13 - 2 [Fool] Monstrum and The Tree Cursed to Die That Did Not The Tunnel Rat Mageling - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

The Apprentice laid on his cot, staring into the shifting sea of shadow that was the marmon ceiling. The hearth crackled and gave off hazy firelight and warmth to the room.

Where the night before the Dark Ocean incarnate that was the marble above him brought listlessness, now, calm was borne in its place.

Not lost in those deep waters but rather wrapped in them, the tunnel rat felt. A placid womb in the sky; a safe place found.

A found fa—, the mageling started to think before he bit his mind’s wayward tongue with teeth covered in the plaque of strife. No, not that. Not yet.

Not so soon.

He sat up, looking towards the Exorcist that lay opposite him five span away, sleeping. Or whatever version of slumber that myth-hunter partook in; Fin had attempted to explain the happening with strange words such as ‘hypnagogia,’ but not a grain of a gram had stuck.

The mageling ruminated, letting stew nicely the memories of this day.

Fin had returned, given Eiden a gift, and then started his own ‘magick show.’

Yet this was no simple street magicker’s performance on the tavern corner, but instead true sorcery.

Eiden let out a bubbling chuckle, light and airy like some pastry sold in the end of year festival.

Fin had almost given the lad a slap to the nook and nape for ‘bespouling high sorcery as piecemeal spiritry.’ It wasn’t a mad sort of reproach with actual harsh words, but instead a gentle jest where his amicable tone was at odds with the content therein.

Simply put, sorcery was something grander than the magicks that Fin had showed. He did not elaborate more on that other than a simple: ‘You’ll know more soon enough, when the time is right.’

Eiden did not feel too disheartened as just right after the joking chide Fin went on to summon heatless, screaming fire and brought out a queer stone with a heartbeat of the same hame.

The ‘magick show’ was, in actuality, a maintenance routine as the Exorcist had explained. Truly, the magicking world was a step above the mundane as even the most basic of their chores were downright wondrous.

When the physical sight before him was starting to get dull (not that it did truly ever ebb under the notice of his interest), the spiritual beneath took him with great allure.

The various flavors of mana that emanated from the magicking tools were each distinct and held shadows of greater things still. If Eiden’s conjurings of mana were distillations of his emotions and experiences, what were the original hosts from which these essences were taken?

To who or what belonged the mana of ancient and old and permanent loden stone? The mana reeked of permanence immemorial, of adamant born in the black bosom of the Goddess Below and unmelting ice hailing from the permafrostian, mountainous peaks from which Dyeus looked down into the mortal world from the Near Heavens.

Eiden reckoned that the existential juice within that magicking oil—that which Fin called the essence of stasis—would last longer than his own mortal span twice over and multiplied by five score. No matter that mana was wont to return to its natural state—to return to the grand flow of the Wheel so that equilibrium may be reached as Fin had lectured—not a drop of that magick oil dissipated back into the Spiritual.

And it were not a single wondrous distillate of physick present neither; no, there was another queer and downright intoxicatingly grand smell of spirit, of mana.

These twain essences stole away most of the show, the weight of their presence a heavy leaden weight upon the blanket of the Spiritual.

Whose was the mana of change inexorable—the relentless revolution of a milling wheel that would ground-down All Things under Heaven and Earth if left unchecked—of The Spark That Makes The Mountain Move?

Half of the feelings—which were otherwise indescribable without the use of bardistry and poetics—that the mageling bore from his observations of the twain essences were decidedly strange.

Familiar and gen yet, at the same, alien and eld. Like hearing the echo of his own voice, discomfort came from the rift between what was and what had been thought to be.

Words he had never before heard, much less spoken, came easily to the tips of thought and tongue twain. Instincts, buried so deep within that Eiden would be hard-pressed to ever scratch the packed dirt that hid them, came into the fold.

He had a wisdom of things he should not rightly possess. No mortal should possess, he felt; worst still, one so lowbrow such as him. This ken was a thing of sages and kings, he knew in the core of his core and heart of his hearts.

From where did this subtle ken, of things arkane and occult, come from?

Eiden’s incessant curiosity buzzed like an apiary were stuck inside the hollow dark in between his ears. So many thoughts and questions flitted through him, his nerves tingling with the need to get up and ask.

To poke and prod, and—Hell take him—bloody shake the answers outta the slumbering monster-slayer, if need be.

The mageling only kept himself back from waking Fin by virtue of tomorrow being a whole day of just magicking.

For a reason Eiden could not rightly fathom, the fact that the Exorcist had promised he would stay the next day fully made him… happy was not the right word for it, but mayhaps “alright” was.

It made the festering dark a little more bearable. The weight less of a burden; still there, still reminding him of That Night, still noticeable, but less potent withal.

A distraction. A diversion.

Each lesson, explanation and what-have-you-not that the Exorcist provided were like water to a beast of burden in the drought-month; gulped down and assimilated gladly as parchment.

