Arcanogenesis

Okay to talk about this I'm going to have to give some context and that context involves dinosaurs so

THE DINOSAUR LORDS

Source

 

They ruled sovereign over the earth for a hundred million generations, kaiju as huge as cathedrals and covered in brilliant plumes of feathers and where there weren't any feathers there were horns and claws and teeth, and when they moved they moved with all the unstoppable momentum of plate tectonics, the highest links on a primordial chain of being, and beneath them a thousand-thousand species of merely-enormous saurian underlings and supplicants and soldiers and hunters, every niche dominated, Perfidious Dinosauria, a taxonomic clade on which the sun never set

except they could never take the oldest forests 

(where the trees were as iron and their branches grew tall enough to drink straight from the clouds and their roots wound deep enough to blacken their tips against the inner heat of the earth)

The First Folk lived in those trees, locked in a long, slow evolutionary war against scale and egg; they were soft-skinned and nimble (and they had boobs and fingernails and three weird little bones in their ears), and they survived against overwhelming odds by being fucking clever.

The trees were too big and the forest too dense for the Lords themselves to enter, and so time after time they sent their raiding parties of deinonychus and allosaurus sprinting through the undergrowth, and time after time they were driven back, ambushed by envenomed arrowheads and ensnared in nets and pitfall traps.

But the dinosaurs had their numbers and they had their fury, and over millions of years of war the assaults grew to be almost constant. The dwindling populations of the First Folk sought safety in the highest branches, up past the clouds and the squadrons of circling pterosaurs, and at the top of the tallest tree of all they found the stars just within their reach, yearning burning yawning portals to another brighter world (maybe even a home) and in they went and while the Folk didn't find a home and while a whole bunch of them were driven incredibly mad (their gray matter boiling in their skulls and out of their ears as they raved) the ones that made it back out carried with them in their crackling minds the first bit of magic, the ur-spell, a Noumenal idea more influential than reality.




The ensorcelled Folk did three things upon their return to Phenomenon:

1. They fireballed the ever-living shit out of the dinosaurs, the ancient feud finally finished.
2. They studied the magic they now held and built an arcane engine in the sky to empower it further, to catalyze their apotheosis into godhood, and populated it with the wayward souls of their many dead. Nowadays people call it the moon.
3. They ascended into immortal beings of pure light and launched themselves into the far future where nothing would ever bother them again–

–which turned out to be a somewhat more explosive than expected and sent a chunk of the newly-minted moon hurtling into the planet below. Its impact (combined with the recent orbital bombardment) resulted in the extinction of 75% of all plant and animal species, including all the surviving dinosaurs, except obviously I'm stealing one of Arnold K's fabulous ideas and saying that a few of them escaped fiery death by pursuing the First Folk through the timelines and are even now chomping out the throat meat of all the disgusting hairy mammals they can find.

And how did God react to the theft of magic, this blasphemous intrusion into Their domain? The Church, if they knew about any of this, would probably sputter that it was nothing but Their infinite mercy and love for Their children that allowed even a few of the First Folk to escape Noumenon unscathed. The elves, who consider themselves direct and honored descendants of those most ancient people (they're mostly right) say that God, who loved the First Folk as Their dearest favorite, granted magic to them as a gift so that they might take their rightful place among the stars. And the heretics, the cultists who listen to the whispers of the old chaos that still speaks from the quantum spaces behind creation, they preach that Anu is gone, that the thieves looted an abandoned house, that the path to salvation now lies only at the feet of the maddening things squatting on the property.

First Post: The Noumenon

Hello!

I'm starting a blog. I owe a lot to such wonderful folks as Last Gasp and Coins and Scrolls and Goblinpunch and a whole bunch of other fantastic creative people for inspiration and stolen ideas, but it's starting to feel original enough that I feel more or less comfortable making it public. I could go on about my insecurities about posting at all and my relative ignorance about everything, but that's boring and masturbatory and that's never a great combination, is it, so let's get this bitch on the road.

——————————————————

To perceive the universe is always at the same time to interpret it. When you look up at the sky and see that it is gray, that information has not entered into your awareness unfiltered; your limited organs and your meddling brain have mediated the truth, have gotten to the thing before you could and subtly buggered it up. We are astronomers burdened with warped telescopes. An understanding of the universe as it truly is must always, by definition, be closed off to us; we can only hope to understand the world insofar as it appears to our senses, ignorant even of the degree to which they mislead us. It's not even an issue of accuracy or incomplete information—the range of visible light is a tiny 320-nanometer slice cut out of an electromagnetic spectrum that theoretically stretches from the Planck length to the size of the universe, but even with perfect sensitivity to every conceivable wavelength the human eye would remain a tyrannical intermediary between subject and object, beholder and beheld.

