The Ordering of Chaos

See: Giant Cosmology INDEX, The Ineffable Ones

The Word Mythek #

The Teang’quess language, the archaic root tongue from which a great many of Rolara’s older terms descend, contains a word that mortal scholars have spent the better part of three millennia trying to translate cleanly. The word is mythek. Modern translators usually render it as “magic,” and this is correct in the same way that rendering ocean as “wet” is correct: it captures something true and misses everything important.

The literal meaning of mythek is chaos made orderly. Not chaos defeated. Not chaos suppressed. Not chaos banished. Chaos made orderly: meaning the chaos is still there, still present, still chaotic in its underlying nature, but arranged into a form that holds together long enough to be useful. A storm is chaos. A storm made into rain that falls on a particular field at a particular time is mythek. The rain is no less wild than the storm. It has only been aimed.

This is the giant cosmology in a single word. Everything that follows is commentary.

The Cosmological Premise #

In the giant frame, the universe began as undifferentiated chaos: not the absence of order, but the presence of every possible order at once, all of them screaming over each other, none of them coherent enough to be called real. This state is not described as “before time”; it is described as the condition that time itself is the first answer to. Time is the first ordering of chaos. The fact that one moment follows another, rather than every moment occurring simultaneously, is the foundational mythek.

The giants believe (and the giants are old enough that “believe” is the wrong word; remember is closer) that they were the first beings whose presence in the world performed mythek simply by existing. A giant standing on a ridge orders the chaos around it. The wind is shaped by the giant’s mass. The light is shaped by the giant’s bulk. The local possibilities of the world narrow, in the giant’s vicinity, from “anything” to “the things compatible with a giant being here.” This is not a metaphor in giant thought. It is the literal mechanism by which the world becomes legible.

Mortals do this too, in the giant view. A mortal standing in a field also narrows local possibility, but only slightly, and only within the small radius of the mortal’s body. A giant narrows possibility across a valley. A true giant, in the cosmological sense, narrows possibility across an entire range of mountains. This is what the Mythekin are doing when they sit, motionless, on the slopes around Mount Origin. They are not waiting. They are holding the local chaos in a particular shape, and the shape is the reason the region exists at all.

Magic, Giants, and the Stars #

If mythek is the act of ordering chaos, then everything mortals call “magic” is a particular style of mythek: a particular way of imposing temporary local order on an underlying chaotic substrate. Spellcasters do mythek with their voices and gestures. Sorcerers do mythek with their bloodlines. Wizards do mythek with their books. Druids do mythek by asking the chaos politely. Wild magic users do mythek with the chaos still half-loose, which is why their results are so unpredictable.

The Stars of Power are the largest single instance of mythek currently extant in Rolara. They are not a magical artifact; they are a constant ordering operation, performed at the scale of a world, that shapes the underlying chaos of the cosmos into the particular pattern that allows mortal life to exist. When the Stars were sealed at the end of the Age of Wonders, the ordering became thinner. The chaos did not return; it merely loosened. Magic became harder, less reliable, less ambitious. The aetheric currents that giants depended on for their full mode of being became too weak to sustain them at scale.

This is the giant explanation for the decline of giant civilization, and it is much darker than it sounds. In the giant view, the Stars were sealed because of something the giants did or failed to do. Whether this is true or merely a giant’s characteristic willingness to take responsibility for events on a cosmological scale is not known.

The aetheric crystal that infuses the deepest regions of the world is, in the giant cosmology, condensed mythek: chaos that has been ordered so completely and held in that order so long that it has crystallized into matter. A vein of aetherite is a vein of frozen ordering. This is why the substance is so valuable and so dangerous: cracking a piece of aetherite is, in a literal sense, releasing chaos that has been held in shape for an entire age. Most of what mortals call “wild magic events” near aetherite deposits are small chaos-releases, and they are small only by comparison to the larger ones that nobody survives to describe.

The Yemmoi Reading #

There is a myth, told by mortals across many cultures and recorded in the Primordial Twins, in which a mortal named Mannoi sacrifices his giant brother Yemmoi at the dawn of the world, and the giant’s body becomes the foundation of mortal society. Yemmoi’s head becomes the priestly class. His chest and arms become the warriors. His legs become the herders and farmers. The myth is usually read as an origin story for social hierarchy.

In the giant cosmology, it is not an origin story. It is a cost statement. The first ordering of chaos at the scale that allowed mortal civilization to exist required a giant’s death. Yemmoi was not sacrificed for symbolic reasons. He was sacrificed because the chaos that had to be ordered, in order for mortals to have a world to live in, was too large for any smaller being to order. A giant had to die, and his death had to be performed as a deliberate act of mythek, for the world that mortals now inherit to be possible.

The Mythekin remember this. The Storm Giants of Thal’orim remembered it. The Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks are believed to have inscribed the memory directly into their architecture, though no mortal has ever read the inscriptions back. Whatever the mortals of Rolara owe their gods, they owe the giants more, and the giants, characteristically, have never asked to be repaid.

What This Means for Mortals #

A practical consequence of the Ordering of Chaos cosmology, for mortals who interact with giants or with giant-touched places, is this: the giants are not protecting you. They are holding the world together so that the question of whether you need protecting can arise at all. A giant who walks through a town and steps on a person has not failed at protection. A giant who walks through the same town and does not step on the person has performed a small, deliberate act of mythek (has briefly narrowed the local chaos to exclude the possibility of stepping on the person) and has done so as a kindness the person will never fully appreciate, because the person was never aware the chaos was loose to begin with.

The mortal religions of Rolara teach gratitude to the gods. The giant cosmology, if it teaches anything to mortals, teaches a quieter and stranger gratitude: gratitude for the background condition that allows gratitude to exist at all. Gratitude for the held shape of the world. Gratitude for the giants who hold it, even when, especially when, the holding is invisible.