Delgar is like a room with no doors and many different windows. Inside are a few basic tenets which are absolutely true, but the different windows provide a variety of ways of looking at the same things.
In this post, I’m going to try to illuminate those core truths as well as touch on one of the manifold ways the diverse societies of Delgar approach them. I will switch tenses quite often, as my words slip in and out of character depending on whether I’m recalling something or analyzing it. Hopefully this won’t cause too much confusion.
The Loceri
Delgar is a world of many cultures, and each of these has its own way of looking at the one reality laid out before it. For centuries, the forces of the world were described in various mutually exclusive contexts. To one people, the morning star Ao was the flaming shield of a great deity, taking its name from his. To another, the continents were heaped up on the shells of massive cwara adrift in a boundless ocean, driven on by the earth-mother Lakaia. To yet another, the moon Eua was the savage realm of the dead, governed by its eponymous mistress of the hunt.
Delgar, in fact, is not one world at all. It is a word that means “the world” in the sense we use it in ours. It refers to all that is, was, and ever will be. It is not so much the world as it is the entire universe. To the most influential of ancient peoples, the Loceri, Delgar was the word for everything in existence – but not, strictly speaking, the spaces between them. Delgar was not the bits and bobs from which the planets and stars and all life are constructed, though – not atoms, though the people didn’t know of those, of course… Delgar was, as the word is held to have meant, the pattern of these things. Just as our same twenty-six letters can be plucked judiciously to wright words of hate or of love, so were all things merely a consequence of the way their components were connected.
To the Loceri, they were Delgar as surely as the earth, the moon, and the stars.
It was in this state of mind that the Loceri laid down, so long ago, those thoughts that led to the foundation of magical theory. It is true that only recently has that term been coined and its precepts set down, but these are the inheritors, not the progenitors, of great truth.
The sun, Ao, the Loceri postulated, was no great god wielding fiery shield. It was a force of nature. It served, however, as a profound symbol for certain realities of Delgar, and most keen among these were Fire and Light.
The moon, Eua, they went on, could not possibly be the resting place of the dead. The dead were observed to go nowhere except back into the earth, so clearly this too must be symbolic. In that vein, Eua served quite handily as an icon of two other concepts, Ice and Shadow.
Lastly, dispelling the obviously ludicrous notion that the landmasses lay on the backs of cwara, the Loceri suggested that Lakaia, the earth, was a symbol of the last two primal realities, Earth and Air.
But what, then, was the ocean? The Loceri had not set out to assign to every domain a symbolic anchor, but the question simply demanded an answer. The oceans were places of incredible violence without cause: storms and waves drowning the coasts and crushing vessels at sea, incredible monsters, and torrential downpours. They were also, conversely, thought to be the place where life had originated. The Loceri had long studied the fossils of things long gone from the world, and that study had made it manifestly clear that life had changed over time, originally from oceanic forms, becoming increasingly complex over time and eventually moving onto land.
The oceans, the Loceri decided, were the domain of Chaos, that entropic spark which foamed at the boundaries of all orderly things, evinced in the wearing down of rocks in a stream, the origin of life, and the essence of all things where inertia gives way to activity.
In opposition to Chaos, the Loceri observed the reality of Order, that contrary condition deep within the confines of solid things, the impregnability of diamonds against the reckless march of time, and those necessary constants of existence, like the timeless rules of mathematics, logic, and physics. Order had no true place in the physical world, so its domain, they said, must be the space between things. In the ultimate nonexistence between this and that, Order finds its most comfortable state. Nothing, the Loceri figured, could be more orderly than the absolute nothingness of the Void.
The six realities of the more familiar world – Light, Shadow, Fire, Ice, Air, and Earth – were seen to lean to one side of the Order-Chaos continuum or the other, even as they shared a respectable balance. Light, Fire, and Air are, of course, more chaotic forces than their counterparts, in order, Shadow, Ice, and Earth.
Naturally, Ice is not so much ice as it is cold, as is Fire not really fire but heat. They are opposite extremes of a similar nature, for which the best examples were arguably fire and ice. This polarization had clear echelons of strength. The least polarized were thought to be Earth and Air. These two realities are different very inertly: one is solid while the other is vaporous. More strongly opposed were Fire and Ice, which actively compete. Stronger still was the opposition between Light and Shadow, which are physical opposites, and strongest of all was the disparity between Order and Chaos, which are mutually antithetical.
It is from these prolific forebears that we inherit the most central of our ideas of the nature of reality: that we are as much a part of the world as is the sky or the sea, that profound order can come from utter chaos as surely as immaculate peace can erupt into unimaginable violence, that the whole of existence is built up of rather few and simple concepts, and that, perhaps most critically, the only thing separating us from the stars is a twist of the pattern that is Delgar.