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True History of Chaos Well By One of Its Creators

Lore, history and other content by the citizens of Underlight preserved for posterity.
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Starfall
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True History of Chaos Well By One of Its Creators

Post by Starfall »

I am going by a years old memory at this point, so this is the best I can provide. But as one of its creators I feel the need to commit even these few details to the record before I forget them completely.

In the early days of Lyraclesia, we were all still finding our footing. Each group of dreamers came from very different cities, with different arts, and different expectations surrounding essences and essence energy. From Lyra, many still carried strongly held beliefs about how nightmare essences were to be disposed of: banishing, cleansing, imprisoning, draining. Idoaclesia had a much more functional approach across the board. Essences were energy and that was not much debated, and so there was a flourishing of energy manipulation art research there that would have turned the stomachs of many of the Lyran houses.

Idoaclesians had grown used to having personal containers for essences. But no such arts existed in Lyraclesia after the merging. Since the houses opening in Lyraclesia were a mix of dreamers from both cities, the beliefs surrounding essences softened substantially. But they didn't go away completely. So the Idoaclesian container system felt a bit too much like draining for some Lyrans. A new solution was needed for the new city.

The DreamSmith's Guild in the early days was a fractious, fighting lot. None of us could reach consensus on anything of substance at times. There was a danger that the guild would tear itself apart, and take the ability to teach Forge with it until it could be reconstituted. So we came together to create Chaos Wells.

We came up with several key conditions that had to be met in order to accommodate both functionality and beliefs:
  • It had to be accessible to every dreamer, so a dreamsoul art and not a resilience art
  • Whichever way it contained the essence, it had to do so without disturbing its nature
  • It had to naturally break down as a part of depositing energy into a prime artifact
  • It had to be separate from the dreamer so that free spirits and initiates could contribute to primes that were often housed in guardian or ruler areas.
Points 2 and 3 were necessary to accommodate essence beliefs. If the chaos well changed the essence, there would be no way to be sure that the other essence arts and primes were still working as intended. And the chaos well would be useless if the container was permanently attached to a dreamer with no way to transfer the energy to a prime.

So the DreamSmiths Guild set to work. Each of us tackled a portion of the problem, and engineered a solution to it. The plan was to come together and assemble it from the mechanical pieces we had each made. We gathered in the Grand Forge and used its power to assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. The plan backfired however. We went back to the drawing board and realized we had over-engineered our solution. We'd focused too much on being smiths and not enough on being DreamSmiths. So we adjusted our solutions to operate more on dream logic than on cloudbreak logic. This time when we gathered at the Grand Forge, it was a success. We created the first Chaos Well, and the means to reproduce more.

I cannot confirm from memory exactly which Smiths were there at the time. For the sake of inclusivity, I will list all those I can recall who might have been there: Starfall(definitely present), Kaer Gerroz(definitely present), Magnilia(likely present), Golah(likely present), guardDog(possibly present), possibly Ghazgkull but I think he had left the city, possibly Eros and BladeSlayer but I think they joined later.
_-*
I want to have adventures and take enormous risks and be everything they say we are.
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