Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  Thought-exchange

  Telepathic communication used by voiceless animals and gill-men. Though lacking the conceptual rigour words give, this form of exchange is much more immediate than speech and less prone to misinterpretation.

  (The) Tinderbox

  A magical item made by the Master of Mordew in an attempt to prevent his destruction at the hands of the eighth Atheistic Crusade. It consists of a container within which the Flint and the Char Cloth are contained, and the fires it starts are scarcely controllable, even by its maker.

  (The) Tontine (occult)

  A general understanding of the word ‘tontine’ can be had from any good dictionary, but its particular use in Mordew tends to relate to an organisation of specialists in occult lore who used their knowledge to locate and kill the weftling. Just as a normal tontine is a fund whose value increases to those who draw upon it as those entitled to so draw are reduced in number through death, the power possessed by the occult tontine will devolve entirely on the last living member of the group, making them the successor of the weftling, at least in the material realm.

  (The) Trumpet

  A magical instrument that can be put to the lips of those unwilling or unable to answer questions. The dead, liars, and mutes can all be made to speak truthfully with it, and while it can be used on animals and objects, the results are unpredictable and difficult to understand.

  (The) Underneath

  The Manse has a facade and internal architecture accessible from the outside, an antechamber that gives on to the private areas and, underneath, an area given over to the Master’s machines. This is known as the Underneath. What he uses the Underneath for is his alone to know, but it labours constantly and noisily. Glass pipes deliver the Living Mud deep into the machinery, so the assumption is that the Master is working magic, something he is known to do.

  Ur-angel(s)

  An ur-angel (like an ur-demon) is a lesser type of angel, being more of the material realm than an angel, and less of the weft, and having, as a consequence, less Spark and magic at its disposal. These types of angel are more prone to corruption than the other kind, since the material realm is more base than the immaterial realm and an ur-angel can be misled or tempted like a man may be and even induced to work against its summoner.

  Ur-demon(s)

  An ur-demon (like an ur-angel) is a lesser type of demon, being more of the material realm than a demon, and less of the weft, and having, as a consequence, less Spark and magic at its disposal. This type of demon is more manageable – though still not very – than the other kind, and can be used in preference to it, if the summoner is inexperienced in the handling of such creatures, or if the job required for the demon is specific and therefore widespread violence and destruction are not desirable. There are some very material ur-demons indeed, and these can be spoken to as one would speak to a man, and they are scarcely furious any more than a very furious man might be. They can be given tasks on the promise of immediate return to their proper place, though they are quite rare and difficult to summon, since in their realm they are predated upon by the more violent demons, and over a period of many generations they have dwindled in number while their more violent brethren have flourished. Indeed, there may be almost none of the manageable type left, and any attempt to summon one will need to also include magics designed to plumb an earlier period of the intermediate realm’s existence when they flourished. This is possible, given the complexity of the relationship between time as it is experienced in the material realm and time as it is experienced in the weft, though those who can manage such magics would rarely find the need for the skills that these lesser demons are capable of, and could follow a less convoluted route to their desired ends.

  Usher(s)

  One of a species of lackey employed by the Master and almost entirely unmodified from a normal man. They might move more quickly when pressed, or be willing to carry heavier trays, but otherwise they live quite normally. Their work is not onerous, and they eat as well as any of the servants. A boy taken to the Manse should wish to be allocated this role in preference to any other, since the alternatives have significant disadvantages.

  Vat(s)

  Living Mud must be contained in something if one intends to use it, and the Master of Mordew puts his in glass vats of various sizes and connects them with glass pipes. Glass is the best material because it is transparent, so the Master is able to check on the progress of his experiments and processes.

  Waterblack

  A now defunct city in the North-western Peninsula. Also known, portentously, as the City of Death.

  Weed

  A dried leaf which has a combination of properties when smoked through a pipe. It can be used to enhance concentration, to provide stimulation to the senses, to relax the body, and to satisfy or create the longing for food. It is grown, primarily for export, in the Southfields, but self-seeded plants can be found throughout the slums. Those who pick these plants know to avoid ones that have grown in a bed of the Living Mud, since the smoking of them gives nightmares.

  (The) weft

  The medium with which, in which, and through which all existence both material and immaterial is manifest, but reducible to neither. As clothing is made from cloth, the sea is made from water, and a language is made from words, so the material and immaterial realms are made from the weft. The weft is the source of all things, including the Spark, which is to the weft as thread is to cloth, as tides are to water, and as letters are to words.

  (The) weftling

  A name given to God because he is the only thing capable of existing solely in the weft since he was born from it and is entirely in concert with it. It is only through perversions of the weft that God came to be killed, and even that death may not be permanent (for many reasons – the weft preserves his concept perfectly and he still lives in it by some understandings of time – but primarily because his body and spirit are both extant in the material and immaterial realms and resurrection can be achieved by recombining his elements).

