GENERAL
CONCEPTS
ELOIN – [el-oh-in] aka Emergents are the next stage in human evolution. They are mortals who can regenerate so that, in effect, they can become immortal. However, like everyone else, they can suffer physical damage or be killed. With careful guidance and supervision after the process of regeneration, they will mature as dedicated servers of humanity. This may manifest in a variety of ways – as great healers, musicians, technical pioneers, teachers, artists, scientists, or humanitarian mediators. Eloin who go through their early years without the proper guidance and instruction can take a turn down the Shadow Path and become lost to themselves and humanity as ‘Perdu’ [per-doo] or, in some extreme cases, Chameleons.
SUFINAM – [soo-fi-nam] a secret order of humans dedicated to fighting the dark Chameleon forces of the Shadow War. They are also tasked with protecting young, vulnerable Eloin until they reach the age of maturity and come into full recollection of their true nature and powers. They have no occult powers, but often excel in martial arts and display passionate dedication and unswerving commitment. The order has produced many great leaders and warriors.
Also known as the Pax Verime or Pax Veritatis (‘Truth in Peace’).
AELIM – [ay-lim] aka Angels, Bene Elim, or Watchers (and many more titles and names) are elevated beings who exist at the highest vibrational level. If they sustain serious injury in their etheric form, an Aelim can be reconfigured to a state of physical mortality like an ordinary human. They can also take on a physical form willingly in order to carry out a given task. When inhabiting fleshly form, they can suffer injury or die. Aelim may also be condemned to take physical form if they are exiled for a serious transgression.
Once exiled to the mortal plane, the Aelim’s overriding desire is to evolve and regain their original higher nature. To do this they must carry out a series of redemptive tasks. This can take years, decades, or in some cases centuries. This is because they are subject to all aspects of living in the physical world, and this may involve forgetting who and what they really are. If they become truly lost to themselves, they are termed Excidiats or The Lost – Perdu.
THE SHADOW WARS – the centuries-long battles fought over the fate of the human race. The unending struggle is between evolved Eloin and their Aelim allies, and the dark forces of the Chameleons.
CHAMELEONS – Chameleons are typically brutal, wickedly cunning, voracious, insidious, and warlike. They are termed ‘The Perverted’. They can adapt their physical forms to pass as human, though this is a protracted and painful process. These grotesque beings are the grim results of what can happen if a young, newly regenerated Eloin somehow comes under the corrupting control of other Chameleons. Over many years they are twisted into a perverted version of what they should have become as benign entities.
Deprived of Sufinam protection and guidance, they know no other path and become manifestations of pure brutality and decadence. For them there is only the Shadow Path.
NEPHILIM – an ancient hybrid race of Aelim and mortals. Not many remain, but those that do are immensely powerful, highly unpredictable beings – not to mention unstable. They refuse contact with most other sentient beings, preferring to pursue their own obscure obsessions while indulging in long bouts of morose brooding – sometimes for decades.
BLOOM – aka the World Eater is a blue, self-replicating nano-fungus that nearly destroyed all life on Earth in 1991. The outbreak entered records as The Event, and the calendar years in Cody’s time are reckoned as pre-Event or post-Event. Bloom was only killed off by the occurrence of the Fimbulwinter. When Bloom is dead or inert it leaves behind a glutinous residue of thick black Tar. Intermittent outbreaks of Bloom still occur in the present day and must be incinerated as quickly as possible by dedicated Fire Warden teams.
A secret kept from the world at large is that the outbreak originated in a Chameleon Breeding Houses, possibly in Afghanistan.
FIMBULWINTER – aka the Ice Event, the Arctic World Shroud, the Ice Year and the Ice Mantle. The freakish winter conditions that lasted 14 months and destroyed Bloom as a world threat. No one knows what triggered this period of intense Arctic conditions so close on the appearance of the blue nano-fungus, but despite proving lethal to untold numbers across the globe the planet was delivered from annihilation by the Bloom. The two closely linked disasters changed the world forever.
TECHNOSAGES – Chameleon scientists. They are renowned for their deadly bio-breeding programmes and arcane technical innovations. Their mindset is enslaved to obscure and convoluted scientific techniques utilising retro-alchemical principles and obscure sources of ancient knowledge, as well as modern cutting-edge sciences. Their work combines nano processing, electron manipulation, metallo-mimetic materials, and cutting-edge bio-technology. The range of bio-weaponry they have created is astonishing and includes all kinds of truly hideous abominations, such as the Vil-kind.
