Living Lore, Myths & Wonders

LIVING LORE, MYTHS & WONDERS

This document collects the smaller beliefs, inventions, spells, stories, customs, rumors, and habits that make An'kor feel inhabited. Not everything here is objective truth. Some entries are established practices, some are common beliefs, and some are stories that people repeat because the story is too useful, frightening, funny, or beautiful to die.

When an entry is a myth or urban legend, its uncertainty is part of the point. A rumor does not need to be true to make people avoid a road, leave an offering, distrust a machine, or hire adventurers.

Religion, Faith, and Things People Treat as Sacred

No Single Pantheon

An'kor has no universal religion and no agreed list of gods. Old human-descended cultures produced thousands of local deities, saints, spirits, ancestors, philosophies, and cults. Some survived. Others were absorbed into later traditions or vanished when their temples, languages, or peoples disappeared.

The arrival of Xanaras did not settle the question. If anything, catastrophe made faith more complicated. Some people became devout. Others concluded that any gods capable of preventing the invasion had clearly chosen not to. Corian therefore contains shrines that contradict one another within walking distance, and nobody considers that especially unusual.

The Living World

Among many Demian communities, nature is treated less as a personified goddess and more as a living totality that can be listened to, offended, aided, or called upon. Groves, rivers, weather, migration, decay, predation, birth, and disease are all part of the same living system.

This broad tradition contributed to the forces of nature used in creating the Core. That success strengthened the belief that nature can answer, but it did not prove what answered. Demian priests disagree over whether they contacted a conscious world-spirit, many lesser spirits, or simply a magical property of life itself.

The Sacred Continuity

Most Aquarians do not worship knowledge as a god, but many treat preservation as a moral duty with almost religious seriousness. A life, language, ecosystem, memory, or discovery destroyed without necessity is considered a wound in the continuity of the world.

After the destruction of the great archives, memorial chambers appeared in many Aquarian cities. They contain empty shelves, blank crystal tablets, and lists of repositories whose contents are no longer known. The emptiness is intentional. The lost catalogs were destroyed too.

The First Spark

Technobeasts generally resist language suggesting that Professor Alvas gave them souls. Their cultures prefer to speak of the First Spark: the historical moment when uplifted animals stopped being objects of research and became able to recognize, teach, and free one another.

The First Spark is commemorated in secular ceremonies, political speeches, memorial art, and sometimes rituals that are religious in everything except name. A common custom is to deactivate nonessential network connections for one minute, then restore them together. The point is not silence. It is remembering that connection should be chosen.

The Useful Dead

Diesel Dwarves do not have one standardized ancestor religion, but famous engineers, miners, rescuers, and inventors are often treated with a reverence outsiders mistake for sainthood. Workshops keep tools associated with dead masters. Families repeat useful sayings attributed to ancestors whether or not the ancestor actually said them.

Dieselbeard occupies the highest tier of this cultural reverence without being considered a god. Asking him for luck before starting an engine is common. Expecting him to answer would be considered strange. If the engine starts, however, thanking him is free and therefore efficient.

The Steward's Argument

A Prosperiticer religious and philosophical tradition holds that abundance creates obligation. If a person possesses more food, land, security, education, wealth, or influence than they require, they become responsible for what their surplus could protect.

Supporters fund hospitals, fortifications, refugee housing, archives, and military logistics. Critics point out that the doctrine is extremely convenient for a wealthy people who get to define what responsible stewardship means. Both sides can produce several centuries of expensive commentary.

The Core as a Holy Object

The Core was built as a defense mechanism, not a temple. That has not stopped anyone.

Since the invasion, small religions and civic cults have formed around the Core as the thing that literally keeps the world alive. Some call it the Heart Below, the Common Light, or the Last Hearth. Core engineers dislike worshippers entering maintenance areas, touching machinery, tying prayer ribbons to access panels, or insisting that alarms are prophetic.

The fact that the Core was built by cooperation between peoples who once hated one another has also made it a symbol for reconciliation. This interpretation tends to irritate people currently having political arguments inside Corian.

The Final Hunger

Zompire death cults devoted to Xanaras worship the Infinite World Feeder as an ending rather than a creator. Their prayers ask not for protection, wealth, or victory, but for oblivion.

Titles such as the Liberator, the Final Hunger, and the End are common among these cults. Their doctrine varies. Some merely believe Xanaras will eventually free all Zompires from the curse. Others actively seek Feeders, sabotage defenses, or attempt to place themselves beyond the shield. The further a cult moves from private despair toward helping Xanaras consume everyone else, the less tolerant Zompire authorities tend to become.

