THE AGNYETT
Select Panegyric Discourse on the extant’s Cultural Polarities & Quirks,
Inherent to State & Sovereign Civilization,
Drawn from Across the Breadth of Modernist History
Gods audacious enough to claim that they remember existence long before their arrival in the Agnyett are a rare find—especially who continue to roam the extant in our present-Modern. But there are those that will hint that, in a wider context, out there in a largely unknown cosmos—cataclysms of desperate proportions are not as uncommon as a living soul might be inclined to think.
Other extants, far too distant to imagine, have experienced transformative moments in history of unparalleled scale. Times where the foundations of realities are threatened; divine forces turn upon one another, silencing materiea life permanently; when mortal will directs ambition to storm the heavens, only for their assault to be cast down, plunging civilization into unconsciousness in countless versô; sometimes, reality itself comes to an end.
The civilization of state & sovereign crosses the wider extant, from any one boundary to the extreme side of other. But without the Unfettered Durance and its Wars, the advent of modernist history wouldn’t have been. Our conflict with the gentry devastated the extant-materiea. The Principles adopted in the aftermath were agreed upon to serve a greater purpose, and see civilization rebuilt. They are the values enshrined within the Vismott Accords. With their Ratification the statelands were defined, and the 31 sovereignties were appointed to nurture congregations, and the connections between them. To guide exchange and commerce, across borders—and to collectively protect the sanctity of stateland boundaries.
Even in the present, spread across all the wider extant, some cultures are buried so deeply within their respective statelands that the Accords, and what they gave they Agnyett, may as well be folklore or myth. For many, intersovereign power shows no practical influence in maintenance of their lives. So far removed from the stage of sovereign machinations, and far from the tenuous web of sovereign power, it would be difficult to convince that native soul of single benefit that glows to them from their sovereignty.
But, for a citizen native to any of the 31 sovereignties themselves, the Accords dictate a the terms that have sustained life through a tenuous peace, across the extant, for the whole of modernist history. You could call it a biased perspective—but, it’s also technically true.
There are 24 statelands within the extant materiea; unevenly scattered amongst them are the 31 sovereignties. But its a rare soul that learns or sees more than one of each in their lifetime.
“The Agnyett is familiar with the best and worst of kin and kine because of the frankly stupid diversity of its living souls, constantly expressing their unfettered natures. We bite and soothe one another from all sides, every exception thrives between, and what we know of segregation and the concept of isolation based on “nature” is a litany of failures.
If what we know of the aughts before the New History is true, the sejurne where gods used us in ways reminiscent of infants playing with toys had more to do with old hubris and habits the powers developed in isolation, before the First and Second migrations brought us all to the Agnyett. But long before the Vismott Accords reclaimed all mortal lives from final thrashing of the Imúre Durance, the powers were already disillusioned with their traditional notions of control. In fact, many went on record, dictating their narcissistic, absurd, and wildly inconsistent memoirs to the Accurate for posterity—many of them thinly veiled, repetitious sermons amounting to “serves you right”—many of them recycled as familiar holy scripts in later versô. Evidently, a little supernal distance can make any soul, mortal or undying, a little smug.
The point being that state & sovereign are an affair of the mortal soul that assumes it belongs to itself, before any greater power. It assumes that appeals beyond the mortal are secondary. It’s never been a perfect system. The two “halves” of the equation were never created to be harmonious or equal. There’s no template that claims or advocates a form uniform cooperation.
But, in six thousand years of known history, mortals have yet to come up with a better system.
When you say that you’re in support of any means to supplant the Accords, attempt to overturn intersovereign law, or return to stateland empire—I’ll be blunt. Without a cataclysm to break the extant from one extremity to the other, any of that is impossible.
Think smaller. Think local problems. What would it take to isolate Pajûne and force it to become dependent on the Catena, indefinitely? I see several ways forward, and modernist history is not light on lessons to share with us.”
