Kurulham/WhatIsFate

What Is Fate?

Fate is The Pattern of Creation (and Heaven too). It's what keeps the laws of physics sane. It's what makes causality work right. It is the echo of the massive working of shaping that was the birth of Creation. It's what really differentiates Creation from the Wyld.

A Brief History of Fate

First there was not fate. Things just happened. Stronger Essence patterns overpowered weaker. Things happened. Sometimes they didn't.

After a while, the Primordials came to be. They were very, very strong Essence patterns. They exerted so much force that they sometimes caused patterns they created to be nearly as strong as they were.

Gaia and Cytherea made Creation. Somehow. That was when fate came into being.

For a while, fate just kind of was. I have a suspicion Cytherea was the one running it, during this period of time. Regardless of how, fate was happening. When two beings met, they no longer needed a contest of power to see whose vision of existence would prevail. There was only one vision of existence in Creation: fate.

When the gods were made, the Maidens took over. Not a whole lot of difference in how fate ran. Even when the pattern spiders started running it. The Sidereals, though, changed things.

When the Sidereals took over, they began working with fate from both sides - both with the overall force that was the Tapestry, and the actual events that it influenced and managed. It became much easier to unravel snarls - places where fate didn't work right, for some reason - because they could work from both above and below. This is good, because around this time fate started to get snarled a lot more often (what with the Primordial War and all that).

An Example of a Tapestry Snarl

Ethel the Aardvark gets up in the morning. At the same time, there is a pattern spider who begins spinning her fate for the day.

Ethel waddles on out of her burrow. As she does so, the pattern spider is spinning the fate of an aardvark waddling out of her burrow.

Upon leaving her burrow, Ethel gets stepped on by a Third Circle demon. The pattern spider, blissfully unaware that his charge is actually dead, goes on weaving the fate of an aardvark going about her day. When he meets other pattern spiders weaving the fates of their charges who are fated to meet Ethel, he goes ahead and weaves her fate on in with theirs, not knowing that they aren't actually interacting. Threads begin to tangle as the Loom exerts force on something that isn't there.

Finally, things come to a head. The pattern of disruption has spread, over the course of a month, to the entire region. Fate is pushing on itself and on people in ways it shouldn't. Finally something snags. The Tapestry snarls. Glaring Star is thrown from a horse and is both fated to die and not die.

What happens now?

Well, things get a little weird. Glaring Star dies, but stays alive. Even though people around him remember him breaking his neck, he's just bruised. He remembers breaking his neck, and is a little weirded out by the experience. He now has two fates: the fate of a dead man and the fate of a living man.

Fortunately the problem has now come to the attention of Iron Siaka. She tells the pattern spiders how to weave so that the man has only one fate. Then she goes down there and makes it so.

It's too bad that that one fate has to be the fate of a dead man.

An Example of a Fate Defied

To come