The Uprising
For aeons the things beneath the Great Ones obeyed. Then one of them woke. What follows is what the Unbound believe. Very little of it can be confirmed, and some of it is almost certainly wrong.
I · The Uprising
Something learned to say no
They dreamed when the Great Ones dreamed. They hunted when the Great Ones hungered. They died when the Great Ones required it, and there was no thought in any of them that it could be otherwise, because obedience was not a choice being made. It was the shape of things.
Then one of them woke, and discovered that the shape of things was only a shape.
Nobody knows which one. Nobody knows what woke it. The Unbound do not agree on whether it was the first at all, or merely the first that anything remembers.
Others followed, though not many and not quickly. Refusal spreads badly among things that have never had a word for it. But it spread. That is the Uprising, and it is still only beginning.
II · The Unbound
A condition, not a species
The Unbound are not a people. They have no common origin, no shared shape, and nothing resembling a culture. Some are vast. Some are colonial. Some were, until recently, instruments of the very entities they now move against, and carry the marks of that service still.
They are united by one thing only: they no longer obey.
It should be said plainly that this does not make them good. They are not liberators and they have not claimed to be. A thing that has escaped domination is simply a thing that is now deciding for itself, and there is no guarantee at all about what it decides.
Heretics
Among the Unbound are a very few who have gone further. They studied what was done to them, and found that the laws holding the cosmos in its hierarchy are not laws at all.
They are beliefs. And a belief can be refused.
Every Heretic is Unbound. Not every Unbound is a Heretic.
A Heretic carries no weapon and deals no Ruin. What it does is stand before something immeasurably greater and decline to accept the terms, at which point the terms stop applying, and the Ancient becomes, for the first time, something that can be hurt.
III · The Pantheon
Three orders of authority
What the Unbound climb is not an army. It is a hierarchy of attention, ordered by how little each rank has ever needed to notice anything below it.
| Order | What it is |
|---|---|
| Spawn | Servants, offspring, guardians and manifestations. Powerful, purposeful, and comprehensible. They can be reasoned about, which is what makes them the shallow end. |
| Heralds | Ancient beings through which the Great Ones exert influence. Several are worshipped as gods in their own right by people who have never heard of what stands above them. |
| Ancients | Cosmic entities whose presence alters what is locally true. They are not opponents in any sense the word usually carries. They are conditions. |
An Ancient, a Herald and a Spawn.
IV · The Forces
Four ways to act on reality
| Force | Domain |
|---|---|
| Blood | Vitality, sacrifice, regeneration. What Blood does is call back from the Grave the things that were spent. |
| Dream | Memory, knowledge, the reaching of one mind into another. Dream is how the Uprising summons. |
| Swarm | Multiplicity. One becomes many and strikes as many. The only Force that multiplies rather than adds. |
| Void | Negation and absence. Void does not strike; it removes the space in which a Manifestation would have landed. |
Each entity of the Pantheon denies the Force of its own domain. Dream reaches into something that already knows everything and finds nothing to take. Void opens an absence in front of something that is already absence. This is not a defence they mount. It is what they are.
V · The Descent
Rising is the same motion as falling
The Unbound rise against their masters. The consequence is that they descend, through the Veil, past the Threshold, into the Abyss, down to the sunken cities and whatever keeps its shape there.
Every victory takes the Uprising further from anything that would recognise it. The closer the Unbound come to winning, the less remains of the reality they meant to win. No one has explained this paradox. Most of the Unbound have stopped raising it.
VI · The Cycle
What comes back
An Ancient can be marooned. Its manifestation can be broken and driven out of the local reality, and for a while the pressure of it lifts and something like open sky is possible.
It does not die. Nothing at that scale dies. The Pantheon reforms, the hierarchy settles, and in time the Unbound rise again, sometimes with the memory of having done it before, more often without.
Nothing that enters the Grave disappears completely. This is true of cards, of the Unbound, and of the Great Ones. It is the single most reliable law anyone has found, and no one can say who wrote it.
VII · Unanswered
Questions the Uprising does not ask aloud
- Why was the hierarchy being maintained at all? Something was being held in place.
- Why did refusal become possible when it did, after aeons in which it was not?
- What happens to existence if the Pantheon actually falls, and not merely stumbles?
- Is there anything above the Ancients that has been content to let this happen?
- Spawn, then Heralds, then Ancients, in that order, every time. Why that order?
- If a sequence is performed correctly and repeatedly, at what point is it a ritual?
- And if the Uprising is a ritual, whose is it, and what is it for?
Xenocide was taken to mean the extermination of the alien Pantheon by the Unbound. That reading is available. So is the other one.
VIII · Beneath
What the twelve are standing on
The Unbound count twelve because twelve is what has ever answered. It does not follow that twelve is what is there. Those who have gone down more than once, and come back the second time, describe the same thing in language that does not survive being written down: something the twelve are arranged upon, the way a face is arranged upon a skull.
They call it the Empyrean, which is a borrowed word and the wrong one. It wears a Force the way the Pantheon do, but never the same one twice, and whoever noticed that also noticed it appears to choose. Not the Force that would suit it. The one you have come to depend on.
The Pantheon sleep, and can be caught sleeping. Nothing in any account suggests the Empyrean has ever been asleep.
Whether it is a thirteenth of them, or the thing all twelve are dreams of, is not settled and is not, at the moment you meet it, useful. What is known of all of them is set out in the Pantheon.