyzed and a connection to SANGUINE OCHRE was drawn. This can’t be allowed to happen again.

There have been two further encounters with SANGUINE OCHRE since then, each one of his works appearing with no possible explanation except FOREIGN action at some point in the past. Each is a dangerous terror weapon, damaging the sanity or physically warping (if not consuming entirely) anyone vulnerable in its vicinity. The pattern behind the paintings’ appearances is unclear, but we can only assume it is the result of an enemy plan to prepare softened landing zones for an eventual full invasion.

* * *

The ultimate case of the Townsends - how one particularly disturbed young man became the vector for so many distinct Infections - is unknown but of significant interest to the Managing Partner. While any information that is happened upon is valuable and should be secured, it is also hardly something that Velos employees are trained or equipped to hunt down. Suffice to say that Mr. Townsend was likely possessed, for one reason or another, of a very unique sensitivity - and that it seems several different strains of parasite and infection took advantage of the fertile ground. The dramatic nature of his death is very likely related.

Velos Antiquities expects a great deal of independence and initiative from its factors, but verifying the location and authenticity of - much less acquiring - a Townsend is more often than not a task that will require the assistance of experts in alternative skill sets. If any are simply forgotten in a warehouse or storage locker, Velos has not found any hint of them in more than five years of searching. Rather, in every case one has been encountered, it has been in the very determined possession of an individual with at least some vague idea of its significance (if not its origin). The assistance of the usual contractors tapped to deal with recalcitrant sellars was in every case necessary (though very far from sufficient). If you have good reason to believe you have a line on a Townsend and require their support, a request to Senior Leadership for support from our friends in the security services or else more specialized contractors will likely be approved. That said, Townsends are both obviously valuable and incredibly fragile (no more resilient to entropy or violence than any other painting), and so care must be taken to ensure that Velos Antiquities does, in fact, secure custody of the piece.

The case of the late Mrs. Cruz is instructive. Having tracked a lead on Devilish Revels across several countries, she found herself at a decided disadvantage actually acquiring it from the current owner - a man with little or no idea what he had, but quite convinced it was the key to ultimate cosmic power. The Managing Partner was able to prevail upon several local business partners to provide support convincing him to part with it, but we have been unable to track down any survivors of the resulting gunfight in a state to provide a full explanation of what followed. Neither Ms. Cruz nor the previous owner (nor, in fact, the Townsend) has been seen since. Very nearly literally, as in the eight months since every portrait and analogue photograph of either has either gone missing or become damaged in very distinctive and improbable ways (should any of you have worked closely with her, you are encouraged to examine your own archives for any odd visual artifacts involving greasepaint and motley).

Mrs. Cruz is the closest any Velos agent has come to acquiring a Townsend in the last three years - though not, it must be said, the only lead that ended in lively exchanges with other interested parties. Please keep her example in mind when deciding what level of investment should be made in risk mitigation.

* * *

What do we mean, when we call these pieces “outsider art"? The label applies in the vernacular sense - the artist was clearly alienated and marginalized from society, and died without public memory or legible legacy, but the three pieces we have are deserving of the appellation in a much more profound way. Put simply, they are art from outside and, like all great art, to truly appreciate them is a paradigm-breaking exercise in empathy. Bound so tightly in our web of socialized expectations, it is a truly bracing, if not revelatory, event to experience the true xenos, to feel the vibrations of someone knocking against the frosted glass which comprises the hard border of your universe. To, perhaps, realize the glass was neither so solid nor so opaque as you had always taken it to be.

These are art in the highest sense, fine centerpieces of an exhibition, attempts to communicate concepts and emotions so subtle and so vast that the idea of conveying them through words is absurd on its face. It is quite astounding that they seem to have been painted by the same hand and with the same materials, so distinct are the styles and effects; it is only through analyzing them in relation to each other that the true message being conveyed by the artist’s oeuvre can be understood. Even working with an entirely inadequate budget and lodgings, simply framing the three works in our possession in the correct relation to each other in an area with a small amount of work done to encourage the connections have had truly dramatic effects on the viewing experience, and on the subjectivities inherent in the works themselves.

We believe the unknown artist has a true message they were trying to convey, one that could change the world. With the support of the Anderson Heritage Trust, we believe we could create a gallery that would give that message a chance to be truly heard, and even responded to; a place where a true exchange of views entirely beyond our own might begin. We have contracted architects and designers who can realize our vision, but funding remains an issue; as, for our greatest dreams, does the lack of whatever other works the artist must surely have sketched or inked while creating these three masterpieces. This is why our second major funding request is for a long-term effort to search for and safely bring home similar pieces of outsider work from across the globe…

* * *

SANGUINE OCHRE was a valuable FOREIGN agent, that much can’t be argued. When he became a dangerous loose end, his handler terminated him and took out half a cell of PATRIOTS for its trouble. But that doesn’t mean ABROAD and its agents aren’t still trying to use him. PATRIOT Agents have encountered three OCHRE THREATS in the last X years, and two of those cases involved a dangerous FOREIGN conspiracy that actively fought to secure the threats for their own ends before the PATRIOTs on the ground could apply sufficient quantities of incendiaries or explosives to reliably destroy the THREAT.

The nature of the FOREIGN-directed conspiracy is unknown, but it seems to be an organized criminal syndicate. Other street gangs and criminal elements have been involved as hired guns, but at its core it seems to have grown out of the Russian mafia. This sort of organized, internationally active group of traitors to humanity has been exactly what B-CELL has warned about for years. Their short-term goals are unknown, but their long-term dedication to the betrayal of all life on Earth in favor of their FOREIGN masters is obvious.

We are at war, even if we don’t know it yet. SANGUINE OCHRE is just the beginning, but we hope it is all the warning that A-CELL requires to finally take our warnings with the gravity that addressing them will require.

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some-small-mercy · 1 month ago

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A Dreaming Vigil

The border between the Dalnics and the Fellowship was a jagged and uneven thing at the best of times. It was not even right to call it a ‘front line’ - at a certain point, the man-eating dryads and bloody-handed marines had gotten tired of marching and paused to digest their gains. That that arbitrary line then became what was, for the moment, the recognized frontier was merely a happenstance of diplomacy. And so absolutely nothing marked the particular ridge that some hastily drawn truce marked as the border from the last one that the teams of Dalnic scouts had crested, or the next. In the desolate wastes that made up so much of the Underworld, there was little cause (or budget) for the Fellowship to stud their borders with outposts and watchtowers - and however impressive on parade and well-drilled the army they now marshaled was, it hardly had the numbers for extensive garrisons. And so the scouts, diligent and disciplined as they were, did not spare a thought for how anonymous and unremarkable each new crest and valley seemed. They did their duty, planting seeds which might one day sprout into murderous new dryads and burying supply caches with signs that only trained marines could hope to recognize. When the time came to march again, they would not worry about outrunning their own logistics, no matter how wide a wall of barren desolation the Fellowship had evidently burned to inconvenience them when they did. It was the mist that first began to arouse genuine suspicion. At first so faint it was imperceptible, but growing thicker with each league they trespassed into the Crownless Lands. It did not take long for the different teams, communicating through their own magical means, to realize that it surrounded each and every one of them. It was the dreams that first incited true fear, for every scout dreamt them as one. Endless marches through impenetrable fog - at first chasing taunting fairy lights, promising villages from which answers and supplies could be gleaned. Then, as the days wore on, running from packs of faceless, nameless shadows which bayed and howled whenever they believed themselves free of their hunt. Sleep brought no rest, wakefulness no clarity - and soon the boundary between them became as permeable and unmarked as the border. Over a matter of weeks, almost every would-be infiltrator was found wandering alone along one of the two faction’s many frontiers, terrified and raving of the ink-blooded knights and abyssal hounds that had harried them. Of the rank-and-file (insofar as such a thing existed among the scouts), only those who had met their end through accident and misfortune were not returned. It was only the officers and tacticians that had truly been hunted. And of them, there was no sign.

#worldbuilding #dead gods #fantasy #for tw

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some-small-mercy · 1 month ago

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Hecatomb

The Bull of Heaven’s bones are pitted and scarred, a rib cracked and burnt through by the Sunswallowers rude entry. To the scavengers and treasure-hunters of the Underworld, nothing seems so obvious as to descend on them like hyenas and vultures, tearing and cracking until every drop of divine marrow is sucked clean.

