The Tiamat-Ymir Principle.

Big creatures are vital to mythologies everywhere. They are the movers and shakers of the world, sometimes literally. They can be gods, or guardians, or monsters in need of slaying by a hero going through their standard-issue 17-point plan for greatness. And while their importance might often end with their deaths, their being dead can sometimes be of equal or greater significance to the narrative.

Sometimes the death of a Big Thing leads to the birth of much greater things. Even something as big as a world.

Mythological Context (AKA Feel-Bad Stories)

When the Babylonian goddess Tiamat discovered that her husband Apsu had been murdered by their children, the first generation of gods, she was furious. She took on the shape of a terrible sea serpent (or dragon, in her more pop-culturey depictions) and made a war of vengeance on her treacherous sons and daughters. She conjured the first dragons, and other monsters, as tools of her will. And when her son the storm god Marduk killed her, she was carved up into two halves and then mutilated.

Her eyes, still bitterly weeping even after death, were made into the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Her ribs became the vault of the sky, her lower body the earth. Her tail was flung into the void to form the Milky Way. She was big enough to be made into the world that we live on, and in that way the Mother of Monsters is humanity's mother as well.

When the North Germanic giant Ymir was born from the thawing water that existed between the frozen realm of Niflheim and its fiery opposite Muspelheim, he didn't do much more than sit around sweating and drinking cow's milk straight from the tap. But from his armpit sweat and chafing thighs were born the jotun people, and from the salt lick that the cow Auðumbla tongued placidly was born Búri, ancestor of all the gods.

Eventually Odin and his brothers--all of them distant descendants of Ymir thanks to their jotun mother Bestla--came to slay him. Not because he had done anything in particular against them, though the gods did seem to think the giants were evil, even back then. They killed him because they wanted to become the rulers of earth and sky- things which did not yet exist in the yawning emptiness of Ginnungagap. So they fashioned the earth out of his flesh, mountains from his bones, trees from hair, the seas from his blood, the sky from his skullcap, storm clouds from his brains, and the entirety of the human realm of Midgard from his eyebrows.

Of course there are thousands more beings that die like this. Some of them are more benign and peaceful. I don't know of any existing term for it in proper mythography, but apparently Jungian theory calls it the Cosmic Man.

So What?

When Big Things die, they turn into bigger things. Like normal flesh-and-blood creatures they don't just vanish into the ether. They have bodies with physical pieces and parts, and just as we decay and get reused by nature, these parts can be separated and made into something else.

So what if this Tiamat-Ymir Principle™ applied to other things?

What if every significant beastie in a universe was able to turn into something upon death? And what if this process could be directed and controlled by the smaller creatures that kill them? Not just in the sense of cutting off a dragon's horns for weapons or scales for armor, but shaping an entire fortress or range of hills out of its body.

What if adventurers were less like thieving murder-hobos, and more like landscapers (but also still thieving murder-hobos)?

You get a setting where the classic pass-time of going out and killing big things has immediate, physical consequences in the world that even the least attentive party can see. The landscape can be transformed by accident or by deliberate act, either as a plot twist or as part of a plan made by any players clever enough to kill a titan.

What To Do With This

At this point I'm just throwing out whatever sounds nifty. It's not a unique idea at all obviously, but I never saw it called out and named before. Feel free to appropriate the idea however you see fit.

Landscaping- The world has always been home to colossal things and the little pests that murder them. It's a way of life. Hunt something, kill it, fashion a civilization out of its insides and then eat the rest. Monster Hunter, Salt in Wounds, etc.

But here, every landmark has a bloody, meaty history. That island in a lake was a wyrm that hit the ground so hard it formed a crater. Those mountains are actually a graveyard of stone giants being riddled with tunnels by dwarves like termites in so much rotting wood. This city was built with the fingerbones of a Hekatoncheires.

The world is defined by the monsters that live and die on it, and in attempting to master their environment the mortal species take a more hands-on approach.

The consequences of Big Thing death can be just as destructive as they are creative, of course.

Killing the monster harassing the town might make the road to the town impassable, or snarl the area in marshes, isolating the settlement from trade and travel and killing it more slowly. A wounded or naturally old being might be herded away from populated lands so it doesn't completely throw the region's topography into whack. Sending a titan running amok into enemy lands could inadvertently give them building materials for a new castle.

Maps could be made utterly useless every few years thanks to a brand new chasm or forest that definitely wasn't there before. Travel is never entirely secure. The world is living, breathing, and growing with every death, stacking up high on the literal bones of eons.