There are, therefore, two versions of reality: There is the world as we perceive it, the world we inhabit and interact with, and it is called Phenomenon; and there is the Real World, the realm of absolute truth and ideal forms and perfect understanding, and it is called Noumenon, and God lives there, and its divine light lances into our world through the portal-things set in its skin we call the stars, and at the center of it all a sun of glass and gold and an artificial moon covered in ivory fire and opal mirrors and ghosts dance eternal around a blue planet with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, suspended in the infinite black like a pearl on a satin handkerchief.

If you were to climb into the sky and somehow haul yourself unscathed into that brighter world beyond our own, as the First Folk once did when they stole the gift of magic from God Themselves, the experience would be literally indescribable. Description is a primitive tool of approximation, of relating one disparate thing to another, and nothing about Noumenon is "like" anything else. It skips jauntily past your retinas and your eardrums and imposes itself upon your tiny brain in a way that it is utterly unequipped to deal with, all of it at once, your neurons fraying and burning and melting into goop under the strain. It is the thing-in-itself, and the longer you stay there the more of your unsophisticated human ontology it's going to pull out of your fucking nose.

Sidebar: Safely Traversing Noumenon

Can you take a day trip and go look at that which lies beyond the ever-receding horizon of human knowledge? Of course! All you have to do is temporarily rid yourself of your pitiful three-dimensional neural architecture before you go up there. Here is a few ways the deed might be done.

1. Depose your fifth soul (which is memory) from the meaty throne of your corporeal body and send it skyward, through moonlit firmament, through luminous apertures, into the unthinkable. You will need to hire or befriend or coerce a powerful magician to pull you back and reunite your souls after your business is concluded, or else you must attain total mastery over your spirituality.
2. Risk permanent brain damage and flood your body with dangerous psychoactive drugs, riding your high across the cosmos. The substances necessary are almost as expensive as they are illegal. 
3. In a dream, cross the ocean to a certain glowing archipelago, climb the Yearning Mountain all the way up to the moon, commandeer a working mirror-ship, sail it through a star. Also possible in the real world but you'd probably have to get help from some moon-ghosts.

End Sidebar

God's name is Anu. They sculpted the world from the raw seething undifferentiated chaos it once was, riddling the sky with stars and with their light binding discord to divine law, imposing the nuclear forces on unruly particles and decreeing that effect must always follow cause. That is what the cerulean-swaddled deacons of the Church preach, at any rate. It has barely been two-hundred years since the founding of their faith, since fervent proto-paladins razed the heathen metropolis of Diyu to the ground and built Carrillon, sacred city of bells, upon its blackened bones, and its power and influence continues to grow nearly by the day. They are right about some things, terribly, terribly wrong about much else. The light of the stars, for example, actually does uphold the fundamental laws of nature, which is why the unlit places beneath the earth bear so many horribly twisted children. But the thing the Church prays to is not that power. The silver voice that spoke to those first prophets through the trembling mouths of the pagan deities they once attended is something else entirely; interloper, imposter, its intentions unknown but clearly and disturbingly interested in mortal affairs.


Now I leave you with this recipe for some tofu pudding which my wife found on a blog called Eat your Kimchi and made and which honestly you would never know was principally made out of beans.

Chocolate Tofu Pudding

INGREDIENTS:

2 lbs silken tofu (two packages, we didn't really get the sense that this shit needed to be precise)
~10 oz dark (>75% cocoa solids) chocolate

1 tbsp vanilla extract

4 tbsp honey/agave/maple syrup/whatever sweet liquid you got, it's all good baby

Pinch of salt

Dash of cinnamon

Citrus zest? Chili flakes?? Go NUTS

DIRECTIONS:

1. Melt the chocolate in a microwave using 30 second intervals, mixing between each.

2. Drain the tofu of excess water.

3. Throw everything into a blender and blend until smooth.

4. Chill in fridge for 20 minutes.

5. Top with whipped cream and cheap chocolate syrup and eat it right out of the goddamn blender like an animal.

This makes rather a lot of pudding, as we discovered, so be prepared for that. Maybe halve the whole thing if you're not sure if you'll like it.