Else, or close enough ✨

• Using domain names as identity: smart, with tradeoffs.
• Website stack: Hugo -> Github -> Cloudflare Pages.
• Portraying conflicts between powerful entities and worlds where they can plausible exist.
• Different ways supernatural creatures avoid death.
• A white paper on the effects of exposure to gods.
• Appendix for a guide to witches.
• Puzzle boxes and grief: a story.
• Consent in high magic settings: probably pretty complicated, actually.
• Having power is fundamentally limiting: an exploration of a recurring theme in my worldbuilding.

Really into that last idea in high-magic/high-power settings.

Personally, I like playing with these themes within "power as inherently limiting":

• Diminishing returns for power- early on power has a negligible cost (beyond the knowledge/luck/circumstance to pierce the veil), but you need to make bigger and grander sacrifices to scale that power later on.
• Power as cyclical- Classically wise, influential people rise and fall like the sun, the seasons, etc. One can grasp great magic with little downside, but that magic is inherently fleeting.
• Power as controlling others versus power as freedom, and the trade-offs for both kinds.
• At the highest echelons of power, an entity's biggest enemy is themselves. Almighty creator gods fracture into a dozen of different aspects, worshipped by different people with slightly different interpretations. Time-shattering heroes must face the consequences of their alternate selves (from other timelines, or possibility spaces). The universe begins to exert near opposite forces against certain entities that just wish to barge in and reshape the place.
• Clever beings are obsessed with biding their time, curses that aren't actually bad, and universal cheats because those are only reliable ways to expand their influence- because straight-up power grabs don't work out. Maybe its better to be friends with Goku than it is be Goku. Maybe faeries are so whimsical, vain, and fickle because using reality-shaking magic to grow plants, manage the seasons, perform nonsense quests, and throw fate-shaping banquets is actually much more sustainable than empire-building, god-birthing, and other forms of divine ascendancy. Nearly omnipotent entities want to help you, but they can only make sure the rounding errors of magic are in your favor- you're a realm over from their sphere of influence.

Oh! This is, like, 50% congruent with my own thoughts on it!

• Diminishing returns, absolutely! Both in the amount of effort it takes to make progress, but also the form of progress you make—looking at real-world science, it's really really uncommon for a researcher to upend an entire field. Most people get really really good at one specific thing. It's all fractal. Most of that knowledge/skill isn't directly transferable.

So it's (comparatively) easy for a person to become a witchling. Like, it's really just a category for anyone who's started to gather scraps of knowledge and power. If you live somewhere like Corrade, it's an education track that you might get shunted into in high school or decide to pursue in undergrad, or just pick up on your own time. (Corrade's university also has a post-grad track which teaches you how to ascend to godhood. This is a plot point in a 10k word smut that I have never remembered to post publicly.)

But most people stop there. Life gets in the way, or they don't really have the aptitude, or they're just not willing to pay the price. Or something sucks away their potential and leaves them burnt out and bitter.

• I really like power as cyclical. Sometimes that's the rise and fall; sometimes it's beings who have become part of the cycle of seasons and are so bound to it that they can neither exist nor act outside it; sometimes it's the folkloric/mythic cycle of someone who's a part of a story that keeps on being told. If you have that sort of power, the world won't let go of you, and you're not going to be able to act in ways that go against your story and your nature.

• forms of power are a whole thing, and I'm not sure where my thoughts are on them.

• In my writing, the beings at the highest echelons of power are Powers: people (human and otherwise) who have entangled themselves with a fundamental aspect of the world (what it is, how it's experienced, etc). There are utterly terrifying when they manifest; I adore writing about the way they warp the fabric of the world around them.

Some of them are still people, sort of. They still have thoughts and motivations and occasionally do things. Consider Lavender of the Shrouded Sun: she spends most of her time playing house in a pocket dimension where it's always sunset and her eye lazily rests on the horizon, seeing everything, watching her body putter through its routine. She is absolutely useless, incapable of any sort of proactive action, and in another century she'll be irretrievably deep in her reverie.

The handful of powers I've bothered to name (Lavender, the Astral Witch, the Witch of Sin, the Witch of Hateful Mirrors, She of the Empty Places) are the functional ones, stuck in their loops, slowly dissolving into the concept they've tied themselves to. The older ones, the world-forgers and -breakers, things like The First Snail and Regression Toward The Mean and All Things Fall, are no longer meaningfully distinct from the world. They just Are, and good luck having a conversation with them.

• This, 100%. There's a reason that being clever lets so many real-world species carve out a niche! Being clever is good; being clever gives you options; being clever keeps you interesting.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Your writing inspires me a lot, and it is really fun how your ideas agree and contrast with my own ideas and inspirations.

In my writing, the beings at the highest echelons of power are Powers: people (human and otherwise) who have entangled themselves with a fundamental aspect of the world (what it is, how it's experienced, etc). There are utterly terrifying when they manifest; I adore writing about the way they warp the fabric of the world around them.

This sounds astounding existential in a sort of deliciously evil way!

Worldbuilding-wise, I like playing around this space- it makes for such good mythos. Entities become Powers and handle that transformation in different ways- some still hold true to some nuanced ideals they held in their past, others lose their proactive will in mundanity of their existence, and others become too active- spreading like viruses, corruption, or disease.

I'm really into creating ambiguity around these expectations as well. For example, Gods as Beliefs- where there may be no original Power, but the collective desire for such a Power creates the Power. There are also some cool opportunities for time shenanigans in this concept. Maybe something becomes that Power in the future, but the Power is still felt in the past.

I do really like the concept of some heavenly beings as chill and personable, but I like accommodating for settings with diverse entities which different and strange modes of existence. Or- maybe if you find a goddess a little relatable, you're actually not that human yourself?