Summary[]
A Tale of Lost Swords is a verse created and owned by Monarch Laciel.
Twenty thousand years ago, the world ended. The Gods fell from Heaven into the world they had created. The trichiliocosm was shattered, and Chaos engulfed the fragments of the world and reigned for a thousand years.
However, six great heroes wielding the weapons of the Gods appeared, quelled the Chaos, and restored the trichiliocosm, binding the shattered fragments of the cosmos together in a new form - an endless Spiral.
When at least the chaos of the fall ended, and the remnants of humanity emerged from their hiding places, they found a changed world. The world had been reformed in its entirety, entire continents shifting, mountains being torn down and placed elsewhere. The sky was tinted red, and most notably of all, a lightless second sun shone down upon them, eternal and unmoving in the centre of the sky.
But worse still, were the monsters. Crawling from the darkest pits, swooping down from the skies, they numbered without limit. Mankind was forced into a desperate struggle against the new beasts that ran rampant across the land.
But now, when a chance attack destroys the home of one boy, he begins a journey throughout the land to stop the monster invasion, a journey that will lead him to becoming far more than he ever though he could be, and to the ancient weapons of the Six Heroes... The Lost Swords.
Music Themes[]
Spiral In Chaos (Main Verse theme)
Tropes Applying to the Setting[]
Alien Sky: It's less noticeable during the day, but the night sky is heavily tinted red, with star clusters and galaxies appearing against dark red clouds.
"Awesome McCool" Name: Tends to be a lot of this. Justified, in that people choose their own psuedonyms that they generally go by, because due to the way the magic system works, having your real name widely known is a great way to get spontaneously killed from half a world away by anyone who knows how to say "Is Dead" in the Divine Tongue. Erebus's chosen name means "Darkness of the Mountain", and Oneiroi's name means "Dream of Victory".
Binary Suns: The world of the Spiral has two suns, Sol and Pollos. Pollos is always directly overhead, no matter how far in any direction you go, and is even there at night. However, it also doesn't give off any light, instead just appearing as a small white circle in the sky. Still hurts your eyes to look at though.
Cracksack World: Oh yeah. Most places in the Spiral are uninhabitable, either due to incredibly harsh conditions such as the Terridian Desert which is hot enough to evaporate exposed water in seconds, or incredibly aggressive wildlife. People use magical portals called Gateways to travel between the habitable areas of the Spiral, but these Gateways are mechanically fragile and no more durable than normal stone, which can leave whole villages stranded with finite resources if someone so much as accidentally chips it. The ruling party of Terridia, the Senate, cares nothing for its people and are quite content to sit in the Ivory Palace living in luxury while their country slowly dies. Most governing systems other countries aren't that much better, either having oppressively autocratic rulers, or outright anarchy. Powerful earthquakes are extremely frequent across the entire world. Hordes of horrific monsters practically embodying Body Horror can appear from underground at seemingly any moment and slaughter entire towns in few hours. Sometimes, more powerful monsters will appear that can only be killed by use of Magecraft, but the words required to use Magecraft are largely unknown or jealously guarded by sorcerers. And knowing too many spells can drive you insane or burn your soul away. Oh, and the entire world is trapped in a slowly collapsing cycle of Eternal Recurrence that will eventually result in all sentient beings devolving into mindless Technically-Living-Zombies. If the resident Sleeping-Evil-In-A-Can doesn't wake up or all of space and time doesn't straight up fall apart first. Luckily, most of the more outright apocalyptic scenarios are a long way off.
Eldritch Location: There's a lot of these in the Spiral. In areas infected by Chaos, plants and animals are twisted into horrifying monsters, the laws of physics break down and Reality Is Out To Lunch as gravity, space and the flow of time go wild. The Tombs of the Dead Gods are full of Alien Geometries that wouldn't look out of place in an MC Escher painting, and just moving through them is a challenge because of this. Then you have the Far North and the Far South - in the world of the Spiral, the number of dimensions the Spiral has increases as you move North and decreases as you move South. In the East, this means that normal 3D humans who aren't used to navigating more than three dimensions of space can accidentally end up in the past or future time periods of where you're walking, or even cross into increasingly weirder alternate histories by accidentally passing along four, five or even higher dimensional axes. Most people who have tried exploring the North ended up lost forever in alternate variations of the world or trapping themselves in a Temporal Paradox after encountering their past selves, and moving safely through the North requires the use of special paths that were found through trial and error. Travelling to the Far South on the other hand can result in people getting flattened into 2D shapes and eventually 1D lines (though they are still sentient and capable of movement), before finally being compressed and trapped into a 0D point where everything is one with everything else and there isn't even a "south" or "north" to move in anymore. Finally, the Spiral as a whole could be considered this - it's a mishmash of shattered pieces of space-time forced back together and when Erebus sees it from the outside (and it is translated into a shape that he can comprehend), it looks like an enormous twisting spring shape that glows a blue so bright it's almost white, where each subsequent "rung" of the Spiral is thicker than the last - somehow, even when it twists back on itself to create a loop, with many smaller blue specks circling around the main spring, all floating in a vast rolling sea of crackling orange-red energy.
