Yes, the Seracca do it frequently and the Thaumatarchs have all lived beyond normal human lifespans (which seem to be pretty much like ours, ~60-80 as long as you aren’t getting killed preemptively, RIP helots). It seems to get more expensive, blood wise, the older one gets. True immortality is likely impossible outside of whatever the lich Gaesh is doing, but you can definitely get a few centuries.
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I think the only MCs of mine that would ever pursue “immortality” would be the ones romancing the Thaumatarch’s heir since she/he is probably the only one that could be alive throughout all these centuries with the MC.
Watching all your friends, companions and advisors pass away as you increase your lifespan using bloodmagic tenfold sounds like a depressing situation to be in for anyone sane and normal. Then again, when you think about it, how many of the MCs will end XoR in a state that leaves them sane and normal…
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I suspect it’s like close to some form of vampirism. You’re basically taking the years left of the people you’re sacrificing for the life-extension spell and tacking it on to your lifespan. I suspect that the one’s who can even approach the understanding required are probably middle-aged by then so it kind of keeps them at Middle-Age.
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No, because the Seracca are able to do it using their own blood. The aging is stopped by Changing the body, not taking someone else’s lifespan.
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I was talking about Hegemony people, not the non-humans who need to be purged because humanity-first.
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Huh. I don’t think that that’s how Theurgy works - aging isn’t a specific lifespan but a gradual transformation of the body’s telos until it’s unable to continue as a living person.
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At its most basic level it’s all about exerting your will to alter reality as you see fit. The more you understand reality the stronger you become. Doing a ritual that reinforces this idea can probably work.
Since it’s related to understanding of the world and fundamental realities of it and then manipulating those building blocks in ways you see fit. You can approach things from different angles and get similar results. I suspect a people who are all about sacrificing others in blood ritualistic fashion are all the more willing to use that foundational principle in a way to tack years on.
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Would the Hegemony believe in something like the “vital force” or how would they understand aging?
Edit: excerpt from a very cursory search for Aristotle’s theory of aging:
When Aristotle turns to consider the reason why these facts hold, we find him appealing to his theory of elements. According to this theory, all animal bodies (and indeed, all sublunary bodies) consist of the hot and the cold, the dry and the wet. An animal is by nature hot and wet, and in some sense this is what it is to be alive. But old age is dry and cold. Aristotle thinks this is plain to observation, since the living animal is warm and moist, while a corpse is cold and dry (De Long. 466a 17-23). On this picture, the process of aging is tied to the gradual drying up of the internal moisture necessary for life. Aristotle identifies two primary factors that might prolong this drying up : the quantity and the quality of moisture. A greater quantity is not as easily dried up. And since large and blooded animals contain more moisture, this quantity accounts for rules 2 and 4 (De Long. 466a 25-32). But the quality of moisture is also important. Quality is here understood in terms of warmth or heat, so that moisture will be of greater quality the warmer it is. Since, on the whole, terrestrial animals are warmer than aquatic, the superior quality of moisture accounts for rule 3. This also explains the unusual longevity of humans for their size.
I think that would tend to support the idea that whatever the Thaumatarchs are doing involves something vampire like since typically their framework for understanding things is heavily Aristotelian. I’d hypothesize involving the use of young helots.
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Just found out that you can get Linos to say that Romancing Calea as a Noble is a strong motivator of human action if you say that as your guess, instead of Compassion. Linos gets it. Still hoping against hope for that Aristo Calea Romance in one of the future books even though I know it isn’t happening.
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It could be argued that life and death are teloi above teloi in an emergent capacity: that while all that composes life acts in accordance to its own nature, the “final end” all life approaches is death. No single piece in the puzzle of life exists just for the sake of dying (nor necessarily, for the sake of being alive, or for consciousness): yet nevertheless every passing moment brings life in the present and death on the horizon.
In a world where all form and purpose can be Changed — with enough power, that is: the world’s endless potential and possibility made manifest as “aether” — it’s perhaps not too much of a stretch to suggest that the literal tendency to die could be perceived and mastered by a sufficiently powerful Maker of Change, at an unthinkable cost in life. Damning Damming a river to keep it from flowing to the sea. If that was possible, it could be a mechanism befitting of a Thaumatarchy in its heyday, leeches glut with aetherial blood.
「The Seracca」
As for the Seracca, perhaps it’s as simple as an unmatched attunement with their own bodies-as-complex-systems, such that they can heal the damage that comes with time. Not Changing any one thing, but everything — perhaps not even consciously. Life, in this view, would be like the patterns perceived in seeming chaos, as their art depicts: something joyous that is discovered, endlessly multifaceted, and composed of the tiniest of threads.
