The Form of the Founder
….
What almost no-one would realise is that almost every
active being within the Seraphormer is the Eldritch founder.
The Founder is a multdimensional hive mind, the visible
projection of which in our reality is a vivid-blue Cuttlefish-like creature
roughly the size of a loaf of bread.
These super intelligent Cuttlefish build for themselves
mechanical or magical bodies, which they
inhabit, each different according to their purpose and intent, called Agents.
Though they come in varied kinds, no two bodies are
exactly the same and each bears the crazed and slightly haphazard sign of the
Founders personality.
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| Ex Profundis |
Incorporated into each Agent body, often at the centre, sometimes
hidden by armour and robes, but sometimes very obvious, is a globular fishtank
full of glowing hyper-energised cosmic fluid, in which the true Founder swims
and operates the mechanical form with its tentacles through haptic controls.
The Prime-Founder, (if there truly is such a thing) the
one operating the Soul Foundry at the core of the Seraphormer, is a huge,
multi-limbed semi-mechanical being with a hooded face but octopus-like metallic
tentacles hanging from it. But the body is simply another such construct; the
largest and most potent of its kind, made to survive the insane cosmic energies
of the Soul Foundry.
The degree of unanimity amongst the Hive-Mind is totally
unknown. But the different elements do seem to have different personalities,
the Rocket-Angels being intense, driven and dutiful and the Founder-Prime being
brilliant, maniacal and gleeful. The ceramic hyper-body in the Core of
Possibilty is inhabited by another such expression, this one calm and philosophical,
the giant tadpole creature bound in the Delusion Engine is another.
Perhaps these are all simply concentrated expressions of
particular thoughts and processes in a mind existing beyond reality. Perhaps
they do sometimes argue with each other, hide information or intent from each
other and may know, or not know, what the other does.
Each expression holds, as in a holograph or a cell, a
plan of the whole, and if every expression were destroyed but one, the Founder
would still exist and could re-grow all that had been lost.
No thinking being, and no being at all, except perhaps
the Lords of the Lichejammers, will ever know that all the creatures in the
Seraphormer are construct bodies, that they are driven by Blue Cuttlefish or
that all the Cuttlefish are in fact one hyperdimensional mind.
It is a level and a layer of deceit and subterfuge which
boggles the mind with its impracticality, signalling deeply prescient paranoia,
a truly alien mindset, low-level insanity, or all three.
…
Outside the Seraphormer
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| Cubist Kokopelli by Brandon Allebach |
Think of somewhere dark and dead.
The dark side of the Moon, or industrial ruins at night.
A place defined by absence. Somewhere so chewed over by time that even Entropy
has lost interest.
But just, just slightly, only by a hairs breadth, just
within sight of the core, the centre of all things, the fading spark of life
and light. Imagine standing in a dark and ruined factory and seeing in the
distance, the lights and movement of the city.
Here, assembled from the relics of impossible empires and
detritus taken from the invaded dreams of sleeping gods, is the Seraphormer,
the Factory of Souls.
Even if you are looking for it, you won't find it, for a
key component of the Seraphormer is its mighty Delusion Engine, perhaps the
greatest of its kind ever made or sustained in any of a thousand parallel
eons-long histories. This Engine keeps the Seraphormer hidden.
More than hidden; not even suspected.
The pale field of the Delusion Engine reaches out to
brush the edges of the cosmos, tangling with errant thoughts, twisting, gently,
the minds and perceptions of all that think, turning them away from even
conceiving of the Seraphormer, from even considering the idea that such a thing
might be possible.
What the key or pass to this Engine of Lies might be,
only one being can guess and, it is said, even they sometimes forget for a
while should they pass outside its core, not remembering exactly who they are
or what they do until some trick of time reminds them of the code, whatever it
is.
Should you pass within the Engines field, you will see;
The Void
A crackling maze of dimensions on an inconceivable scale.
A void, or something like a hollow moon filled with
things stolen from the dreams of sleeping gods and recovered hypertechnology
from forgotten stellar empires. A scrap machine, full of strange energy and
incalculable workings; something clearly botched together by a lunatic.
The void-maze is lit by the contrasting glows of small,
imaginary suns, by multicoloured fire bursting from barely-controlled realm-tears,
by the glitched sigils of the language of angels orbiting post-singularity
space-hulks, and by the lightning, plasma-venting and sparks of its own titanic
energies.
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| J Otto Szatmari |
From each tear, sun or engine, vast cables the width of skyscrapers
plunge down through the light-spattered void, some black, some radiating solar
energy or leaking fire, all joining together in the Core, the centre of the
Seraphormer, an insane mass of machines, energy and detritus from a billion
years of dead civilisations.
