About Vigil… here’s my best effort to piece together the story of its founding and its fall. Who knows, maybe some of it might actually turn out to be true.
I’ll be drawing primarily on the following sections of “Chaos and Telos”:
- The Whiskered Hawk’s “tale and songs” test, particularly Kylik’s story of Cunning-Quick and the first tale of Old Rat and the stars.
- Vigil (obviously)
- Cerlota’s revelations (obviously)
- The lovely interlude: witnessing what beauty Storms can create
We begin with Cunning-Quick, a thief who is exiled by her family to the driest wastelands.
One day the great boulder on which she slept spoke to her and told her that beneath it was the Dream-spring, which could bring all dreams to pass in the waking world. Cunning-Quick became not only the wittiest but the most beautiful, strong, and long-lived of all folk who walk on earth. She poured out rivers into the desert, fountains of liquid gold and trees of jewels.
I propose that this is the founding story of Vigil: a city sustained by the Dream-spring in otherwise inhospitable wilderness — and that the lands of Vigil were reshaped by Storms: not the Xaos-storms we know today, but by forces of Change that would bend to the dreams of the wielder, fueled by the Dream-spring. So that when the people of Vigil would give a name to their holiest temple, it would be the Temple of Storms.
In case it isn’t clear already, I’m positing that the Dream-spring is, in effect, an immense reservoir of aether deep within the earth, and the great boulder is a Talisman — a meteor, or more tinfoily, a shard of the Moon, which the nomads (perhaps incorrectly) believe to be the source of the stars (aether). This places Cunning-Quick as a parallel to Hera the Thaumatarch: a clever woman who harnesses an incredible source of magic to perform miracles and to be the strongest, the most beautiful, and long-lived in the world.
And like Hera’s Thaumatarchy, so too would Vigil fall.
Her family heard of her glory and in jealousy summoned Kargash the Unmaker to undo the source of her good fortune. Kargash slipped past her defenses, discovered the boulder of dreams, and attacked with all Its power. At this point in the tale, the whole tribe joins Kylik, chanting over and over:
The Dream-spring was cracked, and the sleepers ran mad
Some of the nomads sing the words in a high wail, others in deep tuneless drones, all at different tempos and with no attempt at harmony.
The Unmaker. What is Xaos if not the adversary to a supposed natural order (Xthonos, for the more faithful)? Cerlota’s research suggests that Xaos-storms attack a “meta-telos built into the fabric of time and form: the tendency of things to return to their original nature […] The germ of a Storm affects substances’ nature to have a nature and purpose, in effect loosing it and creating a vortex in which both telos and form spiral madly out of control.”
Whereas harnessing aether is to be a Maker of Change, Xaos resists that imposition of will and cause. I posit that this is Goety, this is the Kargash that cracked the Dream-spring, and this is the Xaos — the Void that Burns — in Vigil, not some evil god.
To get more tinfoily, the Dream-spring cracking could also be the origin of the streels. The legends make no mention of streels, lending credence to the idea that they only came into existence during/after the fall of Vigil (and Old Braurach with it). Let’s say the Dream-spring existed deep below this land, and when it cracked, the earth broke with it, creating wounds in the world: the streels. And Vigil is the place where all the streels meet, and every Tower — able to withstand the full force of Storms — observed by Ulbern is accompanied by a streel.
Which brings us to sleepers: plural. The inference is that sleepers are the ones who dream, and so are the ones who wield the Dream-spring’s power. More on them to come…
Cunning-Quick came to find that all was lost
Fountains broken; riches taken,
Spilled from her spring now nightmares only
Dreams transformed into nightmares: I posit this is what the Xaos-storms are: they Change the world into one straight out of nightmares. But every once in a while, the Storms create something precious and fragile, wonders one could only ever dream of…
“This is no work of Xaos,” Cerlota says, quiet-voiced but firm. “Taratur holds no such beauties as this.”
“Perhaps there is more than one mind or intent behind the Storms.”
The sleepers may have been driven mad; their dream may have become an eternal nightmare. But deep in there, there are still those who dream, and those who work miracles.
Which brings us to the question: what work of Xaos would drive them mad? I think the answer lies in the meta-telos Cerlota describes: I think someone (Cunning-Quick’s “family”) attacked the concept of the sleepers’ form: their very existence as a distinct singular entity. And to do so, I think they tried to draw all of the aether of the Dream-spring into Vigil itself, leaving the streels behind as scars. And perhaps with enough people and the aether within them, losing their form all at once, that power would only grow. That raw concentration of power is what I believe a Theurge senses in trance at Vigil:
Barely veiled by the chaos is a blaze bright enough to burn a hole in your mind. You throw up your hands reflexively in front of your now tightly-shut eyes, but it makes no difference—the white-hot light pounds through you as if flesh, bone, and eyelids were so much dust. That giant shape behind the Storm, the stony tree or city, is incandescent with raw power. Its gaps and hollows pulse with it.
And something in it sees you.
It lashes out at the interloper who dares intrude its dreaming. It’s not the power itself, but something in it that has intelligence and malevolence. It could be one oversoul dominated by a single self (perhaps some Brauracha prince, or Cunning-Quick’s family); it could be a collective (un)consciousness of the sleepers (mages) who once wielded the Dream-spring’s power — but regardless, I believe it is now dreaming, and it has been shaped by the nightmares of the once-people of Vigil.
Obviously, this all could be very wrong, but I like what it does aesthetically: a tragic story of a people grasping at and being destroyed by powers they didn’t understand, wanting to create a living dream but creating a living nightmare instead.
And instead of an evil god or all-powerful sorcerer hidden away in a dark tower, we’d just have dreams made manifest, in all their beauty and horror, lashing out at the world.
And perhaps to end the Storms, one would not seek to battle a monster, but to wake the dreamer from its nightmare.