  Weft-stuff

  The material of the weft – matter, energy and concept combined.

  (The) White Stag

  A lesser god born of the territory surrounding Malarkoi. It is mute, and of minimal practical intelligence, but it is supposed to possess great wisdom. Without the means to communicate this wisdom the assumption must be taken on trust, but as an organism particularly suffused with the weft it is capable of powerful magic. If provoked, particularly by the desecration of its lands, it can use the Spark to reinstitute conditions preserved in the weft, thereby returning the world to a state it prefers. This magic is wide-ranging and difficult to counter, and providing the White Stag lives, it can undo any attempts to undo what it itself has undone. Even if it is a god, though, it is still an animal and prone to irrational actions. Its instincts drive it to flee most conflict, and it is easily startled.

  Willy

  A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. His parents will not take no for an answer, and one day their perseverance may pay off and he will go into service, but a boy not taken on the first occasion, nor on the second, nor indeed on the third, is not likely to find pleasant work if he is accepted on the fourth.

  Witch-women

  It is no secret that the women of many cities are prone not only to mistreatment by virtue of their social standing (in its widest sense), but also on the grounds of their sex. This combination has forced women to foster close interpersonal links to offset their structural misfortune. Witch-women are a subset of women who, either having themselves been born with a fortunate congruence physically and conceptually with the weft (see: folk magic) or having known other women that have, have come together to form a group who dress commonly and advertise their magic-like services to those who find they have a need for them. They have very strict rules – over their schedule of charges, for example, or their unwillingness to offer refunds, or their maintenance of a ‘closed shop’ policy – t
hat protect the terms under which all members of the group are employed. Such solidarity between these group members has allowed their commerce to flourish even under extremely trying economic conditions, and no community, be it ever so poor, is unrepresented by a local witch-woman.

  (The) Wolves

  A lesser god in the service of the White Stag, who, in an inversion of the natural order, has pledged fealty to a prey animal on the basis of a shared interest in protecting its hunting grounds. This god takes the form of a pack of large wolves each individual of which may act independently but who also represents some aspect of the combined godhead. The pack can be understood as a single organism, or multiple ones, but its main function is to remain and fight a foe while the White Stag flees. The Wolves occupy an aggressor and the White Stag alters the material realm at a distance until the aggressor disappears entirely and the pre-existent condition of the weft is restored. Endless manipulation of the material realm using the weft is likely to provoke more powerful weft-manipulators to intervene, since it interferes with their own interests.

  Womb-born

  In Mordew, the presence of the Living Mud has led to overabundant fecundity in its population that is unnatural (indeed it is magical). A slum family (who come most into contact with the Living Mud) will create, typically, three children in any year (a combination of womb-borns and flukes).

  The Living Mud has the ability to generate life from, seemingly, nothing, and a distinction is made between those born of sexual congress between parents and those either entirely or partly born without the combination of parental seeds. When a distinction needs to be made in the world then a word is coined to describe it, and womb-born refers to any child known to have come from a womb and to have been placed in there by another human parent or combination of parents (whether they be father, mother, mother capable of passing her generative seed to a womb-bearer, womb-bearing father, or combinations of the above).

  Not all children who are born from a womb are called womb-born since some children have been known, amongst other methods, to come from virgin birth – the Living Mud having taken the role of a generative seed – and while these children may have gestated in a womb and may be born out of it, they are not womb-born in the sense that it is used in Mordew but instead are considered a form of fluke and, though it may seem harsh, they are considered unwelcome.

  Similarly unwelcome are: children who come from the expression of the generative seed into the Living Mud, children who develop within a discarded corpse, human-like children born from the mutation of the foetus of a lower animal and found in an animal’s litter, the exceedingly rare human flukes born from the random evolution of the Living Mud, children born of the congress between parent(s) and a lower animal, children born of the congress between parent(s) and an object, children born unprovoked out of an object, children that create themselves, embodied ghosts, children generated by spells, children of a mysterious provenance generally, and orphans who have no parent(s) to attest to their origins. No word has been decided on for this mass of unfortunate children (other than the catch-all ‘flukes’ which is also used for non-human magical life), and if they use a word of their own, no-one has troubled to note it down.

  Unwelcome children are fated either to starve in the slums, to be killed and made into food or leather, to work constantly in the fields and factories, or, like the many unwanted womb-born children, to be sold into the service of the Master of Mordew by ‘parents’ clever enough first to claim them and then immediately to give them to a Fetch (and who will thereby go on to qualify for a weekly stipend).

