Excerpt from Principia Haatelis by Eibon of Cykranosh

Library of Doom Catalog Number: ßéÅçþ-69454-AD-¥mç-CXXXIVCLXIX

Perhaps one of the first principles taught to me by my first master, Zylac, was that of polarization.  Now, of course, most of my learned readers will assume I mean ferromagnetic polarization; however, that is but an analogue to that of which I speak.  I speak here, to the central concept of life, animus.

Animus, as we all know, is the manifestation of the elemental plane of Spirit upon the physical planes of existence.  It is that which when assembled according to the rules of Law produces the Soul.  That which we consider our primary life force, the true essence of who we are, and that which allows us to transcend the limitations of the physical world and return to the Outer Realms upon death, or to be reincarnated in new flesh depending on our contracts with the deities of the multiverse under the covenant established Adam and Eve from whom mortalkind is derived.

In the realms in which the majority of us ‘live’ animus is a positive force, it is life and living and is the key to immortality.  However, what most will not tell you is that the multiverse is bounded by more realms than those we think of.   In addition to the standardly taught multitude of physical planes, elemental planes, outer planes, the singular Astral Plane and the truly hellish Abyss there are four other quasi-planes.

I refer to them as quasi planes because no one or thing may dwell upon them.  No animus may ever reach them.  Rather they are more like ‘forces’ that shape and bend the other planes.  In particular, the physical planes and outer planes.  So while many conveniently refer to them as planes, this is simply because of how people on many worlds confuse the notion of 4 Dimensional Intersections of Quantum Strings as “Planes” or “Multiversal Energy States.”

These four ‘planes’ or ‘forces’ or whatever you call them are what I prefer to think of as ‘meta-forces’ in that they work to shape the topology of the 4D Quantum Strings and their Intersections (e.g. the planes), particularly with respect to animus and mana.  However, they do so in different ways.   I will, eventually, get to some of the details, as I understand them in my limited manner, later in this tome; however, a full discussion is beyond a single volume.

These four meta-forces, I think that is probably the best word to describe them in simple mortal language, consist of Law, Chaos, Positive and Negative; for want of better words.  These words are not at all accurate, they are but poor mortal substitutes for what the Gods know intrinsically.  Now actually, Law and Chaos are a pair and Positive and Negative are a pair.  So in truth, what I just told you were four meta-forces, are actually but two.  Each anti-posed aspects of the other.  Law/Chaos and Positive/Negative as one would expect due to the Laws of Bifurcation; but I digress.

Law/Chaos work on mana; it works to bind/unbind mana.  Briefly, for this is not what I want to speak of in this text, the relative balance or proportion of Law/Chaos in a region of the multiverse determines the balance magic or technology available to planes within that realm.  Where there is more Law, there is less magic and one must use technology to unleash the equivalent effects that one gets from magic.  Where there is more Chaos, mana is less bound, more available for use by individuals.  With such chaos, the repeatability of science and technology degrades and randomness and uncertainty creep in.  Clearly, things become quite untenable at either end of this spectrum.

Similarly, in life forms, and this is what is important and why I discuss Law/Chaos in this text, is that for mortal creatures, the balance of Law/Chaos determines how tightly mana is bound to flesh.  What we call the elder races, such as the Sidhe are less tightly bound to flesh and thus reflect a higher degree of Chaos.  Younger races, such as humans and dwarves tend to be more tightly bound and reflect a higher degree of Law.  Incidentally, the lifespan of a race tends to be, but is not exclusively, represented by how tightly they are bound to flesh.  Meaning that the more tightly bound races tend to have shorter life spans than the less tightly bound.  However, those lives tend to be more stable and in some ways, harder to terminate.

There are many reasons for this, and we will go into this in later tomes; but for now, as you might imagine, those that are the least tightly bound can live a very long time.  However, even they are subject to the Phoenix cycle.

So after this long digression I come to Positive/Negative and we use these words emotionally, not so much scholarly.  Animus is subject to Positive and Negative polarization.  In this part of the multiverse, we mainly see positively charged animus.  In other regions there is much more negative polarization. 

Now, because both negative and positive polarizations are animus, on the physical planes, both can support ‘life’ however, within a polarized section of the multiverse, they are very different sorts of life, and in the later course on Necromancy we shall cover this.  The short answer is that on this side of the multiverse, where organic life is grown with positive animus, the binding between flesh and spirit is much more integrated and thus has a higher degree of Law, and thus lower Chaos. Negative life on the positive side of the multiverse will be bound at a higher Chaotic state, than positive life.  Meaning positively charged animus is more tightly bound to matter (over here) than negatively charged animus.

The key here, the crux of our discussion, is that positively charged animus, or ‘animus’ and negatively charged animus or ‘antimus’ as it is colloquially called, attract each other, even as Chaos and Law are attracted.  Chaos seeks to unbind Law, and Law seeks to bind Chaos.  So life based on ‘antimus’ which I will call ‘Unlife’ seeks out and tries to cancel out life based on ‘animus’ or ‘Life.’  Although of course, this is far too simplistic.

Realizing that these designations are arbitrary, I seek only to cast that which is least familiar within the most familiar of terms.

That all being said, because antimus binds to flesh, but on this ‘side’ of the multiverse it must be much more loosely bound, when attempting to reattach animus to flesh, it is generally far easier to first polarize the animus into antimus and then attach it to the flesh.  Of course, this is a very loose binding as discussed, and the flesh itself was grown using animus and not antimus and…well quite frankly the Unlife inhabiting the body needs to replenish the body with positively charged animus, or the body will eventually fall apart.  However, if one can acquire fresh animus to repair the body, being a Chaotic binding, one could live for a very long time.

I will also take this opportunity to note that on the other side of the multiverse (or wherever it is) flesh that is grown naturally with Unlife is perfectly stable, and over there, positively charged animus animating a body requires infusions of antimus to keep it functional.  I think this is important to note.  Despite popular misconception, there is nothing intrinsically ‘Evil’ with antimus or ‘Good’ with animus.  Such terms are completely relative to where one resides in the multiverse.  Over here, antimus is seen as evil, on the Negative ‘side’ of the multiverse, animus is seen as evil.

Where the questions of good and evil come into play is the methods needed for sustaining a decaying body.  Such methods are typically seen as unethical; and thus referred to as evil.  A concept, of which, I am sure we can agree, is quite amusing and useless.