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mistswalker · 1 year

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Some thoughts on the Void and the Mists

End of Dragons has been on my mind a lot. I found the Void fundamentally and thematically intriguing beyond its clear reception of the real-world emotions contemporary with the EoD release.

It raised many questions— About the difference between the Void and Mists. The differences and reasons for the differences between the apocalypses of Kralkatorrik's rampage and Soo-Won's void corruption. About the nature of the Void and its role in the Eternal Alchemy.

What I hadn't expected was the way those questions were answered, or the greater implications they seem to have. I felt like many things about the larger metaphysical lore clicked into place with this new understanding— The deeper nature of the Mists. The "madness" of the Elder Dragons. The role of the Forgotten, and the lasting and unintended impacts of the Six on Tyria. While I'm sure I'm extrapolating and reading a bit much into certain things, as I always have with this series, I'm definitely glad to have this understanding of these concepts for moving forward with my own fanworks, and I haven't quite been able to shake the high of cracking this metaphorical Da Vinci code.

Now, this all gets a big disclaimer that some of this includes extrapolations and headcanons I've previously built for my stories, but that aside, let me just rehash some of the basics of the Mists. As we know, the Mists are potential incarnate. The Mists, "the All", and the "Void" are all facets of this same concept, and each of these facets are interconnected. Each culture in Tyria seems to interpret what it knows of the Mists in different ways. The way most of Tyria seems to best understand the Mists' nature of infinite potential is when it's represented as a physical space. Areas of manifested potential all chaotically swirling, building, deconstructing, and rebuilding. The God realms. The afterlife. The Fractals. The Mists War.

This facet of the concept is what's most observable. But that aspect of the Mists is only the answer to the question "where?" "The Void", on the other hand, is raw coalesced magic. The clay of reality. The raw potential that could be shaped into anything and that manifests reality as its observed to its inhabitants. In this sense, the Void could be considered the Mists' answer to "what?"

"The All", also known as the Eternal Alchemy, is what ties these two pieces together. It is the fractal-pattern of how that reality manifests. The "blueprint" for what the clay is built into. Each new reality's blueprint is slightly off from the last, creating the infinity of the butterfly effect, and the in-world nod to the multiverse of commander timelines. The Mists' answer to "how?"

I speculate that the overlap of The All is an important factor in the distinction between the two potential apocalypses of Kralkatorrik and Soo-Won.

This is what the people of Tyria have decided is the most genuine representation of "the Eternal Alchemy" at work: Six magical aspects that balance and sustain a world. We see this with the elder dragons, obviously. But where's the other notable place in which six magical aspects tried to balance and sustain a world, only to strangely leave theirs and seemingly planehop to the setting of our story?

The Human Gods.

They aren't perfect matches for each of the Elder Dragons— but they didn't have to be. They were what was created with the clay of their universe, following the larger scale "pattern" in their own unique way. They also exhibit a parallel ascension to that of Aurene taking the mantle of Elder Dragon, and we witness this with the birth of the goddess Kormir from the spearmarshal Kormir.

Another noteworthy parallel between the Gods and the Dragons is something only observable over time in their lore and history— we notice the Gods beginning to go mad, and manifesting in darker and more twisted aspects of themselves as time goes on during their ultimately brief stint in Tyria.

We see it clearly with Abbadon. We see implications of it with Dhuum. And finally, we see further hints of it with Balthazar (including some very creepy deep-lore and environmental storytelling in his realm, but I'll get to that some other time...) But to get into the Gods and the God Realms further, I need to explain what leads me to believe that the Human gods are the reason for the distinction between the Kralk apocalypse (where all of the Mists began coming undone), and the Soo-Won apocalypse (where this facet of reality began dissolving into Void). And to do that I need to talk about inter-planar travel. So we know that many finite universes within the Mists share many aspects with each other, just altered in small ways that stack up over time. We also know that the people of the world experience the Mists to be a sort of afterlife in addition to being a source of all history and potential. We have also seen and visited different "domains" within the mists. The part of the Mists that is the physical living realm, influenced by these forces is the globe in the center. The gray and colored areas outside of it are pieces of reality concretely formed enough to influence that globe very strongly. Tyrians perceive those things as "real", and those include the "domains" in the Mists.

