Avalon was made from faer. Faer is a proto-elemental building block of creation, like a stem-cell, formed of a coalescion of divine song-notes, resonance and creativity passed through the "flame imperishible" binding the trinity in an irreversible process. In the eons before the world a trillion faer filled the void with a chaos of energy and potential, each faer stem-cell a particular note, colour and resonaant signature. The faer is grouped by regions of colour and pitch: these are known as realms.
When it was time, the Creator traced a vast dome of stars, a hemisphere into which all the faer encompassed. Confined, the chaos becomes more dense, more vivid in colour, more intense in sound like a perpetual snowglobe.
Then the Omnipotents entered the dome and the chaotic maelstrom was brought into order, painting broad-strokes of faer to delineate the natural world in faer: oceans and mountains, earth and air, forest and storm, sun and moon, light and dark, fire and ice, brilliance and shadow, life and death, rock and gem, plant and animal, Man and beast.
Every single location, every object, every living creature, every player, every force of energy, every mote of dust: it is all a blend of realms, faer rendered stable fixed to immuntable laws.
Then, the doors of night were thrown open and the Omnioptents looked out at the void and called "come, those who wish to see what their song has made, leave the void and feel the light of the sun and the moon!". Many stayed without but many were curious and entered the world in tangible physical form. All marvelled and most remained when the doors of night were shut again so the history of Avalon could begin. [see HELP 23 for full versions of Avalon's creation and stories of its earlier ages]
Now, here is the rub: not all the faer in the world is part of divine inventory and not all faer was brought into stasis with the creation of the world. Some of this free flowing faer, though bound by the laws defining how its realm (its behaviour) must behave, is ebbs and flows about the realm as elemental, ethereal, candescent, natural and resonant forces. Much of the rest is bound to locations, like dark matter, unknown and dormant or in daisychains criss-crossing the dome, like dark energy, unseen and uninteractive.+
It's the dark matter and dark energy that become the well-spring of the EIGHT FUNDAMENTAL FORCES in Avalon, whether a mortal knows it or not, and manipulating these forces is the purpose of a host of mortal abilities. It's one of the most powerful and significant facets of specialist skills: the awakening, developing of this knowledge and the growing mastery of one or more of these EIGHT FUNDAMENTAL FORCES as summarised below.
--[ The EIGHT FUNDAMENTAL FORCES on AVALON ]--
Elemental Forces:
1. Fire (flame, firestorm, heat, devouring)
2. Air (wind, storm, tempest, density, weather, hurricane)
3. Water (ocean, river, rain, flood, fertility, cascade, deluge)
4. Earth (volcano, mudslide, forest, spirits, mountains, quakes, chasmss)
Energetic Forces:
5. Ether (ethereal, sphere, senses, kinesis, catalyst, portal)
6. Light (candescence, illumination, daytime, sight, lightning, colour)
7. Darkness (evocation, night, blindness, sleep, underworld, underdeeps)
8. Shadows (stealth, subterfuge, forms, ghosts,
NOTE: there is power in music and song and life and death and indeed power in intelligence and the mind and in gems and beasts, not to mention magic itself. These are explained elsewhere - these are uniting or gestalt forces and not fundamental. They are not inferior merely because they are not one of the eight fundamentals.
The beauty of this crucible of the natural world, its people, and the eight fundamental forces is the interwoven interdependant cross-profession contests it engenders. This side of Avalon can be glossed over - it's not mandatory to know about it and some pass their whole lives without such expansive ambition - or it can be played with planning, building with strategy, defensive or aggressive, short-term, long-term or in the moment. The best tactics are defined by situation, conditions, opposition and allies. There's no perfect binary "trigger" to victory. It is not the domain of automatons or indolents. It's a game worth playing if challenge matters but a game easy to disregard if what exists is enough and the pleasure found in linear progress matters more.
