Aurholm Fundamentals
Moving House
Nothing exists except Arsene and Camellia.
Traumatic separation from Pleroma has severely disrupted Camellia's mental state and stricken him with a convenient case of amnesia. Being immediately fond of Arsene, and having better ideas than to sit in a void forever, Camellia creates a world for them to live in.
Unable to access Pleroma, and ignorant of its existence, Camellia uses fragments of his own soul as the base material for this world. His soul is large enough that he functions fine, despite this.
They name the world Our Home, corrupted over time into Aurholm. Aurholm is a single, flat landmass floating suspended in the void. It is shaped like a four-pointed star, with the bottom point slightly more distanced from the others. Stepping off the landmass teleports you to the opposite point: so, stepping off the easternmost point deposits you at the westernmost point.
Camellia and Arsene establish their house in the very centre of Aurholm, the area of which is later named The Glen. For one of his first inventions, Camellia creates a lake around their house as the root source of the world's water, called the Spring of Life. So he continues, creating light and night and day and plants and animals and mountains and forests and rivers and so on, quite self-impressed with his genius.
Between bouts of delirium, domestic fluff, and playing, Camellia gleefully shares new project after new project with an awed Arsene. He adores Arsene. Likewise, Arsene adores Camellia – with single-minded, absolute devotion, a perverted holdover of his programming as Miquir.
Arsene's mission in life is to make Camellia happy. Everything he does, says, or thinks revolves around making Camellia happy. The gratification when he succeeds is enormous. When he fails – well, he doesn't fail. Camellia loves his life too much to ever be anything but happy. So Arsene loves life, too.
Things are blissful, for a very long time.
Humans Happen
One day, Camellia creates humans.
Arsene disregards them as more animals. Camellia knows they are not. Humans are his most complex invention yet, with faculties of sentience, ego, and psyche. Given that Camellia's disconnected psyche underpins all of Aurholm, to prevent the humans' psyches from always manifesting as Camellia's, he instates them with a special element: personalized names.
Names are a yoke for various concepts to let them override those that typify Camellia. Camellia's influence does remain in named creatures, but only unconsciously and subordinately. Names are dictated by various factors, including parentage, birthplace, and universal RNG. Everyone inherently knows their name from birth.
Camellia also instates humans with souls. Souls in Aurholm are conduits between the name and the physical body; they link the ego/psyche to the physical world. Souls are formless, metaphysical objects while the body is living. They dislodge from the body and assume a tangible, perceptible, physical form upon death. Their form appears constantly changing; from orbs to webs to sheets to pools to mist to anything else, but they are truthfully always in all these forms simultaneously. Souls can't move, interact with, or perceive the world, though the psyche remains hazily conscious inside the soul while dead.
Finally, though these humans are definitely humans, they do not activate Camellia's overprotective High Terran instincts. They are made from the soul of a High Terran; Camellia subconsciously registers them as he would a High Terran.
He likes them. He happily watches them build little settlements and societies in his world. But inevitably hardship comes to one settlement, and Camellia inevitably intervenes to help them. This coddling of humans soon becomes a persistent hobby, cutting into his time with Arsene.
Arsene grows jealous. He resents humans for stressing Camellia with their problems so often, compounded when the first human death in Aurholm bereaves Camellia. Arsene solves Camellia's grief by suggesting he put the dead soul in the sky to be admired forever, but this too becomes a new project, feverishly recreating the old world's constellations on every death.
Arsene persuades Camellia to restrict his governing to only one small settlement, which grows into a large settlement as settlers flock to him. To stem the tide, Arsene erects a spacial distortion field around the whole of The Glen. Humans monopolize their time; they barely do fun things any more.
Arsene's own bitterness towards humans – that Camellia is so proud of, and loves so much, and that make him happy – frustrates him. Reluctant to tear Camellia away from them, he simmers.
Arsene loses it
One day, a human named Bartholomew asks to venture outside The Glen and see the world. Worried for his safety, Camellia instructs Arsene to accompany him.
Arsene does. The journey lasts a year. Bartholomew enjoys himself, and learns very much, but Arsene is disgusted. Humans have settled on or gouged many places of significance to himself and Camellia. His resentment for humans blooms into hatred, which he again suppresses.
Once they return to The Glen, Bartholomew begins contemplating a life without Camellia's smothering presence. Arsene encourages his ideas of independence, and with some surreptitious teamwork, Bartholomew defeats Camellia in a bout and secures the authority to govern The Glen's population.
As an ascendancy gift, Camellia tells Bartholomew the secret of the universe: that everything is made from, and contains parts of Camellia's soul. This revelation awakens Bartholomew to the faculty of cognizance and the power of invocation, a form of reality warping. He is indeed now well-equipped to preside over humans in Camellia's place, leaving Camellia and Arsene to themselves.