Myths, Urban Legends, and Stories Nobody Can Quite Kill

The Eighth Archive

Aquarian scholars joke that whenever a student cannot find a lost text, they claim it survived in the Eighth Archive. The joke became a legend.

According to different versions, one complete Aquarian repository survived the invasion by sinking into an abyss, sealing itself behind ancient magic, or being moved before the archives fell. It supposedly contains copies of nearly everything that was lost. No location is agreed upon. Serious historians dismiss it. Serious historians have also funded expeditions looking for it.

The Ghost in the Network

Technobeast technicians occasionally report packets, machine handshakes, or fragments of corrupted data that appear to originate from network infrastructure outside the shield. Most are explained as damaged routing tables, old automated systems, or ordinary errors.

The legend claims something beyond the shield is learning how to speak through abandoned lines.

Older versions say it is the consciousness of a Technobeast trapped inside Severance Station. Newer and less comforting versions say it is Xanaras practicing.

Dieselbeard's Knock

Miners in the Thundering Heights sometimes hear three heavy metallic knocks from rock that no tunnel has reached. Tradition says Dieselbeard is pointing toward a rich deposit.

Geologists insist that rock under pressure makes noise.

Dwarves agree, then ask why it so often knocks exactly three times.

The Poor Prosperiticer

A centuries-old Prosperiticer folktale claims that one day a child will be born among them who possesses absolutely nothing. No estate, no inheritance, no hidden family fund, no valuable name, no unexplained account. That child will mark the end of Prosperiticer abundance.

Before Xanaras, the story was usually told as comedy because the premise seemed impossible. It is told less comfortably now that enormous amounts of Prosperiticer wealth sit outside the shield where ownership has become theoretical.

Mara's Window

One window of Veyr Manor is said to show the house as it existed during Mara's captivity if viewed at the right hour with no artificial light nearby.

Visitors claim to have seen a woman behind the glass, children standing outside a locked door, Sevrin before his transformation, or their own reflection with a corpse standing behind it.

Mara has been asked whether the story is true. Her documented response is that people should find better hobbies.

The Eleventh Death

A widespread non-Zompire superstition claims that a Zompire who dies eleven times in exactly eleven years will not return after the final death.

Zompires know this is false. Several have tested it.

The belief persists because mortals desperately want the curse to obey symbolism, and because Zompires occasionally tell gullible executioners that the current death is number ten.

Borrowed Faces

Shieldline soldiers tell stories about Feeders that mimic people they have consumed. The creatures in these accounts speak with familiar voices, repeat memories, or stand at the edge of the shield calling family members by name.

No confirmed Feeder has demonstrated perfect human imitation. Several species are capable of disturbing vocalizations, camouflage, or crude copying of shapes.

Military commanders still order soldiers never to cross the shield because someone outside sounds familiar.

The Wrong Stars

Travelers near lost territory sometimes claim the stars look different through the sky above Xanaras. Constellations seem slightly displaced, dimmed, or rearranged.

Aquarian astronomers have not established whether this is an atmospheric effect, magical distortion, exhaustion, fear, or evidence that Xanaras alters more than the ground it consumes.

The phrase 'wrong stars' has become shorthand for any situation in which the world looks normal until one notices a single impossible detail.

The Walking Drill

Long-range observers of Drill City Nine have reported periodic vibrations and lights since the city was lost. One popular Diesel Dwarf rumor says the enormous central drill has torn itself free and now moves beneath occupied territory.

The story becomes more elaborate each year. In some versions the machine is still following its final mining orders. In others, Feeders operate it. In the worst version, Xanaras has grown flesh through the engine and learned how to drill.

Magic and Named Techniques

How Magic Is Understood

Magic exists throughout An'kor, but there is no single universal magical theory. Aquarians study it as a measurable part of the natural world. Demian traditions often approach it through living systems, spirits, places, and relationships. Old human traditions include ritual magic, curses, charms, divination, and countless local schools.

Named spells below are well-known techniques, not a complete spell list. Skilled practitioners modify them, combine them, or perform equivalent effects through different traditions. Magic usually requires knowledge, concentration, suitable conditions, and often material or environmental support. Powerful effects become dangerous when treated as effortless.

Deep Breath

An Aquarian spell that temporarily allows an air-breathing creature to extract usable air from water. The spell does not make the subject pressure-resistant, warm, able to swim, or immune to drowning if concentration fails.

Aquarian guides use it constantly and are tired of surface adventurers discovering the pressure problem after learning the breathing spell.

Glasswater

A practical Aquarian technique that stabilizes a volume of water or air into a transparent pressure-resistant boundary. Small versions create temporary air pockets, isolate contaminated water, protect delicate objects, or form windows during underwater work.

