Cataclysm, the: A universal conflagration that swept through the ether, burning the cosmos from the inside out. Its cause remains unknown, though the point of origin seems to have been in the ether over Mithgar. The only survivors were those occupying prana-infused, elemental fire-resistant, or ether-partitioned locations.
Clairsentience: The nexic ability to receive information beyond normal sensory perception.
Dawn Tribe, the: A collective term for Gen who remained on Middle Stratum spheres during the Purges. Surviving in isolated pockets, the Dawn Gen emerged from hiding after the Cataclysm destroyed the Guild. Their culture has regressed to a pre-industrial lifestyle led by shamans.
Ether, the: A universal medium through which light travels. “Ether” is used when referring to a quantity of this substance, while “the ether” refers to the region it occupies.
The ether boasts a number of extraordinary qualities. It has practically no mass or viscosity and allows objects traveling through it to exceed the speed of light. Ether is also highly volatile and combustible.
Ether-Runner: A ship built to travel quickly through space by traversing the ether. Almost all ether-runners are piloted using a sympathetic interface called the Wheel.
Factor: The user of a Working; named for the act of fashioning prana.
Faerda: A primordial animistic deity worshiped by Gen in ancient times and by the Dawn Tribe after the Cataclysm. Outsiders misinterpret Faerda as the divinization of the White Well, but her followers claim that their goddess is present in all life, everywhere, and at all times.
Gen: An immortal race of the Middle Stratum holding a place in the hierarchy of being one step above humans. “Gen” is the word for “people” in that race’s tongue, and is both singular and plural. The word’s pronunciation varies between Mithgarders, who render it “Ghen”, and Kethans, who prefer “Jen”.
Greycloaks: Properly, Lawbringers; members of Shaiel’s priesthood identified by their eponymous uniform. They wield shadow swords and the power to manifest the Void.
Guild, the: Properly, the Sublime Brotherhood of Steersmen. Though it was a private professional fraternity, the Guild acted as a self-appointed regulatory agency. Its primary functions were advancing the science of ether-running and regulating the construction of ether-runners and Wheels. The Guild’s authority was thought to rival the combined power of all current and former political bodies.
Human: The race holding the middle position in the whole hierarchy of being. Called the clay tribe by the Gen, humans possess intelligence but have limited life spans.
Isnashi: A sect comprised of Night Gen who perverted Faerda’s gift of skin changing to serve Shaiel.
Kirth, Ebrim: a Factor from Mithgar celebrated as the first human to fashion a Wheel. Popularly called the Arkwright, Kirth is credited with pioneering human ether-running. A minority of revisionist historians claim that Kirth learned to fashion the Wheel from a Gen sage.
Kost: An archetypal antagonist found in the folklore of most spheres. Though the particular attributes and names ascribed to these creatures vary by locality, a kost (pronounced “kosht”) is commonly identified as an evil spirit inhabiting the body of a living or once living being.
Most sources relate the kost’s ability to indefinitely delay death by taking a succession of stolen forms. Extant accounts disagree as to the beings’ original nature. Some describe the kost as a pure spirit or demon, while others portray kosts as wicked Factors who attained a sort of cursed immortality. These latter accounts usually refer to a Worked object that houses the kost’s soul.
Light Tribe, the: Members of a Gen enclave that survived the Purges by taking shelter in hell’s Sixth Circle. Descended from the nobility of the more refined tribes, the Light Gen took their name from their self-imposed mission to keep the flame of civilization alight.
Malefaction: An effect produced by fashioning Void according to the user’s thought patterns. The practitioners of such techniques, called “Malefactors”, have attained infamy belying their historically small numbers.
Metasomatics: A branch of nexism whose practitioners can alter living flesh by will alone.
Metastasis: A class of nexic powers that enhance personal movement and facilitate travel.
Midras: A god whose cult gained dominance in antiquity. The ancient dualistic faith associated Midras with the sun, life, fire, compassion, and virtue. The god of light’s priests were famous for traveling the countryside dispensing justice in lawless lands.
Mystery: One of the ancient liturgical rites of the Gen, whose shamans practiced the first known systematic tradition of fashioning prana.
Necromancer: A common derogatory term for a disciple of Teth, though in practice the term has been applied to social pariahs of varying backgrounds. The study, manipulation, and attempted reversal of death is but one branch on the Way of Teth.
Nexism: A cosmic mechanism for manipulating space, time, matter, and thought by will alone. Properly the domain of higher beings, nexism is rare among the Gen and all but unknown to humans.
Nexus-Runner: A spacefaring vessel resembling an ether-runner in general function but powered and operated by nexism.
Night Tribe, the: Descendants of refugees from the Guild’s Purges (mostly Gen, but encompassing many races) who fled into the emptiness beyond the Middle Stratum’s last stars. Living in darkness for millennia has strengthened the Night Gen’s will to survive and hardened their hearts against the peoples who cast them out.
Nine Circles, the: Hell; variously described as either a place or state of torment reserved for the wicked after death. Ancient peoples’ concepts of hell differed between religions and even among sects of the same faith. Few cults lacked such a notion entirely.
