Primal Wild

The Realm

The realm of the Primal Wild is, as the name would suggest, a vast and uncharted wilderness. All the unclaimed places of the Fallen World have their analogues in the Primal Wild, each ecosystem recreated as an exaggerated version of how it is in this World. Though the life forms appear the same, the scale is vastly different. Trees seem far taller, beasts much larger, terrain more treacherous and weather more powerful. The realm is not exactly hostile to humanity, but discourages humanity’s complex thoughts; here, the raw emotion of the animals and the strange, linear intelligences of the spirits hold sway. All material wildernesses are reflected in the Primal Wild, but none on such vast scales as the jungles and the oceans.

The jungles of the Primal Wild are perhaps the most powerful representation of Fallen World ecosystems. Despite their infinite variety and majesty, their equivalents in the Material Realm do not come close to comparing. For each subspecies of creature the Fallen World has to offer, the jungle of the Primal Wild vomits forth one hundred, each more bizarre to the human onlooker than the last. These denizens of the jungle all want their toll in blood, even the trees and vines, for blood is the currency of the Primal Wild’s jungles; all have their own means of obtaining it. All creatures are enhanced beyond the limits of their Fallen World counterparts; predators are stronger and deadlier, prey are faster and more numerous. Visitors to the jungle – meaning every Thyrsus mage in existence, as this is where the Watchtower of the Stone Book can be found – report their feelings of fear and vulnerability heightened to maddening degree - but so are their passions and lusts, for the madness of the Primal Wild inspires as well as terrifies.

The Primal Wild’s oceans are similar. Humanity’s fear of the first time being in a vast body of water is well known; the roar of the waves as they play with the swimmer, tossing them about, crashing against them, or relentlessly pushing them under, inspires feelings of helplessness and insignificance in many mortals. So much greater is the ocean of the Primal Wild that many get these same sentiments merely looking at it. The moon’s call is greater here, so the tides are too; the waves hurl themselves against the shore with a ferocity that makes many think of titans in battle, a self-aware phenomenon as much as anything else. This is partially true; the power of the spirits in the Primal Wild is undeniable, and the open ocean plays host to war games between great gods of storm and surf, using hurricanes and rogue waves as toys and weapons.

The Watchtower of the Stone Book

Like all the other Watchtowers, and, indeed, every other feature of every one of the Supernal Realms, the Watchtower of the Stone Book’s appearance is fluid at best. This is not to say the tower itself looks flimsy – far from it – but its nature changes often and according to whoever is looking at it. The most common theme that Thyrsus mages settle on is that the tower is made from black basalt, and ringed with a dense covering of thorns. But beyond this, the consensus as to the nature of the Watchtower ends. Some describe it is a great forearm with a clenched stone fist jutting out of the earth; others say it resembles an enormous phallus. The tower stands on a windswept cliff overlooking the vast oceans of the Primal Wild. At the apex of the tower, inside a stone cavern vaster than is possible for the dimensions of the tower’s highest floors, is a series of paintings depicting every single type of living creature in the world. This is the Stone Book itself. A mage signs their name with liquid from their own body. After the dense carpet of thorns that must be traversed to climb the tower, blood is hardly sparse and thus is considered a trite offering; spit, phlegm, tears, and sweat function just as well, and fluids associated with the process of reproduction (semen, menstrual fluid) create extremely vivid markings.

Arcana of the Primal Wild

Life

The gross expression of the Primal Wild. The Primal Wild swarms with life of all kinds. Everywhere one goes, animals and plants abound, all overgrown and accentuated to the bitter extreme. The power of life in the realm is so great that even severed limbs grow back in a week. This great vitality of the realm is so powerful that it reaches across the Abyss into the Fallen World and becomes the Arcanum of Life. Those who master this Arcanum gain power over animals, plants, and other life forms, healing, shapeshifting, and the body.

Spirit

The subtle expression of the Primal Wild. The realm of the Primal Wild is alive, and not merely in a metaphorical sense. The vast wildernesses of the realm crawl with as many spirits as they do creatures, from the tiniest mites that live amongst the insects to the great gods of storm and earth that battle for supremacy in their domains. It is surmised that the realm itself is a spirit of incalculable power. The ephemeral resonance of untold myriads of spirits leaks across the Abyss and earths itself in the Fallen World as the Arcanum of Spirit. Mastery of this Arcanum allows a mage to commune with, summon, and command spirits, as well as manipulate Essence and ward against Numina.

