Inhuman Magic

Orc Rituals

The rituals of the Orc species are many, varied, and incomprehensible to those not familiar with their history. Most tend to believe that they are primal magic going back to the dawn of the world, but those people tend to forget that orcs are but a splinter of the Elven peoples. After the first of the Elves began to succumb to grief, and begin to go into the deep wilds of the west, never to be heard from again. Many scholars believe that the orcs are those elves, corrupted and returned, wielding the magics of their people in fell and dangerous ways. This is unlikely to be true due to the fact that Orcish is not an Ur-Language and therefore it's unlikely to be Elven spell songs.

The relationships between the elves and the orcs is the dark elves and the dread secrets, kept amongst only the Fâe, is that a dark elf who succumbs completely to Spite can fall to Hatred. The greatest fear of the Etharcs is the one day one of their number will Embrace the Void.

And indeed, the Void is the truth source of Orcish power.

Riddick The Blind fought one of the Elven Deities, Tel-Unir, the elven god of Absolute Justice, shattering their spirit into several thousand pieces.

Those pieces are the Void.

A small piece of that deity is lodged in the heart of every orc. Elves become orcs by accepting the piece of Tel-Unir into themselves. And orcs gain their power by embracing the Void of Tel-Unir. And one day, if the Orcish Servants build enough power, Tel-Unir will be reborn.

The Inhuman Species

Some of the Inhuman begins, those without written language, or without certain kinds of language, still have power. The most common ones are spirits, Great Wolves, and Great Spiders. These of course, are not using Ur-Languages, the power of deities, or simple tricks. Instead, they are ancient, powerful, and strange. These are known as the Primal Languages. They are the wind whistling through the trees. The crackling of fire in the hearth. The howl of the wolf on the moonlit night.

The Great Wolves can sing the song of Grandfather and the Ancients. But they sing in the song of the night.

Great Spiders can weave wyrd webs, and use the first symbols. The Dragons actually used the webs of great spiders to create their written language, as it is the only written form of a Primal Language.

The Spirits of the world do not speak any normal languages, but they understand nearly all of them, and speak using the crackle of flame or other primal messages.

When an Entity is Named, and a Namer uses their Name, they are speaking using the entity's name in Primal, not in any other language. So where a Wizard would speak Draconic to address a flame and coerce it into violence, a Namer would speak its name in its own language, addressing it itself. Beware a Wizard who speaks the language of Spirits.

On Deity, Powers, and Animism

One of the major conversations in the circles interested in Power tends toward the convention of hierarchy. Most wizards tend to refer to this as the Euthyphro Problem, though priests are completely unsure the origin of the term, and tend to refer to refer to the Problem of Divine Supremacy.

There are three aspects to this, the first one being the power of Names, and Language. If a Namer can bring about Will within a flame, is that power inherit to the Namer, the Words, or the Flame? If a Wizard can create a spell from mere words, where does that power come from? And if a divine being claims to be a creator, what does that divinity mean?

The Dragons claim that there are no divinities, only great beings. The Sidhe and the Corporal Spirits indicate that there is no such thing as language outside being the names of things, where the things are what they are because they are said, and that language is actively an error, and humans being able to hold ideas in their mind without changing them makes the abominations. The Deities claim that they created the universe, while also being created by it, with themselves each being an important part of the universe.

The Wizard's Guild has resolved this to mean that the deities are just Words given Form. And really, the Namer could create a deities with little to no effort as far as they can tell. Of course, there is a book in their library, written completely in the webs of great spiders, and the fading strands of the rime of first frost, that they claim contradicts this. No one has been able to read it.

Some of the Druids have claimed that the Wizards are incorrect, in that they claim that the deities are part of the world the same way a tree is. The Druids have usually claimed that the closer a being is to nature, the less free will they have, but also the more their will affects the universe. This is why Elves and Dwarves can easily reshape nature, but are driven by it. Whereas when the Great Wolves go too deeply into the forests and grow, they tend to disappear and become an avatar of Nature. And the Deities are simply avatars of part of nature.

The theory the Druids advance is that the Bard and Wizard are a small and dangerous part of the universe, one of the few things that have the power of nature, without being bound by it, the most powerful avatars of free will.