Eternal Recurrence: After the Age of Chaos, the Six Heroes put the world back together, and by world I mean timeline. Unfortunately they didn't actually have enough pieces of "time" to create a full universal timeline, so instead they altered the timeline so events loop back on themselves every 20,000 years or so, creating a never-ending yet eternally looping world where the same civiisations will rise and fall and people become their own ancestors.
Holy City: Pyrgispoli, the City of Spires. A massive city filled with incredible interlocking towers of shining white marble and ivory, built into the side of a mountain. Appearance-wise, it looks like a mix of Minas Tirith, Anor Londo, and Luthadel. Legends say it was personally built by the Six Heroes to act as a sanctuary for humanity, and is inhabited largely by followers of the Six. Follows of the Six who don't live in the city try to make a pilgrimage there at least once in their lifetime. The city also doubles as a Citadel City.
Our Ghosts are Different: Ghosts are souls who have managed to avoid being returned to the Well of Souls on the death of their body, usually via the result of magic binding them there, but sometimes via extreme emotions such as a regret at leaving something unfinished or desire for revenge. Ghosts instinctively create for themselves a shell of ectoplasm, more technically called Imaterial, a spiritual substance capable of shifting between corporeal and incorporeal at the ghost's will. More importantly, the Imaterial tricks the natural laws of the Spiral into believing the ghost still has a body, and thus doesn't need to be pulled back to the Well of Souls. Ghosts cannot be killed through destruction of their ectoplasmic body, although this does cause the Spiral to begin trying to force them back to the Well until they can gather enough strength to create another one. The primary way to get rid of a ghost is to break the magic or weaken the emotion that is allowing the soul to avoid returning to the Well of Souls.
Our Souls are Different: Souls form within the Sea of Chaos, and are the source of free will and the ability to grow and develop in living beings. A being without a soul is effectively a robot, and is unable to grow or develop beyond their initial mindset. The Dead Gods - who are extremely powerful souls themselves - found and collected various souls that had formed within the Sea of Chaos, bound them in Divine Words to limit their power and shackle them to the mortal world, and placed them in bodies of flesh, where they became the souls of humans. A person can pass on portions of their soul through positive interactions with others, such as raising, caring, and teaching them. This is not detrimental to the person, as their soul will "regrow" the lost parts over a few days, and the aspects of the soul that are passed on will themselves grow as their new vessel experiences life and emotions.
Our Angels are Different: Seraphim were beings created by the Six Heroes to maintain the Spiral and ensure it would never be broken. They generally have only vaguely humanoid appearances, tower over mountains in their natural size, are capable of shapeshifting into any form they can imagine, can only be seen through magic or if they choose to reveal themselves. They are also lack souls, are nearly completely immortal, and are unaffected by time reseting itself. The Seraphim have a hierarchy, with the Authorities being the Seraphim in charge of more important or encompassing elements of ensuring the Spiral doesn't break down being at the top. For example, the Authority of Life and Death is in charge of ensuring all souls return to the Well of Souls upon the death of their body, preventing new souls from developing, and ensuring no one lives past their fated point of death, and is the leader of legions of Seraphim each given taskes to ensure this.
The Corruption: The Sea of Chaos, a sea of infinite primordial energy of limitless infinite possibility and impossibility, ocassionally makes its way in through the "cracks" in the Spiral, infecting the air, ground, water, and even the very space of locations, as well as potentially infecting those who pass nearby. This infection slowly drives infected living creatures insane while also twisting their bodies with the raw unlimited potential of growth and evolution - which sounds good until you realise it's causing a lot of limbs and organs, many of which don't even belong to the infected's species, to start growing where they definitely shouldn't be. Those fully corrupted generally don't even have physical bodies anymore, instead being incorporeal entities of pure chaos that randomly repeal the laws of reality wherever they go.
The Lifestream: When people die in A Tale of Lost Swords, their souls are extinguished to be restored during the next iteration of the cycle - however, destruction of the soul simply moves it to the Well of Souls. The Well of Souls exists in the centre of the Spiral, and at the end of the Cycle when the world resets, the souls are steadily redistributed into their bodies as their bodies are reborn. However, until that point, all the souls are mingled together, sharing their memories and experiences. What this results in is that people who caused more happiness in their lives than pain will feel the excess of that happiness, while those who caused more pain in their lives than happiness will feel the excess of that pain. Thus this place can be called Heaven and Hell in one. The problem is that as souls mingle in the Well, levels of Chaos Infection are spread out throughout all souls within. This isn't a huge problem on its own as due to the spreading the level of infection becomes infintisemally small, but it will steadily accumulate throughout the Cycles. This place also crosses over with Akashic Records as due to it being the amalgamation of all souls, the knowledge and memories of everyone in the Spiral can be found here.
Powers of the Verse[]
This verse is extremely powerful. Most characters are Mountain level, such as the Seraphim who are capable of manipulating mountain sized structures and growing to the size of mountains, and characters capable of defeating them. The god tiers of the verse are the Dead Gods. The verse also has some very good speed feats. Characters are capable of dodging lightning bolts from point blank range, and Erebus has a speed feat of flying at least 5 km within 0.0025 seconds, with all characters sitting around Massively Hypersonic+. There also are some Immeasurable attack or defense speeds through use of higher dimensions.