Mind - Inferior

The Primal Wild is a place of instinct and tangled emotions, passion and fury driving inhabitant and visitor alike into a bestial frenzy. Something in the realm inflames the deeper urges of the mind, ordinarily buried beneath layers of rational thought, and compels those who linger there to surrender to their emotional urges. In this soup of instinct and fury and passion, there is little room for the higher thinking and reason that the Arcanum of Mind manipulates. The restraint and calculation that rationality gives are alien to this realm of beasts and can prove fatal. For this reason, the Arcanum of Mind is weaker in the hands of the Thyrsus.

Inhabitants

The Beasts and the Spirits

The realm of the Primal Wild is occupied by two distinct groups of creatures, each the living embodiment to one of the Realm's Ruling Arcana. The two groups coexist in the Realm, without much interaction as neither of them can feed off the other. These two classes of creature are the Beasts and the Spirits.

The Beasts are the representatives of Life, and they swarm across the Primal Wild in infinite variety. Species exist there never dreamed of on Earth, as do creatures well known to mankind but completely out of proportion. Insects the size of phone boxes compete with raptors that can fly faster than some aircraft, both chasing herds of prey animals that cover whole plains, and whose members can run faster than racing cars. Corpses are turned into humus within hours of death as swarms of fungi descend on than, and within the confines of jungles populated by trees taller than skyscrapers lurk pathogens that make the most virulent and deadly plagues seen in the Fallen World look like a mild cold.

On the other hand are the Spirits, representing their eponymous Arcanum. These too coat the Primal Wild in great numbers. The mean spirits of worms and bacteria can be found alongside great gods of emotion or nature or the elements. The very fundaments of the environment are but playthings for the gods as they compete in endless games, using devastating hurricanes, volcanoes, and other destructive natural phenomena as though they were toys. These spirits were all bound here by the Oracle of the Stone Book a long time ago, but since then have grown in their variety to a level of power that exceeds those left in the Fallen World, especially as they have never had to deal with the corrupting influences of modern human inventions and ideas.

The Oracle of the Stone Book

There is not as much ambiguity surrounding the Oracle of the Stone Book as there is cloaked around the Oracles of the other Supernal Realms. A number of Atlantean texts and tales from ancient spirits serve to illuminate the nature of the Oracle, and the events that led her to erect the great Watchtower of the Stone Book. Though one of the five monarchs of Atlantis, she cared little for city life, and was usually absent hunting monsters from the beginning of the world or wandering the Primal Wild. She is said to have been the last Oracle to cease her fight with the Exarchs and build a watchtower, mainly because her bloodlust drove her to hunt the Exarchs, and she barely noticed the other kings and queens cease their own struggles and put up their towers. Finally, knowing that a severance of the connection to the Supernal Realms would mean the end of the Fallen World, the spirit courts and the remaining earthly mages sent a great council of ambassadors to her.

Though sympathetic to the pleas of the spirits, she cared little for the Fallen World if saving it meant breaking of the hunt with these, the greatest of prey. She refused to create a Watchtower. The spirits were about to set off and find another powerful enough to raise such an edifice when a mortal man, with no native power of his own, spoke up. He had been cursed long ago by a god of lust, so that all who looked upon, man, woman, creature, or spirit, him desired him. His offer was this; if the queen broke off the hunt with the Exarchs, and created a Watchtower for the mages of the Fallen World, he would give himself to her. The queen bade that all the spirits present at the assembly become a part of her new realm, and knowing the alternative, they agreed. And so the queen seperated the Primal Wild from the other Supernal Realms, and she and the young man coupled across the whole of the realm with a frenzied passion. They ground themselves against each other for days on end, until the mortal's limited energy was spent and he no longer seemed so beautiful. Then the queen told him to flee, and he did.

He fled through the whole jungle, plants tearing at him, stumbling with exhaustion, until he came to a great cliff overlooking the churning ocean, and there was nowhere left to run. Out of the trees burst the queen, who fell upon him and devoured him in an instant, that he might always be a part of her. Once his bones were picked clean, she collected them and ordered the spirits to build a Watchtower on that spot, to commemorate her lover. The spirits obeyed, calling from the earth of the new realm a great phallic tower of black basalt on that spot, where the queen had laid out her lover's remains. At once the tower began to throb with a great primal keening, more alluring than fresh prey or the flesh of a lover, a call so great it sounded out across the Abyss and reached the minds of the mages in the Fallen World. From the great queen's tears sprang masses of thorny vines, wrapping themselves around the newly formed Watchtower of the Stone Book. And once her grief had drained away, she stood and went hunting for new prey.

References

• Tome of the Watchtowers, pp. 134-135, 137-139