The great mass of the core itself split by a single
barrel-spike, itself encrusted with umbral shrouding and Mistake-Generators
drawing Pneumo-Mystification from the Delusion Engine. This is the
Noumenon-Cannon, a Soul Accelerator which both fires the completed souls out
into the Cosmos on questionable trajectories, and also cloaks their vectors. A
silenced weapon on a cosmic scale.
Between the titanic cables fly flocks of insectoid,
semi-mechanical, rocket powered angels which blast about in swarms. Each angel
is perhaps twenty feet high but in the distance they seem like birds, or
insects. They hurl themselves about the Outer Engine, constantly repairing,
altering, fixing and containing, struggling to keep the great machine
functional and stable.
You may glimpse for a moment, a white ship of bone. A
cylindrical craft with gossamer black solar sails, drifting through the void.
Constructed of mortal bone, crewed by radiation-blasted skeletons and captained
by the greatest of the Undead, these are the Lichjammers, the only visitors the
Founder allows, and even they must be mind-wiped after each journey.
…
The Atman-Engines
The darkest things in the Outer Engine.
Giant post-singularity mega-machines.
Ruined space hulks, abandoned starship cores.
All made by different cultures, different races and societies.
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| Games Workshop |
Surrounded with electrical Halos of the Enochian language
of Angels. But glitched. As if the sacred language of the creation had been
projected as a hologram, but warped and twisted slightly with some transmission
problem or signal fade.
These halos orbit around the dark industrial hulks,
twisting and shifting like neon signs against a black techno-industrial
background.
Gigantic mega-cables lead in like spiderweb strands,
black and dark against the fire and eruptions. Leading up to each Engine from the Core of the
Seraphormer, humming with power and broken up with huge scavenged transformers
and data-mills, the cables momentarily split, sending arcs of electrical energy
out into the void.
The cables carry glitched rivers of sigils and penumbras
of strange sacred data which spills from them in ribbons and blotches of light,
flashing and flickering.
 |
| behance.net |
As power flows up from the core, data flows down.
These are the Atman-Engines; lost digital heavens. The
data cores of forgotten civilisations holding engram-heavens; virtual worlds
where the engrams of scanned populations can live through eternal second lives,
watched over by algorithms and A.I’s. Some are parts of refugee craft for
entire civilisations, others the creations of Hyper-Noble Pure A.I.’s, still
others the brain cores of lost super intelligent god-machines.
All were rescued from the deep void by the Founder and
hidden here.
Here they perform the calculations of the soul.
So indescribably complex is one, single, mortal soul,
that to build its detailed, flexible, recursive and semi-divine CODING, called
by the Founder its ‘ATMAN’, requires all the combined power of all these
hyper-intelligent minds and hives of minds.
It cannot be done by unconscious unthinking machines, it
can only be a product of individual will. Soul-to-Soul.
So the divine calculations flow down into the core.
Delivering ATMAN.
The Imaginary Suns
Between the tethered megatech orbit imaginary suns.
None are as huge or as a real as the sun known to us on
Earth, They are more like painted or imagined images given a half-life; Stylised,
each differently, like tarot-cards, paintings or hieroglyphs. Some are chariot
wheels, others engines themselves, or great burning palaces.
Each sun is tethered to a Solar Collector, which absorbs
its magical energies, like a cone, scoop or shade on an enormous scale.
Each Collector is stapled together at an insane scale from interstellar,
techno-jink, post-industrial megastructures and magical spell effects sustained
by small para-libraries of auto-incanting sorcerer-golems. More giant
transformers, tubes and cables, channel the magical light into massive bound
fibre-optic cables which lead down to the Core.
The Soul energy of the dreaming suns pulses in a
continual dawn-grey, summer-yellow undulating river of inexpressible energy
down the titanic conduits. Thankfully, the energy of the Imaginary Suns is largely
stable and continuous (especially compared to the usual works of the Founder)
but like everything in the Seraphormer these regularly flicker and vent energy
and need to be repaired with interstellar detritus.
These are Suns stolen from the minds of the Dreaming
Gods. The Founder snuck psychically into the profound somnolence of those
sleepy deities and took from the greatest of them, their own conception of The
Sun. Gods both ancient and alien, proud and long forgotten, were robbed in
their eternal slumber and their meta-real conceptions brought here to the Seraphormer.
The energy they channel is called by the Founder; LOGOS.
The light of reason, structure, clarity and divine order.