Eresh approaches things more…subtly is the wrong word. From a different angle. Something more appropriate to the prize.

Ashaima taught the Fellowship that dead gods yet dream, and it is in that incoherent and fragmented dreamtime that the procession approaches. A whole host of seekers and dreamwalkers, of children of Fuxi delighted to play their part in the whole charade. What greets them are not the scorched bones of a slaughtered beast, but a regal temple worthy of his presence. Gossamer threads and the demands of hospitality bind it together, and force the dangerous fragments of power and death-curses now cast as priests and guardians to observe their roles exactly.

It is in Eresh’s nature to go everywhere, to talk to everyone. It requires far more portent a force than the death spasms of a celestial beast to deny her entrance. The expedition follows in her wake, observing every courtesy and expectation of guests in such a holy place - or being devoured as soon as they fail to, having lost by the terms of the game they themselves sent.

By sympathetic connection and allegory, Eresh walks through the memory of the temple with cleverness and grace. Gifts are received, secrets stolen, blessings usurped.

Until at last Eresh enters the innermost sanctum of the temple, the heart and crown of what remains of the Bull. Pale marble and golden, a testament to regal decadence in its purest and most exalted form.

Eresh speaks more sincerely now, the venom and spite in her voice mixing freely with the glamor coating her silvered tongue.

She denounces the Bull of Heaven, and all the kings to have ever taken it as a totem. Lawgivers - tyrants, letting their slaves toil and starve to pile ever more riches at their feet. Priests - slaves of the heavens themselves, traitors to the mortal commonality in pursuit of divine favor. Generals - captains and warleaders who lost the world itself, their domain unmade in the most obvious and irreparable way.

The Bull of Heaven is a reprobate to justice, its death preventing any semblance of repayment for its crimes. It is called to defend itself, as every declaration hammers another nail through its flesh, lest all it is be taken as reparations.

The Bull’s hide was white as snow, and tough enough to turn away any spear. But the dream is never so solid as the reality, the memory more permeable than the flesh. Her denunciation unchallenged, Eresh’s is the hand of justice - not a thing in the world could turn aside her fine bronze knife as it opened the wretched thing’s throat.

The dream soon collapsed around them. The god itself likely following soon after. But not before the bull’s blood filled one hundred thin and poorly shaped clay bowls - each once used to measure a temple slave’s daily bread.

#fantasy #dead gods #for tw

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some-small-mercy · 2 months ago

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Shadows in the Cave - Threat Analysis - Victims of the Art

Including bystanders and collateral damage, SANGUINE OCHRE is responsible for over two hundred deaths across America. A number that is still rising.

* * *

#worldbuildidng #urban fantasy/horror #shadows in the cave #bestiary #pure ideology

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some-small-mercy · 2 months ago

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Desecration and Divinity

Ashaima was a dream of death.

How could it be otherwise? It was a god of prophecy and delusion, too vast for whatever had torn it asunder and split the ruin of its corpse across the underworld’s white-grey sand. A man’s fingers might twitch and eyes flutter past the silence of his heart, certainly the most sublime and awful things might flash before his eyes just as the light left them.

Eresh could not have said which comparison was the apt one. But dead as Ashaima might be - and it [[i]was[/i], she was sure, the heart and feel of the great behemoth torn apart until only the faintest sparks remained - still it dreamt. Prophecies and memories, fantasies and nightmares - drawn from untold myriads of mortal souls, and now thrown up at anyone who might be struck by them. All variations on the same theme - hunts and executions, massacres and tragedies, loving sacrifices and heartless betrayals. A blind, futile attempt to comprehend what had happened to it. On every mirrored wall, her reflection was cast in a different role. In every crystalline pool, hints of her own eventual fate. The voices of friends and comrades screamed and begged around every corner, the air smelled of sickly-sweet rot one moment and roasting pork the next.

Behind her, seekers and heralds moved slowly and sensibly. Clay maps recorded the route they traveled, and bronze milestones forced it into faithfulness with that design. Careful timing and obsessive attention to logistics prevented the deaths that would have otherwise found them. Returned pilgrims, drunk on the Sphinx’s wisdom and far too clear-minded to be counted among the sane, drew unto themselves and defeated the madness that hounded their every step. The effort was humane, responsible, and certain.

Eresh had no time for any of it. She strode between reflections without breaking her stride, her robes billowing around her like an especially pearlescent fish as she passed from storm wracked ship to famine-stricken village to city mid-sack in as many steps. Her form was protean enough to fit into any role, her mind a diamond as mirrored as any glass - there was nothing of her for these death spasms to catch at, and her masked eyes saw clearly enough to find the path they hid.

Navigating them was a frustrating, maddening delay - one many hundreds who had trusted them had suffered for, as she worried her way to Dream’s heart while barbarians razed and defiled the closest thing she had known to home. But those visions disturbed her no more than any of the others.

She took no small amount of satisfaction knowing that, at least at the very end, Ashaima had truly experienced the same horror it and its ilk had inflicted upon all the uncounted thousands they had tyrannized and demanded the worship and sacrifices of.

Traveling through such dreams was dangerous, at least in some abstract sense - but it was far, far more efficient than might otherwise be hoped for. She stepped back into the reality of the god’s remains with each turn of the hourglass than she on occasion carried, and left a charm of silver and bronze nailed to the mirrored, whispering wall - a charm, for those trailing in her wake to reckon by. It was on one such occasion that the labyrinthine passages opened up into a chamber quite unlike the rest.

A perfect sphere, the walls inlaid was a fine, writhing labyrinth in gleaming silver. The opening just high enough to not allow the clear water which filled precisely half of it to escape. And submerged just below the very center of it, a mote of the purest golden light.

Eresh stood in the entrance and beheld it - and in beholding it, saw it change. The light rose and shifted, the soul within - and it was a soul - liberated from the miracle entrapping it by nothing but the regard of another. It was helpless, soft and pliable - too old to remember what it had once been, too weak to defend itself against the demands of the world.

It needed solidity, a structure to adhere to, a vessel of expectations and demands to fill. It would be a weapon, a companion, a perfect tool. All she need do was - not even ask, but [i]hope[/i]-

Her breath was a desert wind on an ice sculpture.

And so she ceased to breathe.

Eresh turned away from the soul and poured a thin line of salt across the entrance-way. Without in any way acknowledging the miracle beside her, she pulled a particularly ornate waystone charm from her robes and slammed it into the wall beside her.

Awakening such a vulnerable soul without mutilating it to her own needs was beyond her. She would have to hope that some other members of the Fellowship knew what she did not.

And, while she trusted the good intentions and virtue of her comrades implicitly, she would not countenance even the possibility of playing some part in one of them accidentally (‘accidentally’) turning an unmarred soul into a purpose-built tool as they had been.

So, quietly humming soothing sutras as the passages around her filled with charnel madness, she settled against the wall and began to wait.

#fiction #fantasy #dead gods #for tw #first bit of prose for this game I'm actually slightly fond of on a reread so - saving for posterity

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some-small-mercy · 3 months ago

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Shadows in the Cave - Minos

An underrated problem of managing a sprawling occult conspiracy engineering the future of civilization is actually keeping all those sprawling tendrils and illegal experiments on-task and on-message. You really do have to grab at every source of reliable information about your own organization that you're able. Or; Ava Young receives a high-stakes chance to demonstrate the importance of maintaining a clear head in stressful situations.

#fiction #shadows in the cave #urban fantasy/horror #civilization without humanity

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some-small-mercy · 4 months ago

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Whalefall: Esoterica

Or, a series of little vignettes to get a sense of the voices of different characters and figure out how exactly they ended up on a survey mission to the ass-end of nowhere that double as ways to explore basically meaningless corners of the All Systems Commonwealth.

Interstellar Grunt Work - Zhou Lei was the security officer on duty for the not-really-a-passenger-vessel Cobalt Dawn during an interstellar voyage. It is not a good job even before you start talking about the fun of keeping passengers from different species and cultures living in cramped, stressful conditions for weeks at a time from tearing each other to pieces (potentially literally). He’s conscientious enough to leave a detailed report with the authorities when they arrive before walking off the job.

Centinati Local Politics - Ven Yekeoul is a xeropol (a minor species with even less institutional heft in the Commonwealth than humanity) aspiring xenobiologist. The brownnosing and flattery to get past the ‘asiring’ bit is probably worse than any of the actual work he’s done. In this case it means digging up the most cringeworthy thing he wrote for the student paper about local politics as an undergrad and pretending to be deeply invested in it.

