SHARDSTONES #3: Mysticism
In our last series, we discussed invocation, how this art was conceived, and bloodcutting. Today, we will be discussing the mysterious and esoteric practices of shardstone mysticism — a blend of Akaran spirituality and the nascent art of shardscience.
Mysticism has been the outlet for Akaran spirituality for well over a thousand years. The old tribal mobs, and even the ancestors too, knew that their world was horrendously cruel and filled to the brim with ways to die and mysteries to be solved. However, these years were too punctuated with ignorance; there was little learning to be done, and the songs and dances that passed down information fostered little wisdom.
The morg were the ones who helped Akarans make the leap from disparate practices to formalized mysticisms. As this wandering species of four-armed philosophers traveled from coast to coast, solitary and astute, they shared with the Akarans what they knew of the cruel world. They taught the old Tribal Mobs how to remember, and how to pass down what was known. These early practices became the foundations for the first formalized mysticism, which today is known as Our Cruel Road, and in turn became the blueprint for every mystical practice afterwards.
Mysticism does not believe in gods, an afterlife, or supernatural beings. Instead, mysticism relies on trying to attain perfect information, and then the use of that perfect information to establish absolute agency over the world so that death is prevented. Thus, the mystic is one who, usually with drugs or rituals that facilitate a state of altered consciousness, becomes an enlightened sage that prevents doom while blooming virtue.
Through this lens, virtue references anything that would help you or the greater tribe, mob, city, or ring survive. Likewise, sin is the opposite; to be sinful is to sabotage others for selfish reasons, reasons that won’t even help you survive, reasons that will only create death from their ripples throughout the great sea that is everything that lives and will live soon again.
These ideas of virtue and sin, as well as the very nature of the Akaran’s altered consciousness when in mid-ritual or under the influence of some potion, is what led to the modern day shard-based mysticisms that scavengers so rely on. Those early scavenger rings with their invokers, drifters, and warlords were incomplete in their abilities. Their hope would break in Torn, and with their hope gone soon their lives were rendered forfeit. There was a need for someone with knowledge that could guide them, who with virtue could ensure that a scavenger ring succeeds in its mission.
By combining shardstones with the altered mind, in Tarnak, the answer was found. A Ruminator by the name of Mahng Xyn Sil took powered shardstone, threw it into his rumination brew, and drank it. Their mind, altered in ways never before experienced, combined with their ideas of virtue as well as their inherent philosophies and with this power were able to produce hyper-dimensional miracles not through bloodcutting or artifice or any other method of invocation, but through raw mysticism itself.
Though they were the first, they were not the last. Other mystics did so, using shardstones for idols or instead having them crushed into the inks used to mark walls or floor tiles in their ceremony rooms or otherwise letting them hang off the body as they worked their secret ways. As they did so, the hyper-dimensional manifested without fail; their attempts at controlling the world, or instilling wisdom into others, or otherwise saving the lives of the dying transmuted placebo hopes into actual miracles.
In this way, mysticism blossomed. Invokers could not explain it, and those that tried were baffled as mystics who entered Torn performed miracle after miracle without any knowledge of bloodcutting nor any ability to properly invoke shardstones. It was as if raw faith in the mysticism alone facilitated these powers; faith, and the weird mental constructs born from ritual and from drug and from cognitive dissonance too.
The proliferation of mystics has led to many new beliefs in the modern age. Shardstone Cults now litter Tarnak, dying and rising every day, each cult experimenting with new ways to combine thought with shardstone with faith with ritual and creating ever more elaborate, impossible, and miraculous philosophies that themselves are used to support not just scavenger rings, but the many refugees flooding Tarnak, themselves made sojourners by the Great Dying and desperate for any hope these same mystics can provide.
Know that much like invocations, shardstone mysticisms are too broken into the tiers mentioned in our last blogpost: jade, vermillion, auroral, sunless, and opal. Likewise, just as invocation relies on force of will, so too do the miracles of mysticism.
SHARDSCIENCE GLOSSARY
This glossary will expand with each blog post!
Attunement — The act of bonding to a shardstone, which calls to Akarans until one grabs it. A turn of a sandglass later and the bond is cemented.
Beyond — The realm of the stars perceived through liquid starlight, outside of time and space, where all knowledge gathers; the World Torn Apart and the various universes contained within the inert Monoliths littering Torn.
Bloodcutting — The art of drawing your own blood with tools designed for gem cutting. Requires too deep imagination and creativity, for you must perfectly picture what you wish this shardstone to invoke. Master Bloodcutters can make shards with multiple powers.
Force of Will — One’s own internal willpower, which is the fuel for invocations. When drained, you can no longer invoke until you rest and meditate.
Hyper-Dimensional — A power, effect, or quality that is outside of time and space, and thus native to the beyond; the supernatural, magical, or sublime; the powers of shardstones or other Torn-native phenomena.
Invocation — The art of drawing upon shardstones that have been bloodcut with purpose, and how hyper-dimensional effects are created with them.
Invoker — A scavenger who is too primarily a worker of invocation.
Mysticism — Collections of rituals and ceremonies designed to pass down information and establish agency over Akara. Modern day mysticism uses shardstones to facilitate this process.
Shardstone Cults — Cults dedicated to esoteric ideas that are made reality through mystical shardsciences.
Sin — Selfish actions that endanger not only your life, but everyone else’s life too.
Virtue — The opposite of sin; actions and beliefs that will better foster your survival, and the survival of those you care about as well.
