“Have you ever heard of the concept ‘consensus reality’?”

“I think so, but I never felt like I understood it.”

“So usually when people talk about consensus reality, they mean something social. Like, the US Government sure owns a lot of guns and bombs and tanks. Who controls those? Look at objective fact, and you see ‘sure looks like a bunch of soldiers and pilots are holding those things, must be them.’ But ask just about anybody and they’ll say ‘The President’. Everyone agrees that it’s the President who is allowed to decide where, when, and whether to use all the guns. That’s not fact, though. That’s just consensus reality.”

“Sure...”

“The big secret, though, is sometimes it’s much more literal. Every so often, something breaks the consensus for a moment, and then just about everything is up for grabs - time, identity, cosmology, everything. The stories that live in our heads are loose, bouncing off each other and reacting, until the breach is papered over.”

“Why don’t we see any sign of that?”

“Because consensus reality doesn’t believe that consensus reality ever fails. And that’s why it’s secret. If a tenth of the population thought this kind of thing could happen - then it might never actually fix itself when it did. Some people think that’s what was normal in prehistory, when all the holy books got written.”

“So why are you telling me this?”

“Because you were five feet from ground zero - the schizophrenic homeless guy, not that it was his fault but they tend to be flashpoints - and you looked at it without flinching, did something that was reasonable whether or not reality was going to ensue. And your reflexive dream-form was useful - we wear more than one name, but the one you fall back on is the one you can trust.”

“Assume I sign on. What happens? Quit my day job?”

“Not entirely. We do need to spend a lot of time in normal lives to keep us anchored. But yeah, you take a month of leave and start drawing a salary from us, you’ll be training for a while. Showing you what needs doing and seeing what you can do.”

“I’m... probably in.”

My blood parents I never knew. Berliners, probably, but they left me in an anarchist-affiliated charity orphanage in Potsdam before I was six months old, so all I know for sure is that they named me Artur. I was adopted fairly late as these things go, about five, by the people who I consider my parents: Jurgen and Verena Carolingt. They could have had blood children, but chose to adopt, and frequently. When I was twelve I had five foster-sibs, but they slowed down after that; I only have two more sibs from the next decade, and they were adopted as the eldest four of us moved out. That's not counting Leo, who was their second fosterling; he was a real hellraiser and chafed at the academic's morality they tried to enforce, so he ran away to join a street gang. I got back in touch with him years later; for all that he left, he was as angry as me about - but that's getting ahead of myself.

My parents were academics, professors at Viadrina Universitat in Frankfurt-Oder, but in their more subtle way raised hell just as much as Leo. They grew up during the first partition, Da in East Germany and Ma in West Berlin, and they both hated the idea of hiding what they believed to cater to the powerful. They didn't budge in their convictions that everyone deserved a chance or that their conclusions deserved to be followed to their end. They believed in equality and metahuman rights, even when that was fairly unpopular, and they lived it. I'm a norm as were they, but my sibs are an even split of norms and orks plus one dwarf. They didn't adopt elves, who got snapped up more easily by more prejudiced parents, nor trolls, who posed logistical hurdles they didn't think they could deal with. (They felt bad about leaving out trolls, though, and donated generously to several charities for them. I do too, now, in their memory.) They budged just as little in their research, not even to stay quiet about it. When their research topics - applied sociology and economics of magic, for Da and Ma, respectively - developed from postulates to specific, inconvenient predictions and prescriptions for the practical world which got the corps to lean on their deans to quiet them down or kick them out, even so they stuck to their guns.

There is no good term for "the entirety of places a person can visit", truly. 'The world'? There are many of them. 'The universe'? Again, it's seems quite likely that it is not singular. 'Reality'? Outright incorrect; many of the places one can visit are decidedly, distinctly un-real. Many scholars would say there are two universes, or worlds, or what have you; there is the one we know, to which humans are native, where the planets orbit stars, light is law and the Judgments rule from atop the Great Chain of Being. This is the realm of Is. Then, on the other side of mirrors, behind the glass, lies Parabola; ruled by the Fingerkings, home to great cats and the eldest of devils, outside time and life and law. This is the realm of Is-Not. They neatly carve up all that could be; a thing either Is, or it Is Not, and lives in the corresponding realm, and so these are the two univeres. That's the theory, at least; as you may have gathered, I disagree.