Everything else out here? That's what Tyria thinks of as "the Mists" in a small-scale sense. The parts of reality that don't have strong shape. The place where potential fragments. This is where the Fractals are. This is where Rytlock was trapped. This is where Kralkatorrik rampaged.

When Kralkatorrik fell back out of the Mists on this rampage, he pulled parts of the God Realms with him. Aurene noted he was being drawn to familiar magics— Melandru's realm and that of Grenth were included alongside the Fissure of Woe this despite Kralkatorrik having only tasted the specific magic of one of those three gods. We could take that a number of ways, but, to me, that speaks to not only a continued parallel between the Gods and the Elder Dragons, but also as a hint to how the Six gods stepped over the border between their original shard of reality and ours.

The Six were magically fluent inherently. They were gods—the Elder Dragons of their homeworld. They used the aspects as a tether between their own domains and the matching magic here in Tyria. They were able to find stasis in the magic aspects themselves.

If we accept the Gods as parallel Elder Dragons, then we can further extrapolate that the Elder Dragons potentially have their own connected pseudo-realms within the less firm parts of reality. Personally, I've long believed this made a great deal of sense as to the nature of their hiveminds, and have talked about that in other non-tumblr babbles about the nature of the Dream and Nightmare to Sylvari.

That aside, since the Elder Dragons were asleep and any "domain" aspect of the Mists connected to them was only utilized for their hiveminds, the Gods would be free to shape some of these mirrored domains to match their own preferences. This borrowing of the Elder Dragons place in our world, ultimately, is what I believe utterly destabilized things when Balthazar was killed.

It wasn't an immediate destruction because of the other Five's foresight. They'd had the good sense to drain most of his magic when they detained him, but they couldn't drain all of it without destroying his essence itself.

So despite their best efforts to mitigate the risk— taking their personal exodus of not just Tyria but the Tyrian Mists as a whole, and draining Balthazar of as much of his magic as they could safely take with them as only 5, upon Balthazar's death there was still excess otherworldly magic lingering in the Tyrian Mists. And the Mists had already become very volatile due to the destruction of two of their own six structural guardians. Magics were mixing in ways they hadn't since the formation of structure in the realm. Things were already heading toward Void and unmaking of this reality, but what tipped the scales into an unmaking of all reality was that lingering excess magic from another realm. One that's very nature tied two realms together.

Kralkatorrik, with Balthazar's ability to walk between planes, began rampaging in multiple facets of reality, ripping bigger and bigger holes and mixing the contents inside like containers of different liquid.

And because of the fractal-like way the Mists infinitely follow the same larger-scale patterns, this was happening not just in several planes, but several iterations of those connected planes. (which you can visualize with the different commander-timelines. Each different commander who reaches season 4? Is another "iteration" of that fractal.)

Aurene, when she ascends to Kralkatorrik's place as an Elder Dragon, spends a huge chunk of time repairing the Mists after this. And the most important part of that would have been isolating Balthazar's magic and putting it back in the realm it belongs in. Limiting any future fallout to their plane. Now that each plane has the same amount of clay it started with, things are more stable in that sense.

Glint gives Aurene advice on Ascension posthumously prior to this. That same Ascension that was tied to the Forgotten, and "True Sight", and the equivalent of the Canthan concept of "Weh no Su" ("Closer to the Stars") and described by humans as being a "state of communion with the Gods". Which leads me to the next piece of this larger puzzle: The Forgotten.

We know the Forgotten appeared in Tyria during the last Dragon Cycle. We also know they reappeared and made their presence known in association with the human gods— but we also know that the Forgotten originate from the Mists. They are yet more planeswalkers.

