A Study in Cosmology - Ravden

Ravden

The Other around this reality, it’s really dark. Not by a lot, but just enough that it’s noticeable. The greens and purples are just a shade deeper than they should be. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t seem… healthy. Does that make any sense? Maybe not, but it makes me glad I have my broomstick. My own little portable reality.

It always feels odd out here, like the ultimate liminal space, but this place is worse. Usually out here I’m just met with a sort of indifference, like I’m insignificant enough to not be worth noticing, but here, this air feels almost malevolent. I didn’t know that places like this even existed.

Even on the inside, there feels like there’s this very thin, gray layer over everything. The days are duller, the nights darker. I wonder what could be causing it. It just doesn’t feel… natural.

But I suppose I can probably get my answer pretty easily.

Mr. Griffin, why is Ravden like this?

Ravden, while not wholly unique among realities, is in a rather odd position. The layman may sometimes err in thinking that realities exist entirely in their own vacuum, affecting nothing on the outside and not being impacted in return. Realities can often be affected by surrounding factors, especially around the time of their creation. Sometimes, bits of older realities can be incorporated into new ones.

On occasion, two entirely intact realities can collide and become one. This phenomenon impacts you specifically, Cynthia. I believe the presence of an entirely unrelated history—Atlantis, of course—in your literature may be the result of such a collision.

So, if I’m understanding you, Atlantis + Ede Valley were once two completely different realities, but because they crashed together, we in Ede Valley remember it as the distant past. That… re-contextualizes some things.

That is, of course, but one example. In Ravden’s case, it has been affected directly by the Other around it. That area happens to be home to a pocket of sin.

I’m sorry, what? What is that? You’re not talking about like… biblical sin, I assume.

For the uninformed, it is difficult to put down exactly what “sin” is. It is a strange substance that doesn’t appear to follow the laws of physics as they are known in most realities. Neither a liquid or a gas, it also has a tendency to taint most things it comes into contact with. I think the best way to describe it is “anti-magic” as it appears to be created as a by-product of magical acts. Magic is an extraordinary force, one that breaks many rules of causality. Thus, in exchange for allowing these acts to exist, the cosmos performs a sort of balancing act by generating sin.

Now, the cosmos is so large that even if there were five times as many magi all casting constantly, we would be in no fear of being overwhelmed. However, we must always remember the price our art costs. And places like Ravden have paid that price. Sin tends to pool in certain areas, and causes problems for everything around it.

Ravden was formed directly inside one of these pockets. Sin makes up its very fabric, which means that it impacts every element of existence there. For the average person, this may affect them less. Crops grow slower, and are more prone to disease and rot. The sky is often grey, and the nights last longer; it is rarely warm, summers are short, and yet true winter is almost shorter. Ravden finds itself in a near-perpetual state of fall.

Fitting, because of what else the sin causes. The peasantry live in fear, huddled in their small villages, for Lycans lurk in the woods, carrying off livestock, or even attacking humans when the moon is full. Spirits and devils, what the people of Ravden sometimes refer to as “the Fey,” will kidnap children and replace them with changelings, and bewitch women to dance with them at their unholy sabbaths.

All of these beings have in some way been tainted or produced from sin. If the very earth is sin, then those that come from it are sin as well.

The common man of Ravden tends to be superstitious and fearful, obviously for good reason. But the peasantry is given great comfort by the church, both in its proselytizing and its extermination of the supernatural. The Gradis Avelina is the church’s inquisition, and they have cells that travel the countryside, investigating cases of witchcraft and eliminating other threats in the name of St. Aveline.

Unlike most religions, the church doesn’t have a “God” per say. They solely worship the personage of the Saintess Aveline, a nearly angelic figure who it is said appeared in a time of great crisis to slay the hordes of devils overrunning the land. Like most figures of worship, it is impossible to determine how much of Her legend is true, or whether She was even real at all.

While they often venture far and wide as missionaries, priests, and inquisitors, the church makes its home in the city of Victoria, which it also rules as a sort of theocracy. Yet, because of its outward focus, there’s plenty of disorder within the city itself. And plenty of varying opinions on the church as an entity.

Victoria, and other cities like it, tend to be more fortified, and thus safer than the outside, and in the last few hundred years, a middle class of secular merchants and scientists has grown significantly. Or rather, perhaps I should call them pseudo-scientists. They call themselves alchemists, and they and the witches are the closest thing that Ravden has to magic.

True magi tend to not be born on Ravden, which makes sense, considering the sin, but as it usually is in the cosmos, someone’s figured out how to use magic anyway. Or in this case, sin. Because the very earth itself is infected with sin, even minerals are infused with… shall we say “alternate properties”. As is traditional, most alchemists on Ravden are after the Philosopher’s Stone, a mysterious substance said to turn lead into gold and grant eternal life.

Well, everyone has to have a goal, I suppose.

I think it keeps them motivated. And not all alchemists are universally after the stone, anyway. Many of them ride the border between philosophy and mad-scientistry very finely. They’re always attempting to experiment on something or other. Often on humans if they can manage it. The Alchemist’s Guild, an organization formed, of course, by the church, attempts to keep them in line, but to little avail. There are simply too many people in the city, and too many niches to hide in.

One of the greatest successes of the alchemists, and I say success with the greatest of sarcasm, was also one of their earliest. They somehow utilized a distillation of sin to create an infectious contagion—usually transmitted orally—that causes its victims great sensitivity to sunlight and an unquenchable thirst for blood.

Now you may be thinking that that sounds exactly like a vampire.

Why yes, that was exactly what I was thinking.

And you would be correct. They function quite differently than the more common “cursed vampire”, and are exclusively located on Ravden.

Cursed by the Morrigan, I’m assuming you mean.

Their existence is much more inconvenient than that of their cosmos-wide counterparts, and difficult. That is what happens when one attempts to utilize sin. It will never create anything positive.

I had no idea there was more than one type of vampire out there. As far as I’m aware, they’re pretty rare in Ede Valley.

There are more vampires in the cosmos than there’ve any right to be.

But my personal qualms with the construction of the cosmos aside, I hope I was able to satisfy your question, if barely. Sin is something which still demands study. In that way the alchemists of Ravden may be ahead of the rest of us. In fact, the whole of Ravden could potentially be worth studying.

I’d like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes, however. So that will never be a task I undertake.