  Wonty

  A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. While Willy, his brother, is a pessimistic kind of boy, Wonty prefers to imagine the best of the world, and in this he provides a great service to those around him, since otherwise they might despair. Whether his optimism is well-founded is a question that only time can answer.

  (The) Zoological gardens

  A place in the Pleasaunce where interesting animals are conveniently barracked so they may be visited and wondered at without the necessity and danger of long trips to places where such beasts are native (if these places even remain). While enjoyable, no doubt, the sensitive may find their pleasure tempered by the ennui that adheres to everything. There is even a sad and dusty resignation in the eyes of the otherwise magnificent exhibits.

  ‌Fragments Towards a Natural Philosophy of the Weft

  transcribed from Notes found in a Catacomb

  Scraps of decaying parchment in a single careful hand were once hidden in an ossuary, and, where they were legible, this is what they had written on them (on various topics):

  On how one might think of the nature of the weft

  Imagine an amount of the world around you that might be contained in a box of any size. Through this box trace the lines of movement, in your mind, of everything that has ever moved through it and will ever move through it. Make the lines the size and shape and solidity of the objects that move, and have the lines persist even when the object has moved out of the box. What you will be imagining is a very strange thing – solid motion – but this is what the world would be when, at the end of time, time dies and is gone.

  On how time is in the weft

  When time is removed from the world we approach what the state of things is like in the weft, since the weft knows time only strangely. Time to the weft is like the tide is to the sea: it has an effect on it, certainly, but it does not alter it such as to change it into something other than it is. The sea is the sea whether the tide is in or out, and the tide does not boil water away, nor does it dry it to salt. So the weft is the weft whether in the past, present or future, and it does not become other than the weft. Everything is occupied by material in bands of solid motion, like the rocks beneath the earth appear when they are revealed by a landfall.

  On the possible as it is, and the possible as it is not, with a discourse on the realms

  Since the material realm is joined through the weft with the immaterial realm, and the immaterial realm contains not just what is and was, but what could have been but was not (since the immaterial realm is the realm of concepts in their totality, not just the happenstance incidences of those concepts as they are manifest in the material realm), then you must also trace the paths of all the possible movements through that box of all the possible objects which did not come to be and will not come to be within the material realm. Then, to this, you must also add all the possible movements that were not taken by all the objects that did come to be, but which those objects could have taken. Then you will be left with all the possible matter (not yet counting the imaginary materials that the immaterial realm allows for which may only be possible within the intermediate realms) through all the possible paths it did and might have taken, and this too appears in the manner of the striated bands of sedimentation seen at a cliff face. This is like to the weft. To the mind’s eye, the weft is something very nearly solid, except only for a few tiny gaps where nothing ever might have passed. Through this solid motion passes the natural energy that makes a thing move (such as must be applied to a still object to set it moving), so not only is the weft a thing of matter, but also it is a thing of force and power.

  On light as it exists in the weft

  The weft is also a thing of light, since light is neither a material thing, nor is it a force that moves matter, but is a type of its own and one which gives a certain character to objects on which it alights, which is illumination. This is a kind of information about the world (just imagine how much more clearly one knows what an object is when a light is shone upon it).

  On the body of the weftling

  Now imagine a box that is sufficiently large that it knows no boundary in any possible direction and in this perform the tracing. In it would be all the solid motion of all the possible matter, and in the gaps there is all of the impossible. These gaps are filled with the body of the weftling – that some people call ‘God�
� – the nodes of the nerves of the body, and filaments – the illumination of solid light which is the Spark – run between them and are as a net, all joining together and communicating. The gaps and the nodes and the filaments make up the body, but at the same moment contain the will of the weftling, because a person’s will is communicated from the nerves to the extremities – such as when one decides to move a finger and thinks to do it, and then the finger moves, but not if the nerve is severed (by accident or experiment), proving that the will is in the nerve that communicates to a limb.

  On the Godliness of the weftling

  This is why the weftling is God, because he is made of the impossible, which is magic, because that is the thing proper to him, it being to him as a body is to a person of the material realm, and it communicates his magical will to his extremities, the material and immaterial realms which make up the world (in the exclusion of the intermediate realms). Thus can the weftling be rightfully said to be all-powerful because he is from the weft, but not constrained within it, and in the weft there is all that is possible and all that is, and he is the sole and prime mover of the weft. His will determines what it is and was and what will come to be, since his form determines what can never be, because he, by occupying it, removes the space into which a thing might naturally go. Through being that barrier, he contains the fact that the impossible might one day be or have been, in the way that a person who stands in front of a doorway prevents ingress into it, and egress out through it, but, by stepping aside, may allow both things.