“If you’re about to tell me that the 31 sovereignties exist thanks to some principle of transcendent, extra-mortal design—I’m going to hit you with this.”
“If you’re right down at the level of the materiea, most souls will tell you the extant is flat.
It’s easier to agree with this than shave the matter into finer degrees because, across our secturnal lives and in the most practical terms, it is. And we can all observe that the breadth of its surface is so prodigious that there’s no good reason to confuse what we know intuitively: as living souls, the amount of space we have on hand is vast. Contemplating the scale of the cosmos is an unnecessary complication. And the bamboozling nature of the New Heavens have given us all more than enough mystery to puzzle over and argue about for nearly two modernisms already.
Keeping all that in mind, for those of us unhinged enough to work in this inherently preposterous field, it’s easy to marvel at how few souls turn up with a smoldering desire to find out if it’s possible to fall off, out, through, or fight their way free of, the boundaries they see on the map. But, every generation, a small handful of souls inevitably shows up, and some of them will appear at your lectern. Most will be ready to hotly contest much of the well-established research that’s already on hand. Many of them will be full of highly complex and generally specious reasoning that amounts to massive conspiracies, and how they have been designed to keep the wider extant ignorant of True Reality! (Capital “T”, capital “R”.)
It’s likely that they’ll want to share their opinion on how it’s high time that the average soul of the materiea has the opportunity to learn the capital “T” Truth—though it’s not always clear why that is.
Granted, this phenomena isn’t exclusive to the field of tripartite cosmology. Souls with a little education and a lot of time on their hands seem prone to developing intense beliefs and a desire to expose the secret pockets of power littered under our feet. I sometimes wonder if they assume that the pockets are full of sweets, but frequently its a fixation that stands between the difference they see between a dropout and a qualified expert.
I wish it was easier to point out that the actual difference between the two categories of nutcase tends to be a lot more mundane. How some of us are misguided enough to spend our working lives debating perplexingly minute matters of fact, at the expense of maintaining healthy relationships with kin or kine, learning how to cook properly, or even make a decent snack before we distract ourselves in the laboratory long enough to pass out for a blind or two.
Deploying conspiracies strikes me as a much more lively way to barely make a living.
Ethical concerns and digressions aside, in many versô the governing council’s official position has been that trying to convey intricacies of knott theory, even in basic terms, to wayward firebrands ends up producing more harm than good. Any soul fixated enough to tie their body to a boulder before skiffing themselves off the edge of the distal boundary isn’t likely to be dissuaded by hard evidence accumulated across modernist history. We’ve got oodles of the stuff, and it’s not locked up, so they’ve already decided to to ignore it. For whatever reason, it’s all come down to assumptions that the Thaniea is manipulating the statelands on masse, that Vismarr has ensorcelled every conservatory instructor across the Basin—you name it, they’ve thought it—so long as its completely unreasonable.
And as if there isn’t enough space across the extant to worry about already.
This may not be the most inspiring way to open a conference on our topic, but it’s an underplayed component of the overall theme. As new professionals to the field, you should steel your nerve. There’s a soul with your name on it in your future, ready to challenge the fundamentals of reality; and it’s likely that they’re going to accuse you of keeping them from the Truth.
The irony is, they’ll probably ask you for help to disprove your own position, and possibly blow your cover, in the same breath.
Let’s be clear—we’re not advocating that you help them order equipment or mobilize some doomed expedition. But, as professionals, it’s not our job to dissuade or heal the faulty maze that’s taken shape in these deluded heads. In fact, the chance of you changing a mind like that is infinitesimally small.
Our advice is that you tell them as much as you think it’s safe for them to know. Potentially, anything you think might help keep them safe from themselves for longer, or give them a better chance at living though their passion project to tell the tale at some later date.
However, our all-case, blanket suggestion hasn’t changed in many versô: whatever, you do, never lend souls of this kind any money before sending them on their way. At least, not if your interested in spending it sometime later.
Thank you, and we hope you enjoy the Symposium.”