Solar Compendium: Void

 

 Solar Society

The lunar body orbiting the Society Celes was first observed by the Oohtlets in under telescope by PP.2789. Ancient reports record the remains of Oohts structures and craft left on the surface. Thousands of years later, scientists in Ruadciem would confirm the presence of oxygen on the world, in line with the theorized terraforming in-process by the Blessed Tree. Moss, shrubs and flora from the tree had begun to spread, converting the canyons into nutrient dense soil and gradually warming the moon's core, causing iron and silicate elements to begin its internal rotation. The presence of magma at the core and atmospheric gravity were observed over thousands of years to create new and unpredictable weather patterns. The presence of precipitation, while slow, furthered the creation of small bodies of waters within the moon's craters. By the time colonists first arrived, brought by Agathys, the retrograde motion she brought to the world had begun to reverse its rotation around the world, causing a terrestrial shift both in the tides of the Celes and the lunar body's axis. The lunar body, once a dim and ill-resolved speck rotating overhead soon became a lush and vibrant ecosphere capable of sustaining a vast biosphere, allowing for farming and massive populations to thrive.

“All forms of art, science, religion, history, and literature all have their origin in the mind. I have found, however, that the most creative works, those that have the greatest universal impact are those that transcend the realm of thought.”

-Oolvie Ruhvirei

The genius industrialist and architect, Oolvie Ruhvirei, would bring an end to the world's terraforming project and the creation of the world known as Oolvesse.

 By utilizing the world's gravitational potential and harnessing Celes's resources Oolviese would become a major center of trade and commerce many technologies and practices the ancient societies in Oolvesse were unaware of, some even leading to the invention of new, long forgotten technologies. He would gather a team of architects and make vast ambitious plans to cover the landscape of the Solar Society with industry and immense infrastructure, aided by Oviature Blightstone, ancestral founder of the prosperous Blightstone Industries.

“We have found the great ancient hunters of the stars, sealed in marble as pure as their souls. It was in their eyes the visions of the Hex were illuminated before our eyes, in a cold and ruthless landscape yearning for something greater. And now, they hand us forth their chattel, their toys and discoveries. Lost to the meager, meek Oohtless for ages. From the impoverished caverns wanting for life, to the springs of life itself walking on the home of the Oak’s blessed roots. We are no mere monsters to prey upon the weak, the helpless any longer. We are the saviors. The bringers of light. We are the Hex. And even that soon, shall be overturned”

-Oolvie Ruhvirei

Ruhvirei's discovery of the petrified Oohts and their abandoned craft hidden within the roots of the Blessed Tree would cause many changes, adding technologies that had long since been lost from the primordial Ooht civilization, many of which had not been unearthed for tens of thousands of years. Oolvesse's industrial base quickly became known across the world. Celes saw the industrial age arrive as a technological marvel and became the first planet to produce nuclear power. One of the greatest improvements was the first implementation of the S-Drive, combining nuclear fusion with the Ooht's primitive Hex-gathering Maelstrom engines, leading to a wasteless method of travel that caused no damage to the celesian ecosphere in record time.  This, combined with the advancements in Celesian technology and 'devious' scientific study into the Hex meant that the sky would be home to new ships, capable of reaching between the Celes Society and the Solar Society with cheap travel and little delay.

 

The once massive distance between the old and new world became infinitesimally small and insignificant. New migrants swarmed into the Solar Society in record numbers, the population soared exponentially. Cities and infrastructure were built all across its surface over the following centuries, adding to the moon's surface weight. Due to this, a cataclysmic shift occurred, as a portion of the lunar crust shifted back into the now-formed ocean, causing a dramatic sea level rise, flooding ancient regions and creating great tidal waves and tsunamis.

 

 This natural disaster, which collapsed the Valley of Life, caused an unprecedented loss of life and a brief economic recession. It became memorialized in Solar Society history as its first 'unnatural' disaster. A great deal of the Solar Society was underwater. The solution, funded and engineered by the Ruhvirei Corp was to simply rebuild over top the watery ruins, extending towers, platforms and structures further above sea level, while utilizing the oceans as bases of hydropower.

New Vygian after the flooding lay largely underwater. The city has been built over the wet ruins since, directly upwards in a vertical ascent. The bottomost layers of former city strata, now form expensive tourist attractions for travelers and thrill seekers.

