Moar Loarspam
Apr. 2nd, 2010 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukieOriginal project and fandom crack again!
--
On Fae faith: The fae pantheon is something like the Hindu one in that all gods and goddesses are seen as reflections of the big All-There-Is. The name of this translates roughly to Heart-of-Worlds (there's a word for the spiritual heart and a word for the physical one) or Soul-of-Worlds. The 'worlds' in question are the celestial, aetherial/astral, mana/magical, and physical planes.
You'll hear Vicky sometimes discuss the Lady and the Lord. These beings are Lord Day and Lady Night, and it's not quite accurate to call them a god and goddess. Rather, the Lord and Lady ARE Yang and Yin. Their children are the deities of the fae pantheon. [Yukie aside: Thus far I know of four gods and four goddesses - four seems to be a significant number for fae sometimes.]
While the fae might not exactly worship members of other pantheons they don't deny the divinity of them. Rather it's believed that these pantheons are born of other emanations from Heart-of-Worlds. Different spheres on the same Tree of Life. You'll never see fae desecrate or vandalize a building or artefact sacred to some other god or goddess. Even if that deity is a jerk.
While deities aren't considered to be necessarily omnipotent or omniscient, Lord Day and Lady Night are closer to these. Each of them has a half of whole-power and whole-knowledge.
If you ever hear fae refer to St. Dorcha and St. Leukas, this is the Lady and the Lord, albeit referred to in such a way as to not make the poor mortal Templar knights jumpy. The Templars actually recorded the name of the community-working 'police service' branch of the Appointed as the Knights of St. Dorcha. (It was during the crusades and people had some set ideas about gender roles - compassionate discipline and mediation was seen as a mom-lady thing and so yeah.) They're still sometimes called this if working with Christian churches. It doesn't offend the fae to have the Lord and Lady called this way. They figure the Lord and Lady have better things to do than fuss overnames. Each of them has multiple names and epithets anyhow. And the Christian knight guys gave them nice, accurate types of names, with 'Dorcha' meaning 'dark' and 'Leuk' being the proto-Celtic for 'light'. (Lugh and Llew come out of this.)
While the Night and Day Courts principally revere the Lady and Lord respectively, it's well understood that revering one is revering the other. They're two halves of something much greater.
The day sacred to the Lord is the Summer Solstice; for the Lady it's the winter Solstice.
---
On the Bastion: The Hallowed Bastion is a wellspring of the Dark, much like Lea Monde. It wasn't uncommon for the Kildeans to centre their cities on intersections of ley lines and on wellsprings thus. Because they knew well how to live with such energy and respected it, there really wasn't a problem with doing such until people - outsiders mostly, but sometimes Kildeans - tried to grasp for the power suffusing and protecting these cities. This inevitably ended in disaster, as when the wellspring of Lea Monde erupted.
The late Cardinal Batistum is responsible for the curse on the city that ignited this event. Intending to grasp the wellspring and the Dark for himself, Batistum used a taboo magic to kill near every living being in the city. Every human who dies in the city therefore finds their soul entangled by the corrupted energy, and is unable to pass on into the next life. Truly, these people become borderline-Heartless possessing a body. For all intents and purposes their Dark-burdened hearts should separate fully from their bodies and souls, and the latter be born in the World that Never Was as Nobodies. However this natural (albeit highly strange) process is arrested by the curse. This act cost him dearly, and he began to sicken and die little by little after this deed. It was the discovery that the death of Lea Monde was no natural disaster that drove Sir Roméo Guildenstern, then the head of the Iocan Knights of the Crimson Blade, over the edge into a full breakdown.
It is not only the Dark that can cause a splitting of heart and body/soul. Indeed, an overabundance of light can be just as disrupting for the equilibrium of a being. This fate befell many of the Riskbreakers, who underwent a highly-experimental 'locking' of their hearts and memories under the supervision of Steward LeSait. Artificial keys crafted from the light-saturated hearts of people (inevitably criminals convicted of a capital offense - they were seen as 'acceptable' to use this way after the efforts to reform them by supersaturating their hearts with light led to the collapse of said hearts and the transformation of the person into a light-based 'heartless' being and a Nobody) were utilized to block off a Rickbreaker's emotional heart in order to make him or her more ruthless and less inclined to succumb to compassion, and also to hide traumatic memories from them. Ashley Riot is a good example of what happens to a person when this artificial lock gives way. Jan Rosencrantz is a good example of what can happen to a person who undergoes too many 'treatments' with these false keys. While he believed himself to be his own man and motivated by his own desires, he was in fact motivated by a composite of several layers of fractured memory and orders. To call Jan 'brainwashed' would be quite accurate. It was, after all, very easy for LeSait to plant in the open heart of a Riskbreaker his own desires; the heart, once locked again, temporarily accepted these as its own. But the locks were not permanent, as the keys were false.
