Apostles of Doom

These four “planes”, or “forces”, or whatever you call them, are what I prefer to think of as meta-forces in that they work to shape the topology of the 4D quantum strings and their intersections (e.g., the planes), particularly with respect to animus and mana. However, they do so in different ways. I will eventually get to some of the details, as I understand them in my limited manner, later in this tome; however, a full discussion is beyond a single volume.

These four meta-forces — I think that is probably the best word to describe them in simple mortal language — consist of Law, Chaos, Positive and Negative, for want of better words. These words are not at all accurate; they are but poor mortal substitutes for what the gods know intrinsically. Now actually, Law and Chaos are a pair and Positive and Negative are a pair. So in truth, what I just told you were four meta-forces are actually but two, each antipodal aspects of the other. Law/Chaos and Positive/Negative, as one would expect due to the Laws of Bifurcation, but I digress.

Law/Chaos works to bind/unbind mana. Briefly, for this is not what I want to speak of in this text, the relative balance or proportion of Law/Chaos in a region of the multiverse determines the balance of magic or technology available to planes within that realm. Where there is more Law, there is less magic and one must use technology to unleash the equivalent effects that one gets from magic. Where there is more Chaos, mana is less bound, more available for use by individuals. With such chaos, the repeatability of science and technology degrades and randomness and uncertainty creep in. Clearly, things become quite untenable at either end of this spectrum.

Similarly, in life-forms (and this is what is important and why I discuss Law/Chaos in this text), e.g., for mortal creatures, the balance of Law/Chaos determines how tightly mana is bound to flesh. What we call the elder races, such as the Sidhe, are less tightly bound to flesh and thus reflect a higher degree of Chaos. Younger races, such as humans and dwarves, tend to be more tightly bound and reflect a higher degree of Law. Incidentally, the lifespan of a race tends to be (but is not exclusively) represented by how tightly they are bound to flesh. Meaning that the more tightly bound races tend to have shorter life spans than the less tightly bound. However, those lives tend to be more stable and in some ways, harder to terminate.

There are many reasons for this, and we will go into this in later tomes; but for now, as you might imagine, those that are the least tightly bound can live a very long time. However, even they are subject to the Phoenix Cycle.

So, after this long digression I come to Positive/Negative, and we use these words emotionally, not so much scholarly. Animus is subject to Positive and Negative polarization. In this part of the multiverse, we mainly see positively charged animus. In other regions, there is much more negative polarization.

Now, because both negative and positive polarizations are animus, on the physical planes, both can support life; however, within a polarized section of the multiverse, they are very different sorts of life, and in the later course on necromancy we shall cover this. The short answer is that on this side of the multiverse, where organic life is grown with positive animus, the binding between flesh and spirit is much more integrated and thus has a higher degree of Law, and thus lower Chaos. Negative life on the positive side of the multiverse will be bound at a higher Chaotic state than positive life, meaning positively charged animus is more tightly bound to matter (over here) than negatively charged animus.

The key here, the crux of our discussion, is that positively charged animus, or animus, and negatively charged animus, or antimus, as it is colloquially called, attract each other, even as Chaos and Law are attracted. Chaos seeks to unbind Law, and Law seeks to bind Chaos. So life based on antimus, which I will call Unlife, seeks out and tries to cancel out life based on animus, or Life. Of course, this is a very simplistic explanation.

Realizing that these designations are arbitrary, I seek only to cast that which is least familiar within the most familiar of terms.

That all being said, because antimus binds to flesh, but on this “side” of the multiverse it must be much more loosely bound, when attempting to reattach animus to flesh, it is generally far easier to first polarize the animus into antimus and then attach it to the flesh. Of course, this is a very loose binding, as discussed, and the flesh itself was grown using animus and not antimus and… well, quite frankly, the Unlife inhabiting the body needs to replenish the body with positively charged animus, or the body will eventually fall apart. However, if one can acquire fresh animus to repair the body, having a Chaotic binding, one could live for a very long time.