September 12th, 3522.

Tess loved her schedule, it was five classes split across three days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Modern Paracausal Studies was on all three days, while Applied Metaphysics and General Fundamentals were on Monday-Wednesday. General Fundamentals was an audited class, more for supplementing her core course, while Applied Metaphysics would earn her a degree and certification in the metaphysics field, and was Monday-Friday.

This Shamanism class was… a program run by Bunji Burhan for students who were more interested in diving into the world of the naked shadow, the wild lands of the spirits. Combat was a free exercising class, with masters coming in to show what for… to anyone who thought they could take them.

Which made sense to her, back home everyone knew how to fight. Not learning to defend yourself, not being willing to fight was frankly insane to her. It was like going into a gun fight with one arm tied behind your back.

But that might explain a lot about the conflicts of the past.

“It’s quite fortunate that you mastered the basics of the World Eyes at such a young age, most spirit-touched can take weeks to learn the skill.” The dusky skinned man sounded bemused as the two of them sat on flattened grass in meditative positions.

“I’m so glad I don’t need peace and serenity to deal with spirits.” Tess reminded herself, as she batted away a fire spirit in the spiritual equivalent of one of the school’s courtyards. It was something that was very useful from what she had been told, being able to interact, cross over into or exorcise spirits in a rage, panic or even drunk was useful.

Apparently.

Spirits wafted all around, from the abstract to the concrete, spirits of grass and plants, spirits of air and even iron where structures and benches sat. One chitta in the distance was happily wrestling with one, being thrown down like an unruly child by the spirit that resembled a humanoid structural beam.

But he fought on with a chittering laugh that she found oddly adorable.

Master Burhan gestured for her to approach, and she blinked as he held out a fat ratta, the chubby bird hobbling with an injured rear leg. “You have already mastered how to see into the higher planes, and how to call out to the spirits. But I can teach you how to invoke them, how to demand of them their power, to do things strictly beyond the limits of channeling.”

“Show me.” Tess demanded, and Master Burhan smiled as he gently reached out to the air and spoke.

“Adaptable Water, ambrosia of the gods, wandering road, whisper of the moon. Gear of Regeneration. Wise walkers of the ancient path, please flow through this meager form and fill it with majesty. Reform! Let your power shine, as life rises from the waters, so shall life return to the waters. As the flesh weakens and withers, it returns to the waters, and the waters return to renew the old flesh. Reform what has been damaged, restore what has been lost.”

Water spirits surged into the wound, listening to the long prayer with satisfied egos. Flesh was knitted together as the animal’s spirit was invigorated, and she stared intently at the spirits as they vanished into the Outer Sphere, their work done.

“Directing the spirits to help you? I’ve never asked, I always just thought of them as my… friends, neighbors?” You could make friends with spirits, but that mainly applied to the more intelligent of them. An aspect spirit was a barely sentient speck of existence, droplets of water, tiny flames, a multicolored spark of pain.

And most spirits were alien in thought and behavior, more so than actual aliens.

Master Burhan looked bemused. “That will aid you greatly, the greatest of shamans do not just demand of the spirits, they coerce them, treat them with a healthy respect and care. And you will not play the fool either, you will not walk up to the World Eater and attempt to befriend him would you?”

“I’m weird, not insane.” Tess said with an affronted huff, even as she marked out other spirits in the vicinity, who had flinched at the epithet of such a spirit.

The World Eater was the darkest spirit known to mankind, the serpent that gnaws at the roots of the world, powerful enough to have fought the Moon and Ocean in ancient times. Worshiped by many cults who had attempted to restore him, the greatest child of an ancient monster from beyond the stars, long forgotten.

That was what the stories said anyways.

“What else can you do with spirits?” She asked, watching light spirits dance in the rays of the sun. Tess assumed there were a lot of options when it came to coaxing the spirits, they had many powers, as was their right as beings of the higher planes.

Master Burhan gestured for her to approach, and the spirits walked with him. “For initiates, they can whisper to the dreaming spirit of a material object to beseech their aid, it allows one to pick a lock easier, to debug a program in less time or to drive a car with greater ease.” He explained with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m sure you’ve noticed machinery yielding to you with unnatural ease.”

Tess blinked, she had noticed. She was talented and studied and worked hard, but there was almost a sense of… something letting her in when she worked with technology. Like patching up an old friend…

“Or you can learn to counter the paracausal manifestations of spirits and shamans, a counter prayer to unravel their power. The World Eyes allow you to peer into the Spirit, but there is a deeper sight… the Form. To see into the very deepest core of what a spirit is, to learn their name and their nature. Both come naturally to you, and shamanism has always been as much instinct as science.” He shrugged, and Tess nodded with a nervous grin.