After the disaster, the Ruhvirei Corp would begin to colonize the new Solar Society and bring Celes's resources to the growing population of Solar society with an aggressive terraforming and industrialization effort, converting the rest of moon's native forests and few agriculture centers into the world's largest industrial complex. Solar society became the powerhouse of the cosmos, now with an economy a thousand times larger than even the largest Celes Society cities. Celes's population density fell sharply by comparison.

 

By the time of the Great Terrace, the Ruhvirei Corporation was the most powerful single entity in the Solar Society, bearing the collective of the Nite Sisterhood and Hex Church itself. While the Ruhvirei's business practices were widely known for being a combination of ruthless and mercantile, their technological advancements were unmatched in the Solar Society. The Ruhvirei were the only corporation ever to make use of Ooht technology, and they began to pour their profits into research centers, scholarly academic institutions and the education of the Solarian people. Joining these organizations into a single institution, the Solar Dancing Circuit quickly gained a reception as the foremost advanced pioneers in scienticism and non-Euclidean magical research, aswell as critical voyages into the realm of Borromean atmospheric turbulence.

 

The greatest innovation brought to the world by the blessed tree was the discovery of the ancient Ooht civilization. While it was not a completely unprecedented discovery, it was a technological advancement of far greater magnitude than what they had ever known before. In Oolvesse, Ooht-derived machinery was perfected, allowing the creation of massive constructions of observation equipment that could only be theoretically drafted before. The device, resembling a function of the wildest feverish fantasies of the Santri, "The Divine Machine", were able to locate an open point in space above the moon and Blessed Tree where an impossibly dense measurement of the Lucifierous Lament was observed in tripartite ring-like structure of spatial coordinates. Despite photonic turbulence existing primarily at the intersection of light, it appeared the clear quality of this measurement was unrelated to any light sources, entities or interstellar bodies. This discovery sparked heated debate when initially discovered, with no one believing such a concept could exist at first, despite the evidence something was going on here. Voyages towards these coordinates oft disappeared, and the few that returned made miraculous claims of another dimension, one of shifting floors, without proof or substantial evidence.

 

These are merely the hallucinations of an overactive imagination. None of these 'floors' spoken of are real.

After deep thought and reflection, along with five centuries of camping out along the tree's highest built platforms, an alliance with the Sisterhood and Church allowed a guild of Wards, perhaps looking to further their study of the superstructure beyond the Solar Society's atmosphere, began to meditate and conduct rigorous evaluations with the Solar Dancing Circuit.

 This alliance was the culmination of hundreds of years of secrecy and the Sisterhood's attempts to build a following of followers and disciples, slowly turning them away from their original goals of spreading word of the Blessed Tree and Ooht's history. By this point, the Sisterhood had amassed a massive army, an entire fleet of military airships and ships, and a massive number of soldiers. The Hex Church rejoiced at first, convinced the Sisterhood had done this for the sole purpose of assimilating the Solar Society back into the Celes and under the Church's thumb. Far from it, they armed the Solar Society from any potential invasion from the Hex Church, to the point where they would begin their own independent research projects within the solar dancing circuit. The Hex Council was outraged, and Upper Hands of the Sistory demanded a theological intervention to resolve this crisis, lest an ecclesiastical split within the church occur.

 

While the Sisterhood's version of the Divine Machine lacked much of the power of the Solar Circuit's own device, the Sisterhood's device was capable of entering through the superstructure and into the ominous dimension. Without the bureaucratic red tape and same restrictions of the politicians or Hex Church, the Sisterhood began funding their own voyages and traveling within. The perfected state of being the Santri theorized, "the Perennial Archcycle" appeared to be realized on the other side, within a realm they soon would call 'The Tower.' Both the Solar Society and Hexist Celestial leaders were torn up about this discovery. But any conflicting feelings the Solar Circuit Research Departments had was soon offset when the Sisterhood cordially invited them in, and shared all subsequent research efforts.

 

A World of Terrible Beauty

“ The nameless and uncharted landscape, beyond, within. The night sky, filled with stars, was seen to contain a greater light beyond, an unknowable and impossible to quantify, but known all the same. A source of mystery and awe, and we called it at first The Unseen Horizon, a place of hope and of mystery, and of an even deeper unknown, but an unknown that could be understood and dealt with. It was the search for the answers of the horizon that led us to a new realm of existence and the beginning of a new history.”