Some of the Crimson Blades underwent this treatment as well as a way of barring the darkness from their hearts permanently (they thought). The attack on the Bastion's prince, Ansem, was carried out by six of such people. They were, at the time, on medical leave (suffering from the effects of their 'locks' beginning to break down and their hearts beginning to fracture), and were thus able as patients to access the storage-place of false light-keys. They attempted to use this key on Ansem to bar the darkness from entering the young prince's heart, seeing their actions as 'saving him'. Unfortunately, they fractured his heart, and it's only the fact that he was a child and therefore possessed of a very resilient, 'flexible' heart that it mended enough that he did not experience the sort of shattering that led to their breakdown. It was this event that caused the birth of Ansem's 'brother', Xenos (later Xemnas). Xenos, a 'sleeping' heart and whole awakened soul, resided in Ansem's heart and mind until the Prince's catastrophic, fanatical effort to restore balance to the worlds by opening the cosmic wellspring of the Darkness. When Ansem willingly separated his heart from his body (this is, incidentally, the way humanshaped Heartless come to be), Xenos remained there as the Nobody. Ansem's soul was, at this time, asleep and recovering from the reawakened memories of the disaster that led to Xenos's birth. Xenos therefore protected his brother's soul.
It should be noted that Kildeans refer to people with multiple selves or personalities as 'share-soul'. They believe that a protector soul is born in a person to protect the existing soul from harm, as Xenos was for Ansem. More than one guardian soul can exist on a body at any time.
---
On Erebos: Erebos is known for being a dead land and a corrupted one, ruled by a god who long ago left sanity behind. This was not always the case, however. When Thanatos was younger, and stable, the land was not desert land and the 'blight' that affects every plant or creature within it did not exist. As well, the Necropolis palace did not shift its inner configuration constantly. It was Thanatos's descent into anger and grief, and then into madness, that caused the land to sicken and experience desertification.
Erebos was always dark (its name is apt) but not always desolate. If one looks closely, one can see the echoes of what existed before Thanatos went completely nuts. The rivers, for example, are still clear, and though a soul will certainly be affected by drinking from Lethe or Mnemosyne, the water is no poison. The underground river Sanzu, which all souls must cross on their path to Erebos and their own rebirth, was always absurdly cold as well. (The fact that it IS so cold is what makes its status as a trial so effective: the worse a life lived by a soul, the longer it takes to cross the river. It can take YEARS for the soul of a mass-murderer to get across, and the river is cold enough that for all intents and purposes it should be long since frozen. One who has reached the other side of the river is considered to be cleansed of the majority of their sins, though their karma lingers and they must atone further when reborn.) The weird albino plants don't bear poisonous fruit, but most are too put off by its appearance to eat it. [Yukie aside: I don't blame them.] Only the most resilient and determined of flora and fauna make their home here, and most are terribly strange to mortal eyes. They're not without a curious beauty, though. For example, the enormous moths that feed from the flowers of the albino plants are extremely pretty. They're just...huge. The largest subspecies has a wingspan of eighteen inches.
The one plant that is inevitably dangerous is one that's slowly becoming more common as Thanatos's madness deepens. This is the Rose of Oblivion/Rosa tartaros which feeds on life-energy and mana. A being 'given' to these flowers becomes their nourishment, and the energy that feeds the roses also feeds the nut who's making them grow all over by being crazy. They're probably quite poisonous, but no one is mad enough to try to make the hips into jam or tea. Thanatos might try it if he weren't so damned lazy, but then again he might not. It's hard to say.
On the Necropolis: The insides of it shift around because the master of the house is crazy. Enough said. The number of rooms remains more or less constant, but where they are can vary immensely. The only ones that don't move are the observatory (always in the highest tower), the library (always on the Western side of the palace), and the god's personal chambers (always at the heart of the palace).
The library is something of a curiosity. One might wonder how the hell Thanatos got all those books until one considers the sheer volume of dead languages and lost literature in the worlds. When a language dies, it comes here. When a body of literature is lost, it goes here. For an equivalent in this world, consider the Library of Byzantium. Every book lost from there would be in the library at Erebos.
Needless to say it's not uncommon to find Thanatos taking up the entire sofa in there reading. It's probably the library that's kept him from going even madder from loneliness and isolation.