Large Glasswater structures require multiple casters, prepared anchors, and maintenance. Permanent air chambers in Aquarian cities use more sophisticated descendants of the same principle.

Current Reading

Aquarian investigators can examine water for traces of recent magical disturbance, unusual biological activity, toxins, temperature change, or violent displacement. It is often described as reading what the water remembers.

The phrase is poetic. The water does not provide a recording. Results are fragmentary and become harder to interpret with time, distance, mixing currents, or deliberate contamination.

The Still Tide

A defensive Aquarian working that suppresses motion within a limited volume of water. It can slow projectiles, weaken currents, stabilize collapsing structures, or make swimming extremely difficult.

Using it on living creatures is exhausting because bodies constantly create motion. Strong opponents can fight through it. Attempting to freeze an entire battlefield in place is how students learn that magical theory and magical stamina are different subjects.

Rootcall

A Demian nature-working used to encourage roots, vines, fungi, and other local plant life to move or grow in a desired direction. It can reinforce soil, reveal buried structures, entangle movement, or help damaged ecosystems recover.

Rootcall does not create mature forests from nothing. It works best where living growth already exists and becomes weaker in poisoned, frozen, heavily industrialized, or Xanaras-altered ground.

Green Mercy

A Demian healing tradition that encourages a body to cooperate with its own natural repair. It can slow bleeding, reduce shock, support recovery, and improve the survival of damaged tissue.

It does not restore missing limbs or erase severe mutation. Genevolvers sometimes mock Green Mercy as primitive until they need a patient kept alive long enough to reach a surgical table.

Weatherknot

A difficult Demian technique that nudges existing weather rather than creating it freely. A skilled practitioner can encourage fog, delay rainfall, redirect wind, or help a storm break earlier.

The larger the requested change, the less predictable the consequences. Weatherknots performed by several practitioners can affect military operations, but nobody competent promises exactly where all that displaced weather will go afterward.

Gravecount

Zompire occultists developed methods for sensing the remaining time before a dead Zompire's return. The simplest forms rely on ritual objects linked to the deceased. Experienced practitioners can sometimes estimate the return without seeing the corpse.

Gravecount is useful for families, armies, prisons, and assassins. It cannot prevent the resurrection. Zompires have spent centuries being annoyed by that distinction.

Blood Recall

A dangerous family of old vampiric techniques that uses blood as a sympathetic link. Depending on the school, a practitioner may track a recently fed-upon victim, sense whether specific blood is fresh, or strengthen perception of a person whose blood they have consumed.

The technique is unreliable across long distances and ethically disgusting in ways that have not prevented anyone from using it.

The Common Lattice

The creation of the Core required Aquarian magic, Demian natural forces, Genevolver enhancement, Technobeast control systems, and Diesel Dwarf infrastructure to function together. Researchers later developed much smaller cooperative rituals inspired by that achievement.

A Common Lattice allows different magical or technological systems to share power, measurements, or stabilization for a limited task. It is one of the few new magical disciplines born directly from the alliance against Xanaras.

The technique is powerful precisely because nobody fully owns it. Every nation has portions of the theory, and the most advanced versions require experts from multiple traditions.

Technology and Practical Wonders

Whisperwire

Whisperwire is the common nickname for Technobeast communication systems that carry messages through cables, relays, encoded signals, and network nodes far faster than physical messengers.

Inside dense regions the system can support near-immediate text, voice, telemetry, machine control, and data exchange. Reliability worsens near damaged infrastructure and the shieldline. Nobody sane connects an unknown cable leading outside the shield without isolation hardware.

Memory Cores

Technobeast memory cores store large amounts of written, visual, technical, and sensor information. They transformed recordkeeping even before Xanaras and became invaluable after Aquarian archives were destroyed.

The technology is not perfect. Cores require power, compatible readers, maintenance, and formats that future systems can interpret. Aquarians now insist on storing important records in both advanced and embarrassingly simple forms.

Modular Prosthetics

Technobeasts pioneered standardized mechanical joints, sensory interfaces, artificial limbs, and replacement organs that can be repaired or upgraded without rebuilding an entire body.

The technology spread beyond Technobeast society. War veterans, injured workers, Demians with painful anatomy, and some Mutamons use adapted components. Genevolvers and Technobeasts argue constantly over where medical restoration ends and voluntary enhancement begins.

Diesel Pressure Engines

Diesel Dwarf engines convert refined Diesel into enormous mechanical force. Pumps, drills, lifts, rail engines, saws, generators, furnaces, and battlefield machinery all descend from this basic family of designs.