Firstly, consider the Neath. A great cavern under the earth, where sunlight does not reach and most of the laws of nature are suspended. But merely suspended, not negated; death is strange in the Neath, but not unknown. Breaching the Great Chain and elevating oneself (or, theoretically, debasing oneself, were it not that the Great Chain considers humans to be nearly as debased as it is possible to be) is possible, here, but difficult, and nearly impossible without a counterweight which moves the opposite direction on the Chain with the same magnitude. It is easy for us to access Parabola, especially compared to the Surface, but we are manifestly not in Parabola, as you may note easily from the fact that causes lead to effects, motion passes through the intervening space, and the vast majority of locations are in the same place on Sunday as they will be on Friday week. We are not Is-Not, but not quite Is either.

Then, consider Irem, far across the Zee. Irem sits outside time, and one can take a stroll through its pillared streets and find yourself in Parabola, then wake from that dream and find yourself in an unfamiliar bed in a room you will have never entered. Irem will be, is, and has ever been, all at once, and ideas may be held in the hand, there. It will be very much like Parabola, and clearly will not be in the realm of Is, but it will not quite be Is-Not either. (The odd tense in which one will always find oneself speaking of Irem will be another aspect of its unreality.)

These establish that the distinction between Is and Is-Not blurs and has gradations, not a simple binary. But even within the Neath, there are stranger realms in evidence. Consider Frostfound. It is a realm of ice, in which time does not pass linearly, suggesting that it Is-Not. And the reflections in the mirror-bright ice of Frostfound have a life of their own, likewise similar to Parabola's gateways. But one cannot reach, or even see, Frostfound from dreams, and the Fingerkings not only have no power within its walls, but appear to find it utterly terrifying. If time is a river flowing to the ocean, Parabola is a placid lake where eddies swirl in any or every direction, but Frostfound is a boulder sitting mid-stream. It defies time, deflecting or imprisoning anything which attempts to impose causality upon it. This is very hard to reconcile with any gradation of the Is/Is-Not distinction, indicating strongly that it lies outside that spectrum.

I submit that the explanation can be found in one myth of Frostfound's formation, which is in at least some sense true. This myth goes that a stray Judgment entered the Neath; not the Lovelorn King who Surfacers call 'the Sun' but a star from a far-distant land. This traveling king sought something, something it felt a powerful need for. It sought it across the High Wilderness but in vain, for what it sought is not. Judgments cannot visit Is-Not, nor would they be permitted if they tried, but it heard that the Lovelorn King had made a realm outside star's light and yet not Parabola, and so it opened the Avid Horizon and entered the Neath. When it was here, it sought its desire in the irrigo depths of the Cave of the Nadir, it sought it from the Mountain of Light which is the god Stone, and it sought it in the peligin deeps of the Zee, but still in vain. the Traveling King spoke to the shapelings of the Neath-roof, and learned that what it sought cannot be found in any star's light - d___ inconvenient, as it was itself a star. But it is the Neath, and breaking the Chain is possible. The Traveling King could make itself no longer a star. It carved from its timeless nature an eternal island, so that whatever changes it might undergo would have always been so, and yet it would still know how to appreciate things it had once wanted; this was Irem. It carved out its memories of its search and the hunger Stone's light had amplified, and placed them as a great castle at the edge of Stone's light, and this was Kingeater's Castle. But it was still too much a star, and so it carved out the desire itself, creating something that eternally Was and yet Is Not. The twin paradoxes of this need being always true-in-the-past but never true-in-the-present, and of the Traveler excising the need and yet remaining driven by it, made water, minds, and even time freeze around it, and that was Frostfound. And then the Traveler, no longer a king, went East from Irem, seeking its desire in the unlit eternity of the East.