Corporate Espionage - Renata Kende is a talented engineer who has, by complete coincidence, been hired on to a rival syndicate of her previous employer more or less simultaneously with that rival announcing exciting new technology identical to what she had been involved in developing. Unsurprisingly, some politely pointed questions are asked.

And a variety of popular outreach articles blog posts by Verit Lavoie, graduate student in xenoanthropology, serial procrastinator and actual protagonist, about various weird things that have occurred in the history and periphery of the All-Systems Commonwealth.

The Slave Lords of Rekath - The Star Empire of Rekath is a rogue state on the fringes of the Commonwealth, a xenophobic state entirely controlled by the native Rekath - walking tanks of a species with a lifespan that approaches four digits. This leaves them with a fear of death that borders on culturally approved paranoia. Thus, all the demeaning, dangerous, or just tedious labor that could not be easily automated is handled by a slave caste descended from Commonwealth colonists abducted centuries ago. They’re very popular.

First Contact Misadventures - The tlilf were one of the first intelligent species encountered by Commonwealth explorers after its founding - and the first that weren’t advanced enough to be considered prospective members. Which meant the regulations on how to approach it were…vague. Which meant the corporation sponsoring the expedition saw a huge potential for profit. The Commonwealth now has a much harsher stance on arms-dealing to rival nation-states.

The Republic of Eden - Humanity’s flourishing and restive extrasolar colonies were pried away from Earth’s control by a Commonwealth ‘peacekeeping intervention’. A century later, the solar system was annexed by the Hykaeri Imperial Republic. In between, the bitter and increasingly desperate human rump states tried a lot of variably wise things - like sending a fleet of heavily armed prospectors to a newly charted expanse of space hoping to find a viable new colony. It didn’t go quite as badly as it could have.

The Kirik Empire - The Krin-Tcho Compact was the first other interstellar society encountered by the then-young Commonwealth - an empire ruling over half a dozen species and more than twice as many worlds with an iron fist, endless streams of tribute turning their homeworld into a beautifully parasitic paradise. First Contact went badly, and the war that followed shortly after started off even worse - but soon enough the downsides of most of your population kind of hating you began to show themselves.

#whalefall #worldbuildidng #science fiction #meta

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some-small-mercy · 4 months ago

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Shadows in the Cave - Notes on an Incursion - Tangled Space

I’m delighted to be able to answer some of your questions. Psychic depressions are absolutely fascinating phenomena, and the most conclusive proof I’ve encountered of the mind’s primacy over ‘objective’ reality. When you see the weight of human passion and intensity quite literally deform the world around it, what further evidence do you need?

The specifics of it are still opaque, I admit, but the basic mechanism is quite simple. When a specific and self-contained strip of land (always a complete circuit, such that walking along it deposits the walker back where they began) becomes the repository of a critical mass of intense feeling from a sufficient number of people, then their collective image of the circuit becomes more real than reality, and superimposes itself over it. When they collectively agree that the strip of land is infinite, endless, and inescapable, then so shall it be - with each circuit completed, they take another step into a liminal space between the world of atoms and the world of dreams.

The requisite weight of emotion is no small thing to organize and direct, and almost never occurs by accident. But once constructed and stabilized, depressions are really quite stable. My little community of truth-seekers has lived almost entirely inside of one for years now.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

The Tartarus Site is a bit of an oddity. Well, everything about Nyx is odd, but Tartarus especially. Walls, cameras and armed guards around the clock to protect, what - a half-mile long loop through a rat’s nest of derelict homes and ‘urban prairie’? There’s a whole lab complex, and an army of surveyors and photographers who came in during construction to make the view from the loop was never disturbed. The whole production must have cost more than some countries’ GDP - but every cent was worth it.

Put simply, Tartarus is a stable dimensional abscess - a place where spacetime has been permanently warped by hypergeometric energy, but in a predictable, reliable and unchanging way. The value for Nyx is obvious - there are satellite labs and quarantined studies scattered all over the place, but Tartarus is our beating heart.

Among many, many other uses, it’s how we stress-test.

Project Nyx exists to sculpt the next step in existence - to create a stable and worthy inheritor to earth’s civilization once the current users are no longer fit for purpose. There are a lot of different ways that might happen, but the most obvious is the millenia-long streak of good luck we’ve had evolving in a cosmological tidal pool finally breaking. The curtain is going to fall eventually, and when it does homo sapiens sapiens will start tearing its own eyes out. So we need to make sure whatever we make can do better.

Tartarus is a space with an additional dimension of movement - the more loops you complete of the walking trail, the further you get from the rest of the world and the more directly you are exposed to hypergeometric energy. After six loops radio signals are lost and unshielded electronics start to break down. After thirteen, leaving the trail any way but turning around and retracing your steps becomes impossible. After thirty-three, attrition rates for baseline humans exceed eighty percent.

Last week Subject Muninn set a new record, returning apparently alive and plausibly sane after entering a 482nd loop. We’re all hoping it survives decontamination and debriefing well enough to share some stories.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

Threat GLACIAL JUDAS is a dangerous form of FOREIGN incursion created by Threat PIOUS WEEPERS as part of their attempts to invite a direct, physical invasion from ABROAD. With the completion of Operation SALTED ANTIOCH, WEEPERS have been burned out, but containing and dealing with JUDAS is an ongoing issue until F-CELL figures out how to destroy it.

PIOUS WEEPERS created three different instances of JUDAS that we know of - and we are pretty damn sure that that’s all of them, seeing as how otherwise we’d all be dead. Besides which, digging each one seems to have been difficult or expensive or both, even for a cult like that; the second and third paths were only dug once PIOUS WEEPERS was on the run and we had secured the first one (and lost a damn good Agent stumbling into it).

JUDAS paths don’t look like anything special from the outside, or anything at all. One is nothing but a pair of drainage pipes under a highway and two goat paths between them on either end. Which is the whole point; each path is a circuit, and you will only realize what it is once you’ve walked it more than once.

Each instance of GLACIAL JUDAS is a secret door from here to ABROAD, a path that looks normal until you start walking it right down into hell. And there’s something at the other end knocking and asking to be let in.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

The outer levels of a depression - those closest to the material - differ from it only in the lack of wildlife and the pleasant insulation from the noises of the outside world. Each level is also really quite separate from those which border it. We’ve built dormitories on one, a cafeteria and concert stage one level further out, and mediation areas on a level further in. Despite occupying what are theoretically ‘the same’ part of the little patch of Floridian paradise we have acquired for ourselves, the only way to even hear one from the others is if someone is loud enough for the sound to echo all along the path we’ve cut around and through the island.

The inner levels are less anchored to mundane reality and more subject to the symbolic impressions that formed the depression - in our case, heat and humidity predominate and the effect quickly becomes sauna-like. The flora begins changing as well, from reflections of the greenery in the outer layers to reflections of how it is perceived. Brilliant flowers, dangerous thorns and snarled roots, and an absolute cornucopia of fruits as tempting and luscious to behold as you might imagine. Some are filling and delicious enough to be the mainstay of a dier, some rot on the vine or taste of rat poison and razor blades – determining which can be safely eaten and harvesting them at scale has been a major preoccupation of our community for some time now.

The innermost levels of the Depression spiral towards the egregore born of its creation, which perpetually dreams and maintains it. Wildlife reappears, now wholly symbolic dreamstuff but not any less capable of stinging, biting or poisoning unwary explorers for that. The landscape and the very laws of reality become increasingly dreamlike as well - and this is the focus of my current research. It is my contention that these inner levels will, to a sufficiently trained and conscious dreamer, be as malleable and controllable as their own mind it - that the depression can be reshaped to any sort of paradise or sanctuary which might be required. The therapies and courses I oversee are focused on achieving this precise level of control, and with the right natural talent I am sure we might enthrone them to replace the reactive and often-unhelpful egregore with someone who can truly dream of Paradise.

So far we have had little luck, I admit. But I believe this has been nothing but my own squeamishness - an unwillingness to trust one of my students to maintain their own identity as the egregore subsumes them. This, then, is what I hope you will be willing to generously sponsor and support. I’d ask you to imagine what we might accomplish - but in six months I hope I will simply be able to show you.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

What exactly it’s like inside the Tartarus anomaly itself is strictly classified - of course it is, too high a risk that an accurate description of what a high-energy loop looks like is an infection vector for some memetic parasite. Not the worst thing to have happened when someone gets sloppy - but the general details are easy enough to piece together. Each layer is a bit less protected from the energies bombarding most of the universe than the one before - you’re crawling up a long, spiralling ramp from the earth to the stars. Which works out about as well for you or me as going sunbathing without an ozone layer.

