My current WIP, "Resonance" or "The Chain of Fate"

Millennia ago, the age of gods ended, and their bodies evaporated into the voids of the world. Their blood, thick with energy and rich with flavor, called Ichor, vaporized invisibly into the vastness of the universe. 

There hasn’t been a day since when the gods, or at least their remnants, didn’t try to get that power back. 

Alongside the dispersion of their life-force, they created a powerful pact called a chain of fate, which vowed forth the birth of a single vessel every century. Every time an Ichor Vessel is brought into the world, their fate is always the same. An Ichor Vessel doesn’t function the same way as a Sergen for instance, who simply brushes Ichor across space to create magic; instead, their bodies actually take in a constant stream of Ichor from surrounding air and use that to power their strength. This technique is known across history and fable as Resonance.

Although, they were given this power for a reason. Ichor repels Ichor, it is one of the key principles of Sergen techniques, and so the only way for the gods to efficiently collect their blood, and therefore their power, back into one place to begin reincarnation is to use Ichor Vessels as transportation for the energy. As a vessel collects ichor deep into the roots of their bones, they can be harvested by the gods at the prime of their lifespan in order to retrieve the power they lost. All vessels die in the end. 

The vessels aren’t the only ones this process hurts either, as with each sacrifice of Ichor, the world which has come to rely so much on magic loses a bit more of its fuel. 

Raki Miyanae is the modern incarnation of the vessel. 

At a young age, she was told carefully by her mother not to let history decide her fate; to not let any man, woman, beast, or god decide her fate. Many don’t believe it can be avoided. 

As with all Ichor Vessels, Raki is equipped with an Exhaust Halo, which has floated a few inches above her head since the day of her birth. As a vessel clings onto and taps into their internal ichor stores for fuel and power, a massive amount of heat, pressure, and humidity is simultaneously generated. Without a way to properly vent this excess, Raki would quickly explode from the inside out, so to avoid this the Halo is biologically linked to her internal Ichor supplies in such a way that it glows brighter and spins faster the more her resonance is used in an attempt to rid her body of the otherwise fatal byproducts. When the halo is not in use it is practically invisible. In a situation where the technique is overloaded however, the Halo may suddenly stop spinning and shine a blood red hue, symbolising that it is no longer capable of venting properly. If she were to continue despite this, she would die. 

As the time comes closer for Raki to be sacrificed, the gods begin sending forces after her to collect their vessel. They do this by taking advantage of the Natural Resonance of wilderness creatures and pushing Ichor into their bodies to take control of them and force them after Raki. Eventually, these creatures can get quite large as the gods realize they need to send more power after her. Because their capabilities are limited with individual creatures whose Natural resonance is really quite low, they begin creating coagulations of the corpses of creatures to combine the total max Ichor they can put into something. These blended beasts are called Golems and they are bipedal forces of the gods, some of which may even evolve to have their own primitive exhaust halo. 

On the eve of Raki’s 13th birthday, a great Ichor-infested snake snuck into her home and found its way to her room, hoping to kill her then and there. However, her mother was awoken at the last second and attempted to stop the attack before being bitten and killed herself. The situation was on the verge of finality when an old Sergen mage suddenly appeared in the doorway, slicing her hand across the air in one swoop to bisect the reptile. From this day forward, haunted by the death of her mother, the young Vessel was trained by the old mage Loaran. Loaran tried to teach her all she would need to keep herself safe from the gods' attackers, including special Ichor purification techniques that allow her to intake refined fuel only. And after years of studying and training a young and inexperienced Raki watched as her mentor was brutally killed in front of her by a prototype golem, the first one ever created by remnants. In her dazed and shocked state proceeding this, Raki dispatched of the Golem in a blur before passing out. Upon awakening and coming to terms with the death of her second mother, Raki found a letter addressed to her in Loaran’s bag, which she read before finally setting off on her own into the open world to begin her defiance. 