Technosages are resourceful, tenacious, and prolific, and are constantly applying the results of their experimentations to themselves. Many bear hideous scars – the signs of grotesque vivisectionist ‘improvements’. All are dependent on the very technologies they claim to have perfected.
VIL-KIND – [vil-kin-d] aka Vil-breed, Vil-children, or Vat-born. The Vil-kind are nightmare products of the subterranean Technosage Breeding Chambers. Essentially living weapons, their bodies are a hideous patchwork of flesh, wires, rags, talons, and vat-grown tissue. Their bio-patchwork hearts are vat cultured using organs harvested from human children or, if supplies of these are scarce, animal origin. They are impervious to pain and notoriously difficult to kill.
ALBION FAYRES – weekly trading markets and social gatherings. Cody Conmar’s village of Clayton Bar is famous for its canalside market where everything is traded, from hard-working farm ponies and furniture to domestic wind turbines and bounteous home-produced food. There are Albion fayres all over the country and Microliter Salvager teams are a common feature at these gatherings. This is where they come to trade or barter the wide selection of salvaged commodities lifted from within the Tar Zones.
ELECTRONIC GLOBAL LINKUP – aka the EGL. The international network linking all computers around the globe in Cody’s world. After the twin disasters of Bloom and the Fimbulwinter, much of the infrastructure needed to maintain international communications had been destroyed. So much of the Earth’s surface had been devastated by the blue nano-fungus that only fragments of functioning technology could be salvaged. It was only through the efforts of Professors Bernard Timmersly and Nate Limberton, working at the New Oxford Technology Institute, that a new form of internet was slowly re-established – the Electronic Global Linkup.
Computers were a rare item in Recovering Britain and only available to the public in some schools, libraries, business facilities, and medical centres. Almost no private homes could boast a computer of any kind.
All netsites have the prefix ‘egl’, e.g. ‘egl.shadowhistories’ for information on the many secret and forgotten wars that have been fought throughout history.
MICROLITERS or SCAVENGERS – teams of lite-aircraft salvagers who make a living by air-lifting sought-after commodities from sites that are otherwise inaccessible because of patches of Tar Bloom.
SENTINEL STONES – pairs of upright stone pillars or markers guarding the perimeter of Eloin bases and safe havens. They vary in size and can be massive sandstone slabs, unremarkable boundary markers, stone circles, milestones, or statuary. Anyone approaching the stones will activate them and be scanned as possible intruders. If they register as ‘species unknown’ or hostile, highly charged bolts of energy will be discharged between the stones repelling the strangers or, in extremis, reducing them to incandescent tatters.
PHANTOM LIMB or SCAEDU FOLM – [skay-doo folm] mature Eloin can generate and channel a form of power called luminic energy from within their bodies. Under a situation of extreme personal danger, Cody had this ability triggered years before she is mature enough to understand or control it. In her case, this bio-luminic power takes the form of a near-invisible column rising from her heart charka and resembles a translucent, shimmering hand. With it she can grip objects with astonishing strength, and even reach through solid matter. There has been only one other reliably documented case in Eloin history. Scaedu folm is Old English for ‘ghost/shadow hand’.
CAEBIMHIR or QUENELLAN LANGUAGE – [cay-bim-heer] aka Old Tongue or Aelde Tunge [ay-ld tung]. A spoken language of mixed origins used by the ancient higher races. It contains traces of many ancient languages such as Old Scandinavian, Greek, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as dead languages, e.g. Latin, Assyrian, and Old English.
Although the original speakers of this language never produced a written form, over the centuries there have been countless visionaries and scholars who have produced a variety of glyphs and alphabets that aspire to represent the original speech.
This written form is called Quenellan, and a few examples of this beautiful and rare form have been found on ancient stonework and in long-abandoned ruins. One example that is claimed to be angelic script or Quenellan is the so-called Peaks Engravings. At present, this remains unverified.
THE PEAKS ENGRAVINGS – these enigmatic markings were discovered in an abandoned mine complex deep beneath the Peak District during the early years of the post-Event Government Resettlement Programme in 1994.
The script was very ancient and of obscure origin, and though carefully recorded it lay unremarked for several years until, in 1999, a linguistics graduate named Cullie Brown at the University of North Wales noticed similarities with the Angelic scripts of Dr. John Dee. The graduate produced a translation of the Engravings and was adamant that this was an angelic language called Quenellan. Her claim was hotly contested by many academics.
Interestingly, the Engravings themselves have since proved to be untraceable, leaving Cullie’s translations as the only evidence that they ever existed. Cullie Brown’s book ‘New Albion Legends’ sold out of its first print run and has been unavailable ever since.