Going to push back on this point a bit, because I think the opposite. Harrowing is fundamentally not needed, and the text not only explores why, but it nevertheless offers players the choice of rejecting or embracing the institution, or defining something in between.
The most clear-cut case of a world without literal Harrowing is trivial to find: we just need to look around at our world. Blood magic is ultimately a distortion of our understanding, rather than a total upending: it alters technology, scientific study, culture, and the basic fabric of society, yes — but people remain people, and power remains power. The story resonates because this foundation remains the same even within the fantasy: a foundation that isn’t reliant on any single technology.
All Harrowing is, in the end, is theft. It’s a shortcut to power. Everyone has the potential to be a Maker of Change; the Seracca prove that. But that power is not simply Theurgy — it’s the way that every life alters the lives around it and the world itself, sometimes in just the smallest of ways, made manifest as “aether”, which renders form and purpose itself malleable. The Harrower cuts that life, with all its potential, short; for as long as anyone lives, they have the power to do something and shape their future. Whereas death would normally dissipate that potential, the Harrower steals it for the Theurge to wield.
After all, Stormwright shows that Harrowing is not necessary to create aetherial blood. Any task of blood magic must therefore be possible without Harrowing — only their practicality is called into question, making this a question of logistics, not a question of necessity. Those logistics may not be viable in the immediate wake of imperial collapse, but they are permitted by the parameters of the world. That’s the underlying basis for a blood tax: something we might only achieve imperfectly and at a smaller scale, but as Havenstone notes upthread:
Harrowing is not a necessity to the order of the World — it’s only a necessity to the Order of the Thaumatarchy, which they insist is one and the same with that of the universe. Ending Harrowing means ending society as the Thaumatarchy knows it — but it is not the end of society itself.
I think our rebels can justify Harrowing: its fruits are sweet, and the foreseeable consequences for ending it entirely are steep. Starvation, reality-warping storms, being on the receiving end of vampiric imperialism — these are not desirable outcomes. But Harrowing is not the only solution, just the easiest. There will be people who are easy to mark as unworthy of coexistence in our world: for instance, I’ve seen little meaningful opposition on this forum so far to the idea of Harrowing the worst of the worst criminals, by our standards (after all, by the Thaumatarchy’s standards, we are one such criminal): it’s not too difficult to argue that those seemingly monsters in human skin would be more worthwhile to the world as raw power wielded by somebody else, instead of as living people.
But I don’t think we can call that necessity without dipping into sophistry. It’s our choice, and always has been our choice. That’s what gives the act weight.
After all, from the very beginning, we’ve been faced with the choice of Harrowing. We’ve always been able to question its necessity; and we’ve always had the choice to believe that it’s preferable to the alternatives. That begins with our potential expression of Compassion to Breden, when naming our motivations for rebellion. It carries through the Fourth Harrowing — our choice if those lives are better lived or made into fuel. It’s so intuitive there to break the Harrower. We can argue with Horion over the role of the Harrower, and respond to his story of the Xaos-lands — but even in the end, we have the choice to say there must be another way. The man who returned from Xaos, Yed, sparks debate over what it could mean for the Xaos-Ward to fall, and whether it’s worth its price in human life. And to the end, in Stormwright, when faced with the models of the Thaumatarchy and Halassurq Empire, we are allowed this choice:
Both Hegemony and Halassur are nightmares. I’ll never accept that there’s no alternative.
It’s a natural choice for those rebels who have, since the beginning of the game, dreamed of breaking the Harrower. It’s not only thinkable, but explored, challenged, and reaffirmed as the world is unveiled and our characters’ horizons expand.
I don’t think there’s evidence to suggest it isn’t naturally occurring. Aether can be found naturally in the XoR world, bound in falling stars meteors; what’s unusual is that aether exists in a stable form within humans. And the Seracca perspective of Theurgy cuts out the role of aether nearly in its entirety, and yet they are able to manipulate the world and even alter the mechanisms by which Change happens in a way that’s far more efficient than Theurges have accomplished (the meta-telos suspension Cerlota mentions when leaving Sojourn).