The letter she found in Loaran’s bag described a grand, walled city of elves and Sergens where Raki would find an old mage named **Ranadala Eiro**. Upon reaching the city, Raki is instructed by the letter to show her signature to the guards at the front gates, and that they would let her in upon seeing it. The guards don’t quite seem to believe in the legitimacy of the signature at first, but when closer inspection is done they let her in with bewildered looks. Raki wanders through the bustling streets for a while before finding her way to the small, squished house and knocking on the door. Nobody answers, and as she begins peering in through the windows a young woman sees her as she is passing by and asks her if she’s looking for somebody. Raki explains that her letter has this address and the name of a woman named Eiro, to which the girl tells her has been dead for almost ten years. Raki pauses in frustration and sadness, and the girl comments on her fatigued state, asking if she'd like to go get some food. They head off into the crowded market and sit down after buying some food, at which point the girl introduces herself as **Kierro.** After talking for a little while, and with Kierro having no clue about Raki’s identity, she tells her that the woman she had come to meet was her Grandmother. She explains that Eiro had fallen deeply out of public favor in the last decades of her life and had practically been exiled due to her views on Ichor Vessels and their sacrifice. 

See, almost a century ago, Eiro had begun discussing the moral and ethical failures of Sergen society to sit idly by and let people be murdered by the gods, taking the world’s Ichor stores with them. This however, was not and is not a popular take among Sergen populations, who see the creation and sacrifice of a Vessel as a part of nature, and something that should not be intervened with. During the pinnacle of Eiro’s protest, she took her debate to the highest position of power in the whole of Sergen society and her friend at the time: True Mage Loaran. Loaran viewed the process the same way that many others did during their debate, and she dismissed Eiro to be forever disgraced and looked down upon within the city. Raki is more than shocked by this and the mental turmoil is almost more than she can handle. Not only was her mentor and second mother formerly one of the strongest Sergens in history, but while she held the position of True Mage she actively advocated for the killing of the vessel? She can’t believe it. 

Raki is not immediately given this information, and she probably won’t learn this for a while, but what happened after that debate changed Loaran forever. A couple of years after these events ended, the next Ichor Vessel, and the one directly preceding Raki, was born within the walls of this city. As the child was brought to Loaran, she began to grow attached to him, and as he grew up Loaran began to view this vessel, named Dotas, as her apprentice or even her own son. Then came time for his sacrifice, and Loaran sat idly by as he was killed by the gods. She resigned from her position only a week after this, when she went to talk to Eiro again. Loaran’s mind, from that day forward, had been changed. She retired to the village where Raki’s mother would one day live as an incredible True Mage who left her position too early, and Eiro was forced to live out the rest of her life in seclusion. One hundred years later, Raki, the next Ichor Vessel, was born in that same village. 

As Raki and Kierro get back up and begin walking down the winding streets which bend with the banks of hills and twist along patches of tall grass, Kierro finally asks for Raki’s name, and then asks her to be honest. “You’re an Ichor Vessel, aren’t you?” And suddenly, before she can even formulate a response, she begins naturally burning her ichor to limit her stress levels which in turn causes her halo to become faintly visible in the air above her head. Kierro had her answer. Raki is pushed into an alley and assured that Kierro doesn't want to hurt her. In fact, she’s been waiting for this opportunity all her life: the opportunity to put her grandmother's ideologies into practice. After she’s calmed down Raki is led back to Eiro’s old home where there are stacks and stacks of old theory books and technique studies and pages filled with the writing of this Sergen grandmaster of two generations ago. Before going any further with her, Raki breaks the second truth to Kierro, which is that she knew Loaran. Kierro says she figured as much, given her accent from across the valley and residual purified Ichor that hung around her clothes, which she says was the signature technique developed by the True Mage Loaran during her rule. “I don’t hate Loaran, if that’s what you’re worried about. Most people don’t even know why she ended up resigning, and most people don’t care to look into it. All they remember is the ghost of a great, all I remember is a person, and people have flaws. My grandmother did, my parents did, I do. But no one deserves to die for something they had no choice but to believe in.. that they had no choice but to do, or to be born with. It’s the revelation of it that counts in the end.. redemption can be bought only through doing what is right when it’s all over. My grandmother knew letting vessels die wasn’t right, and I do too. Besides, it seems to me that the True Mage had a change of heart after all.”