Frostfound is, according to this story, a crystallized paradox, Is-Not created from the raw soul-stuff of a Judgment, which is anathema to Is-Not. Like a hole dug so deep that it wraps around to fall from the sky, Frostfound is at the same time the direct opposite of Parabola and a duplicate of it. This explains a number of events and phenomena where items extracted from Frostfound both have transportative properties reminescent of prisoner's honey but also inhibit prisoner's honey or Glass-work by their presence. I posit furthermore that just as the nature of Law-distortion, as developed from Parabola and demonstrated in the Iron Republic, forms the discipline of the Red Science, investigating the nature of Frostfound in detail will reveal an equal and opposite discipline, which I shall provisionally name the Blue Science. This is not limited exclusively to Frostfound; the Drownie bubble-London of Dahut, on the floor of the Unterzee, seems to operate along the same lines. (This suggests that the Fathomking may have some skill in the Blue Science, though as His Complexity is known to trade with the Fingerkings, that picture is manifestly - pardon the pun - a complex one.) Certain reports from the High Wilderness, in domains such as the Garden-King's realm which no longer possess a shining Judgment, also point to similar principles; I particularly note the Silent Saint and certain well-substantiated ghost stories. The Saint may have been formed by a similar mechanism as Frostfound, but no record survives of its formation. The ghost stories are more intriguing; multiple stories from the former-Garden include principal figures capable of acting as living men for considerable time, hours or days, and which leave physical traces of their presence and actions, which remain even after their ghostly nature is discovered and the figure himself has disappeared. These walking shadows appear to share the Was-Yet-Is-Not nature of Frostfound and the Blue Science, and without the direct involvement of a Judgment, which is quite intriguing; should I venture to the High Wilderness myself, confirming and investigating these stories shall certainly be my first research subject. Broadly, I expect from these examples that the Blue Science is not capable of effects as dramatic and powerful as the Red Science, but that it is will also prove much easier to control and harness, avoiding a known shortcoming of that anarchic field.

I have written a chunk of fiction recently, just going to batch it all here.

Several-part The Secret World fic with some Phoenicians who aren’t idiots, of which the only canon one is Tanis. Also there are lesbians because one of Carmen Preda’s lines was just asking to be treated as innuendo. (And then I gave Zaha a girlfriend because I was mean to her.)

Kinky smut of Rebel Galaxy (written three years ago but only published this week), because one of the mercenaries you can hire is a hot Scottish woman with a very showy collar.

The first law of the Divine Shells is that no one can exist safely around others with a sufficiently large gap in degree of importance to the universe. The second law is that nothing short of divinity can traverse outwards from stronger worlds to weaker.

The third law is that dragons are not subject to the first two laws.

There are many terrifying beasts to be found in every world, but they are subject to the same laws as the common populace. A beholder cannot exist safely in the outermost world, and while individuals might manage to hold on, over centuries the species could not remain. (There are conspiracy theories about ancient aboleths which still sleep on the sea bed, having waited for the shells to change around them so that they can dominate the very fabric of reality as soon as they wake. But only theories.) Dragons, however, despite that fact that when fully-grown they are far too potent for even armies of ordinary men to handle, can and do pass to any world they please. Legends say that a dragon is a world unto itself, and so it can pass through even the most potently unstable realms of Faerie without being affected and affects nothing of its surroundings except by ordinary actions. Whether this is true, we do not know; none of the civilized humanoid races has ever determined, and even the benevolent dragons refuse to elaborate.

What we do know is that dragons come to our world to hatch their eggs. Typically they do not stay long - the evil chromatic dragons rarely stay at all, once the eggs hatch - but the wyrmlings all spend their first years of life in our world. Most move on after about a century of life, around the point where their spark grows beyond what ordinary mortals can achieve here safely, but not all. The oldest dragon in recorded history was Silent Death, a mute white killed at the age of 524 by a team of three wizards, the master sages of two sword monasteries, three mighty priests, and two master thieves, identity never known. Of the ten, six died and the remaining four ascended on the spot, at the moment of the white’s death; the sole witness who remained was the adventuring bard Bodrick the Great, who provided them some assistance, spread the story, and ascended some time within the next three years.

How dragons move to and from worlds is partially known; they have innate magical senses, and are able to find portals to other planes. It is known that many planes have portals to several shells of our world, so they may navigate through these. It is also possible, though unsubstantiated, that there are direct portals between worlds, which most would be unable to use even given the opportunity but dragons can traverse in both directions.