Terraforming- Space is a lot of empty, well, space. There aren't a lot of habitable worlds out there for most humanoids. But the void is home to giant things, living or dead. Think of the astral god-isles from Planescape. Most of these petrified deity remains probably occur from gods naturally losing followers and slowly decaying, but some must have been made suddenly, and by violence. Setting deicide aside for a moment, think of all the titanic alien beings that exist out in the gulfs of space, eldritch or otherwise.

If a sufficiently advanced civilization wanted to expand beyond its homeworld, but it could find no suitable planets to claim as their own, why not just make a new one?

Our "heroes" would be science-fantasy terraformers, tasked with tracking down a space Big Thing, killing it, bringing its corpse to a desired location, and then shaping its blood and bones into something that resembles home. If the creature had parasites, gestating young, or just a whole lot of gut fauna, perhaps this new world will offer unexpected competition or neighbors. This could be a process that takes centuries, or sufficiently powerful demigods could take care of it in a campaign or two.

And if the universe doesn't have the right kind of teleportation or flight magic, they're going to have to make a spaceship out of someone first.

Homegrown Gods- Paradise in all its forms has some overarching similarities, but just as many qualities are tailored to the people of a historical time and place. In many fantasy settings the gods either populate ontologically distinct planes after coming into existence, or they helped create them when they splortched this new universe out of cosmic goo.

Why not take this a step farther? In settings where gods are created by the hopes and prayers of mortals, and gods create their own planes, then are mortals not indirectly creating those heavens and hells for themselves? What if they cut out the middleman, so to speak?

Found a religion. It can be about anything, as long as it has a god or godlike being, and that being can be imagined in a body. Gain followers. Feed this blind, mindless godhead the thoughts and souls of thousands of like-minded people until it is a polished mirror reflecting back at them. Nurture your nascent deity, foster its growth and development. Teach it with ritual and scripture. Reward it with sacrifices like treats to a good child. Describe what the afterlife is like in your faith. Make your god strong enough to embody it and protect it.

And then kill it.

Butcher your god. Take its bones and craft a firmament. Shape the new land with its meat. Fill the air with its dying breath. Use its skin to line the boundaries of this new realm.

With your pandeicide complete, you and your followers may now enjoy an eternity or however many eons or kalpas your afterlife is meant to last, all to yourselves. Belief will continue to bleed into the landscape overtime, letting your infant plane grow.

Just don't let it slip to your living followers that god is dead and you killed him. Some philosopher might latch on and make a big deal of it.

Hunted- They're after you. The fiendish little upstarts. They've stopped playing with fire and digging holes in the dirt long enough to decide to kill you. Their champions are on the way, with magic potions and bright iron. Perhaps some of your kin assisted them. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is that they want to inflict that final and absolute shame upon you. They won't just kill you. They will take you apart and desecrate you. You will be devoured by lowly little things that are not even close enough to you for it to count as cannibalism.

There's no true escape. Chaos is vast, even infinite, but the hunter is tireless. They will always be right behind you. You can fight back, but they are great- greater than you, even. Your hubris would kill you before their swords did.

The best you can do is deny them their prize. Fight tooth and nail, and when those teeth and nails fall off, devour them. Allow nothing to fall into the hands of the enemy, for they will grow mightier for it. Live a perpetual fighting retreat. Leave a bloody trail across the length of the abyss.

They want a world. You will give them a battlefield.

Qut.

Now that I'm inching back into activity here on the blog (I honestly thought I'd be gone longer), I realize it's time for another one of my posts that can't decide between history and mythology. And what better topic to address in that mindset than the millennia-old concept of sacral kingship, in order to quell the need to go back and edit my college research project?

Sacred kings, past and present, are broadly defined as monarchs (male or female) whose temporal rule holds religious significance. They may hold religious authority, in which case they may hold some similarities to an outright theocrat, or they may simply be an otherwise earthly ruler reigning with the legitimacy conferred on them by a sacred figure or institution. Sacred kingship took a huge variety of forms around the world throughout history, arguably being present on every single continent with the exception of Antarctica.¹ The divine right of kings and mandate of heaven were enormously significant in the western and eastern halves of Eurasia respectively, but I want to look into a form of divine legitimacy that was carried by rulers of states which often straddled Europe and Asia- nomadic pastoralist empires.