“And there’s more than that is there?” She was excited, very few shamans had been willing to come into town and most of her parent’s friends were scattered across the galaxy. “Is there…” the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she turned around.

It was poultry in motion, three toed feet stomping on the ground, feathers ruffling and a hooked beak snapping at bewildered shamans in training. She could feel her friend’s spirit, one stronger than her body, pulsing in tune with her heart, like a beating flame.

“Swift-Feather!” Burhan looked surprised, though it was quickly buried under an impressed expression. “What the hell? We live like two hundred miles out, how are you here?”

The bird leveled a searing glare. Did you think I would leave you behind, Marked Child? There is nowhere in this world I would not follow you.

“Impressive, you have learned her name, and befriended a spirit of the wilds.” Her teacher grinned, eyes mirrored with the glare of the World Eyes.

“She’s an animal spirit?”

The older man had moved silently, gently brushing his hand along Swift-Feather’s feathery flank. “The division between animal and spirit is very thin, all living things have living spirits. And some animals well… they can become much greater, a platonic ideal that overcomes mortality. Your friend isn’t quite that, but she’s an interesting bird.”

Tess felt an affectionate flare in her heart. “Yeah, she really is.”

“Then we’ll have to extend our lessons and provide a place for your friend, Gnomon makes allowances for animal companions.”

That was something she desperately wanted, to have her old friend with her throughout the next few years.

I’m going to have to help with feeding her aren’t I? Tess pondered, crossing her arms behind her back.

Well, no one said being a channeler was going to be easy…

September 14th, 3522.

Swift-Feather had been… an interesting addition to her routine especially as she learned more about spirits and thus the spirit of her friend.

Marked Child, your friend has deigned to show herself.

Tess blinked. “Friend? But neither Mogu or Xinji are… are you kidding me?” The astaran was approaching her, practically gliding on air as she walked up to the pair.

The morning sun was singing through her veins, and she did not need some prissy and bitchy woman needling her during her personal time with Swift-Feather. She eyed the red skinned woman in searing orange and brown robes, no matter how tightly they clung to her frame.

She stood up from where she was lying up against a gnarled tree, and kept a steady hand on her animal companion as the woman approached with ghostly steps, as if gravity ignored her. Tess felt the comforting weight of her modified holo-caster on her right arm, and the MID on her left arm.

The explanation for how they worked had been one she was still getting her head around. It involved dark energy and metaphysical energy interactions. Dark energy was the baseline energy substrate underlying space itself, the closest energy to their layer of creation. It was why it was the easiest energy transformation through origonium, and why it served as a conduit to bridge to higher realities.

Anyways, the MID tech worked by creating a skintight shor field to manipulate and interact with chakras. Earlier iterations used electromagnetic-dark energy fields to affect particles down to a subatomic level, used for wireless brain to machine interfaces, manipulating nerves with high precision, sensors for instant compound analysis, pathogen classification, and wireless atomic and subatomic manipulation.

Which explains why Mr. Cadences said my holo-caster was ready made to be an MID machine.

“What do you want?” She bluntly asked Sveta once she snapped out of her musing, trying to gleam at her intent.

She scoffed, ears swiveling in an expression of indignation. “I don’t care for liars,” Sveta said with an easy smile. “And I certainly don’t care for someone who refuses to use her full power, and refuses to quit playing.”

Her fury ran hot, and she stood up straighter, Swift-Feather flanking the bitch with silent footsteps. Her teeth almost stabbed into her lips, and heat shimmered around her fists. She has no damn idea does she?

“Don’t pretend to know me from a handful of meetings,” Tess’ smile was not kind and full of far too many teeth. She might be a foot shorter than the ice queen in front of her. “You have no idea the lengths I had to go through to gain just the tiniest scraps of power, and how hard my parents had to fight so that I could be worth something. So how bout you shove off before I shove a fireball up your—”

Something leapt from the tree they were under, and Sveta let out a clipped but hilarious scream at the culprit. It was a panadim, one of her classmates, Mordin, something or other.

The panadim were an arboreal species and it showed as he easily landed on his feet from a dozen feet up. Mordin stood up straight, smooth mottled green skin glistening in the morning sun. He was about six feet tall, with two sets of arms, one built for swinging from trees and the other for fine manipulation. A weird cross between reptile and mammal, and with a facial disk that aped that of owls. He wore pants and a shirt like a weird little man, and his climbing arms hung loosely against his legs, two curved claws almost touching the ground.

“Oooh my, I’m sorry to interrupt your little cat fight but is this the best time for that? We’re going to be late for class.”

