Difference between revisions of "Sorvians"

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(Created page with " '''History''' There has not been one conflict forged in this timeless world where differences were not present. It has always been the nature of Men to confide in ways which...")
 
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But while Sorvians are driven to serve ideologies unquestionably in their height, it’s all for naught when the ideology falters and fails. If not by common sense, Sorvians learn that to bind themselves to miniscule followings is to pledge themselves for frankly nothing at all, for when the cult they’d come to serve falls by the vicious persecution of a neighboring nation which thinks it heresy, Sorvians abandon the idea they aligned with because it simply no longer has standing. Sorvians cannot find it within themselves to retain loyalty to a cause without form, much unlike an old patriot who saw their kingdom fall, yet retains the ways it once formed.
 
But while Sorvians are driven to serve ideologies unquestionably in their height, it’s all for naught when the ideology falters and fails. If not by common sense, Sorvians learn that to bind themselves to miniscule followings is to pledge themselves for frankly nothing at all, for when the cult they’d come to serve falls by the vicious persecution of a neighboring nation which thinks it heresy, Sorvians abandon the idea they aligned with because it simply no longer has standing. Sorvians cannot find it within themselves to retain loyalty to a cause without form, much unlike an old patriot who saw their kingdom fall, yet retains the ways it once formed.
  
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'''Their Design'''
Their Design'''
 
 
   
 
   
 
Sorvians are inheritors of Jevex’s admiration for mortal ways, so when it is stated they are “expressionless” and a “canvas”, that is to be taken both literally and figuratively. The ritual which Men go through in order to become these ideological thralls put them into a status best defined as a “stalling” -- everything within their very being, from the flesh to the very core of their soul, is put in a pause, or a limbo. Lifeforce stops its natural cycle, blood ceases to run, growth no longer transpires; organs do not function, but they do not function because they’re forced to stop, not because they die. The mind is sent into a spiral until it, too, becomes a blank slate, where the only directive is to find a worthy ideology, and, once found, to be molded by it.
 
Sorvians are inheritors of Jevex’s admiration for mortal ways, so when it is stated they are “expressionless” and a “canvas”, that is to be taken both literally and figuratively. The ritual which Men go through in order to become these ideological thralls put them into a status best defined as a “stalling” -- everything within their very being, from the flesh to the very core of their soul, is put in a pause, or a limbo. Lifeforce stops its natural cycle, blood ceases to run, growth no longer transpires; organs do not function, but they do not function because they’re forced to stop, not because they die. The mind is sent into a spiral until it, too, becomes a blank slate, where the only directive is to find a worthy ideology, and, once found, to be molded by it.
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Advantages'''
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'''Advantages'''
 
   
 
   
 
*Sorvians are capable of being the perfect soldier; while they can feel pain, their capacity to tolerate is higher even to the degrees of dismemberment, and to lose extremities such as limbs fails to incite death-bringing afflictions such as shock or bloodloss. At that point, pain and the general lack of limbs becomes the greatest deterrent.
 
*Sorvians are capable of being the perfect soldier; while they can feel pain, their capacity to tolerate is higher even to the degrees of dismemberment, and to lose extremities such as limbs fails to incite death-bringing afflictions such as shock or bloodloss. At that point, pain and the general lack of limbs becomes the greatest deterrent.

Revision as of 23:50, 2 July 2017

History

There has not been one conflict forged in this timeless world where differences were not present. It has always been the nature of Men to confide in ways which they are convinced to adhere; to spill blood and to die for these ways, to share these ways with their friends, their brothers, sons and strangers. It is hard to discern the term “way” as a singular thing, for it takes many forms. Sovereign nations have a way. They design themselves by the nature of their people and by the authority of their leaders. Culture follows a way. It is shaped by the world around those who herald culture, who learned that their way was the best way in the circumstances they faced. Faith follows a way. Their way is to say their way is true, that sometimes their way is the highest way, and that other ways are ways which lead one astray. Men are defined by ways. Without ways, they have no meaning, no guidance, and in a world without ways, Men are left to wander a plane with no mountain to follow or horizon to foresee.

There are those who commune deeply with this truth. A soul known as Jevex, the Spirit of Order and Self-Sacrifice, confides with them more than Men themselves, for ways are abstract aspects of the mind which are not confined to the nature of mortals. One may say Jevex may have been present since the very dawn of time, for is it by a “way” that the Creator shaped the very cosm all things are hosted within. But instead he formed by the sheer presence of Men’s attunement to ways; Jevex was birthed by the fire within that mortals bore to persist in their ways, to form their ways, to know their ways. If anyone knew the nature of ways, it was Jevex. It was inspiring; to spread one's’ ways to thousands of others and for these same ways to guide them forth to carve their path through history is something no other form of being truly achieved. Even the Aengudaemons, who directly usher ways to Men by the design of divine missions, have never come close to such a feat. They may only mimic the creation of ways and perpetuate what they believe in by sharing it with duration-adhering souls that do not follow Immortal existence. Such a transaction, it is alien -- But in the end, it is the cultivation of ways.

