Guardians-vese origfic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guardiansverse) wrote2030-02-06 08:54 pm
guardiansverse) wrote2030-02-06 08:54 pm
Worldbuilding!
Picture human souls like little generators of magical energy, which can be connected in a grid. Each soul produces a small amount of energy.
This energy can be perceived in close quarters, or between people who are very close, as a very faint "presence"; normally people are too preoccupied or just not close enough to notice it. Ordinary people can learn, after much practice, to manipulate their own energy. But because there is so little of it, they can only achieve very minor effects: say boost the growth of a potted plant, heal a very small animal, or create a spark. However, souls naturally tend to connect into "webworks", through which certain people called Guardians can access a very large amount of this energy to use in various forms.
In each webwork, one Guardian will be an exception. This Guardian:
- Is the main node of the webwork: all other Guardians draw power through them
- Can perceive and manipulate souls, roots, and other Guardians' Anchors
- Isn't consciously chosen by the community, but ascends through a coalescing of popular sentiment that comes to see them as a central symbolic figure to the community's identity and ideals. No one in-universe quite knows how it works. Could happen to anyone who happens to be the right person at the right time (though they'd have to be very well known in the community in question.)
- In the countries of Eloa as featured in 'verse stories, they are called the Land's Own Guardian and are connected to the physical land of a country. However! This is a historically and locally specific form and should not be understood as the default of how soul-magic works.
Webworks and belonging
Souls connect into webworks through a sense of belonging, community, and common destiny. Historically in the verse, this has mostly followed geographic and cultural lines and been especially linked to language. The links between people in a webwork are called filaments and usually form during the first two to three years of life around a person's first language and their early experiences with other strong sensory triggers like diet or music.
A person is normally fixed in a webwork by the time they're three or four and can speak fluently. It is not strictly impossible for a person to gain new filaments later in childhood or in adulthood, but very rare. Possibly the magic uses the same brain structures involved in language learning: it has to catch that early window to really take.
In theory, a person might have filaments connecting them to more than one community, if for example they moved countries at a critical age or have parents from different cultures. How other people feel about a person having a connection is a matter of circumstance and individual opinion.
A person doesn't have to be physically be with the community of their webwork: filaments stretch endlessly and don't wear down over time and distance. However, being actively ousted from the community is a magically traumatic experience that induces painful physical symptoms, "soul-hunger" that may fade over time, but never entirely heal while the person is outcast.
National webworks and countries:
In contemporary Eloa, webworks are almost exclusively tied to nationality, and thus to the land of a country as well as its people. Again this is the psycho-social shaping the magical: elsewhere and -when, things were and are different.
Filaments that lead into the land are called roots; in everyday usage most Eloan people don't make the distinction. Roots create a vast reserve of magical energy within the land itself, which the Land's Own Guardian can access and manipulate within the land's territory. For example, a Land's Own can use this energy to hasten the growth of crops in one part of the country, however the energy is not infinite and using it in one place inevitably diverts it from another, perhaps causing the Guardians in another part of the land to weaken. Soul-power is national a resource to be managed like any other, except complicated by the fact that only the Land's Own Guardian can access it.
Between clearly marked national borders are zones called borderlands, where things are amorphous. Some residual soul-power usually exists in those zones, and their inhabitants might have some faint or residual roots, but the Land's Own's connection and power is severely limited and can only be accessed with special concentration and effort. The exact shape that soul-magic takes in a borderland is shaped by circumstance: a badland between feuding countries is very different from a friendly buffer zone populated by multicultural families.
Like being physically away from one's community, physical distance from one's land has little effect on ordinary people, though Guardians are weakened. Exile is a particularly painful form of ousting as connections to both people and land are lost. An ousted person or exile still possess filaments and roots, but cannot connect with other souls' power; soul-hunger can be seen as a kind of magical phantom pain.