The khan named Temüjin consolidated the disparate Mongolic tribes and officially formed the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. After this date he became known as Chinggis Khan. He, like so many other khans of the Mongol people(s), had previously been invested with his power by a böö, or shaman, at the feet of the mountain named Burkhan Khaldun, located in modern day Khentii Province. This was a sacred mountain for the Mongols, and according to the account of his life, Temüjin once escaped certain death after a lost battle by taking refuge at the mountain. Burkhan Khaldun is traditionally believed to be a sort of axis mundi connected to heaven and the sky-god Tengri. By propagandizing the unlikely victories, narrow escapes, and seemingly miraculous events of Temüjin's life, it was easy to demonstrate to the Inner Asian world that he was a legitimate authority figure, surely under the guidance and protection of Eternal Heaven.²

But Burkhan Khaldun wasn't the only source of sacral kingship that Chinggis Khan benefited from. Humans live between heaven and earth, after all. And that is why he chose to place the capital of his nomadic empire at the literal and figurative center of the nomad's world, in a place called Ötüken.

Ötüken, often referred to as Ötüken-yish or Ötüken-jer, meaning "forest" or "land" of Ötüken, respectively, is an area of land that is difficult to pin down today. One theory put forth by Mongolist Thomas T. Allsen is that it stretched from the Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia to the Sayan Mountains of nearby Tuva³, though this doesn't quite match up when you try to place its most central landmark, the Orkhon River Valley, at its center. This is further muddled by the frequent claim that Ötüken is also a single mountain at the center. Though to be fair, spiritual geography can be very vague or flexible based on the needs of the time.

The Orkhon Valley, located at the tentative heart of Ötüken as well as about 320 kilometers west of the modern capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was where Chinggis Khan founded his first imperial city of Karakorum. But it had also once been the site of the city of Ordu-Baliq, seat of the Uyghur Khaganate almost four hundred years prior. Yet the Uyghurs had come there centuries after the fractious Göktürks had done the same twice over, and before them had come the Rourans, and even before them it is possible that the Xianbei and Xiongnu confederations had centered their states on the river valley. By the lifetime of Chinggis Khan it was the site of over a thousand years of cultural continuity and habitation by prestigious nomads whether they be Mongols, Turks, proto-Mongols, or other poly-ethnic or uncertain groups. Chinggis Khan's decision to place the seat of his new empire there was as natural as it was calculated.

And with good reason: thanks to a local microclimate, some of the greatest grazing lands in the Mongolian Steppe are located here, in addition to a breathtaking array of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. I believe it was as close to a paradise as the harsh steppe landscape could have offered to ancient nomads.

But it wasn't just a beautiful landscape with practical or tactical value and a long history.

Orkhon Valley is the place from which qut emanates.

Qut is a divine power which originates in Ötüken and spreads outward, granting the local ruler the divine right to unite and rule all of the tribes of the land. It was an extension of the favor of the spirits of the land, or yer-sub, whose mood and disposition toward humanity was said to be seen reflected in the weather and bounty of nature, in particular the fruit trees of Orkhon. The valley was recognized in writing as being vital to imperial power as far back as the early 8th century CE, when one of the rulers of the Göktürks, Bilge Khagan, inscribed on a stele at the site that "If you stay in the land of the Ötüken, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötüken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!"⁴

It is also no coincidence that Ötüken is one of many names given to the earth-goddess of Turko-Mongol mythology, commonly seen as second in power only to Tengri, who was often presented as being her husband or relative. By controlling both Ötüken and Burkhan Khaldun, Chinggis Khan had the exceptional ability to say that the two greatest divinities of the world were on his side.

I see qut as sort of a hybrid sacral kingship model, which combines the elements of a few others. It comes from a physical location which must be seized and controlled in order to harness it, yet it takes the form of an empowering supernatural energy that is non-exclusive with, similar to, and distinct from the general favor or protection of the chief deity. I'd dare to say it resembles the power of barakah conferred upon people, objects, and places by God in Islam, though on a comparatively very limited scale, and with very specific stipulations attached.

Today we don't have a lot of world leaders claiming that they are empowered by magical leyline energy, which is probably for the best. But the beauty and history of the Orkhon Valley are preserved by a UNESCO heritage site designation.



¹ Though to be fair, we aren't sure about how the Elder Things governed themselves.

² Franke, Herbert. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Page 347.

³ Allsen, Thomas T. "Spiritual geography and political legitimacy in the eastern steppe." Ideology and the Formation of Early States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. Pages 124-125.

⁴ Drompp, Michael R. "Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 3. American Oriental Society, 1999. Page 391.

Looking Southward and Backward, Part 4.

I suppose that it is now a wise time to address the horking zood cow in the parlor.

The Ivory Tower University is not in the business of studying or enacting magic, as I hope would be painfully obvious to any reader located within the campus grounds or city proper. But for those theoretical readers beyond, I must emphasize this. Though the imperial ban on any form of conjuration not to the personal liking of Haraal have long since dissipated into the ether of liquidated law books and disintegrated regimes, it lives on strong in the practice and outlook of the ITU's administration. "Suffer not the witch to matriculate" has been one of the most hallowed of bullet points in the University's code, right below "say not in one word what could be said in one thousand".