I've mentioned before believing that the Forgotten worked with the human gods to minimize the fallout from their arrival in Tyria. We see Forgotten philosophies echoed in Glint, the Exalted, as well as in Ventari and his peaceful centaur clan. They were very dedicated to Balance. I hypothesize that they were some of the first planeswalkers. They likely learned about the impacts of mists-travel firsthand and resolved to dedicate their existence to preserving stability as a result. (Which may be why even they call themselves "the forgotten". They've existed for so long on the fringes of reality that they may not remember where they came from, only why they're still there. But I digress.)

Ascension and the Forgotten were something integral to fighting the Mursaat (yet again, even more planeswalkers in Tyria) because of how it granted the subject "True Sight" and the ability to see between the realms where the Mursaat liked to slip away and hide.

The Forgotten also had found a way to cleanse individuals from the elder dragon hiveminds as we see in Path 3 of the Arah dungeon, allowing them to preserve free will. I think these two concepts are related in a way.

if Ascension is what taught Aurene how to re-stabilize multiple planes of reality from such a catastrophic mixing of magic, and was also what turned her from a being of crystal into a being of prism? Something that filters light into its base components and sorts it all out? Ascension must be something gives one a sense of their place in the All, their role in the broader workings of the Mists, while helping them reshape themselves to fill that role.

(As a brief tangent, that may also play into Scarlet's fall in Omadd's machine— Omadd's machine was intended to "see and understand the Eternal Alchemy". An artificial ascension. And she certainly embraced her larger role.) Now back to Soo-Won, the origins of Tyria and the Elder Dragons, and the Void-based apocalypse...

Soo-Won talks about being the mother of the other elder dragons. The first one. How she eased her own pain of loneliness by creating children to share the magic with. We see a similar narrative in some senses with the human gods-- Dwayna is looked at as the "first" and the "leader". she's the literal mother of Grenth.

We also see Soo-Won hold off the madness of the Void the longest. Her elemental representation is water-- the foundation of life as we know it. I think that her account of history as being the mother of the other elder dragons and raising them as hatchlings is in some ways true and in some ways metaphorical, as it likely predates Tyria as a concrete reality.

It makes sense to me that Soo-Won was the first consciousness to manifest in the Void as reality began to shape itself. The first sense of will to help the blueprint unfold. the other elder dragons are, in that sense, her "children", but also nearly peers in terms of age in concrete reality. They were created by her will, her loneliness, but reality only solidified into what we know as "Tyria" when all of the aspects found a natural balance.

It makes sense that the Elder Dragons lived lives of isolation— if their distinction had created structure from chaos— something that clearly frightens even Soo-Won, the most familiar with it — of course the answer to that would be separation. Isolation. Loneliness even when no longer alone.

Of course this forced isolation would slowly erode loneliness and despair into selfishness and resentment in many of them. And so of course, then, their own madness and corruption stems from that internal agony. And what is it's drive? How does it take from the world? Consumption. Forced assimilation under their own domain.

"Become part of me. Not the void. Me."

What is the Forgotten's answer to this? The way to preserve balance? To replace the cycle of consumption with a cycle of distribution. willful sharing. Social sharing. A bond between dragons and mortals.

The answer to the fear of being alone isn't to force others into your realm. It's to learn to coexist with them. That's how you fight the instinctual call of the Void.

This is what finally made sense as the answer to Aurene's question. "Why do they all go mad?" The "madness" of the dragons is that— the instinctive call of the Void as they become overwhelmed by pain and suffering and can no longer stand their isolation. They consume and consume more and more to try to sate that emptiness. They grow imbalanced in their identities as they struggle to process all that they consume that doesn't fit.

They don't want to give it back. They don't want to be alone again. Eventually though, it seeps out of them and they awaken more pained and ravenous than before.

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