Only the Land's Own Guardian, or a central node Guardian of other kinds, can mete out the ultimate damnation: uprooting, truly severing a soul's filaments and roots. This will not kill a person in itself, but usually produces crippling depression leading most uprooted people to take their own lives. An uprooted Guardian will naturally lose all their power. This is Not Done in Civilized Nations.
Webworks don't mean that a community or country is in harmony: people still fight just as bitterly over what their country ought to be like. It's not unheard of, though not common, for a country to be in civil war without the webwork breaking down into smaller communities. Such a strained webwork cannot produce or support a Land's Own or even regular Guardians. A country's webwork can deteriorate slowly for many years; however, once it breaks, the country will inevitably fracture.
Guardians
A Guardian is made when a person experiences a formative moment of power, agency, and resolve. This moment creates a Centre: a tenet or belief, usually one that can be phrased as a condition. "If I [do/did X] then I can [accomplish Y]". A very common faith is "If I am in this certain place, then I can protect it", manifesting after a person's formative experience of fighting for their home (this in fact is where the term Guardian comes from.) As long as this belief is not proven wrong and the condition is met, a Guardian's Centre acts as both a reservoir and a focal lens for their webwork's soul-power, which they channel through a particular manifestation.
Guardians' powers come in four varieties, from most common to rarest:
- Place-based Guardians (most common; normally weakest) manifest increased physical prowess within their place of protection, or a limited area effect such as boosting the strength of a door or lock.
- For object-based Guardians, some object (or, more rarely, a plant or animal) represents their formative Centring experience, and is imbued with soul-power to strengthen it or give it some additional ability (flaming weapons are a Thing)
- Spirit Guardians manifest soul-power as a construct that takes the form of some living thing, most commonly animals. Those spirits are directed by the Guardian, share their senses, and can travel some small distance away from them. They can be damaged by normal means, but are extremely tough, and can't be killed - only dissipated.
- Most rarely, a Guardian will manifest some other effect that is created by the infusion of soul-power into their environment. This is usually the result of an uncommon and uncommonly powerful Centring experience, and the power tends to be correspondingly potent.
The experience of being Centred can be seen as the diametric opposite of the experience of trauma with its accompanying psychological and neurological changes. Guardians are not necessarily very confident or even mentally healthy outside their belief or condition, but their ability to wield soul-energy depends on having full, unshakable resolve in the faith of their Centre. If this faith is broken, so is the Guardian: a broken Centre means total mental collapse, and even where possible, recovery usually takes many years.
In addition to a Centre, Eloan Guardians have an Anchor: a kind of transformed root that "closes the circuit" of community-land-Guardian. An Anchor forms naturally after Centring and is effectively inert, with no psychological requirements. It can be removed or shattered by the Land's Own, causing the Guardian to lose their power, but the trauma is very minor next to uprooting and the Anchor will naturally recover over time. This makes Disanchoring a relatively common method of dealing with Guardians who have committed a crime or otherwise need to be punished or coerced.
The continent of Eloa is an early-to-mid 19th Century Europe-like setting in terms of geography, technology, social structures, and cultural flavour. The main four countries featuring in verse stories: Hyem and its seceded province Schervo, Adalas, and Ilyiga, borrow setting flavour from Austro-Hungary, Britain, and Italy respectively. Here follows a brief geopolitical timeline of events that are relevant to the stories, taking the revolution led by Festus Detrich in Hyem as a "year zero":
400 years pre-revolution: Hyem is established out of the unification of a dozen or so small kingdoms sharing cultural and linguistic heritage. One such kingdom, Schervo, remains stubbornly independent and hostile, protected along most of its border by the Eisenhorn mountain range.
~300 years pre-revolution: Duke Herne of Schervo bargains to marry the crown princess of Hyem and become kaiser of a unified nation, earning the sobriquet Herne the Landwright. However, soon after his ascension he is killed by a bastard son of the kaiser who claims the throne producing (questionable) documents of acknowledgement. Schervo remains absorbed into Hyem in an uncomfortable arrangement that grows and wanes in popularity over the following centuries.