Prana: This primeval force is the basic building block of matter and the animating principle of all living things. Also called the light of the White Well.
Pranaphage: Nightmarish monstrosities that feed on other beings’ life energy, pranaphages arose from horrific breeding experiments dating back to the Purges.
The Guild selectively bred Gen prisoners over hundreds of generations to isolate and study their capacity for nexism. Greed and power lust warped the project’s goals toward creating the perfect stealth predator to dispatch the Guild’s rivals. Though lacking sight and speech, pranaphages are potent nexists whose beaklike mouths can kill without touching their victims.
Princes of Hell: Three surpassingly potent and evil beings who ruled the Nine Circles following the departure of hell’s creators. Once human, their unrivaled wickedness earned them infernal honors outranking the baals; and dread curses whose corrupting effects birthed nightmarish plagues among mortals. The three princes, in ascending order of rank, are Tzaraat, Hazeroth, and Lykaon.
Saniyan: The middle rank of Shaiel’s priesthood. The name means “left hand”.
Snare, the: Pejorative term for those realms created by the old gods to capture their followers’ souls, thus preventing them from rejoining the Nexus after death, e.g. heaven and the Nine Circles.
Sphere: An inhabited world of the Middle Stratum, synonymous with “planet”.
Steersman: The pilot of an ether-runner (the term is gender neutral) who can control a ship through the Wheel. When describing an individual with Guild training, the term became a capitalized proper noun. Most Guild-trained Steersmen were powerful Factors.
Stratum: A discrete region of the cosmos. Except for the Middle Stratum, all Strata are defined by their uniform composition.
The Strata are arranged in descending order of potency, beginning with the Fire Stratum located just below the White Well, and ending at the Stone Stratum located just above the Void. The Middle Stratum is the balancing point of these forces and is synonymous with mundane space.
Telepathy: The power to nexically perceive, alter, and even control others’ thoughts. Telepaths are as feared and distrusted among nexists as necromancers are among Factors.
Teth: An esoteric concept describing
the flow of prana from the White Well into the Void. The principle defies easy definition, since its followers claim that Teth encompasses all areas of cosmology, philosophy, morality, and natural science. One of the major tenets of Teth is the dominance that entropy exerts upon all things.
Thelokinesis: The nexic ability to exert force on objects by will alone.
Thelosynthesis: The ability to alter objects and one’s environment through nexism.
Thera: A primeval entity alternately worshiped and despised in a number of ancient faiths. Theological opinions on Thera’s nature vary, though most cults thought her a goddess. Necromancers consider her a personification of Teth. The Nesshin styled her the daughter of Zadok and queen of demons who brought evil into the world through her patricide.
Transessence: The process of exchanging the properties of substances through Workings.
Void, the: The lowest region of the cosmos, where prana flowing from the White Well settles once it has lost all of its potency. The Void is a nearly infinite abode of darkness and absolute cold where life cannot exist.
Wheel, the: A sympathetic control interface allowing a steersman to merge his awareness with an ether-runner.
White Well, the: A vast concentration of pure prana located in the ether above all of the Strata. The Well provides the raw material for all energy, matter, and life; as well as Workings and Mysteries. Some religious traditions equate the Well with Zadok’s divine power, which was separated from the creator upon his death.
Working: An effect produced by fashioning prana according to the user’s thought patterns, particularly via any method among a number of systems developed by the Guild.
Zadok: Nesshin creator deity worshiped by other faiths under different names. Killed at the beginning of time by Thera, his daughter and first creation, Zadok is prophesied to rise at the eschaton and judge every creature.
Zadokim: Souls who have escaped the Nexus and returned from the light beyond the cosmos. Unlike the shards of Zadok, Thera, and Shaiel, Zadokim exist of and for themselves, independent of any nexus.
The following is a preview of:
THE SECRET KINGS
Soul Cycle Book III
Brian Niemeier
Port Concordia
The Theophilus touched down on Crote just in time to prevent Teg from painting the cramped tub’s walls with his brains.
As Teg debarked into the damp chill air, he thought of the weary survivors huddling in the passenger pod—which, like the ship’s two other sections, was basically a big steel drum—and contemplated the improbable; one might say miraculous, chain of events that had brought them together.
His memory of the golden city had faded like a childhood dream. The deaths of Jaren and Deim, Nakvin’s heartbreak, and whatever had happened to Elena felt like tragedies witnessed by someone else.
They were, in a way. Teg had worn Sulaiman’s body back then. His rugged good looks had since been restored by the same demonic regeneration that had ensured his survival over these wretched years.
Too many years.
The temple door had led to a cave system that he’d been surprised, but not relieved, to learn ran beneath the mountains of Tharis. Teg had thought that the desert planet couldn’t get any uglier. Then he saw what the fire had done to it. The grey dust plains lay under a sheet of black slag. Noxious fumes filled the once dry air, and soot clouds hid the suns.
Even more surprising, Teg wasn’t the only one to survive. A reclusive Nesshin cult had lived and worshiped in those caves for generations. The years had thinned their ranks, and the fire killed off half the remnant. Disease, starvation, and suicide reduced them to a number that the Theophilus could accommodate—barely.
