Knock Three Times Only

Once upon a time, the world was real and its shapes and contours were well defined. There was a waking world and a world of dreams. There was a world of spirits and a world of men. There was a world for the living and a world for the dead.

Then man discovered magic, or maybe it was the magic that discovered man first. In either case humanity being humanity, and the infinitely corrupting influence of infinite power being what it is. Bad things happened.

The world ended. Reality was distorted, losing its shape. The boundaries and lines that separated everything from everything else dissolved like sand before the tides.

The greatest kings of man and those few amongst the gods and devils that managed to survive the ruin that would come, would be the ones to save everyone else that hadn't already been killed by the great distortion and bring them all to a new world.

A world made by the hands of old men and juvenile gods.

The new world was a world where magic was literally everything, but that same magic would be talked about in hushed tones and whispers. The new world was one of lawlessness and feigned civility. The new world was a world of fantasy and feigned mundanity. The new world was a world of madness that pretended to be sane.

This was the world of Nishant.

It need not be said that the humans of Nishant were not gods. It need not be said that the hand the old kings of man had in the world's creation ensured that it would forever be imperfect.

Humans were human. They weren't demons, nor were they angels, nor were they fae, or spirits.

Humanity and all its subvariants were merely a clever collection of peoples who had a tendency of being far too curious for their own good and possessed knack of putting their hands on things that they were better off leaving alone.

Humans were creatures of the grounded creation. Miraculous denizens of the mundane. Their ordinariness was an inherit trait, and some had often postulated that they were created for the purposes of anchoring reality by forcing it to keep to a normalized standard. They were the plain vanilla yogurt that muted the spicy curry that was the rest of creation.

Anything unexplainable would soon have a human mind trying to pin it down with numbers and hard facts. Anything mysterious would soon have human hands trying to shine a light on it.

Anything that existed simply for its own sake would soon have people trying to find a use for it. Humans were the great slave masters, the not-so-humble rulers of the world, mother nature's most unreasonable tenants. This and their spectacular breeding power and broad genetic compatibility was humanity's super power.

As such humans were generally not very good at using magic. They could touch upon it, they could sense it, but with the exception of a few mutants and those subvariants whose ancestors were of inhuman origin, most humans were incapable of actually using magic unassisted. Or at the very least most humans were incapable of using magic in a meaningful fashion.

For humans to use magic they either required the use of artifacts or the assistance of certain magical patrons.

Artifacts were everywhere in Nishant, folded into the mundane technologies of the modern world in such a fashion that it was often nearly impossible to separate the magical technologies from the mundane variety.

As for the patrons, these came in two flavors. The first were the saints and sovereigns. The saints were the servants of the gods, the representatives of their will upon the earth. A saint was a former mortal who rose to such a status that one amongst the gods took them into the fold and imbued them with a portion their power.

This power could be shared with the worshippers of the god. With those who served as part of their faith, the men and women of the cloth, getting the greatest portion of this power. Priests and priestesses were generally the only casters amongst the followers of the gods.

However, there were occasionally a few god-touched, or blessed, that could be seen wandering the secular world. Usually having been granted their gifts for the sake of some special service to the gods.

Then there were the sovereigns, secular rulers of the new world and lords of the distortion that operated in much the same way the gods did except saints were exchanged for avatars and symbols, and worship was generally exchanged for some kind of seemingly ordinary (often unsavory) service.

There was a second flavor of patronage, which held a third category of patron. These were the marchen. The folk of the secret places.They were generally not gods, and almost never as strong as either the gods or the sovereign.

Some older legends about their kind posited that the marchen were stories made real, or that they were creatures born of humanity's imagination and collective unconscious. Others believed that the marchen were archetypes for various truths of the world, or that they were creatures born of the power locked within the human heart.

Whatever they were, whatever the case might be, there was no denying that in the current world marchen were a very real presence. Even if most people tended to go all their lives without meeting one, or at least without knowing they'd met one, they were something everyone knew existed.

Reclusive and unpredictable, marchen came in myriad forms and the amount of power each held tended to vary.

If one sought power and was unwilling to join the clergy or become a servant to one of the sovereigns, contracting a marchen was one way to go about things.

A contract with a marchen would usually have various strict rules for either side, and they would last between a few days and an entire lifetime depending on the terms and the contracted marchen. It was often said that such contracts could either bring providence or calamity depending on which marchen one chose to bargain with.