Introduction
The Light of the Keeper ensures that the Asivaa, the 27 islands that were the homes of the Keeper, the Athervannir and the most powerful of the Phalanx, are warm and bathed in its pulsing white blue light. The light itself is too bright to look directly at, and the Asivaa exist in a roughly circular pattern around the great orb. Each of the great fortresses and palaces that were the home to the mightiest of the graces exists within a time dilation. The passage of time in the Asivaa is much faster than in the rest of the Celestial Realm, meaning that a person who travels to the Asivaa without magical protection will experience the passing of many centuries while a person in the Losivaa regions or the Frost Margin might only have lived a couple of days. The Suraians have adapted in order to survive here and the Light of the Keeper has transformed them and all other living creatures that exist in close proximity to it. Some entities, like the Athervannir Horander exist outside of time itself and they are unaffected by the changes in the passage of time inside and outside of the Asivaa. Mortals who enter the Asivaa don’t instantly appreciate that time has speeded up, but if they leave again, they might discover that whilst decades have passed in their own lives, only a few hours have passed in the lives of their comrades. The Suraians who leave the Asivaa accept that their friends and relatives might not see them again for centuries, so they have adapted their society and culture to accommodate this. Some Suraians have breaks of 300-500 years in conversations with one another, which they believe can give them time to think and consider each point. Each Suraian community is known as an Academe, and is ruled by a learned council. Younger Suraians can find the councils frustrating as they appear to be able to decide on nothing at all, let alone take action. However, appearances can be deceiving, as the councils take a very long view when considering what actions to take; they think about how their decisions now might shape events in thousands of years time. Life for Suraians in the Academe is dedicated to the acquiring and archiving of knowledge, and Suraians have grown to see themselves as the sole protectors of information and wisdom in an increasingly ignorant universe. Because the Athervannir allowed them to stay within the Asivaa, viewing them as mortals who were neither ignorant nor offensive, most Suraians have become accustomed to living in immense comfort. Living conditions for the average Suraian are far higher than most other mortals; they live and work in vast book lined chambers, where they endlessly write, research and converse.
The Codex Arrus
The Codex Arrus is a library, venerated by the Suraians as the most sacred place in Celestium, however, it is an archive unlike any other in the Celestial Realm or the Five Dimensions. The Codex Arrus does not contain a single book. It is situated on the Aasiva of Lathorial and appears to outsiders as a gigantic set of bronze doors set in a wall of grey swirling cloud. The Codex chooses who it will admit and who it will bar its doors to and those that enter never see the same interior to the Codex twice. As the knowledge and dreams of the five dimensions constantly changes, so does the layout and contents of the library, The Suraians who serve as curators of the fragments of knowing that the library lets them see live within its ethereal walls, some parts of the library appear as part of everyday reality, with studies, living chambers and reading rooms. Other parts of the Codex are barely formed corridors and plazas of shifting ethereal cloud, or they appear as recreated memories and dreams, sometimes of the person who enters the room, sometimes of others entirely. Part of the Codex captures lost fragments of the past from across the five dimensions and beyond, songs, stories, chants and languages of long dead peoples echo throughout its hallways. PCs visiting the Codex must have some protection against time dilation using an item or a spell or find that centuries have passed while they have been in there.
The Suraian philosopher Tarkwin Majaris wrote:
“In this sense every Suraian, no matter how erudite or refined their mind is, enters The Codex Arrus as an illiterate. In reality every facet of its structure is a transcription of the library’s dreams, which are the product of forgotten knowledge, some of which is thought to be from realities which operated on the basis of different laws, but which no longer exist. For a long time, the significance of the library remained hidden and the mystery of its constant expansion fascinated my companions and I who could not, and in many ways still can’t, comprehend how it was growing. It became a central mystery which, imposed on us for the first time a sense of our limitations, for every discipline of knowledge we applied to it in our increasingly obsessive endeavours to understand it, revealed absolutely nothing about it. From the mystery of the library grew the conviction among us that there were forms of understanding that could not be derived from knowledge.”
The Glassmaker and the Codex
For countless millennia, the dreams of the library were undecipherable and unreachable until an old and decrepit Suraian called Ascartes had a strange and vivid dream, in which he held a piece of clear glass, sequestered with thin blood red lines. Upon waking, he fashioned the glass of his dreams and took it to the library. As he held it before a brick in the wall of the antechamber to the library, a wound streaked with the blood-beading lines of the glass opened in the wall, and he found a vast living reality open up beneath him as the library finally revealed its secrets. Each crystalline crack or division seemed to open up onto a different world and a different dream of the library. When he returned, with the look of someone who had seen much more than he could tell, he renounced his name and was thereafter The Glassmaker.
The Keeper and The Athervannir, confounded that a mortal could have figured out how to communicate with the library, examined the lense fashioned by The Glassmaker and were unable to understand how it was made or why it was able to reveal the dreams of the library. Levanto admitted that the secret of the glass was not for him to know, speculating that The Glassmaker was the only being who would ever be capable of creating it, that it was his dream, as much as it was the dream of the library, and the logic of the library’s dreams was one beyond any fundamental laws. Levanto, would often sit in The Glassmaker’s workshop silently watching him create his glass with a look of fascination in his eyes. A mutual understanding and respect developed between the two, and though The Keeper grew to resent and fear The Glassmaker for revealing his limitations, he never once dared to disrupt his work, sensing that Levanto would destroy him if he so much as touched a single hair on The Glassmaker’s head.
Comments