Lodestar pakaquoia

Tradition: Thaumat

Status: Active

❝

My water! My magic! My people! MINE!

Tyrants though they were, the old gods of Asthaom did not have a monopoly on power. They were the linchpins in a wheel that began turning long before they did. By the height of their reign, our people had already constructed many of the great machine-ghosts and labyrinth-cities which now lie in ruins throughout high Asthaom. These ancient architects were, in many ways, the world’s first mages—in a time when magic did not exist as we understand it. Close readers may hear echoes of the power struggle between the old gods, their artificers, and the common man still today[…]

◆

[…]The Sarikote have a phrase for this, as we often do: “It was true in the water; it is true now.” Never before in history have so many people had access to magic. The divisions between mortal and immortal, god and mage have all but dissolved. But have they? Even now, we can trace the trappings of power to the City of Lights, Old Sond, and the Stormbreak Quarter.

The University, too, is complicit. How much of your scholarship exists at the caprice of a god? You were once an existential threat to Iondreal, your beloved Grey Eminence, but it seems the past hundred years have dulled your knife. They no longer feel the need to breathe down your neck. Do we take this to mean you have succeeded in closing the gap, or have your efforts softened with your hearts? You are undeniably the model institution for the equitable study of metaphysics. The care and keeping of magic belongs to everyone—and these are not empty words, I have come to know this first-hand. And yet some immortal wound remains[…]

◆

[…]Still the mages of high Asthaom are stratified differently than their peers. Magic occupies a place in the public imagination that is very like water, in days of old. Magic is power; it is responsibility, it is infinite, and yet infinitely rare. To hold up magic is to hold down the world around you. This attitude is foreign to the island nations, who have for so long run up and down the horizon with god’s blood streaming out their ears.

This is not to say that the mages of Mercasor lack moral ethic. Far from it. They, too, have a strong responsibility to magic—a responsibility to use it with wild abandon. In so doing they raise up the world around them. It seems there is much that we Mainlanders have yet to learn about this strange, new world[…]

◆

[…]Consider the “towerless city” of post-war Sarikote literature. It is a clever turn of words. First there is the central irony, that our ancestors had already built a towerless city in the literal sense. Instead of scraping the sky with their architectural wonders, they chose to build down, deep into the earth. This is, of course, the last time that any House Sarikote would willingly choose to lower himself for the world around him.

Second, there is the irony of directionality. Our ancestors traditionally thought of the world in four winds, four directions. It was not until we settled and became House Sarikote that we observed a fifth and sixth wind—“up” and “down” to put it coarsely. (These winds are coupled, and we do not distinguish between them except for navigational purposes.)

If a man must go into the Absent North to lose his mind, then one seeking to humble himself must inevitably rise and fall. Put another way, if Sond had not been built deep beneath the earth, it almost certainly would have risen above Mother Mountain herself. Here we can begin to appreciate the keen sense of symmetry in writing from this period. Having taken up the bloody yoke of our ancestors, we begin to understand our actions—noble though they were—as equal and opposite to our aggressors’. Or as Motu himself said: “The higher our purpose, the lower their blows.” The author need not remind you that these were desperate times.

Third, the irony of Houses. The towerless city has no hierarchy, social or spatial. Forced to imagine a city of four winds, we must abandon the cliff dwellings of Merike, the ivory Library of Lin Dai, and the six deeps of Sond. The mage holds no dominion over the land, and the god breaks bread with the common man. We are Akiat and Ser diaspora, Beyenti and Basedti, House and Houseless Sarikote, and yet we are all one Sarikote people.

What does this sound like? To me, there is only one city that cradles the land, humbles itself before Mother Mountain, and vanishes with the morning dew: Ne Kama, ne Mora. It is the monsoon, the water seldom promised, yet always given. Scatter magic, scatter water, scatter people—and watch the tower collapse.