Assuming a subject can deal with unpleasant climate and inhospitable terrain, the minor Infections that start festering into animal-like life a couple dozen loops in are the first real issue. None with anything like intelligence, but the evolutionary pressures mean there are a lot of parasites that will try to burrow in and not mind one bit if they’re accidentally carried back down to an easy meal. Which is most of why the quarantine and decontamination whenever a team gets back is so harsh and thorough (relatedly, did you know that we’re the second generation of the project? The Director had to sanitize the whole site herself.)

But the real difficulties only start around layer three hundred. That’s when there’s basically no resemblance to earth as any of us experience it left, and the basic laws of physics and makeup of the world start breaking down. You know, where relying on a mouth and lungs to breathe oxygen or thinking that skin is enough to keep your blood and organs inside of you suddenly become lethal oversights.

Tracking past layer five hundred or so is pretty useless, really. That’s when you really do reach Nyx - primordial night, the chaos from which all order was born. There are no bodies, because the universe is not yet composed of matter. There is no consciousness, because reality is not stable or complex enough to enable thought.

I’m not sure the party line about what we’re doing here is true, if I’m being honest. We have some clues about the wider universe out there, and it’s not all anywhere near as lethal.

I think the Director’s aiming higher than just creating something that can survive us, or at least part of her is. I think she’s trying to make something that can deal with the end of the world by creating a whole new one from scratch.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

GLACIAL JUDAS is a tunnel under a castle wall; a secret entrance through which FOREIGN agents and infections can seep into the world. The tunnels aren’t complete, but they go deep enough that the noise from the other side can start to echo through. Unguarded, the area around each of them will become the hunting ground of some monster crawling up from the pit within months.

PIOUS WEEPERS at least knew what it was; most cults are precious about it, but they admitted outright that they were clearing the way for their eyeless angel of revelation to ‘tear the scales from the eyes of the world’. You can almost respect it, once the threat is dealt with and the bodies are cooling. Most of their texts and relics went up in smoke, but a few were saved to send to F-CELL. Hopefully they can figure out how to seal JUDAS with them before any other poor idiots stumble down the spiral.

K-CELL does not have the manpower to secure the three different locations, and we aren’t lucky enough to rely on them being scattered across the ass-end of nowhere to keep them safe. GLACIAL JUDAS is a demonic picture plant, and God knows how many people are still trapped inside one of their depths, too far gone to even try and claw their way out. Though they’re still better off than the ones who do.

It isn’t an angel, but there is something at the bottom of all of the pits. The WEEPERS never shut up about it, and it had just about hollowed Agent KEVIN out and filled him up by the time he crawled back into the world.

Whatever it is, we need either a way to seal all three pits nearly or enough high explosives to do it the old fashioned way, because both of us can already hear it sing.

#worldbuilding #urban fantasy/horror #shadows in the cave #bestiary

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some-small-mercy · 4 months ago

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The Broken Throne

What Was

All now know the tale of Lugash-Hiraz, first Lord of the Ochre Plain, then Satrap of Ten Heavens and Assessor of Divine Tribute, and most lately the much-honored Persecutor of the Dishonored Dead. He was well-loved by neither mortal nor God, but he was ancient beyond memory, and rich beyond dreams of avarice. His priests were tyrants and misers, their estates only growing as their patron abandoned each Dynasty in turn, always at just the moment where his betrayal would earn the highest price from their successors. He was a loathsome and many-eyed toad, consumed by sins both petty and grand, possessed of every failing mortal and divine. Most hatefully of all, his appetites were never sated - with each year he forever demanded new treasures and curiosities, ever-dearer sacrifices and slaves. Across what was once the Empire are a millennium of pyres and tombs, hosts and fortunes consigned to the Underworld to preserve the fickle favor of Heaven.

Lo, but his demesne was glorious. A palace of emerald and ivory. A legion of slaves in golden chains and golden masks. Ambrosia-bearing orchards and endless fountains of purest nectar. A court of lesser gods gathered around him, flattering his every vanity in the hope of some scrap of favor, which tried and punished the souls of those who died without blessings or rites. A thousand sacrificed souls, forever glowing with the pyre’s light or walking with the quiet of an airless tomb, waited upon the most transient desire of the meanest guest. All while those to be judged walked barefoot over fields of shattered glass, wailing in agony as they volunteered for trials and games in the hopes of winning the smallest iota of respite.

In the last days of the final Mandate, Lugash-Hiraz grew soft and fat. His reptilian apetites grew so vast that he turned his gaze from the world below and coveted the thrones and offices of the great gods above him, the imperial powers he still debased himself and kowtowed before.

And so it was, that when the order of the world was undone and all fell to blood and ash, he had neither warning nor plan.

And so it was, that when his priests were butchered and burned by those they had held in terror with the lash of his judgement, and his fields and temples were overgrown with all-loving Flesh, he had naught to offer in return but empty rage.

And so it was, that when the White Serpent Fuxi intruded upon his demesne and feasted upon the guardians he set upon it, he had no recourse but to bargain and plead, offering hoards of gold and promises of glory before its ophidian gaze.

And so it was, that the Eater of Gods feasted for a day and a night, and the screams and desperate appeals that were Lugash-Hiraz’s last efforts echo still throughout this grey and lifeless land.

What Is

Fuxi had little interest in mortal souls, no matter the legions that were sent to bar its way. Amid the ruins of the palace of Lugash-Hiraz, many of his household were left unharmed. Bejeweled attendants and silk-garbed heralds as well as the longsuffering drudges whose chains sat more heavily upon them. They lived, in the odd way which the dead might be said to. And yet that mattered little, compared to what else the serpent’s ruin had wrought.

Lo, but they were free!

They made a pyre of all their chains, and fed lash and overseer alike to what remained of their Master’s guardian beasts. Though the gardens wilted and the fountains clogged with filth and silt, they established themselves in the heart and throne of his ruined manse. Amid catastrophe and apocalypse, they exulted and were merry, and partook of all that which had been denied them.

It was only as the glory of their liberation faded that they at last turned their eyes outward, and beheld the wasteland that Heaven had become. The confusion and anarchy that pervaded all, the petty tyrants that now tyrannized the lost and hopeless souls trapped in this ruined shadow of the world.

On every neck a yoke, in every hand a lash. The perfect hierarchy which once oppressed them, replaced with the squabbling of ten thousand petty thugs.

If this was to be the end of all things, the slow dissolution into an exultant Abyss which it is said will follow a world without Mandate and a Heaven without Gods, then surely it might be met with some measure of dignity and grace. An afterlife of an afterlife, where for one bright moment virtue and justice reigned at last supreme.

From amongst their number, the once-slaves elected captains and judges - those whose servitude had seen them shaped into something beautiful or silver-tongued, their minds weighed down with libraries of philosophy which Lugash-Hiraz had coveted but did not read. They donned the golden masks of harbingers and heralds, and walked proudly on what remained of Royal Roads. They held writs bearing the seal of vacant offices, and spoke of debts and bonds most had begun to forget.

They made usurpation an art, and with the authority of their dead tyrant they offered patient mediation and justice both swift and fair. With every secret of rhetoric learned waiting upon a monster’s court, a hundred firefly-wisps in shining eyes and golden masks offered hope, a vision of what yet might be built.

A Republic of Virtue, a shining light against the looming dark. A moment, however brief, where the shades of the dead might finally live as they always should.

#worldbuildidng #fantasy #dead gods #histories #pure ideology #for tw

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some-small-mercy · 4 months ago

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Emmerich - Death and Dignity

On Ao3 Here (for some reason tumblr's link functionality is totally failing to work) or full text below.

I actually just really love Emmerich as a character, and enjoy his story quite a bit. Not high art, but easily above average as far as Bioware companion arcs go - let alone here in Veilguard. That said, games should limited to a hard cap of one (1) toytetic 'adorable' mascot or companion per game.

Honoring Your Elders

I saved Emmerich for last because, honestly, I don’t actually have that much to say here. He’s a good character! With a pretty well-done plotline! His companion quests were some of the absolute highlights of the game for me. Which also means I can end this whole thing on something of a high note, so win-win I suppose.