A distraction. A diversion.

Eiden was just starting to form the edges of shadows of wisdom from all the lecturing Fin had provided. The lad felt he was just starting to make a scaffolding of kennen, where new and potential knowing built up like plaster along wall before it was, consequently, hardened further into the rest of his ricten memory.

As the sleep and slumber came and claimed, he reviewed all the knowledge he had gained in but two days’ time.

A distraction. A diversion.

A little piece of parchment, written in Fin’s hand as Eiden was piss-poor in scribery, lay held tight against the lad’s chest as he drifted off into the dark.

Unspeakable, unnameable things swam in the nothing waters of the moments before he knew no more.

Omens of what could and what was to be.

Eiden had stepped upon the magicking Paths proper, whether he liked it or not; magick arkana had stuck its claws deep into his very being.

Something fomented in the marrow of his for-now-weak bones.

If disaster or fortune was to be his fate remained to be known.

A single symbol flitted in the colors of his burgeoning dreams, morphing from one state to another.

Stuck between Two.

Eld and Gen.

Black and White.

From teeth neverending to deep, unquarried stone. From the unsullied core of his cruxian self to that which he took upon in the dark with hand hankerous.

Twin spirals confined by circle within and without to the questing candle-flame fettered by the octagram and circuit twain, the symbol changed, never seeming to decide which form it would fully assume.

Like a copper coin balanced precariously on its own precipice after being spun, wobbling and ambiguous.

The Wheel turned.

Anima Mundi: The Living Universe, The Myriad Planes, and Existential Anatomy

The Living Universe: The cosmos, Anima Mundi, or the Living Universe Itself, is composed of many different tissues and fabricks. An entire system or ecology of these living and breathing meta-interstitials are called planes.

Each organization or even singular scholar categorizes the Myriad Planes differently. The credence of each planar model is based on the popularity thereof in a given magedom society.

The Three Realms of Being: A planar-division model formed on the basis of mind, body and spirit. The crux of the Tripartite Planar Model is the philosophy that all things are made of three parts: the object, the subject and the shadow.

‘Three Things make further All Else in the Wheel of Creation Neverending. By the mixing of the Three Principles, All Things can be brought to bear.’

The Corporeal Realm: Also called the Stratus Gross or Physical World or Prime-Material—simplified as the Gross, the Physical, and the Material, respectively—it is the foundation for all existence. Mana is moored to the Physical like a boat to the docks and so too are all other planes, be they elemental or otherwise.

This is the realm of tangible substance (the marmon beneath our feet) and energy (light and warmth from the sun or the crackling tongues of a hearthfire), of things often seen and felt, of flesh and bone.

This is the object, that which can be defined; a real thing made of matter.

The Cognitive Realm: Also called the Void or Mental Fold or World of Dreams—simplified as the Void, the Fold, and the Dream, respectively—it is a place of pure thought wrought from the substance of minds. It is the hollow dark in between one’s ears. It is the quiet and empty when the eyes are closed and the thoughts open. This is the realm of things unseen yet often felt, of cognition and psyche.

As flesh and bone dwells in the Gross, emotion and mindstuff dwells in the Fold.

This is the subject, that which cannot be defined; a mind-thing made of qualia.

The Ethereal Realm: Also called the Stratus Subtle or the Spiritual World or the Place In Between What Is and What Could Be—simplified as the Subtle, the Spiritual, and the In-Between respectively—it is a confluence of the Cognitive and the Corporeal, taking both of the substances of matter and mind.

A broth of the tangible and intangible, of Material and Dream, of objective and subjective both such that the two meet and mix freely in the cauldron that is the Ethereal to become greater than the sum of their parts.

As flesh dwells in the Gross and mindstuff makes home in the Fold, spirit and soul dwell in the Subtle.

This is the shadow, that which is not but comes to be in spite of absence thereof. The subject is the light shone upon the object, and the shadow, a child of both; an unreal thing made of paradox.

The Nexus: To better understand the worlds of subtle and gross, of weal and woe, know that All Things are annexed by sympathetic thread wrought of nigh-invisible spirit-fibre; the fascia, the connective bands of reality-in-between.

This agglomeration of spirit-sinew and interstitial ephemera is an interdimensional plane called the Common Thread That Binds or, simply, the Nexus.

More commonly, it is known as Fate or the Doomplace. Though, such is a misnomer, for Fate is the movement and contraction of the Nexus’ planar-muscular tissue on a grand or macro-scale, not the interdimensional strata itself.

To touch upon one end of the string and make it wobble is to do so for the other. To quote your countrymen: ‘All Things, Under Heaven and Earth, are possessing of the Chains That Bind.’

To quote my own realm’s ken and kith:

‘As Above, So Below. As Below, So Above.

As Within, So Without. As Without, So Within.

As the Universe, So the Soul. As the Soul, So the Living Universe Itself.’