Lupdels/Logs/The Price of Catching a Thief

09/24/2024

It has been 450 years, 188 days since the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

It is the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Golden Panther.

It is currently summer and it is early afternoon.

Lupdels

The memories of what Lupdels has named the Gosen Sansebel, the Hungry Gardener, haunt him.

You find yourself shaping creation to your whim, gesturing and twisting nature into an elegant, harmonious design, but find yourself depleted each time – a gnawing hunger filling your being, as you pull from each available mana stream and exhaust its limitations. Years – decades – centuries pass in moments, and yet you find that hunger welling deeper and deeper with each use – insatiable and endless. You reach to broader areas for mana, and are more selective as time passes, but the hunger does not abate.

The researcher Valenal has suggested that the mana of the Plane of Abiding is being consumed, accusing the Heralds of draining the system dry. Reality will collapse. But is it really the Heralds?

Focusing on the hunger, you discover that the only fulfilment you can achieve is by consuming raw, pure mana in immense quantity. In time, you find the thread of new streams of mana just beyond your reach. You call to it, and it does not answer -- and yet the hunger grows, as does your desperation. It takes painful ages, but in that time, you discover a way to grasp that mana -- by pulling something new inside the paradise. Your senses are overwhelmed as you reach out, deliberately slicing into the knitted strands that protect the plane, and force the new threads of mana through, building a new weave. In this moment, you feel more powerful than ever -- and the hunger is sated.

And yet in the visions from Elanthia’s past, the Gosen Sansebel behaved similarly to this mana thief of Valenal’s theory. The hunger was for raw, pure mana, not mixed through sorcerous arts. And the Gosen Sansebel discovered a way to consume new threads of mana from beyond the world it lived in—slicing through the aether barrier around the plane and building a new weave from the external mana.

Extraplanar corruption, like the influence of not just sorcery but lunar and holy magic that corrupt the domains of dragons that Lupdels has long studied. Corruption of a domain on a cosmic scale. And yet the voracious entity consumed this new pure mana and was sated.

Was there not a Paladin or Cleric that had said they felt the mana thief seemed most joyous in consuming holy mana? Lupdels glances through his notes, searching, and instead stumbles on the account on the visions experienced by Waydren when he and the other Rangers and Empaths Beseeched Elanthia to Find … the truth?

My senses reached back to a time when the planet was teeming with wildness. Vibrant, uncontrolled, untamed life was once present here, in this very location. I sensed the rise and fall of countless civilizations here, in this very soil. Under the careful watch of a cultivating eye pruning and fertilizing the natural life on the planet, I felt the influence of guardians maintaining the balance between wildness and civilization. Existence, self-contained and free of outside influence, remained in balance such that life could thrive.

However, I also sensed that this time was short-lived. I felt a distinct time when these gardeners sustaining the balance could no longer entirely fight off outside influence. As each civilization learned to harness the flowing streams of mana, it crumbled beneath a localized extinction, leaving a bleeding wound where no life could bloom. What was an embrace of wholeness now twists into a litany of trauma, as unnatural blights spread from festering eruptions long forgotten. I felt the overwhelming loss of Life within each wound, as disease propagates alien, twisted life from outside of the plane in each laceration. As portions of Elanthia have died, outsiders have planted their seed and begun cultivating to expand their own presence through new pathways into existence from elsewhere.

As new pathways came to take what was here, lesser guardians attempted to assist the caretakers. They attempted to contain the wounds, and to cultivate life, but their impact was severely limited, as it was dependent on a connection to the outside, as if drawing from a well some distance away to put out a raging fire. The wounds continued to fester and bleed. The primary guardians, who were reliant on the balance of life to continue cultivating, focused on what good they could do, leaving the outsiders to attempt to contain the blights.

And then … Lupdels flips over to his own notes from his experiences when he joined with the Empaths and Rangers to Beseech for Clarity.

You feel the breath of the unseen chorus on your face with each stroke that shapes creation in light gestures, and in turn, the streams of pure mana that ebbs with every act. You watch as Gardeners are created to support the Guardians in more consistent but smaller movements, but see that the Gardeners were flawed, leading to their downfall. They mixed streams of mana to enhance their own influence, introducing new and unintended consequences to the plan of their creators, drawing new beings that were not within the intent of the guiding forces of the universe.

The Gardeners, more than one, were all flawed. All too hungry and driven to draw in streams of mana from forces outside of the universe. And there was also that memory Lupdels had from one particular Gardener …

Boundless creation followed, and you found yourself pushing each of your limits. Time speeds up as you watch creation become even more intricate. And yet -- time slows until you can focus on a single feeling -- a single moment inside a single vision. The humanoid has returned. Again, you do not understand her words, but you instinctually are familiar with her meaning -- rejection. Failure. With another touch, you are unmade, and in that moment, you become acutely aware that you are accused of poisoning the purity of this world. In the unmaking, your consciousness becomes attached to a speck of dirt inside a beam of light beneath the canopy that surrounds a now-withering spire, helpless to watch as your creations slowly are undone as a consequence of your actions inside a null prison for what appears to be an eternity.

Many Gardeners, many hungry entities, many decisions leading to corruption. The impurity of the world could not be reversed, but a higher power—this humanoid that had been an orange dragon—could at least eliminate the flawed Gardeners.

