Ruler: Mulsae
To outsiders, it feels cruel because it does not argue. It only yields, absorbs, and returns something different. This Sanctum believes the world is shaped in the dark, then revealed later. They yield first, carry what they gather, and decide what it becomes.
Also known as the Cutting Deep (publicly) and Blooming Deep (privately)
Trigram Story: Absorb then settle carrying. Receives force and guides it downward into depth.
Phase Affinity: Water
Windborne: Emberai
Color: Black, indigo blue
PopulationStarborneAbyss AppearanceAbyss CultureWindborneEmberai AppearanceEmberai CultureHumansEconomicsNotable LocationsDrenvaarLiraeScaldmereVeilstone Manor
Location: North
Typography: TODO
Weather: TODO
Population
Abyss culture is a divided ecosystem. Subterranean Starborne live below where secrets can gestate, sky-loving Emberai chase breath and distance, and humans fill the cracks like groundwater.
Starborne
TODO
Abyss Appearance
- Eyes: Glowing crystal dark indigo
- Skin: Pale from subterranean lifestyle
- Build: Tall and elegant. Streamlined musculature.
- Hair: Black with blue highlights. Sleek and smooth with a soft luster like it's wet
- Hairstyle: Long and flowing. Swimmers wear in tight braids.
Abyss Culture
☵ Abyss Sanctum is a divided segregated culture separated by a gorge of identity differences. Cutting Deep is about abrasive flow, rewards restraint and boundaries, and centers in Drenvaar . Blooming Deep is about nourishing gestation, rewards depth and discretion, and centers in Lirae. Both cultures reward those who can absorb pressure and carry it without spilling.
☵ Abyss is essentially the Water and Earth held together. They normally destabilize each other, and yet ☵ Abyss holds them in sync. This creates a culture where emotional gravity has emotional permeability. High tolerance for moral ambiguity. Long incubation cycles. Controlled destruction. If Earth chokes Water, you get suffocation. If Water erodes Earth, you get collapse. Abyss knows both mechanisms. That makes them frightening. They know exactly how to suffocate a system, and exactly how to undermine it slowly.
Most Sanctums resolve tension by choosing one side of a polarity, but ☵ Abyss refuses to resolve it. They institutionalize the tension. This makes outsiders feel unsettled. There is no clean moral performance. There is absorption, compression, and later transformation.
Cutting Deep is Earth within Water: Hard boundaries surrounded by controlled channels. Abrasion that reshapes through pressure plus persistence.
Blooming Deep is Water within Earth: Flowing thought held under controlled pressure. Ideas incubated in silence. Emotion processed in depth before expression.
- Relationships: Abyss builds power by delaying reaction. The delay is not passivity, it is collection. et the other person reveal themselves through what they do. Decide later what it becomes.
- Cutting Relationships: Absorbs to assess threat. It yields socially so it can measure you. Interactions begin as testing. People provoke lightly to see what spills out of you. Social warmth is rare and blunt. When it appears, it is protective and possessive. Conflict is handled by abrasion. People press until a weakness shows, then they shape the boundary around it.
- Blooming Relationships: Absorbs to understand. It yields socially so it can learn you. Curiosity replaces confrontation. Trust builds through controlled disclosure. Bonds form through shared secrets and shared study. Social warmth exists, but it is private and selective. Public faces stay smooth.
- Status Behavior: Status is all about what you can take in without flinching, and what you can carry without spilling. Depth tolerance. You can sit with horror, complexity, or ambiguity and remain functional.
- Cutting Status: Prestige comes from hardness, restraint, and threat control. Violence competence, controlled. Everyone knows you can hurt, and everyone knows you choose when. Territorial credibility. You can keep outsiders out, and keep insiders safe. Endurance of ugliness. You can live in the abrasive parts of society without becoming sloppy or unstable.
- Blooming Status: Prestige comes from depth, memory, and controlled cultivation. Scholarship and archival mastery. Knowing obscure histories, lineages, magical theory. Mentorship and cultivation. Being known for growing talent, projects, or discoveries in private.
- Leadership: Follows leaders who do not argue, do not flail, and do not show their hand early. Delayed reaction as strength. The leader who absorbs first, then acts later with precision. Quiet inevitability. People feel like resisting them is exhausting because the leader outlasts resistance.
- Cutting Leadership: Promotes leaders who can enforce boundaries through controlled pressure. Threat competence without theatrics. They can apply violence or coercion precisely, then stop. Elevates enforcers who maintain safety through precise boundaries and deterrence
- Blooming Leadership: Promotes leaders who can cultivate and curate. Scholarly authority. Knowledge depth becomes political power. Precision empathy. They can hold pain and complexity without being derailed, then redirect it into growth. Elevates curators who cultivate power through secrecy, scholarship, and long incubation.
- Accountability: Delayed, inevitable, and transformation-focused. They do not argue about whether harm happened. They absorb the facts, carry them into depth, and then return a consequence that reshapes the offender’s access, status, and future options. It investigates quietly, remembers indefinitely, and responds by changing access and structure rather than trading accusations.
