Means of Passage – Teller of Fate

Teller of Fate

Intermezzo: Means of Passage

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The Templars changed many things with their coming and many more in their leaving, but none was as significant in its impact on the Aions as the gift of passage from place to place without travelling the spaces in between.

The Portals, with their odd little mental keys were only the first of them.

There was also the enigma called Azhure’en; a mountain of blue stone of many hues, carved into the shape of a great edifice. It reminded some of a Temple or Cathedral, though its original purpose was the opposite of either. Only the Hermetists, its custodians, knew what that was.

Its structure was more than could meet any eye. Seen from above, it was round. But it didn’t end at a single revolution. Like a seashell, it spiralled ’round and ’round infinitely, though never shrinking; each complete cycle existed on a different world. Thus, it lived in infinite places and each one Hermetists explored, cataloguing and questioning, continuing their quest to know and record all things.

Yet another, known to a relative few, was the Silvergrey Sea. It was an ocean of souls. The knowledgeable traveller could find its entrances, though they were far fewer than either the Portals or the Lodges of the Hermetists. Hermetist ships plied trade in information more than in goods between worlds on that Sea and would sell passage to any who dared sail. Some said that the Silvergrey was a natural thing and not the work of the Templars at all.

There was a fourth way that only the Tribes of the Fæ knew, but they remained silent when asked about it.

All these ways of passage connected only races like one another. All the races thought alike, looked alike.

There were other types of life in the Multiverse though, so different that to many they would not count as life at all. The Templars seemed to have avoided even the possibility of contact with them.

The Garda of Glyph looked to be an exception. They were the most divergent race known. Direct communication with them had never been possible; no one was even sure what they looked like. Glyph, however, was a city of Portals founded after the Templars disappeared.

The Templars were right in wanting to avoid the stranger parts of the Multiverse. Towards the end of their reign, their wisdom failed them. They discovered yet a fifth way to travel: a network of paths to all Aions. They called these highways the Apian Roads.

There were indeed many races in the Multiverse so different that contact would be apocalyptically bad. In their pride, the Airgid Templars used the Apian Roads to contact these other races.

That was their downfall.

Something found them and the worlds they ruled too tempting to resist, and too tasty.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026

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Gideon is a freethinker, free expression absolutist, intersectionalist, and a proud child of the Enlightenment. He lives and works on the Pacific Coast.

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