The end result of gaining too much power and importance in the world is to be forced, by conscience or your peers, to ascend to a higher plane of existence. But the paths to that power are many.

Some are given power, commonly known as sorcerers, warlocks, adepts, or witches. Whether from blood or from bargain, they have a large piece of a mightier being’s power, and as long as they stretch the muscles of their soul, they can strengthen it to enlarge their spark over time. Frequently this strengthening is part of the point, for the greater being; whether by eventually giving the power back with interest (for benevolent and/or fair-minded powers) or by being consumed or subsumed by the ancestor/patron (for malevolent or alien powers); they get an increase in power without needing to fight their peers for it.

Others are given power by a different means; worship. By doing deeds in a god’s name and aligning their mind well with their god’s cause, priests can earn a gift of the god’s power. Unlike sorcerers, this gift is not a lump sum given and then slowly built, but a steady stream supplied, and can be cut off at any time. However, handling large amounts of power does build up their own spark over time, so a priest who loses faith does not entirely lose power, and one converted to another religion will be much more powerful than a novice.

Druids of the old faith are much like priests, and generally use the power of a nature god rather than nature’s power itself. However, if they fall out of their god’s trust they retain much more than would another priest, since their divine cause is as much a force as a being. In theory, priests without gods could do the same for any cause - freedom, wealth, brotherhood, theocide, or anything else - but in practice it takes more force of spark to empower one of these causes than anyone in the outermost shell can manage; priests of causes are an oddity even in the higher Worlds of Mastery, but (apart from the occasional druid) are totally unknown in the First World.

The best known path is the studious path; wizardry. Apprentice wizards learn fragments of the magical laws of the world by rote, and practice mental exercises and meditations to put into practice their knowledge to create spells. As they gain in power and understanding, they incorporate more and more of this knowledge intuitively, and can work at higher and higher levels of abstraction in their manipulation of the world. Unlike the other paths to greatness, this one can, slowly, be walked in reverse. Most other methods of increasing your spark make it something you are, but wizardry is almost entirely something you do. Because of this, it is possible, and not excessively rare, for master wizards to decide to remain and study the subject academically, but cease to put it into practice. Through inaction, they cease to reinforce their spark, and so can - albeit slowly - let it recede. They do, however, usually retain the long life characteristic of those with a strong spark. This is a factor in the reputation of wizards as old, wizened scholars who are scatterbrained and have no practical ability to do anything; strong wizards who desire not to push themselves beyond the world’s ability to contain them must, necessarily, fall out of practice in advanced spellcasting despite keeping their practiced inclinations toward study. The portion of wizards who choose to ascend deliberately attempt one of the known rituals which require the next level of mastery to carry out, and in so doing ascend.

Noticeably distinct but in many regards similar are the martial sages and monks. Their object of study is the self and body and their magical properties, but in many ways the path is much like wizardry, and the scholarly-inclined among the martial masters can produce effects around them very much like a wizard’s spells. They likewise can acquire notably extended lifetimes, and have none of the frailty that wizards acquire with age, and in many cases maintain eternal youth. However, since most of their mastery comes in the form of controlling their body to become a better mystic channel, it is considerably more difficult for them to step back from the edge of ascension. Frequently, an honored master who has attempted to remain in the world will be approached by their students and asked to leave. Some choose to do so by executing a single great work of martial mastery, while others opt for a spiritual quest, with the most traditional being to seek out and confront a great demon and battling until one of them dies or they ascend to the next world, in so doing bringing a menace to a world where it is less dangerous.If a selfish master warsage refuses, their students, even if equally selfish, will band together to fight their teacher.