The Prismatic Fire
Between the tethered Imaginary Suns and the dark
industrial Atman-Engines are tears in the substance of the Real only barely
held under control by hyperactive angel swarms working jury-rigged unshielded
space-warp drives and hyper energised gate-spells.
From within, roars incandescent prismatic fire, raging
like tornadoes, tangled in a thousand colours and forms, like a rainbow or
kaleidoscope of fire.
Massive turbines, engines and funnels suck in these
raging firestorms and, roaring themselves, pipe them down hyper-pressurised
ceramic-layered pipelines and conduits, wrapped in venting cooling systems
glowing furnace-white with the impossible forces they contain.
Through these momentary tears in space, blink infinite
reptilian eyes.
Within this roaring, ultra-dense dimension are Infinite
Dragons. For this is the Dragon Dimension, where space and time do not exist,
but only dragons. Where they writhe around each other like worms in a bucket
and react violently to any tear in their sub-realm, which allows brief snatches
of time and entropy to enter that bound yet infinite space.
The prismatic annihilating fire channelled down into the
Core forms the basis for what the Founder calls NEPESH – the breath and life
and animating force of a mortal soul.
The Bone Ships
These are the Night-Clippers, the Lichejammers. White
ships under black sails.
Relics of many realities, often the first and greatest
mortals to achieve magical immortality, and the first to enter interstellar
space, riding ships constructed of human bone, crewed by skeletons and golems,
simply waiting out the vast reaches of time between stars.
Even in the slow Death of Esh, the Licjammers persisted,
and still persist in the ruined intra-realm Greyspace that remains.
Mighty spellcasters, the greatest of their kind, each
totally indifferent to mortal life on a scale of planets and civilisations
Yet here, they are employees.
The Seraphormer requires one last substance for its work,
for each soul must have a catalyst, a shadow-self within itself, an other and a
mirror. The central conflict/relationship which sparks a being into true
self-awareness and spiritual existence.
QUILETH – The shadow. The necessary toxin. The Catalyst.
Out in the varied Cosmos of Uud, the Lichjammers drift,
seeking the Quileth, the sleeping, dispersed and forgotten Deamons of Esh. The
Ejecta and Refugees of its collapsed Hells.
Only the Lichejammer Captains are powerful enough to hunt
such beings, capture and transport them. Only they are cold and indifferent
enough to attempt the trade.
And even they must submit to memory-wipes on receipt of
each cargo. When out on-mission they know only that the details of their memory
have been altered, and that any attempt to recover them will voids their deal.
They know only what to hunt, and where to take it, and even that is a
potentially dangerous breach in the security of the Seraphormer.
So the cylindrical, slowly rotating bone Lichejammers
drift in the space between reaching cables, passing lightning, coronal
ejections, glyphs, prismatic fire and rocketing Angel swarms. Circling down
towards the docks of the Demon Engines in the Core, where they believe they
will discover who their employer truly is.
The Outer Core
In the Outer Core a staggering exchange of energy takes
place. The impossible super-materials harvested from the Void are channelled,
altered and transformed, while the enormous energies required to balance and empower
this near-planetary Giga-Machine are transmitted outwards. Here are huge
industrial transformers pulled from ancient space ships and forgotten
world-engines - these pulsing power outwards through scavenged materials to wherever
it needs to go.
The Demon Engines
The Lichjammer Docks, together with the statelike
reception areas for the Lich Lords, and the means of controlling and
mind-wiping them.
The captured Quileth themselves are taken to the Demon
Engines to be processed. Black iron
mills full of soot and howling metal. Terrible soul-pistons, compression
machines and prisons for the Quileth who are fed through the process, crushed,
spiritually melted and extruded as a pure, black, ultra-dense liquid.
the Agents who oversee this part of the Seraphormer are
blackened, apelike constructs, heavily armoured and often with shoulder-mounted
pulse-weaponry scavenged from futuristic battlefields. The dark iron of their
bodies carved with mandalas and pentagrammic wards to protect against the vile
energies of the processed Quileth.
Here if nowhere else, the Seraphormr would seem like a
kind of hell.
The Burning Turbines
The Prismatic Fire harvested from the tears in the Dragon
Dimension is funnelled here, carefully slowed and cooled, driven through
gigantic turbines, reducing it to a manageable form of plasmic fluid (itself
insanely hot and potentially destructive).
Everything here is based on shielding and cooling in
massive degrees, (even the cooling systems have cooling systems). Vast towers
vent steam into the Void, the air pulses with energy, alarms keep going off.