Sveta scowled but once his words registered she bolted in a burst of wind, and Mordin let out a raspy and screechy chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” Tess asked, worried about being late but feeling like she was missing a joke.

Mordin lifted his front arms to his round race. “She didn't even take a second to process that the next class is in forty minutes. After all, I wasn’t lying. I just wasn’t being exact with my wording.”

Marked Child, that man is veritably insane. She nodded in agreement with her animal friend, the bitch tornado could conjure up a storm if she was inclined to murder. She wasn’t one of the old ‘peaceful’ nomads brought in to harmonious accord by their great teachers.

Peace. Peace for all of time.

She scoffed. “That’s not going to end well for you.”

Mordin tilted his head. “Your point?”

She laughed, giggled really. I like him. “Well it’s your funeral,” she offered a handshake and he gingerly took it. “Theresa Hoshino, my friends and family call me Tess.” Her toothy grin didn’t falter at his own smirk.

“Mordin Kalchik at your service,” his bright eyes peered down in curiosity. “If you don’t mind me asking, is it normal for your kind to have such large… udders?”

Tess practically choked on air, to the point Swift-Feather lightly kicked her in the back to dislodge nothing.

“By the gods that's… humans don’t have udders you dolt,” she was laughing, and Mordin looked embarrassed. She gestured to her chest. “These are breasts, you can call them boobs or tits or milk jugs for all I care.”

“No I don’t think I will.” He said quietly, giving her a measured look.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, the caramel haired girl feeling on the up and up. “And thanks for getting her off my back, I’m not sure what her problem is with me but I’m not in the mood.”

“No problem.” He seemed bashful and she simply smiled.

“Well… then perhaps you wouldn’t mind being friends? I’ve got a small group, but it’d be cool to have a boy join us.”

Mordin’s face scrunched up in a weird way. “Why not? My lovely presence should be awe inspiring.”

She hip checked him as a sign of affection. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

He chortled. “We’ll see about that midget.”

Tess flushed and got mad. “Hey!”

But it was a happy and jittery sort of anger that she very much enjoyed.

Bunji Burhan was a bit of a kooky person, which was a rude thing to say about yourself. Not that I care, most shamans are mad as a hatter. Which was why he knew when someone was almost as mad as him and twice as reckless.

Theresa Hoshino was one such person, a great name that had yet to exit her awkward youth. Still finding her place in the grand scheme of the world, which also meant she was willing to do stupid things to gain that place.

And as a shaman that was not a good thing when creatures like the World Eater were waiting for fools to unlock doors never meant to be opened, walking paths that slayed gods and mortals alike.

He walked up to the peak of the mountain, where the trail of trees spiraled along and up improbable slopes and unlikely defiances of the natural order. Most city folk didn’t realize entire forests shouldn’t be able to grow five kilometers in the air, or that the mountain itself was impossibly old and stacked higher than natural, or that the central undercity didn’t burrow into the core of the mountain, with most of the city surrounding the mountain heart for two hundred kilometers around.

He walked the path, and bent away a layer of dirt, revealing a layer of bronze and iron, with the constant tick-tick-tock of a clock rumbling beneath the too-warm soil.

The shaman smiled and stepped sideways.

The world became madness incarnate as he stepped beyond the gauntlet, shambolic and maddening torrents of creatures and entities unknown sweeping past as he slipped outside Reality.

The world lurched as an invisible hand pulled him even higher, the flesh of the world recoiling and screaming and rending apart under the authority of a greater power.

The shadow world, the land of spirits, the spirit world, the immaterium, a world of dead and living gods, infinite realms reaching every higher, representing all that was and could be. From shadowy crystal wyrms the size of galaxies, to the drifting fluff of dreams, pillars of eternity and plank-scale marbles.

The madness receded until the world shuttered into place, like a computer game loading frame by frame. He stepped up, and onto an endless garden of gears, upon a genius loci of great scope and scale.

The Clock of the Long Now was a vast genius loci, the home and domain of a High Spirit. One who had seen the world turn billions upon billions of times, who had watched and waited for eons. He was the guardian, both the door and the key, one of seven scattered across the world, holding back the gates of hellfire baying at the gates of heaven.

He stepped forward, and the world let him in, gears and machinery screaming and turning with a pattern he couldn’t quite discern. Impossible geometries twisted and bent reality, robotic princesses with crystal hearts carved from slain faerie gods danced and swayed in an endless dance, cuckoo clock birds flocked together with large grinding warbles, and the sky was a field of melted clocks and the sun a dial of stone made of fire, a paradoxical existence.

This place existed as a legend carved into the world by the High Spirit that was its master and source.

