I wrote a good chunk of these when the AC at my home broke and the house started to heat up. It was 91 degrees Fahrenheit (32-33 degrees Celsius) outside, which seemed to induce a feverish episode of creativity in me.
Hilariously, the least comprehensible of these was made after that issue got fixed. You'll know which one it is.
Content Warnings are: Discussions of hunting, very brief and indirect allusions to abuse in one entry, references to vocal dysphoria in that same entry, discussions of dissociation, and of course general discussions of cognitive disruption and drug use in ritual/magical contexts.
(Please do inform me if this requires any more warnings)
Great Hunters
Simple yet generally impressive spirits of both the natural world and the experiences of the Kith and Kin. They look as young adults dressed in little garb, painted in camouflage, though even a passing but close glance reveals the "paint" to be seemingly a natural part of their "flesh" and "hair".
They have aspects that combine various animalistic traits. Their eyes call to mind the slitted pupils of wildcats, the great gaze of owls and the all-encompassing eyes of dragonflies paradoxically all at once. Talon-claws spring from their fingertips. Their teeth are much like that of a cats, and their wings tend to either the insectoid or owl-like. Their noses are more akin to that of a dogs, though mystics and sorcerers both claim they can track better than the most perceptive of dog breeds.
Regardless they dance through the wilderness in near-complete silence and near-complete invisibility.
What they do is hunt.
They stalk their game for a short time, and then, all at once they go for the kill.
They are as efficient and quick as possible. Their prey suffers only for an instant.
To the wild creatures, they extract nourishment and butcher them properly, keeping a small keepsake if the prey is truly mighty, notable or simply if they are sentimental.
They do hunt kith and kin, though rarely. If they do so, they do much the same as with wild creatures, but extract very little nourishment, and instead perform the proper death-rites for the individual.
The prey suffers very little, after all.
Many sorcerers would like to summon them, but are defeated by the requirements. One must hunt and butcher an animal in total silence, a notable one in some regard. Mighty or unusual.
A token must then be taken, and an offering must be made, and even then it is not guaranteed to succeed. If successful the Hunter will come to the conjuror, share a meal and inspect the token. If they are impressed they will allow themselves to be called via the token, for aid, companionship or invocation.
If invoked they offer either aid or the animal aspects and great skill with hunting, essentially allowing for the invoker to become a symphony of predatory perfection in much the same way as the Hunters themselves.
Other rituals made for conjuring or binding may be used, but the Hunters are wily and deft, and slip through bindings and weave around summoning like a wet fish slips from ones grasp. Great skill and precision is required to pin their essence and draw it to the mortal world, and even this may prove impossible for a skilled sorcerer.
Finally one may encounter them in moderate numbers in the rare great hunts they engage in, scattered among the seething throng of spirits that cavorts and revels through the long dark nights of the great hunt, dancing untouched at the epicenters of spiritual vortexes of the dead and death-dealing.
They stalk both the great wilderness-beyond-sight, the Deathly Lands and the twilit realms of cold rationality, though they favor the mortal world most of all.
It is possible that some of them were once Kith or Kin, but only murmurings and rumors of this are heard. Noting definite
Mountain Chief
A specific spirit, heavily associated with a specific mountain in a range. To the local tribes, it represents both life and death. Mercy and wrath.
It resembles, to those who see it, an enormous goat-creature. It possesses four great horns, two which twist upwards at a ninety degree angle to each other, and equidistant from the very top of its head, and two which are at ninety degree angles to the top ones, yet oriented downwards. Its beard, ears and "mane" create four more points between the four horns, generating a strange "octogram" star shape with its head.
This is emphasized by the shimmering thread that connects the horns. A strange thread that almost resembles the webs of spiders... Or elegant silken secretions of a particular form of worm. At each "groove" in the horns, the threading is affixed, so each pair of "adjacent" horns is connected by four threads.
Its fur is stone-grey, and it stands a full nine strides tall. More than four times the height of even rather tall Kin. Its face is a golden skull of a goat. Its eyes are burning spheres, like white-hot embers smoothed into pristine orbs. Its tail is, strangely, akin to that of an aurochs, a "flyswatter" tail with a long tuft of fur at the end for whipping at irritations. Irritations the spirit is exempt from by its nature.
Bizarrely the feet of the spirit are not the cloven hooves of a goat, but strange three-toed hooves. This detail, to those who are wise, betrays the ancientness of this spirit.
It is a celestial being. Its mountaintop is considered sacred, one of a few bridges between the worlds. A stand-in for the Axis Mundi. And so it is quite a potent spirit. It may choose to walk and not disturb the snow it stands on, or it may choose to prance on the very winds themselves, which are its own to command.