But that is not to say that there aren't certain peculiarities surrounding the Tower which could easily be construed as "magic".

Laizij was a brilliant mind, and though he was deified shortly after his passing, I do not refer to the cult which formed around him, nor their rituals. Rather, I focus on a tradition which he started long before any of that. The detached perspective which the Grand Scholar possessed allowed him to take some particularly odd angles on what would otherwise seem to be self-evident truths about the world around him. He found that while knowledge is powerful, it is conviction in that knowledge which allows one to utilize it fully, or transcend it.

Take for example the time of sunrise on a particular day. Laizij and his disciples, as well as many students of the University today, are accomplished in astronomical calculations, and may come within a margin of error of seconds as to the time at which the sun crests the eastern horizon. Laizij knew that full and well. But one day, his notes and telescope were tampered with. The official narrative perhaps unsurprisingly pins these deeds on the followers of Dherna, but one blasphemous alternative is that he simply was mistaken one night over his calculations. Regardless of how it happened, Laizij's sunrise equation had the sun rising exactly two talecks earlier than it was supposed to.

And then it did.

Initially it was not noticed by anyone else, but Laizij did his calculations in batches, so over the next few weeks it became more and more clear to his students and fellow scholars that something was wrong. Or exceptionally right, as Laizij insisted. He was a proud man, proud of his intellect, and he was insulted at the idea that he could have miscalculated by such a wide margin. So adamant was he that those around him began to find their own math not adding up properly any longer, even if not a single number were changed from how it should have worked days prior. Even today, centuries after that fateful transformation, the sun rises earlier when it is being observed from grounds of the First Tier.

This adjustment to reality appears not to persist very far beyond the walls of the city's uppermost level, however. A lengthy dispute has developed over it in fact, when in AR 96 the amateur astronomer Throne-Steward Ilritus Mesyor erected his own observation deck upon the citadel's tower, which is in fact taller and higher than the crumbling point of the Ivory Tower.¹ Academic correspondence between the citadel and the University eventually revealed this inconsistency to both parties, and the dispute has been raging ever since, at least as much as astronomers are capable of raging.

Other inconsistencies and examples of "corrected reality" present themselves across Deneroth from time to time. Despite the earliness of sunrise, solar eclipses tend to occur half an hour later for the University than for the rest of the city. So much so that those highborn enthusiasts who miss such a celestial event "the first time around" have been known to catch it "again" by sneaking or paying their way onto the campus grounds. Water weights slightly less within the campus, and so the aqueducts in use there are uncommonly light, elegant, and made of materials which would otherwise give way quickly to water erosion. Meanwhile, they are substantially larger and more reinforced on all other tiers. Convoluted puns become objectively more funny the higher up one climbs, with negligible statistic impact on crowds even being recorded a few yards outside of the city walls.

Most far-reaching, and perhaps most potent, is how differently history played out from the perspective of all of Deneroth. While generally unpopular abroad, the histories written by Denerothi chroniclers become more true the closer to the city one comes, even if the events they pertain to happened long ago and far away. On at least one occasion, the Nambarish adventurer Anrar found that his own annotated travelogues of Sarq the Interviewer became somehow less annotated, and more concerned with the genealogies of Haraalians, at around the time that he had crossed the border between Outer Esgodar and Deneroth proper.

These and other curiosities too numerous to list have trickled down from the Tower and through the connected Ersuunian world, often picking up exaggerations or added elements. Over time they've woven together to present the Ivory Tower University as something mystical, almost as sorcerous as it is proud and arrogant, and willing to visit any naysayers and dissidents with a judicious bolt of lightning.

Perhaps the faculty and staff secretly take pleasure in that last facet, despite their general distaste for the rumors.



¹ The damage sustained by the Tower proper during the Rupture has famously remained unrepaired in the centuries since, owing to the building codes set in place by one of the descendants of Haraal who came to administer the city and province. Traditional Denerothi law prohibited a secular power from building or establishing its headquarters upon the highest tier. Feeling spurned, the prince erected his gubernatorial citadel to exceed the height of the Tower by the length of the tail-hair of an ox. Further, he forbade the construction or alteration of any building in the city which would exceed the grandeur of the citadel. Such a visual challenge for supremacy and authority within the city was easy enough to ignore from the ground, but when the Tremors caused the Tower's highest point to collapse, the University sorely felt the prohibition which that same prince had set in place, as if he had seen the future.