The main theme of Emmerich’s content is not exactly subtle - the fear of death , mourning and legacy, living on through children or through being part of something greater than yourself. And unlike very nearly every other companion in the game, everything about his story actually coheres around this. It’s hardly high art, and the writing is at times blunt and obviously twisting itself into pretzels to fit the requirements of the game, but overall it all fits together nicely.

It really helps, I think, that Emmerich actually feels like he’s past middle age - and like someone who really is preoccupied with questions of death and legacy. His struggle over the leap of faith required by lichdom feels entirely organic and sincere ( and is an entirely reasonable thing to be terrified of). He also feels like he slots naturally into the Mournwatch because of his personality and fixations instead of despite them - he’s one of the best heroic necromancer characters I can think of, honestly.

Hessenkoss is, to be clear, a cackling cartoon villain. .But she’s one with personality, and so much more memorable than any of the other companion villains it almost feels unfair to compare them. Hell, the game’s actual villains are cackling cartoons too, and she’s probably more memorable and definitely funner than either of them. She works as Emmerich’s foil, someone equally scared of death as him but much more proactive and destructive to the world in her attempts to avoid it. She’s also just got personality . Most of the other villains I have talked about needing more screen time to establish who they are and how they contrast with the quest’s protagonist, Johanna I just want to have more screen time because she’s a scenery chewing pulp serial villain who’s always a joy to see rant about Showing Them All or threatening to kill her academic rival/former best friend’s little skeleton son or whatever.

The story itself is kind of pulpy nonsense resting on not one but two different arbitrary magguffins (they could have done so much more with just the hand of glory, honestly). But that is all it's trying to be, and it executes on its aspirations with skill and panache.

Not to say I don’t have complaints (there is not a piece of art in all the world I could not complain about). Mostly about the big Choice at the end.

Thematically Emmerich being forced to choose between Manfred and Lichdom absolutely works. Emotionally, too. On the one level, it’s a man choosing between ascending to the very heights of his profession at the cost of functionally abandoning his family (or vice versa). On another, it’s about the choice between living on through children or by being part of some cause or institution or tradition grander and more important than yourself. And through a third lens (though one the game has absolutely zero interest in at any point) it’s about an old man so scared of death he sacrifices his own son for a lease on life.

But the choice in itself is just forced, and feels incredibly artificial - like the world is contorting itself to provide a Big Moral Choice for Emmerich (well, Rook) to make. Manfred heroically sacrificing himself to stop Hezenkoss is fine, I mean specifically the Mounrwatch having no actual limitations on resurrecting him but just explicitly telling Emmerich that if they do they won’t let him join the immortal skeleton club for reasons. It makes the whole thing feel a bit contrived, and makes the Mournwatch itself feel more sinister in a way that leaves choosing lichhood feel even less justifiable.

Which is the other real complaint about the plotline. Or, well, my other real complaint. I am aware I am in the extreme minority in this, but god I have a sharply limited tolerance for cute mascots that feel like they were designed by the Disney corporation to sell plushies to children. Vanguard already had an adorable bizarrely non-predatory lion-hawk. Add a comic relief skeleton on top of it begins to grate. I jumped at the chance to get rid of him.

But the game clearly disagrees! As does the marketing and (anecdotally) the fandom. You’re clearly supposed to love Manfred and find interacting with him a delight. He dies heroically, and Emmerich is very sad about it. Whereas lichdom has been something ambiguous and slightly ominous, and besides that a purely theoretical achievement (the closest thing we see to an actual lich all game until then is Hezenkoss, after all). Everything about the framing and leadup to the choice (not to mention just how any average player is going to understand the options as ‘kid versus self’) is weighing on the side of reviving Manfred being the obvious Correct decision here.

If it was supposed to be the controversial evil choice, then that would be one thing (I would be over the moon about it, actually) - but the game absolutely never acknowledges this once the choice is made. Not a single person offers an opinion about Emerich letting his kid stay dead so he could achieve immortality, or even seems to remember Manfred once he’s gone. It feels profoundly weird!

But it seems a bit unfair to blame Emmerich’s story for that in particular - that would be the sort of irreconcilable conflict over points of principle the game avoids at all costs. Relative to the rest of the game, just losing Manfred and Emmerich’s character model changing (and the slightly cringey tensionless ‘coming out’ scene about it) is far more than I expected. He really was a happy surprise of a companion.

Beautifying the Monument

Running with the assumption that inserting real interpersonal conflicts between companions that can’t really be resolved isn’t on the table, what would I do? Honestly, it mostly comes down to just tinkering around the edges. Like - at zero point in the entire story is there ever actually a clear connection between Hezenkoss and the gods. It’s just kind of taken as read that every supervillain is in a club together. An assumption which proves entirely justified if you don’t do the quests and she shows up in the final battle with her giant bone golem. It would be easy enough to make a note that one of them provided the ritual or raw power she needed to attempt her grand ritual here, and draw some strategic or personal rationale for why they would. Which would by necessity require giving one of them a bit more of a personality and more expansive interests, given that I don’t think either shows a single moment of interest in the Mourn Watch, Nevarra, the afterlife, or the undead at any point in the entire game. Maybe Hezenkoss is being self-consciously cynically sponsored to fuck with someone who dared stand against them, maybe Elgan’an is considering making new ‘first generation’ elven worshipers and wants as much research done on spiritual maturation and material incarnation as he can get. There are plenty of options here, and the game as a whole would cohere better if basically any of them had been picked.

The final mission itself I have qualms with, just because it felt like false advertising - the Bioware Party Infiltration Mission is a staple! And usually incredibly fun. If you’re going to have a mission that’s about sneaking around during a high society soiree without disrupting it as you try to prevent the host from using them all as human sacrifices, if feels like an absolutely incredibly missed opportunity to only actually interact with the party by staring at it from a balcony and making a few comments for a minute or two.

Instead, the majority of the quest is spent fighting demons and skeletons in the manor catacombs, and then sections of the necropolis that had somehow been teleported into Hezenkoss’ basement. Which I assume is a budget thing and a matter of wanting to reuse the environments so much effort had been spent on for how little you actually end up doing in the Necropolis itself. Which is fair enough, but still feels quite painfully artificial here.

The final fight itself is pulpy cheese, but again that’s all it’s trying to be and it accomplishes it with style. Really, all they need to do is find some rationale for the choice of Manfred vs. Lichdom that isn’t entirely just the other liches being dicks about it.

Coda

And okay, that’s 7/7 companions done (with wildly and obviously varying levels of interest and enthusiasm for each).

I will now simply stop thinking of Veilguard in any way for 3-4 months. Then see if I care about any of this enough to actually write actual fanfic for it.

#fanfic #essay #dragon age #dragon age: the veilguard

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some-small-mercy · 5 months ago

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Harding - Drowning in Memories

Harding isn't the first time that a character's whole personality and vibe were basically scooped out and replaced between games to make them a better companion - but it's a bit odd, when the whole reason she's a companion in this is what a fan favorite the old her was in Inquisition.

Full text below the cut

Heritage and Memories

Lace Harding was, if I remember the fan reception of Inquisition a decade ago accurately, a surprise fan favorite when she first appeared. To the point that she was pretty clearly elevated to the status of ‘next game’s main cast’ at the end of Trespasser in large part because of how much everyone already loved her. Ten years later, and despite a total lack of ideas or enthusiasm, they finally had to follow through

Okay, that’s too harsh. Secondary characters being promoted to full companion status and getting an entirely new personality and character design in the process is hardly a new thing in Bioware games, and I love Merrill fair too dearly to complain that much about it. Still, it is striking how much the Lace Harding of Veilguard just comes across as an entirely different person from the Scout Captain of the Inquisition. You can argue that a whole decade has passed, of course she’s changed - I would be somewhat sympathetic to this if you could look at her (or any returning female character, really) and possibly guess she’s supposed to be at absolute minimum in her mid-late thirties. See also the fountain of youth Isabella apparently found and then didn’t bother to share with Varric.

Leaving the discontinuity (and the fact that she also talks and feels much more like someone in their twenties than someone who was accomplished enough to rise to commanding the Inquisition’s entire scout corps without notable nepotism or patronage a full decade ago) aside, Harding’s writing is working under a heavy burden. Two of them, actually. She is simultaneously the vessel for a bunch of exposition and revelations about dwarven lore and for all the fanservice nostalgia calling back to southern Thedas and the cast of Inquisition. Between the two, it’s a bit of a struggle for Lace as a character to really shine through.

