Remnant

The Origins

Remnant was, originally, created by Kyrikain. Not intended at first for mortal hands, it was his method of understanding his own capabilities; the powers lodged within his Domains. Through Remnant, the fledgling God helped craft some of the intricacies of the human mind, and how it interacted with dreams and memories. While these ideas were prototypal, the God now interacting with mortal cognition in much more complex ways, the... remnant left behind remains the way in which mortal magi continue to interact with dreams and memories, even now.

Concepts

Engrams: The first concept a Remnomancer - a practitioner of Remnant - interacts with is called The Engram, or Engrams. Before anything else can be learned, one must understand the physical and arcane significance of the Engram, and its relationship with the brain. In Neuropsychology, an Engram is a permanent change left upon the brain due to the existence of a memory, or, more succinctly: a memory trace. While this definition is accurate, a Remnomancer views an Engram as a visual structure. Using ether, the magi is capable of distinguishing Engrams from within the tangle of the mind, acting as a beacon within the otherwise complex structure. Engrams act as focal points within dreams and memories; formed by significant events, thoughts or experiences, they serve as hubs of recognition. While over time they fade if not activated, a Remnomancer can discover even the most latent Engrams within the mind.

Visually, a Remnomancer enters the tangle of the brain through a complex structure known as the Mindscape. Depending on their state - waking or sleeping - the elements of the Mindscape may be more permanent and visual, or may occur to them more as flashes of imagery, disjointed. Whatever the case, as they tread through the Mindscape, Engrams will appear to them as glowing red centers: often a sphere or a globe, they exist as complex jungles of thought and recognition, each tied - typically - to either a certain and significant event, or a period in one's life. Through the magic, the Remnomancer may activate and restore the contents of an Engram, through a process known as Reclamation.

Reclamation: An Engram will appear more or less vibrant depending on its remaining significance to the brain. Dormant Engrams, such as those which have long since been utilized and may have occurred long ago, are 'forgotten' - a process effectively irreversible, as the Engram enters a sleep that cannot be physically recovered from. Remnomancers are capable of undoing this dormancy, reactivating old Engrams, their vibrancy returning as old memories return to the weave of the mind. Reclamation can do this, and more; it can move certain thoughts and memories to the forefront, perhaps making a man's most vivid memories those he had as a young child. It can also, paradoxically, be used to make memories dormant, even very recent ones. Reclamation is, effectively, the ability to rekindle or dim Engrams within the Mindscape, changing the landscape of it around them, and adjusting the Mindscape's more visual surface: the Memory Palace.

The Memory Palace: Dreams and memories are, in many ways, one and the same. By altering one's Engrams and restoring or dimming memories, the Memory Palace is altered. The Memory Palace is a visual manifestation of one's mind. It is often called 'the dream world', 'the subconscious', or even 'memory' itself. Within the internal memory of one's mind exists a collision of ideas; memories and experiences, fears, doubts, desires, creative concepts, imagined splendor and much more. These all go into sculpting the Memory Palace. To put it into example, a person may have been raised in the slums of Nivenhain; they may have served on a ship for years, experiencing other cultures, and dreaming of many. They may fear the man who murdered their mother, and nightmarishly witness him often. They may desire to be a Lord. All of these experiences, memories, fears and desires coalesce within the Memory Palace, which converges into a both dystopian and hopeful amalgamation of their thoughts. Perhaps a twisted form of Nivenhain, surrounded by an open sea, prowled by the man who murdered their mother - now a Lord - and his informants which hunt the dreamer as prey. A complex, imaginary world, it is very much living even while dormant, as the dreamer lies awake.

The Remnomancer can access this Memory Palace, and as if enacting change upon the physical world, can alter it. Remnomancers, in truth, can live within many minds; their own, those they've acquired access to, and eventually even those very distant.

The Kyrikaric Principle: The Kyrikaric Principle is a philosophical concept relating to the dualism of the God Kyrikain; his state, equally, as God of Dreams, and Lord of Nightmares. While primarily noted by his followers through a breadth of examples, each of Kyrikain's good deeds equalized by a dark imprint, this Principle appears most real to a practitioner of Remnant. The Kyrikaric Principle is core to the magic of Remnant. Just as there is splendor, potential for connection and healing beyond the level of what mortals may otherwise find possible, within Remnant - and the Memory Palace itself - there is lingering terror, danger and dread. Every Memory Palace contains within it a lurching overcast of Nightmare; apparitions whether inherent to the Palace or from Reverie that wish to harm. Further, damage or death dealt to a Remnomancer and their fellow dreamer is often permanent, scarring the mind or even affecting the body in strange ways. These effects are more severe as one's mastery of Remnant brings dream-cognition closer to reality, making the magic one of the few that is more dangerous to practice the more experienced one is.