[Yukie aside: What I've 'seen' of the palace looks a hell of a lot like Gaudi gone Gothtastic. Why Gaudi? Well. Art Nouveau is a very, VERY organic style. Look at the Casa Batllò. Specifically, look at the support pillars. Do those not look like bones. Yeah. That's why. There's a lot that looks Guimard-esque too.
---
There's a bunch of stuff in it that you'd think makes no sense - like why the hell would a god need a bath, or a samovar. WHY WOULD A GOD WANT TEA XD Well - call 'em creature comforts? He sort of made things weird on himself by becoming a lich. He forgets he doesn't have to breathe sometimes too. And his bed's ridonkulous. It's more like - there's a very squishy divan and then he's got this bastardload of soft pillows of varying sizes all over that, and several blankets (he's always cold). I keep wanting to draw this thing, it looks comfortable.
Usually when he overexerts when 'riding with' someone, he ends up flopped halfway off it sprawled out like a drunk on the floor. Tacgnol dignityfail.
Also, he makes an adorably pissy chibi. And he's stupidly pretty. The reason he used to manifest looking like one of his incarnations (he doesn't have much energy to do that anymore except when he's dream trolling) is that he is, in his humanlike native form, uncanny-valley beautiful. If he showed up like that in front of a person their brain would go DOES NOT PARSE WHAT THE FUCK THIS PERSON IS NOT POSSIBLE. That and lol creepy black eyes.
The rood mark on his back's all screwy.
And in closing he's not always a dickhole! Just - most of the time XD; When he's going 'hi I'm the psychopomp' and being the reaper he's not an ass. Even if it's to someone he frigging despised in life. Once they die, the person who pissed him off no longer exists. Their soul crosses the river, drinks from Lethe (and gets a little water from Mnemosyne - this is how people recall past lives but some people's souls forget they have the water), and gets reborn. The exceptions of course are the souls of Ror and her knight, who he pissyfaces at ALL THE TIME (ah unrequited love UR DOIN IT RONG) and he actually once broke a rule and kicked both of them into the Lethe because he was having a giant snit. Dork. But - yes. If Vicky were to fall in battle against him he'd go "NYAH" for about five seconds, then settle down and go "okay, c'mere and let's get you across the Sanzu, fae-soul; it shouldn't take too long."
DORK DORK DORK god this is long as hell XD
--
On Fae faith: The fae pantheon is something like the Hindu one in that all gods and goddesses are seen as reflections of the big All-There-Is. The name of this translates roughly to Heart-of-Worlds (there's a word for the spiritual heart and a word for the physical one) or Soul-of-Worlds. The 'worlds' in question are the celestial, aetherial/astral, mana/magical, and physical planes.
You'll hear Vicky sometimes discuss the Lady and the Lord. These beings are Lord Day and Lady Night, and it's not quite accurate to call them a god and goddess. Rather, the Lord and Lady ARE Yang and Yin. Their children are the deities of the fae pantheon. [Yukie aside: Thus far I know of four gods and four goddesses - four seems to be a significant number for fae sometimes.]
While the fae might not exactly worship members of other pantheons they don't deny the divinity of them. Rather it's believed that these pantheons are born of other emanations from Heart-of-Worlds. Different spheres on the same Tree of Life. You'll never see fae desecrate or vandalize a building or artefact sacred to some other god or goddess. Even if that deity is a jerk.
While deities aren't considered to be necessarily omnipotent or omniscient, Lord Day and Lady Night are closer to these. Each of them has a half of whole-power and whole-knowledge.
If you ever hear fae refer to St. Dorcha and St. Leukas, this is the Lady and the Lord, albeit referred to in such a way as to not make the poor mortal Templar knights jumpy. The Templars actually recorded the name of the community-working 'police service' branch of the Appointed as the Knights of St. Dorcha. (It was during the crusades and people had some set ideas about gender roles - compassionate discipline and mediation was seen as a mom-lady thing and so yeah.) They're still sometimes called this if working with Christian churches. It doesn't offend the fae to have the Lord and Lady called this way. They figure the Lord and Lady have better things to do than fuss overnames. Each of them has multiple names and epithets anyhow. And the Christian knight guys gave them nice, accurate types of names, with 'Dorcha' meaning 'dark' and 'Leuk' being the proto-Celtic for 'light'. (Lugh and Llew come out of this.)
While the Night and Day Courts principally revere the Lady and Lord respectively, it's well understood that revering one is revering the other. They're two halves of something much greater.
The day sacred to the Lord is the Summer Solstice; for the Lady it's the winter Solstice.