Harding’s central internal conflict is, as the game presents it, that she’s something of a people-pleasing doormat who doesn’t voice her opinions or fight for her preferences to avoid making a scene. Which is, frankly, a trait that is much more told than shown outside the specific couple of scenes dedicated to it. This unexpressed frustration and anger is made something everyone needs to care about when she becomes the first dwarven mage in recorded history - which is to say, she can move the occasional block of rock around as you explore the map. Otherwise it never really comes up - and begins feeling echoes of the howling, vengeful rage of an awakening titan in the Deep Roads below Tevinter.

Harding is not a woman who felt much of a connection to her dwarven heritage, by all accounts. Family that has lived on the surface for long enough to have a stable inherited farm, religiously Andrastian, considers herself Fereldan more than anything else as far as nationality goes, has devoted herself body and soul to first the Inquisition and then hunting Solas for the better part of her adult life - prior to the sudden empathetic connection to the titan (and the revelation about the origins of dwarves as a species and what Solas did to the titans) we never get a sense it was a subject she spared any real thought for.

Now, not to say you can’t do a story about someone forging a connection to heritage they’d not really cared about previously as a mature adult. But the game never really seems interested in digging into what a change this is. Harding is The Dwarf on hand, and so gets deeply, passionately angry about the injury the elven gods did to the titans literal millenia ago (and if you play an elf the game awkwardly invites you to apologize on behalf of the entire elven people, for some odd reason). Over her quests, you get a lot of revelations about the origins and metaphysical nature of dwarves and their relationship to the titans, which she mostly accepts with awe. Which is frankly rather odd - you would expect at least a bit of fear or resistance to the revelation that your entire species was at one point the hive mind/physical extension of eldritch primordials. But the game doesn’t seem to even let Rook seem nonplussed by the idea, let alone Harding.

(It’s not at all the game Veilguard is, but you could do a decent gloss on the sudden link to the titans as ethno-nationalism; suddenly becoming deeply angry at a powerless minority for mythological crimes against your people they have some genealogical connection to, the subsuming of individual identity into being extensions of a spiritually and metaphysically greater and more significant corporate body, going from having never heard of a body of traditions and rituals to being incredibly invested in them over the course of a few weeks. You see my vision.)

That self-discovery and the very light gestures about anger issues aside, Harding’s arc is really at least as much about the Kal Sharok dwarves as it is about her. Which is something of an issue, because they were clearly supposed to be a full faction with at least Mourn Watcher/Lords of Fortune levels of content at some point before that was cut and the assets only used for Harding’s personal content. This was probably the correct decision - the very last thing the game needs is another faction and hub area with barely anything to do in it or connection with the rest of the game - but it does mean that the final reveal of this mysterious thaig that has been built up for literally the entire history of the franchise ends up feeling more than a bit bathetic. Apparently they’ve really gotten over all the violent, vicious isolationism in the past decade, having happily taken Shaper Valta in and made her some sort of preeminent religious authority and now also being more than happy to welcome Harding and Rook in to come see her.

Kal Sharok’s whole central mysteries - how they survived the collapse of the Deep Roads and the centuries of darkspawn attacks since, what their society looks like, what sort of terrible secrets are they hiding, whether their society as institutionally horrifying as Orzammar’s - are either ignored entirely or glossed over in a few seconds of dialogue. Which is forgivable, given how limited the screentime they have is, but you do end up being left slightly wondering why bother . There’s one particular point where there’s an ominously vague, implication-laden answer to ‘how did the thaig survive’ that feels like nothing so much as the setup to a real revelation later on - but the whole subject is then never touched on again. Many such cases, I suppose. Still, I can dream of a game where all the resources that were wasted on the Lords of Fortune went towards them instead and the combined effort gave you enough content for one semi-complete faction plotline.

Harding’s ties to the Inquisition and Southern Thedas writ large are also - not necessarily bad on their own, but they do make her by far the most obvious example of how much different parts of the game’s writing doesn’t agree with itself. She’s going to go camping back ini Fereldan or see her mom in her idyllic little farm, you say? Weird, that missive from the Inquisitor just told me that the entire kingdom is basically one giant blighted apocalypse. But in Harding’s defense literally everything is better if we pretend those southern front missives don’t exist, so.

Harding’s memories of the Inquisition feel - well very nostalgia-pandering, honestly. But more than that, like a causality of the game’s decision not to bother with imported worldstates or save files. Still, she would have been the idea character to actually go into the meaning and significance of the choice to disband the Inquisition or not (a choice which otherwise comes up literally not at all, if I recall correctly) and provide some texture and backstory to what the last ten years of hunting for Solas has looked like - but no, her reminiscing is strictly waving the names of characters from the last game in front of you and saying she missed them.

Speaking of those ten years - of everyone in the cast, Harding should be the one with a real and significant preexisting relationship with Rook. The two of them were Varric’s right and left hands, they’ve been working together for years before the game began. Unfortunately, the game barely even gestures at this after the prologue, and does nothing at all to make your friendship with Harding seem like it has any particular history or existing texture to it.

A New Beginning

Given full free rein I would, being totally honest, probably throw out Harding’s entire story and replace it with something totally new and different. But that’s not really what this exercise is about.

So, assuming we are limited by the requirement to keep things in the same general shape? I would lean heavily into Harding being an Inquisition agent - it is the faction the game tells you she’s a part of every time you look at the party select screen. Make her come across as more of a mature professional soldier, someone who's been fighting and spying for more than a decade now, with the life-or-death commitment to the cause that implies. Frame the people pleasing as less a matter of fear and insecurity, and more a matter of devaluing her own preferences compared to avoiding conflict on the team and potentially hurting their chances of success saving the world (give her a slightly unbecoming martyr complex about this). Add a conversation or two where she bites down arguments or doesn’t speak up about things that frustrate or inconvenience her on a level even slightly more significant than ‘pretending to like coffee’ and ‘getting annoyed with how many books a friend is bringing on a camping trip’. Before her arc, the general impression should be a friendly smile and focus on the mission hiding a spring so tightly wound it’s one bad day from exploding. (This sort of characterization would probably make the apparent age difference between her and Taash as they romance start shading into Something That’s Talked about. Dealer’s choice whether that’s reason to cut it or keep it, honestly - they would at least be able to get some good dialogue bonding over the whole ‘falling in a gap between two cultures and legacies’ thing).

The sudden connection to the primordial essence and wellspring of the dwarven race would be significantly less welcome, at least at first - she would lose control of her powers and either threaten to or actually do some real collateral damage before she learns to get it slightly under control and goes looking for answers - something that she wouldn’t be at all eager to do in the first place. If you’re giving her a conflict-avoidant, people-pleasing personality then going on a whole remote trek to make contact with a violently isolationist thaig is not something she’s going to suggest or advocate for on her own behalf. You can either provide the actually-quite-valid excuse of finding out more about the titans being helpful to fight the gods that killed them the first time, or just guilt trip and brow-beat her into it. In either case, the reports of the earthquakes imperiling Kal Sharok would be what finally motivates her to go find a solution in a titan.

Which is to say, make Harding’s quest feel like a bit of an expedition - a longer single quest without easy ways to escape halfway through. You’re in the deep roads, make it feel different than everywhere else with their convenient elven teleportation mirrors on hand. Which also helpfully adds a bit more variety to the experience of playing through all the companion quests, especially as hers would begin rather further into act 2 than most of the others’.

The fact that what we see of Kal Sharok seems to be half-overrun by darkspawn and this doesn’t even seem to be a cause for panic or much of a crisis is less than ideal, on a few different levels. Rather than making Valta an honored religious authority with her own whole throne room, instead present her as a remote mystic, staying further in the depths and closer to the heart of a titan - make seeking her out a bit of a quest in its own right. Which neatly justifies as much spelunking through inhospitable and poorly laid out caverns and slaying hordes of darkspawn as desired.

The boss fight against ‘the titan’ is one of the more interesting things in any of the companion quests, mechanically speaking, and definitely worth keeping. Though I would make the boss fight much more like Harding , rather than just being a rock-mage using her face. Summon some golem meatshields and hit Rook with those nasty status-effect arrow tricks!