All Memory Palaces have an ominous nature to them somewhere, whether it is predominant, or lying beneath the surface. There is always as much fear and dystopia as there is hope and comity. This principle extends to the Mark of Remnant itself, demonstrated by the fact that Remnant is the only magic with two branching Ascensions.

Initiation

Initiation into Remnant is performed uniquely, in that the Mark of Control is created by connecting Engrams within the initiate's mind. The Engrams form a constellation-like tapestry as they are linked together within the Mindscape, one that ultimately appears upon the scalp of the initiate once the process is complete, a visual manifestation of their Mark.

In order to succeed in the initiation, the aspiring Remnomancer must learn to navigate their own Mindscape, guiding their initiator from Engram to Engram to experience facets of their memories, either from birth to the current time or other tangles significant to their cognition. An aspiring Remnomancer who fails to locate other Engrams may become lost within their own Mindscape forever, the initiator likely to abandon them as they feel their ether nearing dangerous fatigue. Failure to complete the initiation often results in the Remnomancer entering a permanent coma, though the damage can actually be reversible through the aide of a Master Remnomancer, who would guide them back to the surface of their Mindscape.

Threshold Sickness

The drawbacks listed below do not always come in pairs, and certainly not simultaneously. Some may come and others may not.

Lesser: Nausea, fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, dehydration

Moderate: Bleeding through the nose, eyes and ears, intense cramps, seizure-like shocks and spasms, internal bleeding, vomiting and weakness

Collapse: Collapse, or Engram-Collapse is a common result of Moderate Threshold Sickness. The over-use of ether causes the Remnomancer's Mindscape to experience backlash, resulting in a very real impact to their memories, especially recent ones. This can lead to moderate or even severe amnesia, with large swaths of one's life being forgotten in more extreme cases. While this damage is reversible through the help of another Remnomancer, practitioners of Remnant find it difficult to reverse this damage themselves, as they often find these areas of their memory to be clouded, foggy and difficult to navigate by traditional means.

Abject Paranoia: This negative feedback often occurs if the moderate overstepping took place within a Memory Palace. Abject Paranoia is a constant, lingering feeling of extreme dread and anxiety that will accompany the Remnomancer through all hours of the day, a feeling as if they are being targeted by strange beings, apparitions and hallucinations in the real world. In dreams, they see nightmares all around them; nightmares that are real, and can actually do further harm to the Remnomancer. For this reason, Remnomancers who are experiencing this drawback will often intentionally fragment their sleep dramatically, preventing them from going into a deep sleep until this effect fades. While this can result in severe sleep deprivation, it is typically preferable to the alternative.

Severe

The Memory Prison: This severe backlash is reminiscent of the dangers of a Remnomancer's initiation; the risk of being lost within one's own mind, and the fear associated. This fear never truly goes away, as the danger of this occurring does not truly end no matter how advanced one becomes as a practitioner of Remnant. Severe overstepping is typically known to result in one of two things; physical trauma that often leads to death, or the loss of one's ability to navigate through cognition on their own terms. The Memory Prison is variable in how it might occur, or where, but its result is that the Remnomancer becomes permanently locked within a particular Memory Palace, unable to leave.

This leads to a coma that is largely considered incurable, save for some outliers. Most often, the Memory Prison is an incurable backlash because the Remnomancer will typically be slain by a nightmare within a few evenings of their imprisonment, permanently collapsing their Engrams and the synapses between them, turning them mentally vegetative. Only if they are rescued from this dreamscape by a Master Remnomancer before this happens can they hope to survive, though often with permanent trauma as the dreamscape they were trapped within leaks hallucinogenically into their real world.

Mutations

Like Mentalism, a common and negative mutation of Remnant is a hormonal shift within one's brain that leads to dream-addiction, the Remnomancer spending upwards of sixteen hours a day dreaming. Dreaming becomes an incurable fixation of theirs, their pull to it stronger than any drug, unable to truly become rehabilitated from.

Aside from this, Remnant's mutations are vast and variable. Many of them are more subtle, and tend to only affect the Remnomancer's own cognition; a dream-like alteration to their perception of the world, a shift in personality. More commonly, and in the positive strand, Remnomancers often find their ability to memorize, and their overall long-term memory significantly enhanced. They also find that they dream almost every night, even without needing to use Voyage, though these dreams are less vivid and offer them less control. Overall, Mutations of Remnant tend to be psychological, though there are many exceptions.

