A body can be mended. A heart can be made to beat. Neither proves that the person who once lived inside it has returned.

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Corwyn’s scholars describe a living being in three parts: physical substance, essence, and awareness.

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• Physical substance gives a being form.

• Essence is the raw energy that gives that form life.

• Awareness is the experience of being someone: perceiving, remembering, and knowing oneself.

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Essence differs from realm to realm. In Corwyn, it is æther, the energy within living things that urges them to grow and endure. In Færie, life draws upon the Great Life Strand. Other realms have energies of their own (see Realms under The Magic). A magician may borrow such power for a spell, but a living being depends upon its essence for considerably more than a moment of magic.

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At an ordinary death, the three parts come apart. The body returns to the material world, and its essence disperses. What becomes of awareness is less certain. No one has returned with an account that settles the matter, though this has not discouraged scholars from arguing about it.

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Sometimes death fails to finish its work. If awareness remains bound to a body or another anchor after its life giving essence is gone, the result may be Undead. Such beings persist without the energy that once helped them flourish. Hunger can remain when satisfaction cannot... a vampire may drink; a spirit may beg for rest. Neither is made whole simply by getting what it asks for.

 

Ordinances

 

What Are You, According To Reality?

The Script, the universe's syntax and language for existence and reality, has a deeper answer than any mirror. It recognizes each being by an Ordinance, a fundamental nature that may have little to do with appearance. Mortals live through the familiar cycle of birth, growth, and death. Constructs owe their lives to creation through craft or magic. Spirited beings like faeries and daemons arise from magical energies. Dreamborn come from dreams, memory, or imagination made real. Even the Divine are defined by more than power alone.

 

An Ordinance can change, but each route has its own conditions and cost. Changing a body does not necessarily change its Ordinance. A Mortal given brass bones, clockwork organs, wings, or a different appearance remains Mortal unless a recognized transformation changes the underlying classification. A wish or similarly powerful evocation of the Script can accomplish the physical change, yet even a wish cannot simply declare that reality recognizes someone as a new Ordinance.

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Known Ordinances

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Mortal

Beings whose primary substance is physical matter and whose lives follow a natural cycle involving birth, growth, æther, reproduction where applicable, and death.

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Example: Human, dwarf, elf, giants, chylds, nymn.

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Undead

Beings whose original lives have ended, but whose physical remainder or comparable anchor and essence persist within creation without the æther required for ordinary life. Necromancy, curses, bindings, and failures to depart may invoke the Script’s provisions for undeath, allowing the undead to supersedes their former Ordinance.

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Example: Revenant dead, vampire, liches, ghosts.

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Construct

Æther bearing life created deliberately or accidentally through craft, artifice, magic, or some combination of them, rather than through the natural life cycle of its apparent species. Artificial creation takes priority when determining this Ordinance.

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Example: Automatons, wish-born, higher magic artefacts.

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Spirited

Beings that arose naturally from magical energies or whose primary substance is magical energy rather than physical matter. Spirited beings may reproduce, be born, mature, age, and die naturally.

 

Example: Faeries, dæmons, and elementals.

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Dreamborn

Beings originating from dreams, imagination, memory, or the subconscious made manifest. Dreamborn is a fundamental nature, not simply a creature that can enter dreams or use dream magic.

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Example: Shadow imps, nightmares, succubus, moon beasts.

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Divine

Beings whose existence is tied to divine office, cosmic purpose, worship, or an equivalent metaphysical authority. Divine status may be attained through a recognized transition or through a belief structure rather than being limited to beings born Divine.

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Example: The Forgotten Gods, the Constellatta (Nature, Time, Fate, Gravity).

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Voidborn

Beings originating beyond the known realms, from unknowable spaces outside creation or outside the reality governed in familiar ways by the Script.

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Example: unknown.

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Primordial

Beings that form part of the universe’s original fabric. They exist as components of creation rather than merely as inhabitants of it.

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Example: Star Ash, The First Iron, Nebula Kin, The Seedstone.

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