There are also less studious paths to martial power. Some orders of knights, and various notorious soldiers and explorers, gain power through mastery of their own body, without study. Through willpower, practice, and force of personality, they build their physique into metaphysique. Through integrating their soul with their body, they gain the ability to surpass the common law of the world through their actions. They are perhaps the most self-made of the great, and the ones with the greatest likelihood of becoming dangerous to their surroundings without noticing the progression, and so the ones who must be sent off to die or ascend with the least notice. For this, communities across the world have developed the same solution; the tradition of the dragonslayer. A great warrior who is observed to warp the world around them, as the too-great do, is, if noble, sent to find the nearest vile dragon, and to fight it to the death. If they succeed, the concentrated power of the dragon will almost certainly push them past the threshold of greatness, and if it does not, bathing in the dragon’s blood or eating its heart - frequently also part of the dragonslaying tradition - will for certain. For the black knights and other evil sorts, either an alliance of the just will meet them at war, or a noble dragon will enact the traditional story, with the same two possible endings.

Not all those who achieve too much greatness for the world are noticeable. It’s certainly much easier for a combatant to test themselves in the sort of contest that stokes their spark, but there are slower paths, though no less difficult. Great skill in crafts can do it, as can skill in deception, acrobatics, spycraft, lore, or a number of other fields. For many of these, we can observe that they reach the threshold but not how they cross it; this is particularly notable for the dangerous and secretive professions, which produce greatness almost as reliably as outright warlike ones, but much less visibly. Great craftsmen often ascend in the completion of a masterwork, which may or may not pass inward with them. Performers sometimes do likewise, and the compilation of lore can be a masterwork in this sense. But for many skills, we see only that they begin to warp the world around them, and then they vanish.

It is a sad fact of our world that by its nature, there are some ills we are not, and perhaps never can be, capable of addressing. Severe illness, when not magical, can be treated routinely, lost limbs regrown, those dead of violence given new life not just once but a handful of times. A soldier of a few years’ experience can carry out better field medicine than most trained doctors of worlds with less Spark. However, the greatness that suffuses our world is not without its costs, and the casualty which seems the least preventable is a happy childhood.

The law that makes this so is simple. No one is born with a brighter Spark in this world than they would be in those lesser worlds further from the divine source. For some races this is trivially true, as the power in their blood is too great for those worlds to hold them. (Though dragons, of course, defy the usual rules in this regard.) But these are a minority, and among the civilized races even rarer. Among the common races, no child is born able to withstand the unfiltered spark of our universe. While their capacity grows quickly by the standards of adults, it is by no means instant; even the mayfly races that come to adulthood in under a decade recognize that children of less than five years, if they wander in the unprotected wilds, are likely to lose their lives, memories, and identities if they encounter anyone.

And so children must be boxed in to our city centers and town walls, kept in controlled environments where they are protected not just from wild creatures but also from their home’s protectors, whose spark has been fanned in its defense too far for even careful preparation and strong will to make them safe for children. And anyone who does great deeds must consider that their price will be never seeing a child of their own blood between the day of their birth and the day they pass the first forge-test that proves them able to wander unprepared streets.

Even with the usual precautions, in any dozen friends there will be more than a handful of stories of loss and quiet pain. Toddlers who, their nursery’s protections showing their imperfections, vanished, never heard from again except in the laughter of pixies. Too-bold schoolchildren who snuck out to see the knights muster, and who were caught up in a tide that left them without any memory of ever being anything but a squire. Young men or women, past their third forge-test and almost grown, who by chance encountered a rabid beast and couldn’t flee well enough. Our world is magnificent, but so are its challenges, and our children bear the brunt.

Professor Heidrikson, Chair of Shepherdry and Childhood Studies, University of Eirik’s Bale, Stacklumber City

Seed: economics + dog

The Profit Hound is found only in places with developed economies which use hard currency; systems based in exchanging letters of credit or barter are immune to its predations, though subspecies which adapt to feed on abstract currencies have been conjectured.

They can hide near-perfectly in any collection of loose coins, though healthier hounds require large denominations or very large piles to hide effectively. When they are threatened or ready to attack, the coins flow upwards into the rough shape of a dog, varying in size from small terrier to large mastiff depending on health and composition; the total value, not number, of the coins that make them up is in direct proportion to their strength and resilience. As they are injured, their coins will transmute from more valuable to less and eventually be shed; greedy attackers will often attempt to sever their limbs while they are still composed of gold, but this is not recommended as they will regain control of those coins if they restore partial contact.