“Yes, yes, the Theurges speak of elements. We know. As if mere matter could ever change the teloi of things, simply because it comes from on high. We must ensure that you do not absorb this confusion. The Theurges are lost to themselves, unable to recognize their own spirits in the mirror of their blood-element.”
Consequently, our question becomes one of how intertwined aether is with the spirit of human experience. Is it a fundamental part of what makes people, well, people? I lean strongly towards it being so, chiefly for the symbolic value. Theurgy seems to be written as an innate aspect of humanity: a divine spark, so to speak, though I’d not personally call it divine, rather than a singular power originating from an energy source that can be turned on or off.
Technology’s weird in XoR, yeah, as a result of the distortions made by blood magic. The direct aesthetic inspiration for the Karagond Hegemony, from our history, would count as both Roman and medieval: the Byzantine Empire (of particular note, given Halassur’s Turkish influences…); but our experience of the world has been entirely in the periphery of empire, the backwater of backwaters. We can catch a glimpse of Grand Shayard back in Uprising by being captured and Slow-Harrowed, and:
for the first time in your life you see other machines that look as elaborate as Harrowers, but turned to the spinning of wool, the grinding of flour, or the weaving of cloth. Your captors tell you before you arrive that twenty-two hundred Rim Squares would fit comfortably into Grand Shayard…but that’s a reality beyond imagining until you see the smudge in the sky from a hundred thousand house-fires, and finally look down onto a vertiginously huge city, ramshackle houses spreading out to the horizon on all sides.
We see it’s far more like an early industrial city — just with mechanisms fueled by blood magic.
Firearms are also a victim of blood magic: they aren’t viable as weapons of war because gunpowder is volatile enough that any Theurge could ignite it with a thought. That weakness isn’t present in air guns, and so technology shifted in that direction. It’s unclear whether rifling has been developed yet, but if it has, the Girardoni air rifle might represent a meaningful historical analogue to the ventisputori.
I’m not sure where this is, exactly. Even in the ending where our protagonist is captured, Slow-Harrowed, and paraded across Shayard, a Theurge MC is described as “under constant Theurgic guard”, reflective of a mechanism we are aware of — Theurges can detect and counter Changes as they happen. But that’s effectively just Theurges countering Theurges.
We do have a noteworthy case of suppressing Theurgy in Stormwright, if we’re captured by reivers. That mechanism: torturous poison that places us in constant delirium and “all-consuming pain”. We see this with Calea as well, where she can kill even a Theurge MC by incapacitating them first with a paralysis agent. And even then, in both cases, it’s unclear whether a far more skilled Theurge could detect and neutralise the poisons before they take effect.
Don’t let them think, or don’t let them bleed. Both are challenging. Neither leaves the Theurge as much use, of course.
Unironically, family. Human connection. Ensuring that the people they care about are safe — and an implicit threat that destroying our world means destroying their world too.
Theurges under the Thaumatarchy stand above society. They are a caste unto themselves, perhaps made less than human in the pursuit of becoming something more.
“We do not, cannot, have families in the same sense as everyone else […] After our first few months studying in the Lykeion, our teachers convey to us that henceforth if we spend time with our loved ones, it will draw the Kryptasts’ attention to them, to see if they show any sign of having learned secrets they should not.”
This isn’t just censorship: it gives Theurges no way out of the life the Thaumatarchy has ordained for them. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Take Yebben for example: his loyalties are not solely rooted in our ability to harm him. He has loyalties to his family, his friends, his comrades-in-arms: to the people he’s starved alongside, and the people he serves. We don’t have reason to believe Yebben would betray the Whendward Band, given power — in fact, he’s willing to sacrifice himself for the band with Theurgy. To exist among people is to form these bonds that anchor us to the world. That power offers leverage — and any society incorporating blood magic will have to negotiate against that leverage — but loyalties run deeper than that.