Ceramic shielding blackens. The Nepesh Energy Warning Signs [Maybe have a
designer come up with an equivalent to the 'radiation' warning sign, but
referring to too much Nephesh instead?] themselves are blackened and curled
with the ambient heat.
The place feels like a Russian power station.
The Agents here look like octopi, Cephelopods and Gibbons
and they run around fixing stuff like the place is Chernobyl. Despite the overwhelming
danger the Turbine Halls are quite cheerful and the Agents here positive and
optimistic. Maybe too much as they sometime hover on the edge of delusion.
The Solar Reactors
Here the Logos-light of the Imaginary Suns is drawn from
its massive Fibre-Optic caballing, bounced through huge reflection traps, mixed
in titanic solar condensers, fractionated through spectral analysis, slowed by
Shadow Engines, then channelled into pulsing diamond-bright projection crystals
for the next stage.
These crystals ultimately shovelled like coal into the
intakes for the Soul Forge.
Things here are radial and symmetrical; clean corridors,
crystal displays and robed Agents calmly observing light. The agents are quite elegant
and well made, (for creations of the Founder, which are always a little
janky.)
The Comprehension Organs
the angelic calculations of the divine hyperminds in the
Atman-Engines must be comprehended before it can be transmitted on to the next
stage. Mechanical reproduction or analysis will not suffice.
The Agents here are all spindly-bodied creatures with
giant fishtank heads bulging where the brain would be. Inside each ‘head’ are
four or five Founders, swimming about and operating the controls, a massive
overengineering of mental capacity, considering that asingle Founder is
effectively a Genius-level intellect.
Yet it is required.
The raw Enochian info-stream from the Atman-Engines is
fed into sealed chambers with hooded and warded displays. To view such a
density of sacred information for even a moment would drive any normal mind
utterly insane.
The Agents dip their heads into the sacred data-stream. Halos
of glitchy enochian glyphs orbit in halos around the agents as they comprehend
the Atman-Spike.
The Agents then move to the Soul-Organs; pipe-organ /
typewriter / Apollo shuttle capsule / Tardis-console input boards, each
individual (like everything the Founder makes).
There, clacking, typing, and sometimes glitching and
freaking out from the info-spikes, they translate the comprehended and
recognised hyper-data and ultra-crypted soul-cyphers from the
Atman-Engines into a more pure and compressed soul-song
which provides the informational structure of the soul to be constructed.
As they do this, the glyph-halos around them dissipate
and disappear as they play out the chords of comprehended music of the Soul.
Summary
These four processes, along with the enormous
transmission of energy outward, making a fifth, are the prime elements of the
Outer Core. (Though of course there may be much more hidden in its
hyperdimensional passages and jury-rigged systems.)
The Demon Engines producing pure QUILETH-Quintessence.
The Burning Turbines creating Plasmic NEPESH.
The Solar Reactors forming crystalline LOGOS.
And the Comprehension Organs forming a song of pure
comprehended ATMAN.
All these Substances are brought down, deeper into the
Central Core.
The Core
Here all the aspects of the Seraphormer are combined and
its central functions take place.
The Delusion Projector
A massive and contained pressure tank, held in the centre
of a sphere of psycho-reactive materials.
Accessible by walkway and tended to by robed and
sorrowful Agents who pipe in nutrients, remove terribly dangerous waste from
the tank and watch over the multidimensional charts and ever-printing graphs
which indicate the state the dreaming mind of the Ultra-Deluder.
All the Founders here are trained to think only in code,
repeating their own thoughts in multiple languages and re-translating them
within their own minds. Only with this constant meta-translation keeping the
information of their own thoughts current, active and fluid, can they maintain
consciousness. Otherwise, the strength of the Delusion Field might simply wink
them out of existance.
In the tank, dreaming intensely of its own non-existence,
is a gigantic, fleshy form of a Founder. Not an adult grow large but the natal
form, a child, a little like a tadpole, but swollen massively in size without
aging physically in the normal way. Its bodyshape like a child of its kind but
its flesh meaty and wrinkled, rather than translucent blue. Huge out of scale
eyes, completely black, blinking and shifting in eternal sleep.
Around it, hidden by its dome, giant psychic engines and
projectors focus, manage and blast out the Delusion Field that keeps the
Seraphormer Hidden.
The Core of Possibility
The incredible machinery of the Seraphormer requires
power to run, and the faded cosmos of Uud is not rich in energy, and certainly
not in any form that might be harvested without Yggsrathaals notice.
All of it comes from here, the Core of Possibility, and
its transmitted out through cables and mandalas of magical and literal power.