Abilities

Voyage: The Voyage is sometimes known as 'Dreamdiving'; it is the ability to enter one's Mindscape, a corridor through which lie many doors, all leading to separate junctions within the Memory Palace. These doors may take one to different parts of the same city, which serves as a crux or nucleus of the dreamer's cognition. Or, perhaps, they will take the dreamer to multiple different realms of cognition, each distinct and separate. The complexity of the Voyage and the sites through which the Remnomancer may dive all depend on the complex experiences, aspirations, fears and so on of the person whose mind is being dived into. One individual's Memory Palace may resemble a nation, even a continent in depth and potential, while another's may resemble a hamlet, and another's may encompass a great city of seemingly endless scale.

The Voyage is inherent to the Mark of Remnant. An initiated Remnomancer can Voyage, and as a Novice, does so by entering a sleeping state and exploring their own mind. As they begin to be able to navigate their own Mindscape and Memory Palace, becoming more familiar with Dreamdiving, they learn to enter others. At Apprentice, a Remnomancer can - by entering sleep - enter the minds of those sleeping around them, with a less resistant mind allowing them greater clarity, access and depth. As one progresses, and particularly around the latter stages of Journeyman expertise, one can dramatically widen the distance through which one may Voyage, capable of entering the dreams of those familiar to them from hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Sometimes, a Remnomancer may dive through a random mind, experiencing the cognition of a stranger purely by chance, or as a result of the exceptional depth of their Engrams. Interestingly, Elves experience these dream-invaders more often than other mortals, as their enhanced lifespan naturally produces more Engrams, inherently drawing in more Remnomancers by accident as they Voyage.

Guidance: While the inklings of this ability appear even amidst the Remnant mage's initiation, they manifest more potently as an ability as one progresses through their Novice Mark. Guidance is the power to locate Engrams, filtering ether through a Mindscape to uncover them. This will cause them to light up red; brighter and more vibrant for more recent or compelling Engrams, or dimmer and more dulled for those less remembered or utilized.

Junction: As an Apprentice, once one has learned to locate Engrams through Guidance, Junction allows the mage to activate or dim those memories upon encountering them within the Mindscape. Junction occurs when the mage suffuses ether within their hand and makes physical contact with the Engram, activating it one way or another. The target and the Remnomancer will then be given the opportunity to experience memories within the Engram, vividly reliving those memories, or dulling and dimming them to reduce their significance. Junction occurs as a result of the mage's ether stimulating the neural network between Engrams, resulting in synaptic reactions. This ability is the core of Reclamation, allowing one to more predominantly remember or forget certain occurrences. Importantly, however, it is far more difficult to dim recent memories, and to reactivate ones much further back. These more challenging applications can typically only be performed as an Expert, or beyond.

Pervade: Suffuse an object or place with an idea, concept or thought, often around an Engram, or from a concept related to one's Palace. Apprentice. WIP.

Phantasm: Memorize aspects, particularly visual or physical experiences, apparitions or entities from another's Palace into your own. Journeyman. WIP.

Falsification: Adjust existing memories in subtle ways, affects Palace. Must be reasonably in line with target individual's reality/experiences. Journeyman. WIP.

Phantasmal Reckoning: Project Phantasms onto visual reality in the form of tangible illusions. Consumes exponentially more ether based on the complexity of the Phantasm, especially if trying to induce other magical effects. Expert. WIP.

The Mask: Masks present self with projected self from the past, altering appearance and even rekindling past physicality and health. Can mask mutations. As one oversteps, the mask begins to dwindle and eventually fully recede, marginally losing effect from Light to Severe overstepping. Expert. WIP.

Astralization: Project aspects of an entire Palace onto the world. Master. WIP.

Trial: Pulls the target individual and the Remnomancer, physically, into the Remnomancer's Palace or the target's Palace. Master. WIP.

Stargazer Abilities

WIP: X.

Abyssal Abilities

Mind Leech: Inserts a 'Mind Leech' into target's Mindscape, rapidly consuming their memories, the integrity of their dreamscape and their cognitive capabilities. WIP.

The Bridge: Links the Abyssal's Palace to the target's. WIP.

Novice

X

Apprentice

X

Journeyman

X

Expert

X

Master

X

Ascension: The Stargazer

X

Ascension: The Abyssal

X

Notes

• The Remnomancer cannot determine facts about another individual's Memory Palace without their consent. This magic is meant to be collaborative and must be played as such.
• A Mentalist's Mindscape and Memory Palace tends to be considerably more unique than the typical person's. The Neurocrux makes their Mindscape much more complex and difficult to navigate. Additionally, their mastery over the Mural often results in greater emotional division within their Palace, often resulting in segregated sectors within their dream-cognition. This can be determined and played between the Mentalist and Remnomancer, but is important to note.