The two of them sat together in Eiro’s house for hours, sifting through her many diagrams, notes, papers on Ichor Theory, and most notably: maps. Among all of her files, one stood out particularly to Raki. The first page was crisp, white paper with the words “Chain of Fate” scrawled across the top in Sergen calligraphy. The first few pages seemed to include notes on possible methods the gods may have used in the creation of such a divine pact past their deaths, but beyond that there was a map. It showed the surrounding mountains, the twisting rivers, patches of dense wood lingering like freckles and then, just beyond it all, a place marked “Anchor Chain.” On the opposite page, meticulously laid out, were Eiro’s theorized steps on how one could go about dismantling said pact.. or how a powerful Sergen could use the location to reach the remnants where they sleep. 

Just then, there came a knocking on the door. Kierro got up to check out the window before quickly darting away as her gaze lay on the uniforms of at least a dozen city guards, and members of the True Mage Reinforcements, all in uniform. See, ever since Loaran resigned over a century ago, the council as well as the new True Mage have been trying to get their hands on the technique that woman managed to craft both during her time at the academy and during her time in office. They have been looking for the secrets to her signature discovery ever since she left, and now that a random girl shows up to the front gates with her signature it seems as good a time as ever to finally unlock its powers whether the girl wants to share or not. 

Raki and Kierro don’t know about this, but what they do know is that if they discover that the new Ichor vessel is in their city as they speak, they will not act kindly towards anyone who tries to aid her in defiance. Before anything else is done, Kierro tells her to get out the back door now, and Kierro opens the door to greet the officers. They ask her if she’s seen a dark skinned human with cheek piercings and she replies with a dismissive “no,” while attempting to shut the door. Even once closed, the struggle continues, and before she knows it the guards are attempting to break down the door to her grandmother's house. Scurrying out the back door with the important files in hand, she leads Raki down alleys and up steps, the sound of the Sergens in uniform following after them. As they briefly double back thick, pounding slams of Ichor crush bricks on surrounding buildings and crack paving stones as the two of them evade each attack, Kierro firing back in sharp bursts every few seconds. 

Finally, as the two of them realize they’ll soon be outclassed by their hunters, Raki makes the decision to let it all loose. She grabs onto Kierro’s shawl and begins burning, her halo becoming more and more of a beacon as she pumps the energy into her muscles and bones, her speed continuing to grow exponentially. The air burns around them as they slip through alleyways and across rooftops, her feet leaving the ground to jump massive gaps between neighboring buildings until she finally begins to slow down. The crimson is setting in above her and Kierro notices, creating small Ichor Void Pockets to suck up surrounding exhaust and make ventilation easier. This allows the two of them to keep going just for a second longer until they are able to hide away properly in the back of a caravan that’s just getting ready to leave the walls. 

Sergen magic operates off of certain laws of Ichor, which proceed as follows:

1. Ichor repels ichor: Ichor always attempts to escape from the reach of other Ichor molecules. This law makes the necessity of resonance to the gods very clear, as without a being of Infinite Resonance like the Ichor Vessel, they would never be able to gather any Ichor back into one contained location. This law is also what allows Sergen magic to exist. When a Sergen pushes their hand through space, they brush particles of Ichor away from them and simultaneously push all other particles in that direction away from them as well. This allows for the casting of shields from Ichor-based attacks and also the casting of offensive spells like a pinpoint push of Ichor that pierces through anything in its path. 
2. Ichor can be destroyed but never created: When the Ichor Vessel is sacrificed and all Ichor they have collected in their body leaves the mortal plane forever, essentially that energy is destroyed. This Ichor that is taken away cannot and will not ever be recreated.
3. Ichor resonance exists to some degree among all things: All items, people, and living creatures of the world possess a certain capacity to contain Ichor within their bodies and souls. This capacity is referred to as resonance. Most things in this world have a very small degree of Natural Resonance, and would die if they tried to contain too much Ichor within themselves. This has one exception, being the Ichor Vessel, who has unlimited resonance. 
4. Ichor burning is relinquishing control: When a being, most notably the Ichor Vessel, “burns” the store of Ichor within themselves, they trade off the energy contained within the Ichor in exchange for the removal of said Ichor from their bodies. This process creates wells of heat, humidity, and pressure as waste products, and without the halo technique used by Vessels, a normal person can undergo immense physical side effects from this trade-off. 

   1. Ichor stains: No matter how much a Vessel may burn to gain energy, Ichor clings consistently to bones and tissue, staining the soul with Ichor that cannot be released. Even if a Vessel burns down the entire store of Ichor in their system before being sacrificed, the stains, or irreversible residuals, left within them will be more than enough for the gods.