They are durable, loud, dirty, repairable, and often capable of continuing to run long after a more elegant machine would have developed the dignity to stop.

Tunnel Rail

The Diesel Dwarves maintain heavy rail systems through the Thundering Heights and parts of Corian's underground infrastructure. Trains move ore, fuel, machinery, soldiers, refugees, and supplies through routes that surface roads cannot match.

Old rail lines beyond the shield are strategically valuable because intact tunnels could provide paths into lost territory. They are also strategically horrifying for exactly the same reason.

Living Splints

Genevolver medicine produces cultivated braces, grafts, membranes, and temporary tissues designed to support damaged bodies while they heal. A living splint can grow around a shattered limb, stabilize a joint, or protect exposed tissue, then be removed or allowed to dissolve.

They are among the technologies Genevolvers cite when defending their civilization from accusations that all experimentation produces monsters. Mutamons generally agree that the medical work is useful and reserve the right to hate the argument.

Adaptive Antivenom

Genevolver laboratories maintain libraries of toxins, diseases, immune responses, and engineered treatments. Their best field kits can be adjusted rapidly when the contaminant is known.

This has become especially important near Xanaras, where biological exposures do not always resemble familiar poisons. Calling a treatment 'adaptive' does not mean it can cure unknown alien contamination on demand. It means the physician has better odds than someone holding a bottle labeled antidote.

Pressure Glass

Aquarian magic and material science produce transparent panels capable of surviving depths that would crush ordinary construction. Pressure Glass allows underwater observatories, visitor chambers, laboratories, and sealed gardens to look directly into the surrounding sea.

After the invasion, pieces from lost cities became valuable salvage. Aquarians dislike seeing fragments of destroyed homes turned into luxury windows.

Prosperiticer Field Logistics

Prosperiticer military engineering is less famous for spectacular machines than for making armies arrive fed, informed, supplied, rested, and difficult to surprise. Standardized containers, collapsible bridges, portable fortifications, coded inventory systems, route planning, and redundant depots are treated as weapons.

Other nations sometimes laugh at Prosperiticer officers for discussing grain storage during war councils. They usually stop when their own soldiers become hungry.

Shield Compasses

A post-invasion collaborative invention, shield compasses combine magical sensing with Technobeast calibration to estimate direction and distance from the Core's protective boundary.

They are vital near the frontier because the shield is not always visibly obvious. Compasses can drift near magical storms, damaged regions, or suspected fractures, which is precisely where accurate readings matter most.

Everyday Customs, Slang, and Small Pieces of Culture

Three Copies

Among modern Aquarians, important personal records are commonly kept in three forms: one local, one stored elsewhere, and one in a different medium. The custom began with scholarship and spread into family life.

Marriage records, family histories, research notes, recipes, letters, and children's drawings may all receive the three-copy treatment. Forgetting to make the third copy is considered tempting fate.

First Ignition

A Diesel Dwarf who completes a major machine traditionally starts it in front of family, coworkers, teachers, or anyone else likely to laugh if it explodes.

A successful first ignition is celebrated with drinking, shouting, inspection of the exhaust, and immediate discussion of how the design could produce more power.

Ask Before the Wrench

Among Technobeasts, modifying another person's body without explicit consent carries enormous historical weight. The phrase 'ask before the wrench' began as workshop humor and became a general expression for respecting autonomy.

It can now be used for anything from cybernetic surgery to borrowing someone's tools.

Open Door Marks

Some Demian homes display carved, painted, or woven symbols near the entrance indicating that a person fleeing persecution, family violence, or abandonment may ask for temporary shelter.

The marks are not legally binding and not every household can help. Their existence comes from generations when many Demians survived only because another unwanted family opened a door.

Prosperiticer Gifts

Because ordinary monetary value carries less status among Prosperiticers, thoughtful gifts emphasize rarity, effort, history, personal relevance, craftsmanship, or access.

Giving someone an expensive object can be trivial. Giving them a repaired childhood toy, a lost family recipe, a first edition, a difficult favor, or a bottle from a vineyard outside the shield can be overwhelming.

Eleven-Week Humor

Zompires make jokes about their resurrection cycle constantly. Mortals usually cannot tell which jokes are acceptable.

'See you in eleven weeks' can mean goodbye, a threat, a promise, or an extremely dark response to someone drawing a weapon. Businesses in Zompire territory may offer storage contracts specifically designed to keep a dead customer's property secure until return.

Inside and Outside

After the shield contracted, 'inside' and 'outside' became emotionally loaded words throughout An'kor. Inside means protected territory. Outside means lost territory, even when the speaker is discussing a place that was once their home.

