Chaos Apostate
First Post
‘And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro’ Nature to find this tree
But their search was all in vain;
There grows one in the Human Brain’
-William Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’
Sigil. A city of many things, perhaps of all things, but above all a city of paradox. In a purely physical sense, it is widely accepted to be at the centre of the multiverse, which is widely accepted to be infinite. At once it is the Cage and the City of Doors. A place representative to all peoples across the planes of freedom and diversity, and yet at the same time the greatest prison ever to exist. Everywhere in the city one can see this paradox displaying itself in microcosm, from the Lady herself - a being with the power to defy the will of every power in the multiverse and yet so weak as to be unable to escape her home plane - to any one of the people who even now scurry to and fro through the city’s streets, many of whom travel freely between various planes of existence as part of their daily life and yet must scrape and steal for every copper they can just to eke out their pathetic existences.
The first thing anyone notices when they first arrive in Sigil is the physical impossibility of the place. It’s a rare man who doesn’t stumble and fall the first time he walks out into the street and sees the cityscape gently rolling upwards and arching over on itself on both sides of him. Eventually though, everybody gets used to it and it’s accepted as a simple rule of life that Sigil is built on the inside of a vast ring. If you walk long enough in a straight line, then you’ll come back to where you started. It’s bizarre, of course, but sooner or later the mind simply adapts and accepts it as a fact. It makes you wonder, though – just what else has your mind accepted so easily?
Such navel-gazing may seem pointless, but here again a newcomer to Sigil will quickly realise that he’s been mistaken – because on the Planes, belief is a palpable force. A strong conviction is all it really takes to change the very nature of existence. And with philosophy such an important force on the planes, it’s hardly surprising that the locals take it very, very seriously.
Of course, some people take it more seriously than others. There are those in any place you care to name who are committed enough to a philosophy that they devote their entire lives to it, and adopt it as their entire reason for being. Such people tend to attract followers, and that’s how religions are born. In Sigil most any philosophy you care to think up, and most any that you don’t, has its adherents and fanatics. Only a few of them managed to appeal to enough people to form a real force, though, and it’s these that form the basis of the Factions. Organisations so powerful that between themselves they have a monopoly on just about everything you care to name in the Cage.
And, of course, it’s the members of these Factions who get the most worked up about their beliefs. So, when a rather bedraggled but very handsome and well dressed man stands up on a soapbox on a street corner in the middle of the Hive and starts waxing lyrical on how ridiculous, ill-informed, and generally distasteful are the members of every single faction in Sigil, it could be considered something of an extraordinary event. Enough, certainly, to make some passers-by hurry onwards in fear that they may get caught up in the ensuing violence and others to stand and watch with the same fascination that makes onlookers gather round the scene of a horrific accident. Currently the crowd he had attracted numbered at somewhere just over a dozen, and its members were diverse. Some tried to argue with him on points of philosophy, some tried to shut him up for his own good, one old and grizzled woman vocally supported him, and a good number just laughed. To all of them, it appeared a minor miracle that the sermon had not yet been heard by anyone who took serious offence – it would only take one member of the Red Death to walk past, and the man’s life would be forfeit.
As it was though, the man had managed to speak for a little over five minutes with no serious interruption and the numbers of the crowd were quickly swelling. Any passers-by now certainly could not help but notice the proceedings, and even the speaker was starting to appear rather nervous about the repercussions his convictions may have. Still the flood of speech continued, his voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd.
Ruddy and sweet to eat
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro’ Nature to find this tree
But their search was all in vain;
There grows one in the Human Brain’
-William Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’
Sigil. A city of many things, perhaps of all things, but above all a city of paradox. In a purely physical sense, it is widely accepted to be at the centre of the multiverse, which is widely accepted to be infinite. At once it is the Cage and the City of Doors. A place representative to all peoples across the planes of freedom and diversity, and yet at the same time the greatest prison ever to exist. Everywhere in the city one can see this paradox displaying itself in microcosm, from the Lady herself - a being with the power to defy the will of every power in the multiverse and yet so weak as to be unable to escape her home plane - to any one of the people who even now scurry to and fro through the city’s streets, many of whom travel freely between various planes of existence as part of their daily life and yet must scrape and steal for every copper they can just to eke out their pathetic existences.
The first thing anyone notices when they first arrive in Sigil is the physical impossibility of the place. It’s a rare man who doesn’t stumble and fall the first time he walks out into the street and sees the cityscape gently rolling upwards and arching over on itself on both sides of him. Eventually though, everybody gets used to it and it’s accepted as a simple rule of life that Sigil is built on the inside of a vast ring. If you walk long enough in a straight line, then you’ll come back to where you started. It’s bizarre, of course, but sooner or later the mind simply adapts and accepts it as a fact. It makes you wonder, though – just what else has your mind accepted so easily?
Such navel-gazing may seem pointless, but here again a newcomer to Sigil will quickly realise that he’s been mistaken – because on the Planes, belief is a palpable force. A strong conviction is all it really takes to change the very nature of existence. And with philosophy such an important force on the planes, it’s hardly surprising that the locals take it very, very seriously.
Of course, some people take it more seriously than others. There are those in any place you care to name who are committed enough to a philosophy that they devote their entire lives to it, and adopt it as their entire reason for being. Such people tend to attract followers, and that’s how religions are born. In Sigil most any philosophy you care to think up, and most any that you don’t, has its adherents and fanatics. Only a few of them managed to appeal to enough people to form a real force, though, and it’s these that form the basis of the Factions. Organisations so powerful that between themselves they have a monopoly on just about everything you care to name in the Cage.
And, of course, it’s the members of these Factions who get the most worked up about their beliefs. So, when a rather bedraggled but very handsome and well dressed man stands up on a soapbox on a street corner in the middle of the Hive and starts waxing lyrical on how ridiculous, ill-informed, and generally distasteful are the members of every single faction in Sigil, it could be considered something of an extraordinary event. Enough, certainly, to make some passers-by hurry onwards in fear that they may get caught up in the ensuing violence and others to stand and watch with the same fascination that makes onlookers gather round the scene of a horrific accident. Currently the crowd he had attracted numbered at somewhere just over a dozen, and its members were diverse. Some tried to argue with him on points of philosophy, some tried to shut him up for his own good, one old and grizzled woman vocally supported him, and a good number just laughed. To all of them, it appeared a minor miracle that the sermon had not yet been heard by anyone who took serious offence – it would only take one member of the Red Death to walk past, and the man’s life would be forfeit.
As it was though, the man had managed to speak for a little over five minutes with no serious interruption and the numbers of the crowd were quickly swelling. Any passers-by now certainly could not help but notice the proceedings, and even the speaker was starting to appear rather nervous about the repercussions his convictions may have. Still the flood of speech continued, his voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd.
