Lore
Eternity... Where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill, and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.
How many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and secret fate of all life. You’re trapped, like a nightmare you keep waking up into.
—Rust Cohle
Many Cycles begin in a world much like our own, with characters who know little of the world beyond their waking lives. Gradually, the crack opens between the mundane and the fantastic, the wondrous and the horrific, the past and the future. Between this world and the three Realms that lay beyond, an invisible battle is being waged through the ages between the light of remembrance and the dark of forgetting. It is a war waged by entities through the generations, with stories as well as swords, guns, and magic.
Maybe you’ve been having prophetic dreams that won’t stop, or hear the spirits of the trees demanding a blood sacrifice whenever you leave your apartment door. But those are just dreams... right?
The Fallen
Forgetful avatars of forgotten gods, but what gods we can invent from their reflections.
You might think of them as angels. But these are not the angels of Hallmark cards: brass trumpets, picnicking in the clouds. In their true essence, they are trans-temporal, swirling engines of wing and blood, fiery eyes that peer around the corners between worlds. Dark, radiant beings conjured from fresh battlefields, a Frankenstein’s Valkyrie, forever crashing to Midgard. What grief demands their hate, what vast, cannibal hunger?
The Feyn
What was old is made new again, come the next Cycle. What is new soon crumbles to dust.
The Fallen are not the only entities from the other Realms. The Feyn are a variety of an entirely different order. Long forgotten by mortals in many ages, only appearing at the time of their approach to the threshold of death, even then hiding behind the mask of a face that is not their own. An Oyun, a mortal bound to them by Pact gives them some entry into our world, in exchange for some amount of access to theirs, but otherwise to most mortals dwelling within space and time, they remain incorporeal as water vapor.
Their Chronicle contends that the essence of a life is the story it weaves, carried aloft in their Realm until every trace has been transcribed or eaten by their scribes, leaving the soul a pristine canvas upon which new tales may be inscribed after emerging from life’s shadowed slumber. Intriguingly, their word for “human” can also signify “entertainment,” “knowledge,” or “sustenance.”