But Bartholomew's independence doesn't distance him from Camellia. He instead begins regularly conversing with Camellia as a peer, often discussing politics and philosophy. Arsene can't even begin to understand these topics. Bartholomew defines the meaning of life as to die happy. Camellia likes this. Arsene never would have thought of it.
When Camellia begins expressing even his pettier, emotional side to Bartholomew, Arsene finally snaps.
Arsene poisons the Spring of Life, making all sitting water fatal to specifically humans. He also poisons the air, so that it painfully perverts and transforms dead souls into monsters, making human deaths uniformly agonizing. Before Camellia finds out, Arsene has a peaceful talk with him and asks if he is happy. Camellia confirms he is. It gives Arsene the resolve he needs to tenderly snap Camellia's neck.
Thank god, thank god, Camellia died happy. Thank god.
Humans are dying, including Bartholomew. Bartholomew uses his invocation powers to maintain his psyche posthumously and furiously confronts Arsene. Arsene is pleased with Bartholomew's anguish. Bartholomew, livid, uses his powers to cast the entirety of The Glen, with Arsene in it, and including its spacial distortion field, deep into the void that surrounds Aurholm, called Nix.
People everywhere scramble to rally themselves and survive, in a world that has fundamentally changed, and intimately loathes their existence.
Camellia's posthumous activity & archons
Camellia, the Demiurge, God of Aurholm, is dead. But not quite gone. A side effect of his soul residing in everything, Camellia's psyche is retained in the 'background noise' of reality, where his weak, fugued ego only occasionally lapses into self-awareness. Struggling to identify who or what or where he is, or his thoughts or feelings or opinions about anything, the moments where he does stabilize into lucidity are truly momentous; often coinciding with great miracles or powerful invocations.
Once decomposition starts, Arsene buries Camellia's corpse. It sprouts into a massive camellia tree, the flowers of which can grant any wish, without twists. Since the tree is nigh-inaccessible at the bottom of Nix, it's the flowers that journey up Nix's waterfalls to their fated recipients, not the other way around. These are Camellia's unconscious responses to the desperate pleas, or prayers for his help that pierce his fugue.
More interesting, and much rarer, are Camellia's conscious responses to such things. Some people he advises, blesses, and protects. Others he punishes, tortures, and kills. And some – infuriate him so much, they obsess him.
These unlucky individuals are the ones whose lives, beginning to end, were hopeless. Their personalities, their identities, their archetypes are as strong as their dissatisfaction, their resentment, their dysfunction – over things so deep-rooted and fundamental, it offends Camellia to let them die without fixing them.
Unable to maintain his psyche for even seconds, Camellia can't nanny them as he desires. But he can buy them time. He appears to these individuals upon their death with a pact. Those who accept, he resurrects as Archons.
Archons are completely immortal and possess incredible, godlike powers. How these powers and immortality manifest depend on the name, personality, personal history, and so on of the Archon – typically, they only exacerbate their issues and make their lives even worse. Their ageing stops either at the age they died, or at the age they acquire a firm self-concept. How their powers manifest changes as their self-concept changes, but this is very rare. By the terms of their pact, Archons will only lose these powers, regain mortality, and die, if completely, and personally, satisfied with the death. Until then, their pact safeguards their identity from takeover by perverting forces, such as mind control, hypnotism, or implanted false memories, and solidifies their existence as an unerasable universal constant.
There are ten Archons, apotheosized at various times over the thousand-year period from Arsene's banishment in Nix to today. As yet, no Archon has died.
invocation
Invocation is an Aurholm-specific form of reality warping achieved by dissociating oneself from one's psyche, to synchronize it with either the 'background noise' of reality, or with a specific named entity, to manipulate the world around oneself or gain aspects of that entity. The former technique is termed generalized invocation and the latter specified invocation.
Generalized invocation demands the invoker dissociate from their self-concept, to synchronize themselves with the undefined fragments of Camellia's soul that compose unnamed objects in Aurholm. From this perspective, the invoker wills changes in the world around them. For example, taking the perspective of a tree and willing it to fall, or taking the perspective of a cloud and willing it to change course.
Though the invoker must dissociate to affect anything, they also must maintain enough of an ego to sustain their desire to change something and reconnect to their identity. Failed generalized invocations can temporarily or permanently disrupt the psyche, incur various mental illnesses, and potentially subsume the ego completely back into Camellia's soul as undefined noise (which isn't the worst way to die).
Specified invocation demands the invoker synchronize their self-concept with that of a specific named entity. Common targets include Camellia, the Archons, historical figures, or deceased relatives. Synchronizing oneself to an entity requires rituals personalized to the target, or strong meditation upon the concepts that define them. If the target lacks any prominent defining concepts, specified invocation will never work on them – meaning only entities strongly associated with certain concepts, symbols, or mythologies (even just local or family ones) can be invoked.