~40 years pre-revolution: Hyem and Adalas have the first of a long series of clashes around trading rights on the Essine river, which marks their border. Adalas begins to industrialize and soon easily outstrips the more agrarian, conservative Hyem.
~15 years pre-revolution: Tensions in Ilyiga escalate into civil war. The war would continue, with intermittent period of stalemate, for the next half a century.
Revolution in Hyem: Festus Detrich, a soldier of humble origins risen to power within the Hyemi army, leads a cadre of generals in an uprising that, despite its brutality, gains wide popular support. The Hyemi nobility are decimated. The reigning kaiser saves his own life by signing into order a new parliament and is placed under house arrest in a summer house in Schervo. His son, Franz, is put in the care of Duke Emen Stattenholme, the most senior of the surviving nobility.
Detrich becomes Land's Own Guardian. Despite the normal ban on a Land's Own being involved in political or military affairs, he retains the loyalty of the people and a grip on the army. For the next twenty years, Detrich holds almost total power in Hyem. He pushes industrialization via militarization and initiates three border wars with Adalas, in which Hyem goes from barely holding its own to sweeping triumph; however, the rapid social changes and heavy military expenditure also slowly wear the nation down.
5 years post-revolution: Detrich pushes the kaiser to commit suicide, presenting his death as a murder by his Schervon lover Eda Vandavern. Emen Stattenholme becomes regent for the six years old Franz, and the only - though potent - check on Detrich's power.
16 years post-revolution: Popular ferment gathers power in Schervo after years of neglect while the bulk of Hyem's attention was on the Eastern border with Adalas. The twins Reylan and Ranna Vandavern, Eda's children, gradually gain power in a growing independence movement.
19 years post-revolution: Franz reaches his majority and is crowed kaiser in Hyem.
20 years post-revolution: As tensions with Schervo mount, Emen's daughter Amika is set to marry Erich von Scher, son of the Duke of Schervo. Shortly before the wedding goes ahead, the Schervon resistance makes its move and declare war for independence. Adalas supports the resistance with funding and arms, with the Vandavern twins as their main liaisons. As part of this support, Adalas recruits the services of Saul Samaren, the legendary mercenary known as the Rogue Guardian, to fight in the Schervon cause.
In the outcome of the war, Schervo gains independence, with Ranna as Land's Own Guardian and temporary political leader. Festus Detrich is killed by Samaren; Amika Stattenholme ascends as Land's Own in his place after securing peace with Adalas, and recruits Samaren into her own service, using him to kill Reylan. Kaiser Franz dismisses Emen Stattenholme as his key advisor. Amika and Ranna both determine to maintain good relations between Schervo and Hyem.
I have all sorts of questions. :)
How do webworks adapt to ethnogenesis? Or, conversely, to the dissolution of an ethnicity after genocide or assimilation?
I think you've said on FFA that you haven't worked out the worldbuilding details of soul restoration, but it seems that you intend to make it a thing. If Samaren's soul can be restored to him, might he experience crushing guilt for many of the things he's done, perhaps especially killing the man who rescued him? (I don't get the impression that Detrich was the one who uprooted Samaren in the first place, but I could be wrong/misremembering.) What kind of expiation or reparation would he have to make to attain a measure of peace?
no subject
1. I think that would depend on whether the cause for their being nonverbal has to do with language processing itself or with something else. If the latter, there shouldn't be a problem: they'll fix just as well by understanding a first language as by actively speaking it. If the former... they may need a lot more of the other potential fixing stimuli, like culture-specific foods and rituals, which if not provided could leave them adrift. It's sad to think about, but I do imagine this is hard world in which to have a language-related disability. Though then again, I also imagine many societies would have some routine for helping children who don't speak: some special rituals devised to embed them in the community to help their roots develop. Quite possibly this is one of the Land's Own's functions.
