Once
Once upon a time the world was flat.
Unicorns lived in magical glades, tended by winged sprites and tiny elves.
And there was a vast difference between being dead and staying dead. And that difference was a simple matter of choice.
Yeah. Simple as that. A man (or woman) could simply say 'I'm tired of this life business' And give up on breathing. And later, once sufficiently dead, he could decide that he'd like to go pay cousin Eustace a visit in the country and he'd be there, quick as a thought, rattling chains or moaning through keyholes.
Then, something happened. It was gradual of course - time being relative and 'sudden' simply meaning 'details lost to human memory.' - but irrevocable.
So, before this 'something' - which we will call 'the sundering' since that's what everyone else calls it- happened people had a pretty good grip on things. Flour spoiled in the jars or bread molded over because the piskies got to it, or fires would erupt in forests unannounced because will-o-whisps were angry, and people died just because, and they came back for the very same reason. And for the most part they were spot on.
:
But things changed around the sundering. Men wanted to understand things. They invented enzymes and bacteria that were invisible to the eye, and they invented refraction that could focus light and create fire, and they invented disease, sickness, infirmary, and they invented death, and the dead, and the insurmountable barrier between them.
Science killed the unicorns.
(besides, unicorns - the female ones at least - are actually vile, mean-spirited creatures. Many an Elf had been trampled and gored in the course of tending the glades. This leads some to believe that they had a hand in the sundering, selling out the secrets of the universe in order to make a place for themselves in the new world. And who can blame them. It was an inevitability. And it was either them, or the unicorns.)
Right, so science killed the unicorns. But it wasn't all astrolabes and microscopes, oh no. Philosophy was as much a part of the physical sciences as experimentation was. Great thinkers would sit for hours on end and sort of guess stuff, as they had done since the beginning of time. And it would lead them to some really nutso ideas. And in that time, just around the middle of the sundering, there were four schools of thought that managed to siphon off the last of the worlds magic.
The first were the Algrins. Pronounced All-greens. They were botanists and apothecaries, healers and biologists. Their interest was in living things, plant, animals, and otherwise, and what it was that made them tick.
They came up with all sorts of kooky ideas, like humors - viscous liquids in the body that controlled mood and behaviour - and a blood tide that ebbed and flowed within all living things. There was even a common belief among them, highlighted in the Flora Angelicus Tract, that Plants were the purest and most pious of gods creations, and that even though plants were alive and possessing of a mind, their entire being was dedicated to constant prayer.
Eventually the Algrins sort of went collectively insane. In a sudden fit of practicality - what alcoholics often call a moment of clarity - Florida Algrin, the schools founder, rounded up and dissected the his three brightest students. Finding no Humors and no blood tide he retired to his bed and made his surviving students swear to continue the explorations he'd begun that day. Then, Florida Algrin promptly died, convinced that there was absolutely nothing that was keeping his 138 year old body going.
The school continued, and flourished, and their most learned students became known as the geomancers. You've probably never heard of them.
And then there was Ignacio Giovanni. He was an apothecary, though not a very good one, and he was obsessed with Florida Algrin's teachings. The geomancers, however, would not accept him. They saw him as a bumbler, and an ignoble butcher. Ignacio was just as interested in the workings of the human body as any other Geomancer, but unlike them he wasn't so much interested in the healing arts. In fact, Ignacio killed more test subjects than any single geomancer in his time. And when he was done he would find ways to re-animate the corpses and receive second hand accounts of the land of the dead. Later, Ignacio would meet Guido Romero, a self proclaimed medium and half hearted undertaker, and they would use Algrin's teachings as a springboard into their own endless ocean of crackpot ideas.
Their school was completely unique. One had to be naturally gifted to become a necromancer - a term they gave themselves as a form of bitten thumb at their geomancers who spurned them - And as they became the last few people who still trafficked with the now alienated and often lonely dead, their school grew where others all but perished.
They built their headquarters in the open in Rome and in the Catacombs in Venice, the city of bones that kept the gilded city above safe and try, in more ways than one. When the plague struck, they moved to Paris and found it teeming and most fruitful. And when most were afraid of possessed warriors and cannibals, they found helpful friends in Zimbabwe, friends who even taught the now ancient pair a thing or two. Their school was the second most helpful in history. Though you've probably never heard of them either.
The story of the elementalists is a sad one. They are, if I may use a school analogy without reproach, that kid that always gets picked on because they're too smart for their own good. No one took the elementalists seriously, you see. There was very little space for their sciences in a world ruled by faith. So when they said things like 'Everything is made up of spinning particles' everyone laughed. When they said 'said particles get hot when they spin faster, and cold when they spin slower' they were scoffed at, and when they said 'everything in the universe spins: The particles, planets, the stars, even god spins' they were run out of town, usually by the geomancers. They were the least loved of all the schools, the smallest, the frailest, the last picked in any sports. If anyone had taken the time to actually look at things the way they looked at things, they might have learned that they were the closest to the truth.