 -Gustavas, 'History of the Hex'

 

The Sisterhood would travel deep within the Tower, finding chambers of strange dimensions and incredible beauty, with vast halls covered in crystal, as if they were a dream of the celesian past. Their research was extensive, but only the most skilled, knowledgeable and devout of Santri and Hexist followers were able to traverse these halls, Wardens especially adept- they found within this realm their power would begin supercharged at the immediate entrance, and then gradually lose its connection with the Hex the farther they went. Within the Sisterhood, an entire philosophy of the Tower was formed, based on the 'Perennial Archcycle's applications within the Hex, as a chaotic counterpart to the turbulence of photonic particles- an excess or surplus, rather than a mediated measurement. This belief held that if the Hex acted as a universal consciousness between matter and matter, guiding, informing and controlling each and every living, non-living and inanimate thing, than a perfected Hex, built not with the rule of two or none, but the absolute of one, could overwrite it and reality itself somehow. This philosophy came to be called 'Kaleidomancy.' The rediscovery of Divine Machines and Kaleidomancy, inevitably pushed the science of the Hex to its empirical limit, until even the vast interdimensional spaces between the world of the Celestial Society and the great Tower beyond could finally be reached.

 

When these results were reported, the Celestial Society had raised into an uproar, finding these heretical ideas a demagoguery of dangerous, unnatural heretical scholarship. The Hexists mounted all Wardens and armies, waited until the Sisterhood's resources were preoccupied within the tower and then took back the Solar Society by force, with a large airship invasion that led to the first and only war between Solarists and the Hexists. The Sisterhood soon returned from the Tower, now in the role of 'Guardians' had taken on their role of protectors of the sacred Tree and Ooht ruins, now called the Garden of Life, sought the goal of protecting its purity and the sacred tree, which would eventually lead to a second war. The Hexists charged the Sisterhood with throwing their lot with heathens and committing to a 'Necromantic' worldview, in investigating the theories of the Oohts and Santri.

“The City that I see, is what once was and yet does not have. I feel the power of her people and I fear it. I feel a dark presence, an overwhelming hatred, the smell of death and the taste of blood. I have seen this City in her bloodied streets and her streets of ash. Her people are like beasts. Even their eyes, so soft. But they are beasts and they are the greatest threat. I will put an end to this, I must. I have been called by a higher authority and I will do as I am told.”

-Night Spectrum Sister Heresies

 

This conflict would be known as the 'War of the Fiery Pentacle,' and would last into the next several centuries, a war between a world and its moon that ended in an exhaustive stalemate.

 

After the War of the Fiery Pentacle, the Sisterhood made a large commitment of time and resources to researching the Sacred Tree and its connection with the Tower. The Celestial Society was in a dire state at this time, having lost a large number of its best and brightest Wardens to the war. As one of its concessions, the Sisterhood was largely stripped down of its militaristic forces and left as a strictly security force to ensure 'Theological Hexist Doctrine' within the Solar Society, as well as forced to give up further investigations into the Tower.

 The Solar Dancing Circuit and the Möbius Dominion

The Sisterhood turned to its most trusted and experienced members of its research division, the Solitarian Division and asked them to dissolve as a branch and assimilate into the Solar Dancing Circuit as the 'Axis Ascendancy of the Möbius Dominion'. Researchers at the Solitarian Division, liquidating their organization into another resourceful institution, saw this as an opportunity to put forth their own ideas and philosophies around the so-called Kaleidomancy, and the most dedicated Solarian's in media, cultural reach and industry were chosen to push this influence. They were ordered to do whatever was needed to ensure Kaleidomancy and the Tower Research, now banned, would continue to find investment within the citizenry and social body.

“This we will fight. This we will see, and this we will conquer. Our souls will rise victorious over the specters of oppression and tyranny. Tower Bless!”

-Solar Society electronic slogan board

In spite of Tower research being directly banned, the theories of Kaleidomancy would be on the rise, and even those within the Hex Church who considered the Sisterhood's findings heretical still found themselves intrigued with them. Through the research of Solar Dancing Circuit's divisions, they found that the 'Perennial Archcycle' contained a 'unified theory of Möbius Dominion', that is to say, the 'theory' behind all the 'theories' that make up the Tower's complex internal structure. Interviews with one of the Tower's librarians, yours truly, had led to substantial assistance and smooth editing of these theories to better contribute to their topological knowledge. With my personal interviews and those of the Kaleidoscope Premier herself, 'New Edition: Tower Compendium of the Kaleidoscope Premier' was published in a timely manner.