Invocations must be done at the mountain, preferably the very peak where the snows begin to fall. Noon or midnight is preferable, and equinoxes or solstices are ideal. Traditionally, a wooden bowl of offerings is placed in a makeshift altar of stones piled in such a way that the bowl may rest comfortably in the center.
The spirit may manifest if the offerings are great enough. If not it may still answer the invocation. In the later case, a sudden stillness of the air, followed by an impossible upwards gust of wind which carries the offerings into the air. The offerings then seem to vanish, like the spots in ones eyes after gazing at the sun.
The spirit is passive and much prefers to get mortals to act in its stead, rather than acting on its own. However it does have a tendency to fall into fascination (and, if rumors are to be believed, love) with particular mortals, whom it may show cryptically high favor. This is easy to lose, however, if one serves a spirit it particularly dislikes.
The spirit is said to offer a degree of authority over the wind, skills with weaving and textiles, a gaze that may stare into the deeper nature of things, skill with rearing particular worms and insects as livestock and the capacity to stride on wind alone. As with all spirits, other gifts may be possible.
Not all at once, of course. Not unless you are favored, or your offerings are particularly, shockingly, flattering.
Tap-Bugs
Though they may resemble insects prone to swarming, they are often conjured alone, or in small groups in uncommon cases.
They resemble great insects, as large as an adolescent if it were to stand up high and stretch out fully. However that is all that can be said of their resemblance to these animals.
They seem to be composed of metal, stone or natural glass, as if their sections were carved individually and they were somehow "assembled" into the animal form itself.
These are not drab greys or whites. The colors of the apparent materials they are made of are quite variable. Reds and yellows, greens and blues. Stones and gemstones and metals and glasses from numberless corners of the world, assembled into an articulate almost delicate insectoid beauty.
Visually they are quite stunning. Akin to a sculpture. Audibly, they are unusual indeed.
Their name is taken from their sounds. A series of constant sounds that overlap but line up in a bizarre fashion.
The quickest is a very delicate "tip tapping", like a delicate needle of metal against another needle. Every second it taps thrice. On every third tap, a deeper "dokk" of stone against metal occurs, simultaneously with the delicate tap. On every ninth tap and third "dokk" a deep "tong", deep enough to just barely feel in ones teeth is heard.
The sounds are, blessedly, not loud. Barely above a whisper. But they are constant.
They are, understandably, unpopular to conjure for long.
However, their invocations are very useful indeed.
Conjuring them requires one construct a vessel of several kinds of stone. It does not require impossible skill to carve, merely an honest effort to gather and use a wide variety of visually distinct materials. Assemblage is often done via drilling small holes in the sections, segments and limbs, and using threading to create the "joints."
The vessel, which should at least resemble an insect of some kind (beetles are popular due to the ease of construction, but others may work better due to the prevalence of beetle-vessels) must then be placed in an environment that has been rendered ritually sterile. A stone surface, swept of all detritus and repeatedly sterilized with various medicinal herbs is common, but it must be done carefully to avoid the accumulation of pungent aromas.
The tap-bugs will then inhabit the vessel, which will seem to deconstruct itself, pulling more material from behind and between the sections. These will click together, carve each other and then finally, assemble into the form itself, which will begin the constant sound.
They offer an incomparable sense of rhythm, an acute sense of measurement and geometry in both space and time, skills with sculpting and the capacity to harden ones flesh against blows, while retaining its pliability and flexibility. The last of which is often why they are summoned, but it is the gift they consider the most crude and least impressive.
They are much more likely to favor you if you seem highly cooperative with others, or conversely if you seem alienated by your ambitions and curiosity. This is the extent of their ethics, though they themselves are non-violent.
Oh cool the AC is fixed.
Echo-Masques
These spirits are extremely closely associated with specific physical objects. To each spirit, a particular Mask, to each Mask, a particular spirit.
It begins with a sorcerer, or perhaps an artisan with such skill as to be near identical to sorcery. Regardless, they must weave the mask themself.
It must be woven of a material of extremely high quality, and so to must its structure derive from something exquisite. Flax and wood will not suffice. These are vain spirits and so must be coerced with fineries not easily accessible to forager cultures.
The mask must have structure and yet it must be flexible. It must be soft to wear. It must look exquisite. Gemstones and metal threading, ivory to hold its structure, glittering glass in the eyes.
At the crux of the conjuring, the mask must be given a voice. This is a difficult but deceptively simple sorcery to perform. All that is required is that one must truly give their voice to it. Fully, psychologically, abandon their voice and speech and give it to the thing being made.
One can learn to speak once again. Understanding has not been taken. Merely the habits and complexes that create a voice. They will never be able to speak with that voice again, but they can learn a new one.