2. I'm thinking the logic here should continue to be that magic follows psychology - so it is about how people in a group understand themselves. If sufficient numbers of people in an existing group develop a new group identity and work to distinguish it, eventually the existing webwork would split, though I really can't say what the critical mass would be - depends on the group size and circumstances probably. I know the formation of a new nation-state is a sudden and violent shift, there is a specific moment in which a new Land's Own takes control of a new web, but that's the only kind of this sort of change I've had in a story so far... as for dissolution, there would be a connection between as many people as are left as long as any are left. As a group is assimilated, its children would gradually fix into new webs, but any already-fixed adults would stay in the old shrinking web until it was gone. Fuck that's also really sad. Fuck.
3. It is a thing, yes! I have had many thoughts. With Samaren, the thing is he does properly have a soul - it's the ability to connect to other souls that he lacks. So it would be not so much restoration of something innate to him, as fixing him into a webwork again. It would definitely have some effect on the way he relates to other people in that web, at least over time (a kind of sensory adjustment I imagine - like how the brains of people who have been blind for a very long time need to learn to see again?) But I don't think it would change his feelings about his past actions, at least not for a long while. Roots or no roots, he was never a good man: the most restoration that could probably be hoped for with him is giving him this sense of belonging that a webwork provides and hoping he'd translate it into attachment to the individual people within. Anyone outside that webwork is still out of luck.
(Which is a shame, I suppose, because the Monster Regains Soul, Also Gains Hideous Trauma trope is a neat one, but I'm afraid it's not at work here. Alas!)
(Also, Samaren's and Detrich's history is. Complicated. I don't wanna say anything I'm totally writing that story. But it's complicated. Woooo complications.)
no subject
That's probably true of all high- or highish-fantasy settings. They're fun to write about, but I wouldn't want to live in nearly any of them, even if I were a royal with magic at my disposal. That said, I imagine it would have been logical for a compensatory ritual to have developed over time.
Fuck that's also really sad. Fuck.
Me with the cheerful questions today. (I wonder if academics who have studied the nature of webworks in Eloa would be another interesting plotbunny…? Epistolary fic full of jargon. So hawt.)
So it would be not so much restoration of something innate to him, as fixing him into a webwork again. It would definitely have some effect on the way he relates to other people in that web, at least over time (a kind of sensory adjustment I imagine - like how the brains of people who have been blind for a very long time need to learn to see again?)
Do you see filaments as akin at all to mirror neurons, with some people having naturally more and others fewer? Maybe that analogy is off, given that Samaren would still lack empathy for most people even with his roots restored.
Looking forward to more Detrich and Samaren!
no subject
Yeah, I mean that's just what societies do, you know? I think when doing historical/medieval fantasy, people often bring in those modern assumptions that pre-modern medicine and understanding, disability would have been insurmountable, but that's just historical untrue. So I think it's good when worldbuilding to consider that people have been adapting forever.
Epistolary fic full of jargon. So hawt.
IT IS HAWT OKAY. Always needs more acafic. I should totally take advantage of the fact that I have two characters actually doing that kind of research.
Do you see filaments as akin at all to mirror neurons, with some people having naturally more and others fewer?
I think so, yes! Perhaps not that this has a direct effect on people's ability to empathize with individual others, but that it goes more with a general sense of belonging in your community? So someone who has more is not more inclined to feel for people in themselves, but would attribute more importance to people who they view as "like them" in this essential way and to being like those other people... so maybe more a kind of sense of identity or even conformity than empathy as such. Though since magic follows psychology, the amount of filaments would depend on how a person feels rather than vice versa.
(I have no idea how this would work in a contemporary identity politics environment. Can't even begin to guess. I'm sticking with my historical setting!)
no subject
Absolutely. The book Ancient Inventions really blew my mind on this count.
IT IS HAWT OKAY. Always needs more acafic. I should totally take advantage of the fact that I have two characters actually doing that kind of research.
Reylan's academic papers, with him as an unreliable narrator of his own brutality, would be terrifically chilling.