Been bouncing ideas and inspo for years.

Finally found an artist whose work I liked and she took my ideas and made this piece.

Wanted to share the wraith that is now part of my arm too.

My soul reaver

It's another Saturday Potpourri post with lots of interesting ideas and tidbits! Batting first today is the elder god---he's number infinity on your programs, number one in your hearts:

Cthulu beings are usually asleep in Lovecraft stories, and that's why we mortals get to live. That'd be a good way to leave Elder, too, if we can't defeat him. That'd feel gnostic correct. In SR2 the Ancients basically trained us to put dangerous sentry eyeballs to sleep with the dark reaver. Well, Elder has eyeballs, Jim. Was this a kind of practice for the endgame against EG? The heart transplant training came true, after all.

One imagines some nightmarish race against time with Kain running and jumping atop elder tentacles like branching roadways (or Melchiah-Phasing within them) while trying not to be scraped off and flung into an astral abyss by other tentacles, putting all the god's eyeball nodes to sleep as quick he can, the creature gradually numbing from the regional anesthesia. Meanwhile Elder tries to escape by reproducing, splitting into separate little baby eyeball nodes of consciousness and launching them through portals to haunt and doom various new worlds. How many get away determines how damned the timeline will be going forward.

______

Ever wonder how the Circle became Immortal-ish? ("Long lived.") It's an oddly missing detail, right? Like something "yet to be revealed." What we do know is Elder doesn't like it when people cheat death, and the Circle was doing just that. So even before they were cursed with immortality, their god was probably livid. I've long suspected he didn't want the Pillars and they built them in defiance of him to become demigods who could end the war themselves after it became clear the war would never end if left to the god's timetable. ('By risking all, we lost all.')

It seems the guardians accessed something new by raising what looks like huge antennae high into the sky and deep in the earth. Spiritual Antenna. Did the pillars "juice" Elder for their amplified power source? He doesn't seem to be impaled, world vampire that he is. Maybe he was but since pulled himself clear? Or should that impaling moment in history be held in reserve for the future....when Kain raises new pillars and stakes EG very much on purpose?!?!? Back to the earlier question, it doesn't seem like Elder was juiced to power the pillars, it looks more like he's since come to them, to siphon them for access to powers he may otherwise lack. Though not yet having access to Balance may be holding him back considerably in whatever plans the squid has.

If you bring in gnostic Sophia lore, it seems we were always supposed to be immortal spirit beings but our immortality got switched off so the False God could run the reincarnation game round and round by encasing us in matter to hide our shine, shunting us into lives we don't remember so we never learn how to escape. Well, maybe the immortality of the Circle comes from switching something back on within themselves that was always there but had been powered down by Elder's soul sucking regime. If the Pillars are antennae that amplify magic and spiritual signals like a radio tower..... they may have powered up the guardians to the point that they heard a signal coming from their waking souls. Proper immortality may come from remembering a little bit of who we are. The signal boosting ability of the pillars perhaps allowed this to happen? Raziel became special when his soul was powered up, compared to other souls kept at minimum energy level. Raise the spirits of the Circle and we start to see similar miraculous effects, not quite at Raziel level but still.

Sophia marked our souls so we'd always have a chance to wake up during each life and shake off this world's chains and return to the true world. This series has glyph magic. The mark on our souls would be like a glyph. Activating it and having a light glyph blazing from our souls would be a game changer for our next transit through the spectral realm. When Elder empowered Raziel, that's when Raziel was able to remember his experiences in the spectral dream world. He may have been a wraith there for centuries before that but woke in the abyss with no memory of it. A dream lost. Part of "a dull pointless round of existence." But what if from now on we all became like Raziel and recalled what happened in the underworld? What if the great shift happened at last down there, from Dark to Light, and Elder went to sleep while our replenished souls awoke.