You spend hours in meditation while M’kyar guides you in contemplating your body and its purposes, great and small. She alternates between long silences and descriptions of human anatomy in minute detail; at times it seems as if the Seracca can give a name and telos for every muscle, nerve, and drop of blood.
As for the Unquiet Dead: we know nothing. That doesn’t stop us from spitballing, but I’ll leave them for later…
Did you know: we can witness for ourselves what death looks like beneath the mask of reality, in a branch of Uprising that probably gets immediately terminated by the player restarting the game. Because we watch Zvad die as we desperately try and fail to save his life.
He flinches and writhes each time you bring your attention to a Change. But he does so silently, eyes fixed on yours in desperate hope. You flinch yourself each time, groan an apology, and keep trying.
Until at last the bubbles stop appearing on Zvad’s lips, and the blur around him dissipates into something far more recognizable: blended earth, fire, water, air.
That blur, common to all the people we perceive, has a cause, and at the moment of death, it ceases to be. Whatever that spark is, we could call it a prerequisite for “life”; and so survival becomes a matter of preserving that hidden cause. Remember, our protagonists can’t perceive it now, but we are only playing untrained, amateur mages (albeit a prodigy) at best.
We know that the matrix of elements binding aether in the human body breaks down on death: the aether or the binding could be the source of the blur. Or, perhaps, the telos that binds aether is a lower emanation of some higher cause that simultaneously gives “life” to a particular bundle of elements. It could be the soul: that material entity of air and fire that Theurges and natural philosophers claim to have identified — assuming they have not misunderstood the purpose of such an organ.
There are a multitude of possible explanations, none of which are definitive, so instead let’s treat this in the abstract: there exists a cause or purpose that specifically distinguishes a living person from the world around them, which can be given name and shape. And what can be done with this idea?
The topic of blood magic immortality has tangentially come up in some of the
sorts of conversations @apple and I have had, and I think her pure telos hypothesis could neatly extend beyond floating mountains (a really elegant solution for that, by the way, that broke me out of a rut in ΧoR hypothesising) and Wards to extended life. But just like the Wards, the telos at play here is more nebulously defined and likely far more complex than what our protagonists can perceive.
In the spirit of those conversations, what follows will be increasing levels of strange speculation.
「The Unquiet Dead」
The Unquiet Dead are an anomaly in our accounting of long lives, because we know so little about them. The oldest known beings in ΧoR’s present — ignoring Ghaesh for now — are likely only around three or four centuries old: the age of the Hegemony, more or less. The Seracca only live “easily” to 200. The Xaos-storms dated to the final years of Hera’s reign three centuries ago, and while it’s not impossible that a sentience behind the Storm-source is far more ancient, there’s not evidence suggesting that. Hera’s Conquest only lasted a century. Her daughter (Eosphora) and grandson (Kleitos) would have lived most if not all of their lives in the Hegemonic Era.
And then there’s Ghaesh. We just don’t know when he showed up.
Nor can we necessarily even be certain of our assumptions. Who’s to say that Ghaesh is even a single person? The word itself could merely mean Archlich and Deathlord, or be a legacy name taken on by all Lords of the Dead. This is to illustrate how profound our lack of knowledge is. “Ghaesh” could be regular old; he could be thousands of years old, and anywhere in between. We simply do not know enough.
With what crumbs we have, here’s what I suspect: the Unquiet Dead are literally dead, in that their bodies have ceased to be blurs and are merely elements. They have found a way to sever or preserve their consciousness apart from their body: for added lich style, let’s call the new home of their consciousness a phylactery. Hence, the body becomes unstoppable and unkillable, preserved in the snow and cold of the Bloodless Reach (a name that itself raises red flags, given the significance of blood to the setting).
"Chalky skin, paler than the palest Nere. Black, dry eyes like coals, with no white nor any glint in them. Wielding Goety of the vilest sort. Unstoppable; unkillable. Coming on starless nights, bearing great wheeled cages that they fill with living humans to be taken north and sacrificed to Ghaesh, Lord of the Dead.
(Incidentally, I’ve been fond of the interpretation that the Unquiet Dead extract aether chiefly from the brain, as a dark twist on the trope of zombies eating brains. Though we can also read their home being the “Bloodless Reach” as them utterly draining bodies of blood. One could even suggest that those “Black, dry eyes like coals” might result from emptying the eyes of aether. This kind of Harrowing — potentially even a kind of self-Harrowing — could be a counterargument to one of the most salient criticisms of the Unquiet Dead being literally dead, namely that they are still able to perform blood magic.)