The final school was founded by a man known only as 'Greyface'. He was a merchant by some accounts, a Duke by others, but most usually - and most believably in my mind - he was a priest and advisor to a certain line of kings. Whatever he was he had the funding needed to organize his school without anyone knowing, until it had grown to match the size of the geomancers, and spread to rival the reach of the necromancers. They were hermetics, they were gnostics, they were alchemists. They did not know The Truth, but they knew A Truth and it was the most important truth of all. "There is no god." says the preamble to the principia hermetica. "There is only the faith in one. And faith, being a product of man, can be turned with the slightest of gestures. It is not a god who makes the sky stay up and the ground stay down, it is not a phantom hand or the devil that plucks the breath from mens chests and leaves their rotting husks. It is faith, belief, concentrated from every living being that makes this things happen. And with the faith in our hands, we are the gods."
A grim truth to be sure, especially when a certain greyface - as their most learned members take on their founder's dour persona as a mark of prestige - caught wind of the other lingering schools. Radicals that were an affront to their paradigm. How could they control the masses, and as a a result the universe, if there were these other wackos out there filling people with ideas like praying petunias and communicative corpses and spinning. And so, Greyface waged war on the other schools, silently but effectively. There were witch hunts and crusades in those times. Churches that had once told stories of spirits impregnating virgins and men reviving their best friends from the dead because they were REALLY looking forward to that dinner party, suddenly spoke of loathsome tales of defilers and commune with evil spirits. Kings that had once been mostly concerned with counting their coffers and mounting the prettiest virgins in the land became suddenly transfixed with the ways of the universe and had scientists, real scientists, on their pay-rolls.
The other schools were slowly having their last bit of power torn from them. The necromancers sounded the horn. The geomancers said 'leave us heathens' and slowly died out. The Elementalists; they'd switched sides, sold out, became hired geeks for the goon squad. And the remainders went into hiding. The alchemists called that time, and the time just before it - the time when all the schools had formed - the sundering. And as a result, so does everyone else.
Once upon a time the world was flat.
Unicorns lived in magical glades, tended by winged sprites and tiny elves.
And there was a vast difference between being dead and staying dead. And that difference was a simple matter of choice.
Yeah. Simple as that. A man (or woman) could simply say 'I'm tired of this life business' And give up on breathing. And later, once sufficiently dead, he could decide that he'd like to go pay cousin Eustace a visit in the country and he'd be there, quick as a thought, rattling chains or moaning through keyholes.
Then, something happened. It was gradual of course - time being relative and 'sudden' simply meaning 'details lost to human memory.' - but irrevocable.
So, before this 'something' - which we will call 'the sundering' since that's what everyone else calls it- happened people had a pretty good grip on things. Flour spoiled in the jars or bread molded over because the piskies got to it, or fires would erupt in forests unannounced because will-o-whisps were angry, and people died just because, and they came back for the very same reason. And for the most part they were spot on.
:
But things changed around the sundering. Men wanted to understand things. They invented enzymes and bacteria that were invisible to the eye, and they invented refraction that could focus light and create fire, and they invented disease, sickness, infirmary, and they invented death, and the dead, and the insurmountable barrier between them.
Science killed the unicorns.
(besides, unicorns - the female ones at least - are actually vile, mean-spirited creatures. Many an Elf had been trampled and gored in the course of tending the glades. This leads some to believe that they had a hand in the sundering, selling out the secrets of the universe in order to make a place for themselves in the new world. And who can blame them. It was an inevitability. And it was either them, or the unicorns.)
Right, so science killed the unicorns. But it wasn't all astrolabes and microscopes, oh no. Philosophy was as much a part of the physical sciences as experimentation was. Great thinkers would sit for hours on end and sort of guess stuff, as they had done since the beginning of time. And it would lead them to some really nutso ideas. And in that time, just around the middle of the sundering, there were four schools of thought that managed to siphon off the last of the worlds magic.
The first were the Algrins. Pronounced All-greens. They were botanists and apothecaries, healers and biologists. Their interest was in living things, plant, animals, and otherwise, and what it was that made them tick.
They came up with all sorts of kooky ideas, like humors - viscous liquids in the body that controlled mood and behaviour - and a blood tide that ebbed and flowed within all living things. There was even a common belief among them, highlighted in the Flora Angelicus Tract, that Plants were the purest and most pious of gods creations, and that even though plants were alive and possessing of a mind, their entire being was dedicated to constant prayer.
