The Void

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The void is not an entity, or a force, it is the concept of an essence. The void is the short hand for a property of the cosmos that represents (not).

Imagine something. Now imagine its opposite. Both of these things are part and parcel of the dream, which is. The void is the opposite of both of these things. It's a hard concept to grasp so don't worry if you're not getting it.

Try an example.

Imagine good. It's a bit abstract so you might try to shorthand this by imagining giving a present to someone, a nice cucumber sandwich, for example.

Now imagine evil. Again, abstract. So imagine that instead of giving the person a cucumber sandwich you biff them sharply on the nose for no particular reason.

In the scope of the dream these acts can be expressed in terms of polarities.

Giving someone a cucumber sandwich promotes the life of the consumer (but preparing it entailed the death of the wheat that made the bread and the cucumber which is sliced neatly and placed inside). The action involves destruction as the nicely created sandwich is masticated by the grateful recipient.

The act's status on the freedom-constriction and order-chaos polarities rather depends *who* you are giving the sandwih to. Let us presume it is a friend. Generally speaking then the act is free, made of free will or, at least given freely within a social contract. If it has been offered without being asked for then the act is chaotic, randomly a sandwich has been offered when one was not asked for.

So despite being a "good" act the profile in polarities of our food gift is one of both life and death, destruction, freedom and chaos.

If we just randomly bop someone on the nose the profile only changes a little. We promote no life, only the death of a few living cells, so we're also being destructive. Given the same social conditions the act is also free and chaotic. The abstraction of "good" and "evil" is purely down to the opinions of participants and observers.

The void, by contrast, doesn't take any of this into account. None of it. Both acts occurringare anathema to the void. The existence of two people one of whom can prepare a sandwich for or punch another person already leads to the existence of two people and possibly a cucumber sandwich. The void cannot abide any of this. Hit someone, feed them, it's just as bad to the void. The void exists to make all things impossible, the void is all consuming and demands a basic entropic absence to operate in the only way that it can.

Agents of the Void

The Void's goal, therefore, is to wipe out the Dream, all that is, has ever been and ever will be. The Void regards the Dream as an aberration, the Void is smooth, constant, implacable. The dream is the act of terming something smooth, constant and implacable. Again, the Void has stumbled over it's own meta-cosmic ignorance to regard itself as something, which it is not.

Talking about the Void as regarding itself is also misleading, as if the Void is intelligent, which it is not, or as if it could regard something, which it regards itself as not wanting to, except it doesn't.

Caught up in this knot of trying its hardest not to exist in any meaningful sense leads to the contradictory manifestations of the Void inside the Dream.

These Agents of the Void balefully regard the love and hate, order and chaos, time and space of the Dream and act to wipe it out.

The most quintessential manifestations of the Void do this without any sort of emotional reaction or rational intelligence. They exist to reduce everything to a slightly clammy beige gas and appear as moulds, oozes, indistinct but vaguely conscious shapes, lower orders of life, spilling across reality like locust swarms.

Agents of the void can assume the trappings of complex life an intelligence but are filled with self-loathing for the existence that they can comprehend. Such creatures are of the dream but reject it wholly. They regard with utter contempt all that the dream has produced whether angel, demon, hero or villain. They attempt to find ways to unleash the unadulterated pure agents of the void upon reality and seek to be the first to cross the event horizon into a state of unbeing.

Void Taint

As the Dream can "infect" agents of the Void so the Void can infect manipulators of the Dream. Non-sorcerers of all races are safe from void taint, but to touch the raw Dream is to open yourself to the possibility of taking a little part of the void into yourself.

Small amounts can be managed but once the concentration of void in a sorcerer becomes too great a Dream creature can become a turncoat on reality itself.

Such agents are particularly dangerous because they hold the keys to all the chambers in reality's castle, or at least a few. They generally know how to open the way for a Void plague. Pure Void agents usually have to trick others into opening the portals for only the Dream can invite its own annihilation.

For this reason all Sorcerer's are taught to tune into their own void taint and to purge themselves of it regularly. If a sorcerer is lost to the void the consequences can be apocalyptic.

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