Jevex wanted to surpass what Men could achieve. He wanted the fervor and the belief of countless mortals bound to the soul of but individuals. What the fervor and belief and expression of these things was based around, Jevex did not care; it was not within his interest to inspire ways within Men, only to incite the conception of ways. In old times, he would come to create the very embodiment of ideology and the servitude put forth toward it. Jevex would conceive the Sorvians.

Their Nature

Sorvians are mortal beings which, by the power of a ritual designed by the Spirit of Order, are driven to “subsist” on the servitude of ideologies. Unlike normal mortals, they do not have free will and instead can be considered hollow and without basis until they unbiasedly find a “way” in which they are led to serve. This means, by becoming a Sorvian, one loses all sense of self; expression and personality decays to the very base level, independant thought becomes machinelike, race and differential corporeality is nullified, and they become a “canvas” for the ways of others to paint upon.

This means a Sorvian is nothing without an idea to serve, but the idea must be concrete; the ideology must be persistent, it must have a name, a design, a spirit of its own. It must mean something in order for a Sorvian to recognize it as something to bend the knee to. Petty oaths are nothing; baseless, militant orders are flimsy; tasks are short-lived. Sorvians crave ideologies to make them whole, and thus they only serve what is prominent. Canonism, Aspectism, Xanism, Tahariaeism, Xionism -- these are ideologies which have depth, which have meaning, which have lasted ages, that were founded by those who matter and have achieved things that bring them up as greater truths.

In an old age, those that witnessed the presence of Sorvians knew them as Truthbearers, for when Sorvians were seen serving their given ideologies, they did not relent in doing so. Unlike mortals, who have a gauge for questioning atrocities the occult may bring them to do, or being apprehensive in their loyalty to a cause, Sorvians are not subject to this. The only way they know in their strange, limboed existences is the ideology they are bound to, and thus they are driven to such unfaltering allegiance to something that to call them Truthbearers would be more than to express what they follow is as fact; it is to express how they do not even question what they serve, ever - not for the slightest moment.

Despite their lack of individuality, Sorvians are molded by the ways which they are bound to follow, and when they align with an ideology long enough, their character reforms into something unique. The best way to describe them in this state is to say they’re zealots; zealots while, indeed, they are unquestionably loyal to their own cause, still carry with them a personality. The personality of a zealot is intertwined with the way they serve, and thus, they are defined by their way. Sorvians follow this nature like a creed, and soon become not so hollow like a resistless slave after all. One cannot become a Sorvian by force, after all - it must be agreed by the one subjected to it. They become a Sorvian, knowing that on the other side, they awaken as a loyalist of boundlessly more faith in their following than they had before.

But while Sorvians are driven to serve ideologies unquestionably in their height, it’s all for naught when the ideology falters and fails. If not by common sense, Sorvians learn that to bind themselves to miniscule followings is to pledge themselves for frankly nothing at all, for when the cult they’d come to serve falls by the vicious persecution of a neighboring nation which thinks it heresy, Sorvians abandon the idea they aligned with because it simply no longer has standing. Sorvians cannot find it within themselves to retain loyalty to a cause without form, much unlike an old patriot who saw their kingdom fall, yet retains the ways it once formed.

Their Design

Sorvians are inheritors of Jevex’s admiration for mortal ways, so when it is stated they are “expressionless” and a “canvas”, that is to be taken both literally and figuratively. The ritual which Men go through in order to become these ideological thralls put them into a status best defined as a “stalling” -- everything within their very being, from the flesh to the very core of their soul, is put in a pause, or a limbo. Lifeforce stops its natural cycle, blood ceases to run, growth no longer transpires; organs do not function, but they do not function because they’re forced to stop, not because they die. The mind is sent into a spiral until it, too, becomes a blank slate, where the only directive is to find a worthy ideology, and, once found, to be molded by it.

