You frolic in the woods and forget the power coalescing in the cities. The city tells me you will fail in your ventures.
Many mages prefer to search for Hallows away from the bustle and grime of a city’s streets. These mages claim the Sleepers clog the mages’ concentration: that cities are cesspools, and only natural sources of magic are pure.
The House of Ariadne says that such thinking should have died with Atlantis, or at least with the invention of indoor plumbing. The cities are the true fount of power. Why are many people be drawn to the city? Money gathers in cities, yes, and political power, too — but could some subtler, greater lure attract people as well? Some mystical power in the sheer numbers of people? Atlantis is proof that even mages create more power when they gather together than the sum of their powers
as individuals.
The mages of Ariadne’s House love everything about the city: the late nights, the crush of people, even the crime, the trash, the gang warfare and the homeless. Every aspect of the city, the good and the bad, creates the chaos in which Acanthus mages thrive. In a great city, you can see a $300 a ticket theater show one night and lose your fortune on the stock market the next morning. Fate’s long fingers manipulate lives within the city, and the city calls for its inhabitants to create buildings and spaces that endure longer than a human life.
The sheer variety you can find in the city, from debutante clubs to bondage clubs, draws the Metropolitans. One seldom sees $300 bottles of scotch drunk at a gentleman’s club in the suburbs. A rural town doesn’t create societies of homeless living underneath overpasses. Cities buzz with all kinds of people and lifestyles, and the noisier the buzz, the bigger the draw.
As a Metropolitan becomes more in tune with the energy of a city, she can follow a ley line wherever she likes. In time, she can learn to see a web of subtler lines, what the Legacy calls Ariadne’s thread, spun throughout the city. The thread can follow a ley line or lead a mage on a meditative path through the city. All the threads together form the city’s Knot.
These threads allow the city to communicate with the Metropolitans. Ariadne’s thread can help a mage locate physical things, such as lost items or people, or abstract things, such as a safe hiding place away from prying magical eyes, Hallows or areas that have borne witness to great happiness, fear or other strong emotions. The threads can even lead to symbolic locations that express the city’s own thoughts or messages to the mage.
Once the Metropolitan can follow Ariadne’s thread, the mage can learn what the city has to say about its history, its people and its magic. The city does not forget its history, the births and deaths, the crimes and benedictions. All the city’s secrets open to the view of a skilled and perceptive Metropolitan. The city becomes a tangled Knot only the Metropolitan can follow, walking the thread without getting lost.
The only trick is finding that thread.
Orders
The House of Ariadne does not favor any particular order. The Legacy doesn’t discourage members from belonging to any orders, but most Metropolitans are too busy following the threads of Fate to worry much about the Pentagram and its politics. Many Metropolitans never join an order, or they abandon former allegiances once they join the House. Those who do belong to an order are seldom very dedicated members.
- The Adamantine Arrow respects the House to a limited degree. The House of Ariadne was founded on strife, but few brave warriors appear in Legacy’s history.
- The Free Council actively supports the House of Ariadne. The idea that Sleepers create magic through cities fits right in with the Free Council’s theory of magic never entirely leaving humanity.
- The Guardians of the Veil wish the House of Ariadne would join them and obey them.
- The Metropolitans’ knack for following threads of power and history makes them popular with the Mysterium.
- The Silver Ladder watches the House of Ariadne closely.
- As the Seers of the Throne do with all mages save themselves, the Seers try to halt the Metropolitans’ work. The Seers have no place in their world for crazy people who talk to cities — especially when the cities talk back.
Attainments
- Attune
- Discovery Meditation
- Geomantic Meditation