“I want to go up.” He said and he did, as this nowhere place outside of normal space and time listened to his gentle demand, bringing him to the entity he was seeking.

The clockwork mechanism unfolded in hundreds of extra dimensions, geometries that bound the fundamental forces together, from the fabric of space and time constructed of an infinite quantum field of electromagnetic and gravity interactions to the subatomic arguments of the weak and strong nuclear forces, to the mysterious dance of dark energy and matter swirling across the voids between stars.

Light filled the universe of machines, and a pillar of rusted steel and crystal circuitry made out of mechanical chaos and stars carved into eternity, a shining azure light forming a vortex of creation.

He blinked alien skies out of his vision, and saw the man-like thing kneeling in prayer. Burhan blinked a few times, always surprised but never frightened at the dread pressure from the Dreamtime God.

The being was made from intricate and complex golden gear systems, thrice the height of a man and with wings composed of ancient canvases of night skies a billion years dead. An ancient Spirit of Knowledge and Time, and a god known the world over by many names even if it was long forgotten by most.

To his people he was Abgal, the patron of knowledge, the first teacher who ever was. But the name that was His alone, the oldest and most core to His identity.

Antikythera. The Wayward Son.

“Nazara has fallen.” The High Spirit intoned and Burhan almost collapsed at the words instilled with ten thousand ten thousand meanings.

“Impossible… he was the strongest of the seven keys and gates, he’s held the line for more than three thousand years.”

“He was slain within his throne world and cast down by the Clockmaker with an infernal power. The logic of the sword has strengthened the killer with great power.”

Distilled horror entered his heart, seven keys and seven gates had dwindled over time as the strain broke down the spirits who willingly sacrificed to hold the World Eater at bay.

“The Clockmaker is a killer on par with the Butcher… but he certainly can’t have the power to slay a spirit of such power.” It was impossible, like a gnat trying to swat a walking whale.

Antikythera sighed. “Think shaman. You have seen such feats before, have you forgotten so swiftly?”

He paled, blood draining from his ashen face. “He found more of Her shards?”

The spirit god’s light faded. “I fear it is far worse, sleeping gods may be beginning to stir once more. Their dreams will become our nightmares, their victories our defeats, their hope our despair.”

“Are you saying the World Eater’s mother is waking up?!” He didn’t scream but his emotions were felt nonetheless.

“I have felt one of her lesser children at work on the World of Humanity, her shard-born children under the control of hateful warring sides. I have felt the touch of the Nightmare King, and you must prepare.”

Burhan scowled, and knew his students were now in danger.

His oath to protect his students was law, and the man knew the curse of interesting times was at hand.

Compendium Entry (The Government of the Solar Alliance): DOMAINS

The most basic form of political and economic organization of the Solar Alliance. Domains are in many ways derived from the old great name clans of the many peoples of Fire, but updated and altered for the modern problems of society.

Domains are deliberative assemblies that form the government of everything from a single village and up to the scale of a city of forty million people. There are many variants on the domain, the Parliament is simply the very highest layer of the domains. Domains were established on a larger scale during the chaos and devastation of the thirty fourth century, from ecological collapse to resource wars and multiple pogroms and genocides, allowing for greater autonomy and self governing as civilization entered a near death spiral.

It was the surviving great name clans of Fire who created the modern domain, as increased societal mixing led to cultures that could give birth to any element and even to people with more than one. So they created a structure that would allow for a family, for a group of all elements to come together. The loyalty of Fire, the piety of Air, the community of Water, and the contract of Earth.

The clans of Fire were open to immediate family, and any and all could be accepted and adopted into their ranks with the correct rituals and oaths. They were often ruled by the heads of the clan, individuals who had proven themselves apt leaders whether through guile, compassion, or sheer ingenuous intelligence, or were passed down through bloodlines.

The modern domain took a more flexible approach, as the head of a domain could be elevated from among their members, or could start their own domain with willing participants. For political structures they tend to take up the administrative duties of local government, from mayors to planetary governors and most businesses and economic centers tend to take the form of worker cooperatives, various enterprises specialized in anything from the creation of art to war fleets, the heads of these domains tend to be known as coordinators, operating and protecting their domains alongside the other members of their organizations.

This form of organization was initially theorized in the early to mid thirty second century and implemented on a limited scale in the thirty third and thirty fourth centuries, with a handful of countries including Shiretoko implementing the domain-system before the destruction of their island state using experimental United States weapons. An unknown lord from Aztlan married a survivor, and during the 3390s helped replace the failing political structures of Terre and prevented the collapse of human civilization.

The two are known only as The Founders, and domains have functioned at scale since the founding of the Solar Alliance in 3400.