The race of the Sorvian just erodes away. In a matter of days, all definitions of their prior race dwindles away - Elven ears become shorter, “usual”, they lose their grace and their vanity; Orcs looks their tusks, their height, they become “normal-statured”; the lush beards of Dwarves and their stocky features fade into a form of assimilating Sorvian normalcy; even Humans lose the vague definition of their racial profile, for all mortal Men become a blank slate that robs even the slightest individualistic design. The faces of mortals, they lose definition - wrinkles and facial features and everything that makes a person recognizable as who they are, it all goes away, turning the newly-formed Sorvians into a grotesque slate.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/HYSYV7uv5nMx5MbRm8PCe3BFFJfGWcSKjjdtZ1wbdROTb1vVu2SqpCKcjP5Kl2H9mZxOJeE1GQQA17jmwBiMW558wP_kmDZdjRkUy3Topr8tFKfgYb3G4ndtCt6XIzDk_ymhUDzD The maskless Sorvian, deplete of individuality.

All they retain are their eyes for seeing, their nose for breathing, their mouth for speaking, their ears for hearing. Strikingly, the most ironic definitions of Sorvians is their immediate and tribal-like nature to adopt the use of masks. They wear dull masks of any kind of material on their face, and when the time comes that they bend a knee to a way which they are willed to serve, they paint their mask and design it in a way to reflect that which they follow.



Advantages

  • Sorvians are capable of being the perfect soldier; while they can feel pain, their capacity to tolerate is higher even to the degrees of dismemberment, and to lose extremities such as limbs fails to incite death-bringing afflictions such as shock or bloodloss. At that point, pain and the general lack of limbs becomes the greatest deterrent.
  • Sorvians are highly resilient to the elements and the use of clandestine utilities such as poisons. As Sorvian bodies are timeless, temporal forces such as the elements have difficulty ensuing substantial degradation to their bodies, such as freezing whether inciting frostbite or flame marking them with extreme, debilitating burns. Poisons do not work because there is not a bloodflow to lead poisons to the heart.
  • Sorvians are unrelenting in what they believe and are incapable in faltering in this regard, much like machines and their directives. A Sorvian Canonist Priest can preach to the masses, word by word, for days upon days and with no deterrent or tire; for their will to serve their aligned way cannot be broken. This coincides with the will of soldiers as well.
  • Sorvians bear a greater supernatural presence within their souls known as Higher-Neutrality. It prevents their timeless bodies and limboed souls from being “corrupted”, and therefore subject to the powers of Aengudaemons, as Sorvians are just as capable of serving Orders aligned with Gods as they are darker forces. If Sorvians were susceptible to these powers, that would mean Jevex’s designs for a unbiased agent of ideology were flawed, which detracts from their core design to embody any kind of mortal following.
  • Their tolerance for physical duress is high, much like their threshold for physical pain. These two bodily aspects go hand in hand, as their timelessness prevents their muscles from suffering from exhaustion that many mortals eventually feel while traveling or upon the battlefield.

Disadvantages

  • Sorvians are robbed of the “self”, meaning literally everything that defined them in mortal life is erased from their facial features to the very design of their race. They become “unbiased”, and cannot form a new personality without being dependant on the ideologies they crave to serve.
  • As timeless beings, Sorvians lose a majority of usual mortal functions that correlate to the basic organic design of their bodies. They can no longer “enjoy” life, reproduce, or confide in mortal virtues. They become a blank slate, a machine, an agent, and are no longer in need of these basic mortal aspects.
  • While they are resistant to natural temporal forces, Sorvians do not react well at all to arcane-based ones. They react almost viciously to powers summoned from the Void, because powers summon from the Void do not adhere to the passage of time, much like Sorvians, meaning these powers and the Sorvians are put on the same “existential level”. This disparages their corporeal form in ways comparable to an undead reacting to gold or holy magic; Voidal fire easily catches upon their unchanging flesh, Voidal ice incites almost immediate frostbite, and Voidal arcane power’s kinetic forces are enough to tear them apart.
  • They must always depend on an ideology to follow, because if they are not apart of one, Sorvians are reduced to bizarre nomadic entities where they cannot fight, speak or bring themselves to do something for the sake of something else unless it involves them becoming aligned with an ideology. In this same fact, they are unbiased in this strange astray state, and do not have preferences toward either dark or light or good or evil ideologies. The design of them does not matter; it is the fact they are there and may be served that does.
  • Both their violent reaction to Voidal powers and the “pause” upon their soul prevents any kind of magical connections from being formed, even in the darkest spectrum. This means Sorvians must always depend on martial skill for matters involving combat, as they are completely unable to use magic.
  • Because all Sorvians are locked into the same physical profile, their strength is limited in a way their endurance and pain profiles are not. While they are capable of being strong - as strong as a lithe soldier, at most - they are not strong enough to heft heavy armor and greater weaponry, especially not all at the same time. The most a Sorvian can wield is a heavy longsword or a two-handed battle axe or a fighting staff, and leather armor or chainmail, but never heavier weapons such as greatswords or protections such as plate mail or higher.