In any event, her struggle as a character would in this case be between being a loyal and reliable agent of the inquisition on one hand, and an inheritor of the titans on the other. She’d react to the revelations of what dwarves were and what the stone sense is with a sort of horror at first, especially when she realizes what that means about her abilities and the ever-increasing rage boiling within her. It would be up to Rook to help her decide which side of things to embrace, and have more significant effects on her character and her resolution either way (if she suppresses the titan’s anger, do something like replace the final scene with the Kal Sharok shaper with an Eluvian conversation with Dagna, maybe?).

And, okay, just two of these left! Going by which of them I can think of more to say about, next is Belara I guess?

#essay #fanfic #dragon age #dragon age: the veilguard

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some-small-mercy · 5 months ago

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Shadows in the Cave - Galatea

Clandestine experiments sponsored by occult conspiracies trying to find a future for civilization past the ever-looming apocalypse do not have a high success rate. The ones that are successful aren't necessarily well-suited to auditing and administering the rest, either. Or; an unscheduled site visit gets slightly out of control.

ty to @circletofcircles and @tinker-tanner for the beta-reading and extremely helpful edits

#fiction #shadows in the cave #urban fantasy/horror #civilization without humanity

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some-small-mercy · 5 months ago

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Taash - Caught in the Middle

Taash clearly had a lot of heart put into writing them, and has a personal narrative that feels deeply, well, personal. It's a pity it's awkwardly stapled onto a high fantasy crpg instead of the contemporary YA novel it would have more comfortably fit in as.

(I remain so incredibly bitter the game just forgot all the existing lore about qunari, gender and transness)

full text below the cut.

General Complaining

Taash is, going off the ambient volume of fan responses, pretty easily the most controversial companion in Veilguard. Partially because a decent number of people on the internet are inevitably loudly baying bigots and they’re the most obvious ‘wokeness gone mad’ thing in a game, and partially because the writing and plotting of their companion arc and the way they interact with Rook is just…not exactly the best or most graceful writing in the series’ history. Because we live in a wretched and fallen world, separating out these two strands of fan reaction is neither easy nor clean.

Which is unfortunate because Taash as a character has incredible potential (and character design) but they really are let down by simplistic and unfocused writing and crippled by being stapled to a bunch of game/setting elements that are poorly-thought-out and jarringly different from the rest of the series. Really weren’t set up for success here, is what I mean.

To simplify entirely too much, Taash’s character arc was clearly very personal and meaningful to the people who worked on it. Probably too personal, as it’s jarringly out of step with the genre of the rest of the game (even despite how much closer to cozy-slice-of-life the rest of the game leans compared to previous entries), with the bits that actually engage with the gameplay or rest of the plot feeling very tacked on after the fact. Though even separated out from the larger project, the writing feels quite painfully didactic and simplistic.

So in rough order of prominence Taash’s companion content is concerned with a few different things - their gender identity and transition, their relationship with their mother, the fire-breathing qunari thing, feeling rootless and torn between Qunari and Rivaini culture, and dragons and the hunting thereof. Which is problematic first of all because the way Taash is introduced and justified as a team member is as a dragon hunter .

Veilguard, as I’ve said before, occasionally feels like the writing team read a bunch of cozy slice of life and coffeeshop AU fanfics and dedicated that that was obviously the sort of interpersonal dynamics fans wanted in the actual game. You hire Taash as an outside contractor to help with one specific thing (hunting and killing the Blighted Dragons the Gods are using to burn down/blight cities). They provide basically no usable information or skills that really help with actually doing so - their draconic expertise is things like hunting patterns, lifecycles, how to bait and sedate wild dragons in dangerous locations, that kind of thing. All entirely useless in dealing with blighted close air support for darkspawn hordes. Which is born out by the fact that they really don’t offer anything to help killing the Blighted Dragons when you finally do - and in any event, roughly five minutes latter the blighted dragons lose basically all their narrative importance and sense of threat because now the Archdemons are the big scary winged monsters to worry about. Despite this, as soon as they’ve moved in everyone else in the Lighthouse starts acting like Taash is a beloved and long-time friend or kid sibling and care deeply about them and their struggles for their own sake. For no reason except the fact of their being a companion, Rook (and the player) are clearly expected to be instantly invested in them as well.

The ‘why do I care’ question is a bit of a recurring one for companion quests in Veilguard - or put another way, the game makes it very clear that it knows you know you’re playing a Bioware game so of course you want to get involved in all your companions’ personal business, right? It’s very explicit about this - but Taash gets it the worst because it’s only at the very, very end that any attempt is made to tie it into the whole save-the-world elven apocalypse double-blight thing going on. Their personal arc is incredibly, well, personal - wholly internal struggles with identity, or else about their relationship with their mother. All the dragon king stuff is basically unrelated to it, except by conveniently killing mom off and giving you the obligatory platforming and mob-slaughtering sequences. The experience of the first half of their arc is, while the world literally falls apart around you and your other companions have issues like ‘causes earthquakes when angry’ and ‘is possessed’, ‘this contractor you hired awkwardly asks you to have dinner with their mom with them’.

Which is an issue because Taash is the only character in the cast who isn’t trying to be likeable. They’re surly, unreflective, brusque to the point of rudeness, and habitually disrespectful of others. Which to be clear in principle I support entirely - the cast could use far more sharp edges and rudeness than what we got. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast and (especially) Rook are basically never able to meet them at their level here - even more than other companions, I found every conversation with them casting me against my will as an indulgent older sibling or therapist refusing to rise to the bait. Never do I more miss previous games letting me be an asshole back to someone.

It’s also unfortunate because the specific way Taash is an ass - surly, sulking, emotionally unaware and immature - just makes them come off as a rather sullen teenager. Well, it at least does combined with the fact that both the important internal conflicts they have are quintessential coming of age arcs about discovering your own identity, and also the fact that their mother is their most important relationship and also the one managing their life and deciding where they work for them. It is perhaps unfortunate to make your major trans character come across as a confused adolescent with a poor relationship with their mother and anger issues! (It also makes their being a romance option/getting together with Harding come across as more than slightly weird in a way I only wish the game was willing to actually dig into).

Identity Issues

But general griping aside - the actual meat of Taash’s arc is their coming out as nonbinary (and their struggle to be accepted by their mother), and to a lesser extent their struggle to find a place for themself between their mother’s Qunari culture and their adopted home of Rivain. Which are both very solid prompts for a story, but sadly both rather fall apart in execution (if the one more than the other).

To take the less important of the two first - when Taash is first introduced, their internal struggle (beyond a patronizing (matronizing?) and controlling mother) is being an immigrant child, torn between two worlds, feeling comfortable neither with their heritage nor the culture they grew up in - you’ve heard the story before, I’m sure. In terms of focus this rapidly loses out to gender stuff, but funnily enough structurally it actually does remain The Conflict for the questline. That is, the thing you’re asked to provide input on and help them decide between throughout the quest (and to make a big important choice about at the end that resolves their arc one way or the other). As far as the game’s mechanics and systems are concerned, the big driving conflict of Taash’s life is whether to embrace Qunari or Rivaini culture.

And it’s just…kind of nothing? It’s not like we ever get to really see or experience either as cultures - our experience with Qunari are their mother and a bunch of glorified tal-vashoth warlords; with Rivain an incredibly cosmopolitan collection of D&D-adventurer style treasure hunters. Which is to say, at no point do we get anything like a sense of what either culture actually is as a living thing to be joined (unlike, say, Docktown or Treviso). So all we have to go off of is the specific things the game brings out as points of tension or ways to express one culture or the other.

And as far as the game’s concerned? Culture is what kind of food you cook and what kind of jewelry you wear. Or okay, not quite so bad, but only barely - everything about the conflict just feels incredibly surface level, because the game’s conception of what culture is is just entirely symbolic. One might think that the qunari and rivaini conceptions of gender and sex would be pretty important for Taash, in particular, but nope. They get barely any more attention than things like your relationship with and duties to your parents, or expectations around courtship and romance, attitudes towards the spiritual and divine (hell, funerals and rites of mourning), even lore and popular attitudes towards dragons (despite their being the target of Taash’s overwhelming obsession). Whichever culture they decide to embrace, Taash has no interest in any of that - and neither does the game.

Which leads naturally to, of all the deeply underwhelming ‘pivotal choices’ you make at the end of different companion arcs, Taash’s being the most entirely meaningless. The literal only change either way is the exact style of ornamentation they use to mourn and remember their mother - absolutely nothing about their actual relationship or opinion of her changes either way, let alone the wider world.