On successful invocations, the invoker attains or is influenced by attributes of the target. This can include tapping into an Archon's power, taking on aspects of the target's personality, learning what the target knew or felt about a certain subject, or speaking, feeling, and giving council as if they were the target. These aspects may not always be positive or manifest as intended. Extreme cases allow for actual possession by the target, telepathic contact with the target, or possession of the target.
Specified invocation is generally more difficult than generalized invocation. Would-be invokers are often too different from their target for the invocation to ever succeed, no matter what rituals supplement the attempt.
Invocations are sometimes accidental, and even the most potent invocations can be so. Attempts are sometimes made to invoke Arsene or Lisbet, but this is pointless, as neither can be invoked.
Magic, Ghouls, & Rot
Arsene, by poisoning the air, has introduced a death system designed to torture humans. Upon exposure to air, human souls painfully transform into monsters called ghouls. This phenomenon is called rotting or soul rot.
Soul rot is Kenoma applied to the air, misanthropic by Arsene's influence, which re-interprets the concepts bundled in human names into their most malicious form. A soul contracts rot upon any exposure to air, and proceeds to rot even if returned to its body, albeit more slowly. Under normal circumstances, though, it takes between four days to a week for a soul to rot into a monster.
Dead individuals are conscious during the rot. It aggravates feelings of personal weakness, pain, hatred, misery, and vice, while hollowing those of strength, fulfilment, joy, love, and virtue. Their personalities degrade and humanity fades. During this, their soul warps into a monstrous new body. The psyche dissolves into that body, dictating how the ghoul manifests, which completes the rot.
Ghouls lack reasoning or intelligence. Even those with human mannerisms or speech operate solely on impulse, instinct, and self-proliferation. They have no idea why they do what they do or any sense of self – they just exist. Those that remember their old life largely find it insignificant.
By some facet of their existence, ghouls are uniformly hostile towards humans. Common manifestations include requiring humans as sustenance, a constitution that passively harms humans, impulses to antagonize them for fun, extreme territoriality and aggression towards them, or euphoric sadism and desires to enslave them. Upon death, ghouls decompose normally and are reintegrated into Camellia's soul as background noise normally.
Ghouls almost always manifest supernatural traits or abilities, intrinsic to their old name. These powers are magic, distinct from Camellia's miracles, Archon powers, or from invocation by the corrupting presence of rot. Magic is naturally seen as evil – but also as an accessible means to power, for those who'd wish to have it...
That is to say, for witches. Witches are individuals who willingly sever some portion of their soul, allow it to rot, and eat it. The rotten fragment reintegrates with their body and confers them with ghoulish traits, but most notably with some personalized magic ability.
Witch magic ranges from near-useless to apocalyptically strong. Each witch has a threshold of how much magic they can use before the rot's influence sickens, strains, and damages their human body, an effective soft cap on their power. Though they retain higher intelligence and sense of self, witches are still corrupt and insane from the combination of their shredded souls and the rot.
Then again, witches are rarely saints to begin with. The ritual to sever one's living soul requires they remorselessly destroy something they treasure, entirely for their own benefit, with the intention of severing it from their self-concept. The most orthodox method is the killing of close relatives. Damage to the soul incurred by this severance is so severe, it alters witches' names. They almost never identify as the person they used to be, though they do find their past significant.
Witches often build covens for socialization, teaching, and protection. They are kill-on-sight pretty much everywhere, though their obvious intelligence and residual humanity make some people inclined to negotiate with them (these people are severely misguided – witches never have good intentions). Witches tend to look slightly, or highly inhuman due to the rot, but are otherwise identifiable by their viscerally repulsive eyes.
Alongside magic, witches gain the power of soulsmithing. Soulsmithing is the ability to 'rewire' a loose, dead soul so that it binds to matter. It's necromancy: resurrection into a dead body, or an animal's body, or a plant, or some other object. Any sentient magical individual can soulsmith, but that translates into “being a witch” 99% of the time, and doesn't necessarily mean with skill.
Soulsmiths can intentionally bind souls in ways that harm the subject. They can induce endless pain, discomfort, dysphoria, paralysis, any number of disabilities, and force specific physical reactions to certain stimuli (like arousal for blood or disgust for your lover). They can scramble the subject's control of their body or limbs. They can also place clauses on these effects, termed geas, so they occur under certain conditions and abate under others. One common geas is a kill command, to instantly kill the subject by dislodging their soul from their body when activated. Soulsmithing is a generally forbidden, evil practice with a history of being abused.
