Sorcerer
"The difference between a wizard and a sorcerer is that between giving a child a trebuchet, and a child who *is* a trebuchet." - Vosis Fail, excommunicated Sophont of Yga.
There are many other words; eukoretic, like a nut whose shell is opened, never seen before, and, once eaten, never seen again, avatar, choreon, shaker, gateling, potalman, anarch, and prophet of chaos.
All descriptions for that rarest and extreme thing - a living being who is themselves a source of magic, not learned, seized, bargained for, or gifted, but an overflowing fountain of reality-altering power.
Such things are incredibly rare, for one to exist as a living person is even more so. No two of identical capacity, origin or nature have ever been reported. No two are ever exactly alike. No one experience can define the 'type' and it can be argued that there is no type at all, each is as precisely individual as a snowflake, a wrinkle in the world, like a spark in ash, or a fallen star.
"And to continue the analogy, a sorcerer is more alike unto a trebuchet that is also the Queen of Falox, who is also the color blue, which is also last week." - Vosis Fail, excommunicated Sophont of Yga.
Sorcerers cannot be predicted, systematized, controlled, or easily understood, each is an individual mystery and as a whole, they are a great miscellany. Their origins tend to be mythic, inhuman, baffling, and are possibly delusions. Stories tend to stick to them like glue, along with trouble.
This troubles and frustrates wizards a great deal, not only has the sorcerer received their powers "for free", but often does not understand what they even are. But doesn't really bother the religious much as this is the kind of thing they pretty much expect to happen occasionally.
YOUR POWER
It’s likely you were either born with your powers, stumbled into them, sought them out, or had them forced upon you.
You might be a being of unusual descent, perhaps two diametrically opposed bloodlines from completely different alter-species meet in you, one demonic, the other divine, one fey the other deoth, one kind of trace ancestral magic mixing with another that was never expected to meet.
You could be a genetic chimera with your own twin, old legend says that Aeth who die in the womb still live on in some brighter, blazing realm where time runs differently, your twins intermixing in your flesh may connect you to this alter-person engaged in great deeds in a reality far different to yours, yet inexorably tied, cell-by-cell, to yours.
You may have been raised by a cult, the product of a deliberate ritual to create some ultimate being or a messenger to the gods, you could simply be an accident, strange lines of recessive mystic force wending their way blindly through generations, slowly attenuating until they are crossed with each other, and spark into unpredictable activity.
You may not be human at all. How much do you really remember about your childhood?
You could be a form of golem - human in material and arrangement but born from no womb at all, perhaps you were spilled from a wizard’s crucible, a homunculus, or you could be a legendary product of the land itself, created by a Lifian, one of the old forgotten spirits of Uud, spontaneously generated to defend it, patterned on a body lost in the forest or bog, holding stolen memories belonging to a dead man.
If you stumbled into power you could just be the seventh son of a seventh son or the eighth daughter of an eighth daughter, it’s an old wives’ tale but perhaps it is true.
You may have been a dream visitor to the Court of Spells. Some truly ancient spells have escaped their casters and become animate, in other cases, the original platonic conceptions of spells, which had to be formed in the ether before the thoughtforms could be used in our world, remained and slowly grew in complexity and awareness, others are simply emergent beings produced from the ripples or leftover magical cruft produced by endless re-castings of the same spell. These beings live together in a strange palace deep in the unbidden reaches of Dream, where few mortal minds can go and still return. Maybe they liked you and found you charming, or you may be related to one of them, an accidental child or descendant of their creator.
Perhaps you are possessed by a sleepwalking god? Or you could be the tulpa of a sleeping god’s dream.
It may be that the beginning of your tale is the end of a much longer one, one forgotten to you. Many, many, many people have dreamed of 'ultimate power', to be something like what you are now; a source of magic. Some have even achieved it. What then? It never works out the way they expect. Memory wiped, body altered, old powers lost and new ones gained without any understanding of their context or use. You may be the forgotten villain of an unknown legend, one that ended with their victory and disappearance, displaced in distance or time.
Maybe you were forced into heroism, or used as an expendable vessel for magical power, for the best of reasons, to defeat a terrible monster or protect a people, inducted across the boundary of reality by a terrifying local psychopomp, aghast at their own actions. Introduced to a Parliament of Souls, a conclave of ancient wizard ghosts in some memory-etched tower on the borders of death. The wraiths of such beings still shimmer with remembered power, perhaps they watch now from behind your eyes, arguing with each other and betting on the outcome.
