Codex of Deeper Mysteries

Transcribers Note: Like many books I have compiled I have employed some trickery to produce it, I utilized a mystical dictation spell to actually transcribe the text and used other magics to allow the pages to actually contain more text than their space allows. While strictly speaking such enchanted tomes with their strange scrolling bars seem to break the feel and nature of a text, when a book is titled something like "Codex of Deeper Mysteries," such an oddity only seems appropriate.

 

I digress.

 

The contents of this document I compiled from fragments of an ancient Lorian text more ancient than the entire timeline of Lore would seem to allow.

 

(Parenthetical note to self. I am slipping. Two uses of the same word in the same sentence. Substitute archaic or something similar. I would use "antediluvian" but I am not sure there ever was a Lorian deluge of that sort. "Old" simply lacks my feeling. Hmm. "Archaic" implies lack of utility that is a potential problematic connotation. Of course, given the contents... and I am rambling once again.)

 

Strangely, despite its apparent age, the ink used to pen the document is inconsistent. The writing shows signs of many inks acquired from and written at many times, even within a single sentence. Some of this ink will not be available in this plane until far into the future.

 

Unfortunately, the original autograph is incomplete and the substance of the missive is, as nearly as I can tell, allegorical gibberish.

 

Falerin Ardendor - Isle de Oriens

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Codex of Deeper Mysteries

 

Truth the First: Time is a River

 

The most important revelation for any initiate of the deeper mysteries to make is that all bodies of water flow to the seas and that the seas are interconnected. For with this revelation becomes the startling conclusion that time is a river.

 

This concept is key.

 

Many lesser beings tend to easily see the sea that is the branching of choice and decision. They recognize easily that choice is a divergent process and forms many branches of the mesh (so seeing the branches they tend to think of trees and bushes).

 

Lesser beings find it much harder to see the core truth that the basic nature of time as a whole is not divergent at all but rather, like all other streams, the time stream tends to flow into pools. While choice itself tends to indeed produce the divergence those lesser beings see, the course of natural force is to unite not to divide, and so in the grander scope there is a tendency like water to unify.

 

Pools have layers and currents. And similarities between these currents can be as often the result of convergence into the pool as they can be the result of earlier divergence in the stream.

 

Truth the Second: Both Convergence and Divergence produce Parallels

 

There exist only a limited and fixed number of patterns and ideas. Very little is ever truly new. This means that beings have far more analogs than they realize and far more echos and connections.

 

While close analogs are the clear result of the divergence of choice in the stream, there exist as many, if not more, analogs who result from time flowing as time is won't to flow toward convergence, towards fixed and recognized parallels.

 

This is why despite the infinite complexity of possibilities, seemingly totally unconnected worlds have things like elves, orcs, and the most ubiquitous, humankind, which is in fact the vulgar form of the many.

 

Humanity arises countless separate times within the ocean because humanity is the natural fit to the niche of time for any universe that follows the fundamentally same basic pattern.

 

For all the varied wonder and diversity the pattern may produce, it must always remain familiar to its core.

 

Like produces like.

 

Truth the Third: Anthropomorphism Dominates Understanding

 

Choices and decisions are constrained by the mind that conceives them.

 

Mind is constrained by the relative limits of experience.

 

While the mind may entertain all sorts of variation, diversity is at core just that variation and not true difference.

 

Warring ideologies arise because beings want to pattern all things after their own selves.

 

This is the inherent tendency of the living. In order to try to reduce all things to their understanding, beings will carve away a square until it is a circle.

 

This itself produces both the illusion of convergence and indeed true convergence, for deities and powers, themselves beings, are as prone to this act of the living as mortal men.

 

However, not all things that appear like are, in truth, like.

 

Many an initiate can speak to the existence of shades or shadows.

 

Just as a shadow produced by light cast upon an object will take upon the appearance, but not the substance, of these surface, so too will a shadow of reality cast upon the mold take upon the appearance but not the substance of its contents.

 

Truth the Fourth: The Mold Can be Broken

 

Every so often events can conspire to break this pattern and to produce true difference. This divergence is so fundamental that the mold itself may crack.

 

If that which has been molded is fluid enough to have not been gelled and set then it will flow away.

 

If the stream of time is fluid enough to be as water then it can be re-set yet again in a new mold.

 

Invariably, however, those who initiate the re-set produce a mold that is patterned on what they know for this is the nature of the third truth.

 

Truth the Fifth: Remolding is not Perfect

 

As any who has worked with gel can attest its setting is not uniform.

 

Cold spots may gel quicker than others while hot spots may remain always fluid.

 

Further collecting that which has flowed through cracks in the mold is imperfect. Material may be lost, and some pieces may be, already, fully gelled.

 

This means that in any re-set fluid there may remain fragments of the original gel embedded in the new, while there also may be less fluid initially than was started with, some will be lost as waste.

 

Truth the Six: Molds can be used to produce other molds

 

A metallurgist or candymaker working with a mold may either use a mold that is easy to recreate, and is thus destroyed in the creation, such as those created in earth and powder, or may instead produce a mold that, is fixed and permanent, many time reused.

 

Cracks in the former type of mold rarely matter for they are not designed to be kept.

 

Cracks in the latter are cataclysmic, for the mold is meant to produce many casts after its kind and indeed to create additional molds based on the pattern of the first.

 

Any new mold based on an old mold or a mold that is cracked is likely to be subtly or substantially different from the original, as the process of recreation is never perfect.

 

Truth The Seventh: Many broken molds can be used to approximate

 

When a mold is cracked and a new one needs to be made, it is often good to have several broken patterns from which to form the new mold.

 

With such, a new mold can be approximated even when pieces of each original are missing entirely.

 

These patterns will help to eliminate instabilities and irregularities in function of the mold.

 

The content, however, is likely to have quirks from all of the molds being used to produce the pattern.

 

Of course, creation of this new mold does not effect and contents previously produced from the old molds, but, rather, replicates their features in an entirely new form.

 

Truth the Eighth: A broken mold may be itself also directly repaired and refilled

 

Given a broken mold whose contents have leaked it may be possible, via great energy, to create a weld to repair the original mold and then to refill it even after contents have leaked and been re-set....*

 

*Here the original document that I copied for this book broke down. It appears to have been torn asunder.