Eventually the Algrins sort of went collectively insane. In a sudden fit of practicality - what alcoholics often call a moment of clarity - Florida Algrin, the schools founder, rounded up and dissected the his three brightest students. Finding no Humors and no blood tide he retired to his bed and made his surviving students swear to continue the explorations he'd begun that day. Then, Florida Algrin promptly died, convinced that there was absolutely nothing that was keeping his 138 year old body going.
The school continued, and flourished, and their most learned students became known as the geomancers. You've probably never heard of them.
And then there was Ignacio Giovanni. He was an apothecary, though not a very good one, and he was obsessed with Florida Algrin's teachings. The geomancers, however, would not accept him. They saw him as a bumbler, and an ignoble butcher. Ignacio was just as interested in the workings of the human body as any other Geomancer, but unlike them he wasn't so much interested in the healing arts. In fact, Ignacio killed more test subjects than any single geomancer in his time. And when he was done he would find ways to re-animate the corpses and receive second hand accounts of the land of the dead. Later, Ignacio would meet Guido Romero, a self proclaimed medium and half hearted undertaker, and they would use Algrin's teachings as a springboard into their own endless ocean of crackpot ideas.
Their school was completely unique. One had to be naturally gifted to become a necromancer - a term they gave themselves as a form of bitten thumb at their geomancers who spurned them - And as they became the last few people who still trafficked with the now alienated and often lonely dead, their school grew where others all but perished.
They built their headquarters in the open in Rome and in the Catacombs in Venice, the city of bones that kept the gilded city above safe and try, in more ways than one. When the plague struck, they moved to Paris and found it teeming and most fruitful. And when most were afraid of possessed warriors and cannibals, they found helpful friends in Zimbabwe, friends who even taught the now ancient pair a thing or two. Their school was the second most helpful in history. Though you've probably never heard of them either.
The story of the elementalists is a sad one. They are, if I may use a school analogy without reproach, that kid that always gets picked on because they're too smart for their own good. No one took the elementalists seriously, you see. There was very little space for their sciences in a world ruled by faith. So when they said things like 'Everything is made up of spinning particles' everyone laughed. When they said 'said particles get hot when they spin faster, and cold when they spin slower' they were scoffed at, and when they said 'everything in the universe spins: The particles, planets, the stars, even god spins' they were run out of town, usually by the geomancers. They were the least loved of all the schools, the smallest, the frailest, the last picked in any sports. If anyone had taken the time to actually look at things the way they looked at things, they might have learned that they were the closest to the truth.
The final school was founded by a man known only as 'Greyface'. He was a merchant by some accounts, a Duke by others, but most usually - and most believably in my mind - he was a priest and advisor to a certain line of kings. Whatever he was he had the funding needed to organize his school without anyone knowing, until it had grown to match the size of the geomancers, and spread to rival the reach of the necromancers. They were hermetics, they were gnostics, they were alchemists. They did not know The Truth, but they knew A Truth and it was the most important truth of all. "There is no god." says the preamble to the principia hermetica. "There is only the faith in one. And faith, being a product of man, can be turned with the slightest of gestures. It is not a god who makes the sky stay up and the ground stay down, it is not a phantom hand or the devil that plucks the breath from mens chests and leaves their rotting husks. It is faith, belief, concentrated from every living being that makes this things happen. And with the faith in our hands, we are the gods."
A grim truth to be sure, especially when a certain greyface - as their most learned members take on their founder's dour persona as a mark of prestige - caught wind of the other lingering schools. Radicals that were an affront to their paradigm. How could they control the masses, and as a a result the universe, if there were these other wackos out there filling people with ideas like praying petunias and communicative corpses and spinning. And so, Greyface waged war on the other schools, silently but effectively. There were witch hunts and crusades in those times. Churches that had once told stories of spirits impregnating virgins and men reviving their best friends from the dead because they were REALLY looking forward to that dinner party, suddenly spoke of loathsome tales of defilers and commune with evil spirits. Kings that had once been mostly concerned with counting their coffers and mounting the prettiest virgins in the land became suddenly transfixed with the ways of the universe and had scientists, real scientists, on their pay-rolls.
The other schools were slowly having their last bit of power torn from them. The necromancers sounded the horn. The geomancers said 'leave us heathens' and slowly died out. The Elementalists; they'd switched sides, sold out, became hired geeks for the goon squad. And the remainders went into hiding. The alchemists called that time, and the time just before it - the time when all the schools had formed - the sundering. And as a result, so does everyone else.
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