Alternatively, it is possible to take a voice, via torments and cruelties that lead one to simply abandon it. This would suffice for the ritual, but there are ways for knowledge of such actions to spread voicelessly.
Regardless of the method, the result is the same. A Mask with a voice that has been given to it. It speaks as if from within the mask, and it quickly learns to understand what the words it now has mean.
The mask cannot at this point do much. It can talk, think and conspire, but little else.
It can be given more voices.
It can also learn to invent voices. It can learn to "throw" its voice, such that it seems to come from elsewhere. It can even, eventually, learn to take control of a dead, mindless or (if truly developed) living body.
With time they can even learn certain forms of purely vocal/verbal sorcery.
The purpose of such a thing is often a kind of ostentatious servant or entertainer. Singing comes naturally to them, of course, and they can learn to mimic all manner of sounds.
Rarely one is created as a scapegoat for someone who truly does not want their voice. In some cases, these individuals may form a partnership of sorts with the mask. A kind of mutualistic exchange of ideas and services. It would not be accurate to describe this in fully human terms, as the Masks are not and never were human, but a parallel can be drawn to the concept of "fondness".
Understandably, many of these masks go on to become notorious artifacts. There are a handful of such masks scattered around the world, though what auditory sorcery they have learned and the weight of ages may have... Changed them.
Formless Inquiry
The name is somewhat inaccurate. The spirit does not merely lack form, it lacks true location and a significant amount of independent definition. Most of its essence lies outside of the range of perception and experience that defines the cosmology of Kith and Kin.
It is difficult to conjure such a being intentionally. They are more often encountered in an abstract sort of way, during a hallucinogenic trip that brings one to another realm. Rarely, such trips will bring one far, far outside of coherent experiences they understand. This is akin to a sort of dissociation from ones sensory environment, kinesthetic sense and even ones own thoughts and self.
Such an experience is unlike any of the psychedelic realms folded into the Mortal World as we understand them. They lie between these perceptions, or perhaps outside or underlying them.
It is "in" such perceptual not-spaces-nor-times that formless spirits dwell.
The Formless Inquiry is a particular kind of these spirits. Perhaps there is only one, or perhaps they are all completely distinct and it is more a pattern of behavior some of them follow. It is not certain to anyone which of these is true, but I find the later option to be the most convincing.
When a mind that has existed almost completely in a world of sharp sensation and perception touches these modalities, sometimes a resident... Thing develops something that might resemble curiosity.
And so it latches on, and follows the intrepid spirit-wanderer back.
The Inquiry does not resemble an entity in the traditional sense. Its more a complex of psycho-spiritual phenomena and processes. It may have elements that translate to sensation, perception, will, intention, compulsion or any other cognitive phenomena, but these express only the part of its nature that overlaps with the experiential reality that the spirit-wanderer understands.
It has elements that cannot be understood, that only exist to us by their wake-effects on those they latch to.
The Inquiry will then, from its lofty vantage point of a hapless spirit-wanderers cognition, begin to subtly twist and color their perceptions and experiences.
They cannot, or refuse to, overwhelm the will of the host. For whatever reason, they seem to avoid "touching" the awareness and will itself. Though the host will likely become aware that Something Analogous To Curious has slipped into their perception, via the "gaps" in their perception.
They are not malicious. This particular pattern of "behavior" is consistent in that regard. They are more like curious scientists or mystics, attempting to glean a world they can just barely catch the slightest glimpses of, via the aspects that they happen to share.
To most sorcerers, they are little more than a frustratingly persistent nuisance. They complicate trips to other realms, as they twist the experience and perception of the realms subtly, which is equivalent to a persistent side-wind blowing a ship just barely off course (or, sometimes, sending them so far afield that its hard to find ones way back) metaphorically speaking.
To a rare few however, they represent a possible mutuality. We are equally incomprehensible to these spirits. We are to them, incomprehensible spirits of things they cannot fathom, just as they are to us. An interplay can form, whereby one expresses an intention and the Inquiry responds in some way. In this way one can (excruciatingly slowly) learn to work with such a thing, to shape ones perception around some incomprehensible modality, and slowly understand what can be understood of it via its cognitive "wake."
And so a rare few mystics have a "partner" of sorts that is more akin to a condition, a cognitive disruption or a cluster of phenomenal processes. These are often the wisest, and possibly least coherent, mystics. Or at least the most curious of that which genuinely cannot be experienced or understood.
These mystics do seem to be the most skilled with simply... Entering a trip by will alone. Perhaps there is a connection, or perhaps some other sorcery is to blame.
(Next post is planned to be an actual rundown of the metaphysics and cosmology of Kith and Kin. Maybe that will make the above entry make sense. Probably not.)
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