---
On the Bastion: The Hallowed Bastion is a wellspring of the Dark, much like Lea Monde. It wasn't uncommon for the Kildeans to centre their cities on intersections of ley lines and on wellsprings thus. Because they knew well how to live with such energy and respected it, there really wasn't a problem with doing such until people - outsiders mostly, but sometimes Kildeans - tried to grasp for the power suffusing and protecting these cities. This inevitably ended in disaster, as when the wellspring of Lea Monde erupted.
The late Cardinal Batistum is responsible for the curse on the city that ignited this event. Intending to grasp the wellspring and the Dark for himself, Batistum used a taboo magic to kill near every living being in the city. Every human who dies in the city therefore finds their soul entangled by the corrupted energy, and is unable to pass on into the next life. Truly, these people become borderline-Heartless possessing a body. For all intents and purposes their Dark-burdened hearts should separate fully from their bodies and souls, and the latter be born in the World that Never Was as Nobodies. However this natural (albeit highly strange) process is arrested by the curse. This act cost him dearly, and he began to sicken and die little by little after this deed. It was the discovery that the death of Lea Monde was no natural disaster that drove Sir Roméo Guildenstern, then the head of the Iocan Knights of the Crimson Blade, over the edge into a full breakdown.
It is not only the Dark that can cause a splitting of heart and body/soul. Indeed, an overabundance of light can be just as disrupting for the equilibrium of a being. This fate befell many of the Riskbreakers, who underwent a highly-experimental 'locking' of their hearts and memories under the supervision of Steward LeSait. Artificial keys crafted from the light-saturated hearts of people (inevitably criminals convicted of a capital offense - they were seen as 'acceptable' to use this way after the efforts to reform them by supersaturating their hearts with light led to the collapse of said hearts and the transformation of the person into a light-based 'heartless' being and a Nobody) were utilized to block off a Rickbreaker's emotional heart in order to make him or her more ruthless and less inclined to succumb to compassion, and also to hide traumatic memories from them. Ashley Riot is a good example of what happens to a person when this artificial lock gives way. Jan Rosencrantz is a good example of what can happen to a person who undergoes too many 'treatments' with these false keys. While he believed himself to be his own man and motivated by his own desires, he was in fact motivated by a composite of several layers of fractured memory and orders. To call Jan 'brainwashed' would be quite accurate. It was, after all, very easy for LeSait to plant in the open heart of a Riskbreaker his own desires; the heart, once locked again, temporarily accepted these as its own. But the locks were not permanent, as the keys were false.
Some of the Crimson Blades underwent this treatment as well as a way of barring the darkness from their hearts permanently (they thought). The attack on the Bastion's prince, Ansem, was carried out by six of such people. They were, at the time, on medical leave (suffering from the effects of their 'locks' beginning to break down and their hearts beginning to fracture), and were thus able as patients to access the storage-place of false light-keys. They attempted to use this key on Ansem to bar the darkness from entering the young prince's heart, seeing their actions as 'saving him'. Unfortunately, they fractured his heart, and it's only the fact that he was a child and therefore possessed of a very resilient, 'flexible' heart that it mended enough that he did not experience the sort of shattering that led to their breakdown. It was this event that caused the birth of Ansem's 'brother', Xenos (later Xemnas). Xenos, a 'sleeping' heart and whole awakened soul, resided in Ansem's heart and mind until the Prince's catastrophic, fanatical effort to restore balance to the worlds by opening the cosmic wellspring of the Darkness. When Ansem willingly separated his heart from his body (this is, incidentally, the way humanshaped Heartless come to be), Xenos remained there as the Nobody. Ansem's soul was, at this time, asleep and recovering from the reawakened memories of the disaster that led to Xenos's birth. Xenos therefore protected his brother's soul.
It should be noted that Kildeans refer to people with multiple selves or personalities as 'share-soul'. They believe that a protector soul is born in a person to protect the existing soul from harm, as Xenos was for Ansem. More than one guardian soul can exist on a body at any time.
---
On Erebos: Erebos is known for being a dead land and a corrupted one, ruled by a god who long ago left sanity behind. This was not always the case, however. When Thanatos was younger, and stable, the land was not desert land and the 'blight' that affects every plant or creature within it did not exist. As well, the Necropolis palace did not shift its inner configuration constantly. It was Thanatos's descent into anger and grief, and then into madness, that caused the land to sicken and experience desertification.