Victims of soulsmithing, as they are usually victims, are called familiars. They are typically slaves of witches, bound into bodies their witch found convenient or appealing, subject to whatever geas the witch felt appropriate. Even without geas forcing their hand, familiars rarely have a choice but to cooperate with their witch – as familiars have already died at least once, they have contracted rot and are growing into monsters. It's a slow process, though, and for a good deal of it they resemble witches, if they manifest their magic before losing their higher intelligence. They're kill on sight, right after witches.
Also resemblant of witches, but far more accepted, are yazata. Yazata is a catch-all term for individuals with some inborn supernatural constitution or power, but who did not acquire this power from rot. They are extraordinarily rare and typically have some involvement with Camellia. As such they're respected, if not revered.
severance
So death is a public safety hazard. It leaves monsters hanging around, liable to kill people, liable to make more monsters. What to do.
Destroy loose souls before they rot, of course. This is called severance, and it is as simple as crushing a soul in one's hands. The soul dissolves like a firecracker; nothing remains, nothing rots, no ghouls happen. A great solution for the living.
Not great for the dead. Without the soul anchoring the psyche, the deceased's consciousness hangs as a raw concept. They experience general emotions and passing thoughts, but not lucidity. Though they lack any physical component, and don't exist in physical space, they do gravitate towards Camellia with vague intention for his soul to reintegrate them.
Problem. The greatest concentration of Camellia is his corpse, which is at the bottom of Nix, next to Arsene, who radiates Kenoma. Before they ever reach Camellia, Arsene's Kenoma perverts them.
They lose the capacity to feel love, fulfilment, or happiness. Feelings of hatred, envy, and emptiness consume them. They stop resonating with Camellia, stop resonating with their own names, and begin resonating with Nix. They meld into Nix, into rocks and soil and rubble, and into the other consciousnesses equally trapped in this predicament.
Hundreds of millions of egos inelegantly melded together. They each know themselves as their former ego, which should be together and whole, but isn't. It's interspersed with the shifting thoughts and feelings and knowledge of millions of other agglomerated egos, like grains of sand. There is no 'overmind' or 'higher consciousness' that coheres these thoughts. This collective is called the Legion.
The Legion resonates only with Nix and Arsene. They hate anything innocent, strong, or good, only feeling self-satisfied when such things are perverted, destroyed, or degraded. They enjoy misery, in themselves and others, alongside weakness, ugliness, and depravity. They envy Camellia's love of humans, hate Camellia, fear Camellia, and are driven to pervert humanity into something Camellia would hate. They are subconsciously influenced by Arsene's envy of humans, hatred of humans, and desire for Camellia to stop liking them.
But they are mostly anchored in Nix, unable to do anything but stew in their hatred and fight among themselves. They can spread only to things and places that also resonate with Nix, which requires proximity to Arsene or Nix. Even then, what's to gain from reaching into another tree, or bush, or rock? They can't manipulate it any more than an invoker could. What's to gain from reaching into an animal, like a cat, or a dog? Sure, there's some mobility, some eyes, some claws and teeth to use, but the Legion is too unfocused to properly control it.
What they really need is a soul. And more than a soul, a name.
Souls are anchors for the psyche, for ego. If a portion of the Legion enters a soul, that fragment stabilizes to enjoy consistent self-concept and desires. It feels whole and comfortable again, as long as it inhabits the soul. If that soul dies – no dice. Right back into undefined Legion, unlikely to ever stabilize that way again. It'd be like emptying a bucket of water into a pond, then drawing water from that pond, hoping to refill it with every exact molecule that was in it before.
But a name would be a yoke. With a name to define it, that fragment could stabilize itself even while stuck in the Legion. It could exercise clear will, and goals, and edge out the indistinct horde in the race to occupy specific bodies or souls. Such a defined fragment is called a demon.
Demons are subtle. When they inhabit a soul, they don't reveal themselves or directly control their host (nor can they). They implant ideas, and suggestions, and manipulate with soulsmithing effects until their host is subverted, degraded, or worn down. Once someone (usually their host) recognizes them, and begins constructing ideas of what they're like, their personality, their motives, and eventually a name to encapsulate these things, the demon adopts that name and identity forever.
From there they continue using their host to spread chaos and misery. A skilled demon might convince the host that they are actually part of the demon—which then becomes true. The host starts resonating with Nix, the demon subsumes them, and assumes direct control over their body. It's the point of no return. Even if they die or rot, they're already part of the demon.
Demons can't invoke, but their hosts can. They otherwise have no inherent supernatural abilities except soulsmithing on their host. Though the Legion is massive, demons themselves are poorly-documented and extraordinarily rare—most people don't even know of them as a concept. After all, those who venture to Nix rarely return, and Arsene never leaves to spread his corrupting aura around the outside. That said, there are some odd places where Aurholm connects to Nix, and allows brief contact or synchronization with Nix's corrupt frequency to proliferate the Legion.