Additionally, the verse has a plethora of powerful hax. The basic magic system of the world is a mix of Conceptual Manipulation and Law Manipulation (using a Divine Language where each word embodies its respective concept and if strung together in statements create new laws to govern reality), and if the true name of a target is used these laws can bypass their resistances. This magic system grants users with the knowledge of the right spells abilities such as Matter Manipulation, Soul Manipulation, Time Manipulation, Spatial Manipulation, Void Manipulation, Mind Manipulation, Regeneration and Immortality Negation, multiversal BFR, Transmutation, Power Nullification, Petrification, Death Manipulation, Resistances, Higher-Dimensional Manipuation, Teleportation and other similar powers.
Explanations[]
The Divine Tongue:
- The Divine Tongue is the language of the Seraphim. It was created by the Six Heroes so that the Seraphim they created could manage the Spiral in their absence.
- The Divine Tongue can be considered to be a sort of "coding" for reality. The Spiral is shaped and controlled by the Divine Tongue in much the same way as coding and admin commands create and control a computer program.
- Each word in the Divine Tongue corresponds to something in the universe, be it a physical object, or an action, or a description, or an abstraction. Words in the Divine Tongue are not merely a way of saying a thing - they are the thing. If one of the Divine Words was somehow erased from the language, it would be the same as erasing everything that corresponded to that word. Remove the word for "green", and the colour green would cease to exist in reality - the light spectrum would simply skip over what used to be green.
- All things in the world, whether they exist or not, have a word in the Divine Tongue, as it was stated that even before Erebus was born, there was still the word for his existence, and the word would remain after his death.
- The Divine Words were not meant to be spoken by humans, and it is physically impossible for humans to naturally speak these words - they are utterly impronounceable. However, Seraphim DNA ended up getting mixed into the human population, and so it is possible for the ability to speak the words to manifest in some humans.
- It is impossible to pose a question in the Divine Tongue - only statements can be made. This is because the Divine Tongue is truth and defines reality - for such a language, asking a question is irrelevant, because whatever is spoken is the answer. Additionally, past tense does not exist.
Magecraft:
- Magecraft is the term for spell casting in AToLS, as "magic" refers to the mystical energy that seeps into the universe from the Second Sun.
- Magecraft is performed through the use of sentences or words in the Divine Tongue. As the Divine Tongue has been largely forgotten, spells are highly limited in their function.
- The way Magecraft works is that the magic user says the words, and at the same time pushes their magic into the words, causing the word (concept) or statement (law) to be enforced on the universe as long as the user continues supplying the words with magic.
- The further the caster is from where the effect is located, the harder it is to supply the words with magic.
- Depending on how much magic is supplied at once, the effect of the spell can have a wider effect on reality. For example, saying "fire" in the Divine Tongue with only a little magic would cause a small amount of flame to appear close by the speaker (maybe even directly on top of them if they didn't have strong concentration on where they wanted the word/fire to manifest), while supplying the word with a massive amount could potentially cause a city wide inferno to spring up around the speaker.
Magic:
- Magic is a divine energy that flows down from a second sun called Pollos. Pollos is not actually a sun - rather it is the hole in the universe created when the gods fell from Heaven, and through this hole their magic flows into the universe. Magic permeates the world of A Tale of Lost Swords, imbuing itself into the Divine Words that bind the shattered multiverse together.
Chaos:
- Chaos is "place" beyond the Spiral. It is the original beginning and the eventually end of all things. A wild sea of infinite energy and raw limitless possibility and impossibility, unbound by the words of the Divine Tongue. Chaos does not truly describe the "place"beyond the Spiral, as it is an ever changing place that shifts into something completely new with every passing moment. The power of Chaos erodes the laws of the world, and if not for the power of the God Swords drawing Magic from Heaven to protect it, the Spiral would be erased in an instant.
The power of Chaos seeps in through the cracks in the world, infecting the Spiral. Those who breathe such infected air, or walk on the infected soil become themselves tainted by Chaos, the energy eroding the form and limits bestowed on them by the Divine Tongue. A small level of Chaos merely unlocks the limits in one's mind/soul, allowing one to recall the memories of past iterations of the Spiral, while higher levels of Chaos begin unlocking the limits of one's flesh, strengthening the body.
Demons:
- A Demon is the later stages of Chaos infection. As the limitations of one's being fall away and raw possibility and impossibility takes its place, the body twists and distorts into a hideous form as new limbs and organs, human and non-human, grow across the body. The process usually drives the infected insane, usually violently insane, both due to the trauma of their body distorting, and due to the Chaos energy randomly "unlocking" parts of their mind. This can happen not only to humans, but also to animals, plants, and even the ground and air.
The strongest and most terrible of all Demons are those who have lost all limitations to their form and being, even the "limitation" of personality and memories, becoming little more than floating lumps of Chaos energy that randomly cross through the Spiral, tearing it apart in the process.
Supporters/Opponents/Neutral[]
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