Where there,s life, there,.s hope. But then, where there,s nothing, there,s hope.
They say that if you stare into the void, the void stares right back out at you. That may be the case for some, but if it affects the Tamers of the Cave that way, it’s hard to tell. Everything they do seems to be infused with a kind of infectious optimism. They bring hope and healing to the Sleepers around them.
It stands to reason. Unlike the other Elemental Masteries, whose chosen elemental forces are tangible and easily observable, the Tamers of the Cave master the void, the element of ether that scientists in previous centuries tried and failed to isolate.
If elemental ether was never found by Sleeper scientists, it’s precisely because ether doesn’t exist, by definition. Ether is the material of nothing, a non-substance that permeates and holds together the vast, empty void. Ether is the prime ingredient of ephemera, the not-living, nonexistent matter from which spirits and ghosts take their substance.
Similar to the other Elemental Masteries, the Tamers of the Cave become, in a way, their element. And they become a personification of the element’s manifestation. To harness ether, then, to “tame the Cave” is to make something out of nothing. Using the principle of like attracting like, the Tamer of the Cave draws void from void, creating a conduit between his body and the great nothingness outside space. He brings forth from his mouth an etheric mirror, a shining, starry, semi-liquid substance made of raw void. In his hands, it’s a malleable, versatile tool, and it forms the foundation of his magic, because, in effect he is the void. He is nothing and everything, all at once.
Manipulating — becoming — the material of spirits and ghosts gives the Tamers of the Cave a keen understanding of the life beyond. They might not necessarily know what’s to come just yet, but armed with their knowledge of the void, they have a confidence that whatever comes after life, they can make something of it. The Tamers of the Cave have seen how everything comes from nothing, how there is a material existence permeated and held together by the substance of nothingness. They are the void. What have they to fear?
The void is also, in the thinking of the Tamers, contradiction. The void is hope and despair, faith and disbelief, all at once. They become these things personified. They become contradiction. To "tame the Cave" is make contradiction their reason for being. They challenge the social order in which they live. "The Cave" can be seen as a picture of the darkness in which so many people live, particularly the Sleepers. To tame that notional intellectual spiritual darkness is to challenge it, to show people to the exit of the cave. Some Tamers do it quietly, encouraging people to question themselves and the social order in which they find themselves over long and eventful lives. Other Tamers stand tall and become activists, making themselves nuisances, burning bright and paying the ultimate price that prophets and visionaries have done for thousands of years. They're not afraid of dying.
To the Tamers of the Cave, Death is not to be feared. It’s a doorway, they say, through which we must all pass. Perhaps it means a transmigration of the soul. Perhaps it’s just the simple continuation of matter and energy, dissipated into the rest of the universe. Perhaps Death really does means an afterlife in some kind of perfect Heaven.
Many believe in some sort of God, or at the very least in some kind of theory that life endures in some way beyond death. To many Tamers of the Cave, the lack of evidence for any kind of transcendent intelligence is all the more reason for faith. Faith for them thrives in the absence of evidence; their magic proves that nothingness produces and creates. Is it so implausible that a creator may be found in the emptiness?
They consider their lives cheap compared to the lives of others, even Sleepers. These Tamers share the Elemental Masteries’ philosophy — that their magic is there to benefit Sleeping humanity. As ones for whom death is not a thing to fear, the Tamers of the Cave are often not afraid to die for others, no matter how undeserving these others might be. There are stories of Tamers of the Cave whose sacrificial deaths were the magical tools to raise others from the dead, or even to bring about a single Awakening. There are stories of others who cheated death and rose again, before Ascending to higher states of being. They’re just stories, of course, but the stories persist.
They’re not all that helpful, these stories. These self-styled “Saints” have a reputation for throwing their lives away. It’s not undeserved. The problem with a Saint is that it takes a certain kind of person to fill that role, and 99 times out of 100, that person isn’t going to be the kind of person the average individual wants to sit down and have a drink with. As Tamers of the Cave grow in power and knowledge, they sometimes develop odd personal- ity tics and messiah complexes. A Tamer of the Cave becomes intense and driven. Many begin to gain delusions about what they are and what they’re capable of. They become overconfident, unable to see that perhaps they are not quite the perfect Saints they should be. Possessed of a death wish, too many Tamers of the Cave sell their lives far too cheaply, achieving nothing, violating at the last the ethos of their Legacy. They die just for the sake of dying, fooling themselves that the miracles they seek to promote are going to happen anyway without any other action.
Tamers of the Cave are rare compared to the other Elemental Masteries, so rare that many mages outside of the Elemental Masteries don’t even believe these Tamers still exist. They have always been few in number, but during the last couple of hundred years, their numbers have fallen further and their few practitioners have become less and less like the men and women who won the Saints their sobriquet.
The Tamers of the Cave have traditionally recruited among people of faith. The twilight of traditional faith and the rise of fundamentalism, with its demands for simple, black-and-white truths and its inability to comprehend paradox, have a lot to do with this. People have always been willing to die for their faith, but the noble scapegoat of times past has given way to the suicide bomber and the creationist. Some people fear that a new dark age of ignorance, bigotry and violence coming upon us. Too many of the Tamers of the Cave who work their magic today seem to be the vanguard of the fundamentalists, rather than those who should, by rights, be holding it back. A large proportion of a small Legacy seem to be too keen to sacrifice themselves without purpose and without finding others to take their place. The Tamers of the Cave are dying out. Maybe it’s simply because their time has gone. Maybe the world has passed them by, and there is no real place for sacrifice in this world any more. Maybe there’s no place for hope.
The Tamers of the Cave who yet endure still cling to their ideals. They still have a place, they say. They still have work to do. This is their hope. For many, hope is all they have.
Orders
The Tamers of the Cave have traditionally been exceptionally open to recruiting apostates.
- Members of the Adamantine Arrow, while no strangers to death, have always found it hard to get their heads around suffering and dying for another rather than fighting.
- Many mages who belong to the Mysterium find the idea of learning the secrets of the void immensely attractive.
- The Guardians of the Veil have always held the Tamers of the Cave in suspicion.
- The Silver Ladder has provided many of the best and brightest Tamers.
- Most of the Saints who come from an order nowadays come from the Free Council.
Attainments
- Etheric Communion
- Etheric Doorway
- Etheric Transfiguration