Within the Golden Core, a singular Agent meditates; calm,
and sitting in lotus position. A body of pure ceramic, coated with liquid
nanotechnological diamonds and etched with sigils of balance and ultrafocus.
Beneath the Agent spins a projection of the Vespershard.
Only a version or a facet of it, yet real enough, for the shard absorbs and
represents all versions and projections of itself.
As the shard spins it tunnels through time and raw
Possibility, piercing a single pin-prick hole through which gous torrents of
golden energy; enough to power the Seraphormer.
This hole pierces a distant future cosmos. A future where
Reality does not die, where Yggsrathaal is defeated and the cosmos is reborn. A
Future the founder keeps open purely by daring to imagine it, and by doing so
creates it.
A tenuous, impossible, daring future kept open by
imagination and raw effort of will. So lives the futures last, best hope,
empowered and energised by the possibility of its own existence.
The Noumenon-Cannon
A relatively simple
device, notable for its gigantic scale and its integration with the
Delusion Engine.
Essentially a huge, spiritual Rail-Gun, the Noumenon
Cannon channels raw new souls from the Soul Forge and fires them out into the
Cosmos of Uud.
In doing so it draws Umbral Energy from the converters of
the Delusion Field, projecting shadowy misunderstanding along exactly the same
Cosmic trajectory as the new soul. (At least that is what it is meant to
do.)
The Master-Ballistae of the Soul-Gun is known to be one
of the more radical and rebellious of all the fragments of the Founder.
Inhabiting a multi-limbed brass construct designed to hold its Cosmic Reticule,
intended to mesh with the systems of the Cannon and to pierce space, energy and
time and so place each soul in one exact moment in one particular place in causality.
The Founder-Prime and the Master Ballistae often have
intense and violent arguments as (in the opinion of the Founder-Prime), the
Master likes to dick around somewhat with the intended targets of the fired
Souls, dropping them into random or unlikely lives and into apparently
impractical times and places.
This could well be yet another subtle layer of some
hyperdimensional scheme, or the Master-Ballistae could just be dicking their
boss around.
The Soul Forge
Here all things are combined!
Overseen by the Founder-Prime (who may be in charge, or
may simply be an aspect which the Hive Mind allows to think it is in
charge) who wears a body designed to survive the mind-crushing energies of
creation required to construct even one mortal soul.
Here the code music of the ATMAN Engines, carrying, and
being carried by its Enochian Angel language forms the code or substrate of the
Soul. Here cooled NEPESH plasma is injected to whirl and mix with burning light
from LOGOS crystals shovelled into the Reactor.
Every process is unique, each requires insane energy
funnelled from the Core of Possibility, each needs both insane levels of
planning but also the touch of a Genius to guide and improvise the process as
it develops.
Even this mixture of ATMAN, NEPESH and LOGOS burns with a
blinding energy and writhes like something half-born, or some reaction between
life and death waiting to burst out.
The Founder Prime cackles and works their
hyperdimensional controls. Sometimes screaming “SHOVEL MORE LOGOS YOU FOOLS”.
They truly love their work, for each soul is a piece of
art to them, entirely unique. The process is insanely dangerous but the Founder
is of a mind that, if you are going to build something, why wouldn’t you crank
the power ALL THE WAY UP just to see what it did?
Anyway, the Founder does not make normal souls. We are
not building accountants here. He makes HEROIC souls. Souls shaped to shape the
world. Creatures of unique and vibrant individuality, with strange fates or
unalterable freedoms. These are the poison of Yggsrathaal, these are his weapon
to destroy her.
Then, the last level is pulled and the black ichor of
QUILETH extrudes into the chamber.
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| Not sure where from |
The reaction is chaotic! Utterly unpredictable! The
Quintessence held within the incredible fields of the Soul Forge whips and
blasts like an exploding sun. It burns like a poisoned world and changes form,
expanding and compressing, forming texture, colour and shape. Half-thoughts
form in the ATMAN, a dream of consciousness is born and semi-visions of
possible futures flicker in the air.
Then, at exactly the right moment, at the point of
cohesion, but a second before LIFE, the Founder cries “FIRE!!” and pulls his
null-black lever to eject the Soul into the breach of the Noumenon-Cannon.
For a second, all the Seraphormer falls silent and dark,
still as the Delusion Projector and Noumenon-Cannon draw all possible power
from every system.
Then the roar of a titanic God as the fresh soul raced,
cloaked and hidden, out across the Cosmos, into time and space, into Udd.
“AGAIN!” Cries the Founder.