Many strange forces might seek a Gateway into our reality, and the form of a person, whether human, chimera, or golem, can be an excellent solution. Such a gate can move itself around, so those beyond can see a variety of things, making it more of a peep-hole than a gate perhaps, it’s easy to see out of and hard to get into and doing so usually destroys the gate. A gate of this kind can defend itself and even run away from agents trying to use it. It is mortal and bonded to time, so will soon enough die, which, from the perspective of those beyond, can be useful.
A King-Hive is an ethereal relic or half-real imagined place. The Optimates, the once-rulers of Uud at the height of its power, had minds like labyrinths of hidden magic, inner realms patrolled by para-selves and auto-tulpas, each as capable of wizardly as any normal mage. With their death, their minds could not die, and were held together by magnificent armories of encrypted semi-intelligent thaumopsychology. These mazes of spells and the plans for now-dead trans planar empires fall and spiral through timeless non-space as leaves washed downstream. Does one of these now look out through your eyes?
You might be Grey Blooded, a vortex in the skin of Uud, with something of Yggsrathaal in you. Enough to burrow into or pierce the skin of the real, but if that is done, what comes through? It can depend on the nature of the piercer, sometimes raw elemental power, as if from some other plane, or horrors from a nightmare realm. You might be a living plug over an oil well of magic or a bandage over a wound in reality.
The Dragons of Uud are almost all gone, disappeared during the fall, some say dead, others say they escaped into the Dragon Dimension, curled and stacked upon one another. Do micro dragons act like blood cells in your body, curled up sleeping in your veins, dreaming dreams of fire, holding onto their own tails in an ouroboros ring and holding onto oxygen molecules with their claws?
BURNING OFF THE ENERGY
The dream of power is yours, your primary problem is finding some way to control it, to burn it off somehow so you don't explode.
Dancing, chanting, singing, muttering, drumming, all kinds of music might work. Shaking, gibbering, screaming, or speaking in tongues could do it. Bleeding light, breathing fire, snow, or sunlight or filling your eyes with the sky, darkness, night, or spring so that they flow out of your gaze might be helpful. Compulsively repeating actions or obsessively constructing symbols, chokes, fetishes, cairns, small temples, ritual circles, or sculptures of some kind. Bathing in natural water, or flowing blood, aging or de-aging in response to stress, cryomania, pyromania, arson, infinite hair growth and compulsively eating hair. Tattoos and scarification might give you some sense of control over the powers churning inside your own body. Animating nearby objects with rudimentary life, giving basic life forms sentience and speech or compulsively converting nearby weather effects into their opposite might also help.
LIFE AS A SORCERER
Did you ask for this? You can't remember.
For all the infinite variety and uniqueness of sorcerers, they can still be divided into two broad types, two reasonable responses to being what they are. There are those who are enjoying it and those who are not.
Some are crushingly depressed, hungering for control, hunched in on themselves, terrified of what they might do, searching endlessly for some form of self-control, some way to just, turn it all off.
Others absolutely love it. They dance to their own tune and inner rhythms. They actively want to have an episode and are thrilled to discover what life will bring them. They never want it to end.
There are a few other commonalities
Your behaviors tend to be so unpredictable and dangerous that it's necessary to keep moving. You don't want to be trapped in the same place too long, which can result in angry reactions from the authorities. Being, essentially, a hobo who is also a bomb, and a flamethrower, you are generally disliked by those in power.
It’s almost impossible for you to get stable work or interface with settled systems long enough to gain expertise or rise up the hierarchy. You almost certainly cash poor. And property poor. And every other kind of poor.
You don't usually stay around long enough to read any thick book you can't carry. But you do tend to learn a lot of different things from different people, and have a wide, though possibly shallow, experience of the world. As well as often, experience in petty crime and avoiding guards. You tend to be a lot more street smart than wizards.
You have a lot of complex internal problems, to the extent that by comparison, you are rather un-worried about common physical threats and political stuff. You are more concerned with the consequences of the magic they will use to resolve them and the domino effect of complex internal processes being messed with. You are also probably adaptive and improvisational. And since you do not know what you yourself are going to do, it’s relatively easy to talk you into following another’s lead, though not for very long.
It's also likely you are at least slightly more martial and sneakier, prepared both to run away and to run towards, more than most wizards. You may actually have been in real fights, though you probably didn't win, you still survived. Since you are accustomed to your abilities flipping out on you and being left in the lurch, surviving this has become a known, if not predictable, challenge.
Your friends, the people around you, are stability, continuity, and acceptance. They are your primary chance to learn about magic, culture, fighting, faith, other worlds, and other’s lives, in-depth. These could be the longest most stable relationships you might ever have. The closest you might ever get to having a home is those who travel with you. Try not to blow them up.
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