Erebos was always dark (its name is apt) but not always desolate. If one looks closely, one can see the echoes of what existed before Thanatos went completely nuts. The rivers, for example, are still clear, and though a soul will certainly be affected by drinking from Lethe or Mnemosyne, the water is no poison. The underground river Sanzu, which all souls must cross on their path to Erebos and their own rebirth, was always absurdly cold as well. (The fact that it IS so cold is what makes its status as a trial so effective: the worse a life lived by a soul, the longer it takes to cross the river. It can take YEARS for the soul of a mass-murderer to get across, and the river is cold enough that for all intents and purposes it should be long since frozen. One who has reached the other side of the river is considered to be cleansed of the majority of their sins, though their karma lingers and they must atone further when reborn.) The weird albino plants don't bear poisonous fruit, but most are too put off by its appearance to eat it. [Yukie aside: I don't blame them.] Only the most resilient and determined of flora and fauna make their home here, and most are terribly strange to mortal eyes. They're not without a curious beauty, though. For example, the enormous moths that feed from the flowers of the albino plants are extremely pretty. They're just...huge. The largest subspecies has a wingspan of eighteen inches.
The one plant that is inevitably dangerous is one that's slowly becoming more common as Thanatos's madness deepens. This is the Rose of Oblivion/Rosa tartaros which feeds on life-energy and mana. A being 'given' to these flowers becomes their nourishment, and the energy that feeds the roses also feeds the nut who's making them grow all over by being crazy. They're probably quite poisonous, but no one is mad enough to try to make the hips into jam or tea. Thanatos might try it if he weren't so damned lazy, but then again he might not. It's hard to say.
On the Necropolis: The insides of it shift around because the master of the house is crazy. Enough said. The number of rooms remains more or less constant, but where they are can vary immensely. The only ones that don't move are the observatory (always in the highest tower), the library (always on the Western side of the palace), and the god's personal chambers (always at the heart of the palace).
The library is something of a curiosity. One might wonder how the hell Thanatos got all those books until one considers the sheer volume of dead languages and lost literature in the worlds. When a language dies, it comes here. When a body of literature is lost, it goes here. For an equivalent in this world, consider the Library of Byzantium. Every book lost from there would be in the library at Erebos.
Needless to say it's not uncommon to find Thanatos taking up the entire sofa in there reading. It's probably the library that's kept him from going even madder from loneliness and isolation.
[Yukie aside: What I've 'seen' of the palace looks a hell of a lot like Gaudi gone Gothtastic. Why Gaudi? Well. Art Nouveau is a very, VERY organic style. Look at the Casa Batllò. Specifically, look at the support pillars. Do those not look like bones. Yeah. That's why. There's a lot that looks Guimard-esque too.
---
There's a bunch of stuff in it that you'd think makes no sense - like why the hell would a god need a bath, or a samovar. WHY WOULD A GOD WANT TEA XD Well - call 'em creature comforts? He sort of made things weird on himself by becoming a lich. He forgets he doesn't have to breathe sometimes too. And his bed's ridonkulous. It's more like - there's a very squishy divan and then he's got this bastardload of soft pillows of varying sizes all over that, and several blankets (he's always cold). I keep wanting to draw this thing, it looks comfortable.
Usually when he overexerts when 'riding with' someone, he ends up flopped halfway off it sprawled out like a drunk on the floor. Tacgnol dignityfail.
Also, he makes an adorably pissy chibi. And he's stupidly pretty. The reason he used to manifest looking like one of his incarnations (he doesn't have much energy to do that anymore except when he's dream trolling) is that he is, in his humanlike native form, uncanny-valley beautiful. If he showed up like that in front of a person their brain would go DOES NOT PARSE WHAT THE FUCK THIS PERSON IS NOT POSSIBLE. That and lol creepy black eyes.
The rood mark on his back's all screwy.
And in closing he's not always a dickhole! Just - most of the time XD; When he's going 'hi I'm the psychopomp' and being the reaper he's not an ass. Even if it's to someone he frigging despised in life. Once they die, the person who pissed him off no longer exists. Their soul crosses the river, drinks from Lethe (and gets a little water from Mnemosyne - this is how people recall past lives but some people's souls forget they have the water), and gets reborn. The exceptions of course are the souls of Ror and her knight, who he pissyfaces at ALL THE TIME (ah unrequited love UR DOIN IT RONG) and he actually once broke a rule and kicked both of them into the Lethe because he was having a giant snit. Dork. But - yes. If Vicky were to fall in battle against him he'd go "NYAH" for about five seconds, then settle down and go "okay, c'mere and let's get you across the Sanzu, fae-soul; it shouldn't take too long."
DORK DORK DORK god this is long as hell XD