TASTE, UNREASON, AND THE CHANGING OF THE AGE

The oldest histories of the world do not form a clean sequence. Human empires rise and disappear; Saurids, once intelligent and world-spanning, survive elsewhere as animals and re-emergent peoples; Demons appear in histories older than all civilizations; Dragons seem strangely indifferent to ordinary evolutionary time. Beneath these contradictions lies a phenomenon known, where it is known at all, chiefly through its effects.

Powerful arcane magic does more than alter the world. Across repeated acts of magical capability, something is retained.

This retention does not appear to operate through ordinary historical transmission. A magical work can participate in patterns established thousands of years later. Ancient structures can exhibit the same taste as modern ones without any known line of influence. The phenomenon is neither intelligence, knowledge, life, nor physical substance. BEAUTY or TASTE are merely the least inaccurate terms for it: a persistent disposition among possible forms, accumulated through arcane practice and capable of expressing itself across nonlinear time.

The Once Palace

This explains an otherwise inexplicable family resemblance among some of the world's highest magical cultures. The pre-Triarchic Once Palace—an enormous, strangely modern complex of formal gardens, squares and interiors—shares no archaeological ancestry with Vornheim, yet certain features of its design feel uncannily familiar there. Related tendencies occur in the oldest refined culture of the Yellow City, particularly among its ancient slug aristocracy.

Vornheim

The Yellow City

The Once Palace may therefore have been less designed than miraculously resolved into form. A wizard using a Wish to produce a stone tower today might unknowingly allow the same ancient-and-future taste to participate in the result.

THE OLD DISASTER

The Saurids once possessed a world-spanning intelligent civilization. They apparently recognized this nonlinear channel and, rather than merely participating in it, attempted collectively to influence it.

Then came the Nytocaust.

What happened is unknown. The Saurid civilization did not merely fall; its destruction possesses an obscure, almost deleted quality. Stranger still, saurid aesthetics appear largely absent from the recurring arcane TASTE found elsewhere. Their absence may itself be evidence: a hole in an alternative history from which they were somehow excluded.

Vornheim may someday face the same danger. The proliferation of wizards is not itself the threat. The danger begins if wizards recognize the channel, study it successfully, and attempt to seize control of something that is already influencing them.

UNREASON

TASTE has another aspect, poorly understood and perhaps incorrectly distinguished from it: UNREASON.

UNREASON is not madness, chaos, or the opposite of beauty. TASTE frequently uses impossibility and irrationality to heighten its own forms. But under stress, preference may cease to be the primary constraint. UNREASON is something like TASTE no longer obligated to remain interpretable as preference.

The Nytocaust may have involved such a confrontation.

Medusae propose an even stranger theory: demons themselves are an ancient nonlinear product of this process. Demons are perfectly capable of contracts, appetites and ordinary personal behavior now; the unreason would lie in their provenance.

Medusae further claim that the Medusas produced themselves through the same process. This may represent profound knowledge, characteristic Medusan vanity, or both.

The miraculous Torn sisters, around whom the human Triarchy later formed, may represent a much more accommodating intervention: something resembling a gift or preference expressed into human history— but the destructive consequences of the Triarchy are perhaps characteristic of TASTE.

DRAGONS

Dragons participate differently.

Human beings externalize arcane capability through spells, books, artifacts and buildings. Dragons possess a pre-literate relationship with magic: they intuit possibilities in reality much as an animal intuitively understands its physical environment.

Consequently, the nonlinear accumulation manifests in dragons primarily as suitability rather than taste. Successful ways of being a dragon seem capable of influencing dragonness itself across time. Prehistoric dragons may therefore appear more advanced than later specimens.

When dragons construct magically, however, TASTE becomes visible again. Crystal-dragon architecture can possess recognizably draconic form while exhibiting inexplicable affinities with human arcane aesthetics—and little affinity with ancient saurid work.

Far beyond the known world, in the brutal southern mountain continent, something stranger is occurring. Dragons there appear to be approaching—or to have already approached—a condition beyond ordinary dragonhood. Deep within that region exists something to which dragons respond as humans respond to dragons.

What it is remains unknown.

THE CHANGING OF AN AGE

The rare occasions on which TASTE appears to have intervened most directly in the world seem to cluster around the endings and beginnings of historical ages.

The emergence of the Torn sisters is the clearest example. The Nytocaust may be another, although almost nothing about that event can be established with confidence. Other apparent interventions are scattered through histories too distant or fragmentary to establish a pattern.

The relationship, if real, is poorly understood. TASTE may become more active during periods of transformation. Its interventions may themselves produce such transformations. Or an age may simply be what history looks like when viewed between major expressions of nonlinear influence.

There is therefore an obscure theory among those few who have recognized the pattern: a sufficiently direct expression of TASTE may herald the changing of an age.

Whether it announces the new age, causes it, or merely accompanies it is unknown.