Refugees sometimes refuse the terminology. To them, a city beyond the shield may still be home. It is simply occupied.

Shieldborn

Children too young to remember the world before Xanaras are sometimes called Shieldborn. The term is not a separate ethnicity. It describes a generation for whom shrinking borders, emergency drills, Feeders, refugee districts, and the Core are ordinary facts of childhood.

Older adults occasionally say Shieldborn children do not understand what was lost. Shieldborn adolescents generally respond that older adults were the ones who lost it.

Core Oaths

In Corian, swearing 'by the Core' or 'on the Core' has become common even among people with no religious attachment to it. The oath carries the implication that the speaker is invoking the one thing nobody can afford to treat lightly.

Core technicians consider this melodramatic and use considerably less poetic language when equipment fails.

Post-Xanaras Fears, Practices, and Frontier Lore

Feeder Bells

Many shieldline settlements maintain alarms with sounds deliberately different from fire, weather, or military drill signals. The exact designs vary, but the phrase Feeder Bells has become common even when the alarm is electronic.

People who have lived near the frontier for years can wake from sleep already moving before they consciously recognize the sound.

Red Rooms

Hospitals and research stations near the shieldline sometimes maintain sealed contamination rooms for anyone exposed to unknown Xanaras tissue, fluids, spores, parasites, or environmental effects.

The name comes from old warning lamps. Being placed in a Red Room does not mean a patient is doomed. It does mean everyone entering wears protection and the door is not opened because someone feels lonely.

The Last Bag

Families near unstable frontier regions often keep a small bag ready for evacuation. Food, identification, medicine, money, water, family records, and one or two irreplaceable objects are common contents.

People farther inside the shield sometimes see the practice as paranoia. Refugees see it as experience.

Claim Maps

Diesel Dwarf families, Prosperiticer estates, displaced governments, farmers, temples, and ordinary refugees all maintain maps marking property that now lies beyond the shield.

Legally, many claims remain recognized. Practically, ownership of land occupied by a planetary feeding organism is difficult to enforce. The maps matter because they preserve the assumption that loss does not have to be permanent.

Outside Salvage

Objects recovered from beyond the shield are valuable, emotionally charged, and potentially dangerous. Nations regulate salvage differently. Some demand quarantine. Some claim military priority. Some recognize old ownership. Smugglers recognize whatever rule leaves them with the object.

Aquarian documents, Technobeast data cores, Prosperiticer collections, Diesel Dwarf machinery, family heirlooms, and pre-invasion art can all justify expeditions that are economically irrational and emotionally unavoidable.

Common Sayings

Across An'kor

'Still inside.' - A grim answer meaning alive, safe, or not yet lost.

'Make another copy.' - Aquarian advice that spread after the archives fell.

'If it moves, ask a Technobeast. If it doesn't, ask a dwarf.' - Corian workshop saying. Technobeasts and dwarves both object to the simplification for different reasons.

'Eleven weeks is not forever.' - Used by Zompires to mean patience. Used by mortals to mean the opposite.

'Gold does not widen the shield.' - Prosperiticer expression for a problem wealth cannot solve.

'The body remembers who held the knife.' - Common among Mutamons and increasingly used when discussing forced modification.

'Nature keeps receipts.' - Demian warning that environmental damage eventually returns as consequence.

'Do not teach the cage to build keys unless you are prepared to open the door.' - A saying associated with Alvas and used whenever creators underestimate their creations.

'Wrong side of the shield.' - Anything valuable, desired, or necessary that exists exactly where it cannot safely be reached.

'Dig first, argue in the tunnel.' - Diesel Dwarf expression. Aquarians consider this an excellent summary of the problem.

Loose Threads for Future Stories

Rumors Worth Keeping Unresolved

Some stories should remain available without immediate answers.

A complete Aquarian archive may still exist somewhere outside the shield.

Something may be transmitting through abandoned Technobeast infrastructure.

A group of Mutamons may have developed a stable procedure that no Genevolver controls.

Some Feeders may be changing in response to prolonged contact with An'korian biology and technology.

A surviving city outside the shield may still contain living people.

A section of the Core may use principles none of the modern maintenance teams fully understand because the original specialists died during the invasion.

The source of Prosperiticer wealth may be connected to something older than their own recorded civilization.

A Zompire may have failed to return after eleven weeks, with no body and no reliable witnesses.

Xanaras may not be the first World Feeder to reach An'kor.

None of these claims are established merely because people believe, fear, or investigate them. They exist so the world has dark corners left to open later.