Fifteen years toiling on a world of toxic asphalt to cobble a ship together. Five years more confined to the cluster of damp reeking barrels they’d shot into space in the hope of finding somewhere decent to live.
Hoping that such a place even existed seemed vainer with each barren rock and charred moon they found. If they’d known beforehand about the ether—that only a patchy, mostly unnavigable residue remained—they’d probably have stayed put and died.
Instead, they’d salvaged what they could from Melanoros, crammed themselves into an ether-runner with little to run in, and lived.
Hopeful signs appeared just when all seemed lost. For instance, last month the ether had gradually begun thickening. The leading theory was that the universal medium was spreading out from the fire’s origin point at Mithgar, and would replenish itself in time.
In any case, the survivors had made more progress in the last four weeks than in the previous four years. They’d found a world whose brown and grey atmosphere looked like the clouds of heaven compared to the blasted skies of Tharis. Now they’d landed, and Teg praised the only god he knew.
Thanks, Elena.
“You look like you have seen a ghost.”
Teg turned from the daunting view—a double ridge of dark, ice-flecked rock girding a lake that filled the narrow trough between peaks—and faced the man who’d spoken. Black gravel crunched as Yato Freeman approached along the shore, barefoot. Why not? It wasn’t as if his feet, or the simple brown habit that befit his priestly station, could get much dirtier.
“This is the right place to find them.” Teg pointed toward the lake. Under the murky sky’s reflection, the bones of drowned buildings were clearly visible.
Yato’s grimace tugged his gaunt face down toward his scruffy goatee. Teg unconsciously ran a hand across his own beard, which had grown rather unkempt itself.
“That used to be a valley under an ice dome,” said Teg. “Local traders ran a port down there. Doesn’t look like anyone survived when the fire fell.”
Yato’s dark eyes stared into the cold, silent depths. “May Zadok judge them worthy.”
An icy wind blew down from the ridge, reminding Teg that Crote’s glaciers may have retreated, but its northern latitudes were hardly paradise.
“Did you see any signs of life from the Wheel?”
Yato shook his bald head. “The equatorial settlements felt the full brunt of the fire before the seas covered them. If the ice failed to save this port, then none were spared.”
Five crewmen loitered about the landing site. None had strayed far from the ship, and all beheld the broad mountain vista with wary fascination.
Teg waved to them. “Spread out and search. If it’s useful and portable; grab it. We meet back here in an hour.”
Teg’s foray along a glacier-carved gully turned up nothing besides scattered ice formations like fragile abstract sculptures; not that he’d hoped to find anything but an hour’s solitude. The light was fading when he sat down on a boulder to remove pieces of the pervasive black gravel from his boot and rub some warmth back into his toes.
Is this all there is to look forward to—flying from one dead sphere to the next; scrounging to survive?
The scream echoed from the mountainside, followed by the sounds of something that Teg knew well—violence. He sprang to his feet and made it several yards before realizing that one of his feet was bare. After a hobbling sprint back to the rock and a moment of fumbling with his boot, he raced back down the gully.
The Theophilus came into sight below. Along with the ground, the two spars connecting the ether-runner’s three pods formed an equilateral triangle. But it wasn’t the ship’s rusty grey hull that stopped Teg in his tracks at the edge of the landing site.
A figure was lurching about the otherwise deserted landing site. No, there were two—a Nesshin scout who’d come back early or never left, and something hairy that clung ferociously to his back.
Teg watched the pair’s thrashing with grim fascination. He took the aggressor tearing at his shipmate’s back for a wild animal—until the victim fell motionless onto the gravel, and his attacker set upon him with something that gave off a metallic glint.
Deeply ingrained reflex put Teg’s gun in his hand. The revolver’s greater weight and poorer
balance compared to his lost zephyrs offended his sensibilities, but accuracy wasn’t a factor here. He’d have balked at shooting into a brawl, even if he hadn’t been years out of practice. Luckily, power and accuracy now took a back seat to noise.
Teg scanned the hillside above the landing site, judged it to be clear, and pointed the gun’s muzzle upslope away from the ship. The recoil jolted his wrist and the report made his ears ring when he pressed the trigger.
The aggressor reared back, stopping its attack short. Other men charged onto the scene, but Teg’s eyes were riveted on the creature that sat astride his shipmate.
It wasn’t an animal, but a man with ragged pelts covering his scrawny frame. His left hand clutched a length of crudely sharpened metal. His right forearm ended in a cauterized stump. A matted red mane and beard framed cloudy eyes that had once been emerald green. Teg knew those eyes, just as he knew that they could no longer see him.
The crude blade stabbed downward as its wielder gave a bestial cry.
Teg’s boggled mind would only let him yell, “Stop!”
There was a dull crack like someone hitting a leather sofa with a broom handle. The would-be killer slumped forward and rolled onto the coarse ground beside his intended victim.
Yato stood over them, a wooden club in his hand. His rapid breath sent up clouds of mist.
Souldancer (Soul Cycle Book 2) Page 39