Unmake them. But perhaps not all of them, entirely.

One memory of a Gardener that survived, barely. Attaching to a speck of dirt, so tiny that perhaps even this original Creator did not notice it—like mortals overlooking an ant. Powerless and simply observing from its null prison.

You watch from the outside as the humanoid crafts a new being -- similar to the one you experienced, except fundamentally different in one fundamental purpose. Where you had experienced the memories of a Gardener, these new creations warded against the fear of rot. Again, you experience time pass in epochs as Elanthia would, watching the verdant glory tarnish, fade, and wilt, and with a feeling of dread, you cannot help but know that something has been beckoned through. You feel pain as war ravages the planet, and time slows to one horrible moment -- when hundreds of these new creations are locked in battle with an incomprehensible outside force. In a flash, one invokes words that have terrible meaning -- and at the expense of the verdant life, it rends everything you consider beautiful into a desiccated wasteland, leaving innumerable creators and their creations joining the soul of the planet. Your vision abruptly returns to normal, leaving you disoriented.

A second generation of Gardeners were made, but more Guardians now as they warded against the rot. The rot introduced by other planes. Demons, yes, but perhaps other entities as well—whatever alien intelligences dwell on the Plane of Probability, perhaps even beings now known as Immortals. Open gates to a city can welcome in both friend and foe, good and evil. Regardless of morality, they would all bring new influences to the world …

Yet, in time, you feel a new powerful influence arrive, and with it, access to their own font of creation, carrying enormous capability and supply of a variant of mana harnessed by new shapers that had no compunctions regarding the mixing of energies. These beings begin to shape and blend and with every exertion of their will, the Guardians' presence feels more distant as the mana streams become further mixed. You feel the tone of the unseen chorus change at this not only do these new beings shape without understanding the Guardians' need, but they do so with impunity, starving the Guardians from the very lands and sources they cultivated for so long. In a single expenditure of will, you feel the Guardians react. You feel the might of these new beings diminished, and the Guardians place boundaries, rules around their capacity to influence and to shape. Despite and without recognizing these limitations, the interlopers persist, enacting their own plans and shepherding their own flocks.

A truce? A partition? Lupdels ponders exactly what word precisely describes this imposed order of limitations that do not do away with the interlopers and instead provide structure and boundaries. Non-overlapping domains of authority?

And then there are the blank pages that Lupdels intended to write down his observations from the effort with Avrenka to trace the stolen mana.

The efforts at creating an Aether anomaly and using Othersight to track the mana as it was drained by the thief were unsuccessful. Unless failure to find a thief was itself a success?

Lupdels begins to write down some observations.

"Valenal believes the Plane of Abiding, like a pitcher of juice, is being drained by an external entity—an entity that consumes pure mana, not mixed-mana. This is creating the wild mana as the low levels have caused the circulation to become erratic.”

Lupdels pauses to ponder some of the other observations from Valenal, that there is a proper balance between the types of mana juice. But if the analogy is to juice wouldn’t that depend on an consumer’s taste and preferences? That may be an issue after avoiding this specific cause of the end of the world.

"While the Heralds, the true Heralds, are accused of draining the mana of the Plane of Abiding, Elanthia herself has shown visions of a deep history of their existence in balance before interlopers. What has changed that would explain the Heralds consuming more mana than before, their centuries if not millennia of existence?”

On the next line Lupdels writes just a single word: “Nothing.”

“But there were also the original Gardeners, hungry entities that broke the aether barriers between the planes in their quest for more pure mana—including new sources like lunar or holy? These Hungry Gardeners behave very similarly to the observations made by Valenal about a mana thief.”

Lupdels wishes he could remember more about the claim by a holy magic user that they felt like there was a preference for their mana over others. Perhaps that could be used as bait.

“The experiment to track down the mana thief was unsuccessful.”

The sentence sits on the page for a few moments as Lupdels reflects on the conclusion he has yet to write. It’s possible this single experiment falsifies the theory of Valenal about a mana thief entirely. If so, it throws the explanations of the chaos of wild magic back to the unknown. He shakes his head and continues to write.

“Further research is necessary. The visions from Elanthia’s past can be considered independent and collaborating evidence of Valenal’s mana thief. A voracious mana-consuming entity, or entities, existed in Elanthia’s deep past and were unmade—but at least one survived.”

Lupdels underlines the final phrase.

Perhaps the experiment was too crude to properly track the mana as it was being drained. The Othersight should have assisted in picking up the vibrations in the Aether, like focusing on a single instrument played among an orchestra. But perhaps Lupdels was not in tune with all of the streams of mana the thief was interested in? Or perhaps an experiment in which a mana that was most attractive to the thief was used as bait could be more successful? But then how best to ensure the use of Othersight to track the movement of this mana?

A gold tuner sits on Lupdel’s desk. The sharp orichalcum needles give him the chills every time he looks at it. He’s worked it over several times, doing his best to shape it to the bumps along his spine. He’s been studying anatomy charts for weeks to better understand the operation, but he worries he’s not ready. But is there time?

Lupdels picks up the tuner and walks out towards the Empath Guild in the Crossing.