 

The Sisterhood would be the 'guardians' and 'protector of the people,' and continue to hold a strong grasp on governmental security affairs, despite their armistice with the Hexists giving the Hex Church a substantial foothold in the Solar Society's political structure. Its teachings brought it into direct conflict with the Hex Church, who now believed that the Tower's 'Kaleidomancy' was a dangerous, heretical concept. The Sisterhood's response was to seek and seek new worlds to settle, searching for uninhabited, undeveloped, pristine worlds of their own. This had led to a large amount of their military, scientific and economic forces to be dispersed around their fleet. This conflict lead to the 'War of Reformation', which in actuality were very minor skirmishes beyond the core planet, in which the Sisterhood had its forces spread across the solar system, in many cases coming into violent conflict within systems the Hexists had seized, and in others there were only isolated bases and isolated pockets of Sisterhood forces. The result of this was the further weakening of the Nite Sisterhood's influence and support they were able to leverage the Solarians within the SS, and strengthening of the Hexist strategic and political position.

A New World Order

 The War of the Fiery Pentacle had changed the Solar Society more than it could have hoped for, a period of stagnation had reigned for the Society that was just beginning to push through with great ideas, and many great and powerful individuals. During this time, Kaleidomancy, and its subsequent 'progressive' ideologies had been on the rise. But just as the Sisterhood had found their way back from the Tower, so did it's philosophies, which were based around a theory of the 'Perennial Archcycle' and 'Luminary Rethinking', an ideal which attempted to join Kaleidomancy with the Hex as complementary systems. The Sisterhood decided to push hard on this ideology alongside the Solar Dancing Circuit, and its most dedicated members would attempt to bring it to the people through popular culture, fashion, popular thought and in academia. This resulted in orders from the Hex Church to borrow the Sisterhood's own forces to suppress this spread, be it in shops and industry, or on the streets and in schools. Everywhere a protester or researcher was caught promoting Kalediomancy, the supposed 'Hexocentric' forces of the Solar Society's Hexist regime would be there to censure it. This response was mockingly titled 'The Revenge Bite of Vygian', due to its historical parallels with the Hexad's attempts to suppress Tempest culture and enforce Hex ideals.

“Ellie’s so cool!”

-Teenage Warden trainee at Newbrandt Ward Academy, 17

“And now we can be called the holy hunters of the neon beyond, chosen to cleanse the darkness from the surface. We couldn’t shake this feeling, that was in the presence of something awe inspiring, the epitome of the spectrum the Primordials looked upon and could only dream of understanding. No longer are our eyes to be set in darkness or the shadows cast, no, we are the eyes that will light up the night. The Kaleidoscope Premier has spoken.”

-Former Night priestess, now in the Wayward Institute for Tower Research

 

 Tower

The Sisterhood would see to the continued development of Kaleidomancy and the Sisterhood itself, while attempting to remain neutral, and while being forced to operate as enforcers for the Hex Church would cause resentment amongst the Solarists at first. Kaleidomancy soon found a place in both the Sisterhood and Solar Society, and by the late 42th era the ideology of Kaleidomancy was seen as a trendy standard for all people and culture to adopt. To this day, the constant suppression and hardened resistance to Kaleidomancy remains within the church. The usage of it is effectively banned on all Warden Academies and given a yearly 'Condemnation vote' by the Sistory.

 

The Sisterhood would find itself, through research and study, having developed a deeper understanding of the Tower. This was the era of 'the Tower Reformation,' and a number of the 'Archive Divisions' of the Sisterhood had discovered an understanding of the Tower that they could not fully express. Within their research, a theory was developed called 'Reality Reformation' which would ultimately take their understanding, in many ways, to its conclusion- a single, unified theory of reality. These findings were later suppressed by the Hex Church, prompting conspiracy theories and notions of the Church's paranoia at what this 'unified theory' might uncover- primarily, the thesis that the Tower and Celestial Society occupied similar overlapping origins in their past, where everything from the Blessed Tree to even the Hex itself stemming from Ellie and the Tower at some point.