The Shape of Things

What everyone in Merretia grows up half-knowing.

The world is held together by relationship. At the root of everything is a bond between two great forces — one that gives shape and one that gives life, order and change, forever leaning on each other. Below them stand the gods the temples name, and below the gods the angels and daemons of story and scripture.

Magic follows from this. Nothing here is truly owned — power is borrowed against a bond and called back when the working is done, which is why every act of magic costs the one who works it (see the Disciplines and their cost).

And at the edges of the world — in the deep places, where bonds fray and break — something is wrong. People call it the Hollow, and mostly they do not speak of it. What it truly is, and what lies beneath these broad truths, belongs to the keepers of the deeper mysteries.