Which is all (except the bit where it’s the choice you need to make) almost forgivable, since despite the game’s protestations choosing between one culture and the other (only two options) really isn’t what their arc is actually about. Instead, it’s a story of Taash realizing they’re nonbinary and coming out. This is, at least in isolation, much better executed but all feels intensely like scenes from a YA story set in the modern day, written with no reference whatsoever to the setting it ostensibly takes place in and and as a consequence feeling more than slightly jarring.

That is - well, first of all it is difficult to tell a compelling story about gender and transness while being so resolutely opposed to actually discussing ideologies and systems of gender. I’m repeating myself here but like - what does being a woman mean among the Lords of Fortune? The Qunari? What exactly are the expectations and roles and whatever else that trigger Taash’s dysphoria or make them feel out of place? We really don’t know, because they only ever talk about it in incredibly vague generalities, and all the actual tension about it with their mother resembles absolutely nothing of Qunari culture that we’ve ever heard about in any previous game.

Which might be the biggest wasted opportunity of Taash’s writing in general. The Qunari are, after all, literally the only culture in Thedas that already has had anything in a previous game about transness and transition as concepts. They’re gone into in some detail even (everyone loved Crem!), and are fascinatingly weird and distinct from anything really recognizable to the (assumed) modern western and progressive audience - by Qunari standards Taash’s gender deviance is not that they’re not a woman but that they’re a full time professional warrior but do not present as a man . Which is something - like the rest of actual Qunari culture - the game has absolutely zero time for. Not that it bothers with any theorizing about what being non-binary might mean in Rivain or even specifically among the Lords of Fortune either, of course (and as an aesthetic matter, I really do wish they’d come up with some in-universe term for it, but that’s just much more minor).

Taash’s mother ostensibly cares about Qunari culture, but in practice she’s just an ISO-standard ‘strict and traditional immigrant parent’ whose opinions never seem to have much to do with the (extensive) information we’ve gotten about the Qunari in previous games. She is also, according to all the evidence we get, literally the only transphobe in Thedas.

The narrative the game wants for Taash - realizing they’re nonbinary, coming out with the support of their Found Family, being rejected by their mother, deathbed reconciliation, realizing how much their mother really cared about them but didn’t know how to express, the natural love and connection of the family is restored through visible displays of mourning and all is right with the world - is clear and, relative to some of the game’s writing, has the great virtue of every beat it needs to hit actually existing . But it’s strange and more than slightly bathetic when literally the only tension around transitioning is their mother. Everything else? Frictionless, instantly accepted, friend group is able to connect them with resources and Queer Community as soon as they express interest - Lich Emmerich gets more of a Coming Out Moment with his friends than Taash ever does. Even their mother realizes she’s wrong and tries to reconcile (because Maker forbid a familial relationship not be redeemed and made wholesome!). Which would be fine if Taash was just a nonbinary character, but when so much of their arc and marketing is about being The Nonbinary Character in a very blunt and talking-to-the-audience way it really does all feel incredibly surface level HR-department approved capital-r Representation.

The Aging of Dragons

Taash does actually have two missions of requisite climbing and stabbing and burning down extremely-selectively-flammable doors and barricades, which do very tenuously tie into the main plot and the whole ongoing body horror apocalypse. It’s just, given all the stuff the story is also trying to do, incredibly thin thematically even compared to most of the other companions’ arcs.

They can breathe fire you see. Which the game clearly wants to be very impressive, but singularly fails to actually make so. It’s not like Davrin (entirely normal elf with a pet bird-lion) isn’t just as good at doing fire damage as they are. Or that the average member of your party can’t break reality with their mind, and one of the others one can teleport and another stomp and cause an earthquake. Or even that the Antaam you constantly fight suffer from any lack of incendiaries to throw at you - they have gunpowder and 15th century artillery along with plenty of explosives. It’s entirely believable that there’s some bit of Qunari doctrine that would mandate any fire-breather end up a berserker and Taash’s mom wanted to spare them that. It’s much less clear why it should have the world-historic importance and mystique the game gestures at it having.

Taking for granted that it is that important and impressive - Taash comes (through their mutual obsession with all things draconic) to the attention of their evil mirror, an Antaam warlord who has been capturing and delivering dragons for the Gods to blight. He wants to use them to give him and his followers the same fire-breathing, as a way to show their superiority and heroic destiny. He kidnaps their mom, and ends up killing her before you kill him in an elaborate ruined-volcano-castle. Along the way there are, frankly, altogether too many dragon fights for how repetitive they get.

The Dragon King is…there’s something there, if you squint? As far as being a mirror for Taash goes. He’s also someone rather traumatically cut off from Qunari culture and grasping for a new way to ground himself and understand his place in the world. He is also clearly preoccupied with gender presentation - specifically with a self-image as hypermasculine in a domineering, physically powerful, top-of-the-hierarchy sense. He either doesn’t know or just doesn’t care about the nuances of Qunari culture and history, and discards the whole corporatist ideology for a might-makes-right vision where he deserves to get what he wants through physical superiority, heroic destiny and brute force.

So you can certainly squint and read some commentaries on gender roles and performances, the flattening effect of reactionary mythologizing, or (if you really want to make him Taash’s direct foil) the radicalization of second-generation immigrants into him. (If your goal is just to say shit and start fights ‘Ghilan’nain giving him fire breath is basically gender affirming care’ would be my recommendation). The game just doesn’t make it particularly easy - he gets like five minutes screentime, total. Most of which is spent cackling and monologuing and tying Taash’s mom to railway tracks.

Which is doubly unfortunate, really, seeing as he’s one of exactly two Antaam characters in the entire game with names and lines and ostensible motivations. Not that any of the enemy factions are especially well-characterized (or -explained), but of them all the Antaam could really have used a bit of narrative from the perspective of a leader on the hows and whys. Giving him literally any relationship to the Butcher (the only other Antaam character) and drawing a line between the two of their drastically different reactions to losing/forsaking the Qun would have helped a lot for both characters, and the faction as a whole.

But hey, could be worse. They all still make more sense than the Lords of Fortune. But that’s an entirely different rant, and one a thousand other people have already made. I could also go on at some length about the role of dragons in the world as the game presents it but, again, not really the place. So:

Finding Yourself

Trying to figure out how to redo Taash’s quests is difficult because well - what the story wants to be is something entirely quiet and personal about their identity. Just throw out absolutely everything about the Dragon King and the Antaam - they’re your teenage cousin in need of a couch to sleep on after their mom throws them out on the street. For actual quests, a dragon hunt or two to find relics/lore about the Gods, or ancient Qunari artifacts - specifically places where Taash actually gets to use their dragon expertise to a) avoid fights-to-the-death and bait or spook a dragon away to get at the horde with no/minimal combat b) to achieve things that actually help the team writ large in the plot. But make the actual thrust of the quests entirely about learning about the meaning of being able to breath fire (which should ideally be given a few chances to be more impressive than what a mage-Rook can do with a wave of their hand) and their evolving relationship with their mother as they come out and realize the things she never told them and the ones she didn’t even know.

Failing that? Make the Dragon King more of a presence early in the quest - in fact make ‘how are the Gods getting these dragons to Blight and attack cities with’ Taash’s big preoccupation instead of that random scroll. Present him very clearly as an alternative model of how to forge one’s identity on the mythologized greatness of a heritage you have lost all actual connection with. Give him grandiose dreams of returning to Par Vollen at the head of the united Antaam and forcing Qunari society to accord him and his men the honor and power they always truly deserved - he dreams not only of being king of dragons, but king by right of his dragon-blood. Also if absolutely no one else in the game, let him be a transphobic piece of shit for Taash to burn to death.

In either case - the game clearly doesn’t have the resources or time to actually give mainstream Rivaini or actual Qunari culture any characterization worth speaking of. But you can still give the conflict that the mechanics ostensibly care about something like stakes. Let Taash’s mother survive, and let the final choice be about choosing to forgive and reconcile with her and embrace their qunari heritage/try to figure out what living as a qunari outside the Qun even means on the one hand, or rejecting her in favor of their found family (families, really) and figuring out who they want to be on their own without caring about any sacred duties or inherited obligations on the other. That would at least probably get people arguing.

#essay #fanfic #dragon age #dragon age: the veilguard

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