Now we’ve approached the edge of the abyss and it’s time to leap out into the yawning chasm of odd hypotheses.
This proposed mechanism for the Unquiet Dead can also explain the Thaumatarch’s kill switch.
Cerlota falls silent for a moment. “Also, it was said in the Lykeion that Kleitos holds the lives of the Nine in his hand at all times.”
If we conceive of an Ennearch in this light, not only do we create a mechanism for the kill switch, but also an explanation for why most Ennearchs would accept it. Imagine freedom from human weakness. No petty assassin could strike a killing blow (as happened to Hera the Immortal). It probably wouldn’t mean total freedom from human need — sleep, hunger, thirst (even under this hypothesis, I doubt Ennearchs are actually dead; it’d be too noticeable) — but perhaps those sensations could be mitigated, or unnecessary teloi suspended for longevity’s sake. Theoretically speaking: clinical immortality.
The only price: if someone like, say, the creator of this link between external consciousness and body knew how to break it.
But that’s enough crackpot for the day. I’ll leave my comments on ΧoR immortality at that.
Actually, last thought for real:
In life, there’s always more to be done. More to learn; more to witness; more to enjoy. It’s a world full of possibilities, and that’s just it: possibilities, which may not come to fruition. It’s cruelly fitting that a Theurge might lengthen their life by cutting short the possibilities of so many others, a metaphor made real by aether and its power to reshape the world. And for what? I wonder about the rebels who’ll seek more than the perhaps two centuries that natural blood can sustain, those who dream of proper immortality: I wonder what lies at the end of the road, or if the point is the road. To keep on surviving until the revolution is complete by their own two hands, and to preserve that revolution for as long as it can last — and should it fall, to start again and never let the flame die.
At that point, I wonder if the once-infinite possibilities have all been cut down to one. A cruel irony of the price of immortality.
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Laughing out loud. 
One of CS’s less-appreciated joys is being able to input nonsensical text replies that sometimes click well.
But yeah, Calea don’t want none unless you’re a helot, hon.
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My MC broke up with Breden because of the genuinely incredibly compelling conflict (my favorite scenes in the entire game are the very real and raw relationship problems you can have with Breden) about having children and not being able to continue the noble dynasty, but they would drop their entire family line and sell their sword for a pouch of water and become a helot if it meant getting Calea. In all seriousness though, unfortunate. I thought the Hector romance was interesting but find him way too evil to really look into it with any depth, I think Calea would have been a very interesting RO for a less evil Aristocrat, but still excited to see what it’s like for helots.
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With theurgy is it not possible drain someone to get more blood instead of using the harrower or is that impossible? I was wondering because if the mc can control their own blood that never had to go through the harrower why can’t they use the blood of others ? And if one needed could they add their own blood to someone else’s to drain them?
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This is answered in the game. Listen to Cerlota’s explanation of how aether and theurgy work.
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I did read it awhile ago but I was wondering if there was any other way as I’m not super familiar with the lore I know some but not a lot especially about the other countries practices besides the baby sacrifices.
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Quick note to say: I’m not going to have a playable version of Ch 2 up soon, thanks to the laptop dying. I’ve got good friends coming to visit next week, we’re taking them trekking, and I won’t be able to get back to XoR writing until mid April.
But Ch 2 has been coming out rich enough that I think I’m going to shift the goalposts, and aim to publish a Stormwright that’s more like the first game’s size, rather than joining the million-word competition. It’ll end in Irduin, not in Grand Shayard. We’ll save the many plots of Grand Shayard for next installment.
Let’s see what you all think when, hopefully at the end of April, I’m finally able to post an update.
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Well, this means you’ll be able to give Grand Shayard the attention it needs when the time comes! I was definitely worried about how the content bloat would be handled and though not ideal, I trust you to make this split work. That said I do wonder if perhaps the Xaos-land prologue will seem disconnected now, without a Xaos-bomb climax ending.
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This is my first ever forum post and I’m crying!
Will the structure remain the same? 5 games with 4 chapters each? 
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Sad to hear but understandable.
Do you plan to expand and perhaps split Xaoslands chapter? I am specifically wondering if hypothetical battle of Sojourn or the attack on wardgate idea is maybe back on the table.
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I think that could work out well overall and allow both Irduin and Grand Shayard to be more fleshed out.
I think Irduin is an important stepping stone for the MC as well to go from backwater nuisance to having Empire wide significance which is what the Shayard sequence will result in. No need to rush the action. It’ll help Irduin not be overshadowed by the latter part of the book which I thought was going to happen when it was all planned as a single work.
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