- Cutting Accountability: Harsh clarity plus deterrence. The point is to make the boundary unmistakable. Uses clear deterrence and removal to protect the perimeter
- Blooming Accountability: Diagnosis, leverage, and curated reintegration. The point is to change the underlying pattern. Uses diagnosis and curated restriction to reshape behavior and reintegrate only when it is safe.
- Intimacy: Slow, selective, and deep. They do not bond through constant emotional display. They bond through trust that survives silence, through secrets carried safely, and through the feeling that someone can be near your darkness without trying to fix it on demand. Intimacy deepens slowly through layered trust, private closeness, and secrets carried without leakage.
- Cutting Intimacy: Protective, territorial, and blunt. Expresses intimacy through fierce protection and controlled access.
- Blooming Intimacy: Confessional, intellectual, and nurturing. Expresses it through confessional knowing, gentle cultivation, and the long patience of shared depth.
Windborne
See Emberai
An active people that builds pressure. They are stimulated by networking, and vulnerable to free flow. They detest boundaries.
Associated with the Fire and controlled by the ☵ Abyss Sanctum. Extremely rare for them to be found in other Sanctum. Have affinity for Durani and Sylvaran, and strained with Ferralai and Ravari.
Wing color: Dark crimson with orange accents.
Talisman: Almost exclusively paired with ☵ Abyss.
Roles: TODO
Emberai Appearance
- Eyes: TODO
- Skin: TODO
- Build: TODO
- Hair: TODO
- Hairstyle: TODO
Emberai Culture
They generate momentum until resistance becomes pressure. They treat effort as currency and motion as proof of loyalty. Their highest skill is turning scattered energy into coordinated force.
They value initiative over permission and momentum over comfort, stillness is decay. They are trained to sustain motion until resistance collapses. They bond through shared exertion. Sweat, speed, and struggle create loyalty. Devotion is proven by how much energy you are willing to burn.
A problem is solved by applying force until something gives. They can escalate conflict because escalation feels productive, and subsequently are vulnerable to leaders who redirect their momentum toward destructive ends.
- Relationships: Friendship is forged through shared exertion and shared escalation. Someone who has bled beside you, trained beside you, or burned time beside you while the world pushed back. Unstructured hanging-out can feel like social drowning.
- Status Signals: Keep a group moving under fatigue. Presence accelerates others instead of scattering them.
- Leadership Style: Can take scattered people and make them hit like a single fist. They follow the person who can name a target and turn the crowd into a weapon. So leadership has two flavors: 1) The Builder-Forge: channels effort into protection, infrastructure, disciplined training, defense. Still intense, but aimed at stability. 2) The Burn-Leader: channels effort into domination, purges, scapegoating, conquest, sexual violence. Escalation feels productive, so cruelty can masquerade as “doing something.”
- Accountability: Prefer consequences that involve effort: service, training, rebuilding, repair missions, dangerous work done for the group. Apologies that do not cost energy feel fake. If someone harms you, the community may demand they “pay” through labor, not through changed beliefs.
- Intimacy: Courtship runs hot and fast because they value initiative over permission and momentum over comfort. Devotion is proven by what you will burn for someone. Partners choose shared missions, training together, building a life that has movement and goals. Conflict handled through structured discharge: argument, run, spar, then talk. Escalation is used to avoid vulnerability, because slowing down would force emotional stillness.
Segregated community.
They live in the region of the ☵ Abyss Sanctum called Scaldmere.
They distrust the slow and contemplative nature of the ☵ Abyss-touched, and hate to follow them to their subterranean communities.
So Emberai relate to each other with a shared, half-spoken grievance. They valorize surface life, breath, flight, heat, open space. They treat Abyss methods as passive or manipulative, even when those methods keep the whole Sanctum alive. They overcompensate by making “visible action” their proof of worth.
Caste system.
Based on one's affinity to the Fire. They are tested at 5 years old and transferred to their caste to be trained. This causes ritual breaking of families. This is a common occurrence because Emberkin tend to abuse and rape the lowest class and create strong children who are removed from their mothers.
Emberai learn early that attachment is not sacred. Motion is sacred. The system teaches: “You are not someone’s child. You are the Sanctum’s fuel.”
Parents love through training their child to survive separation. Siblings treat each other like rivals or comrades depending on whether they end up in the same training stream. People bond horizontally (pack, cohort, unit) more than vertically (family line).
Humans
TODO
Economics
TODO
Notable Locations
Drenvaar
Drenvaar is a canyon city with a culture of abrasive flow that rewards restraint and boundaries. Known as Throne of the Cutting Deep (outsider nickname)
Lirae
Lirae is a hidden city with a culture nourishing gestation that rewards depth and discretion. Known as Throne of the Blooming Deep (insider nickname)
Scaldmere
ScaldmereVeilstone Manor
Veilstone ManorHome of the Abyss Master and their family.