Incarnation

"There are ways you can ask to play chess with Death, or one Death. War, Innocence, Pain, Hope, Mischief… all are forces that can take form in this world, you can meet them, you can deal with them." - Charles Abrams, Lost for Words 1.4

An Incarnation also know as a Pillar or Inevitable is an abstract concept or idea,^[1]^[2] a particular human reality,^[3] which reify into various forms that often have a kind of volition, some even being sapient.^[4]

Incarnate Practitioners specialize in the category or in specific Incarnations.^[5] Those Practitioners who specialize in immaterial things, such as Augurs and Finders will frequently deal with Incarnation and related concepts and others.^[6]^[7]

Specifics[]

They are a singular idea, they can not be as complex as a country,^[1] or a festival, but principles and labels,^[8] despite this there are nuances to them, like the difference between conquest and war.^[9] They also have states of health and how well their individual ideas are expressed, positively or negatively.^[10]

They have a hierarchy among them, the Pillars of Human Existence being the top tier with a large majority of other incarnations considered subordinate to them.^[11]

They cannot go against their nature as incarnations without a loss of power, which makes them somewhat predictable.^[2]^[12] An Incarnation will need to absorb humans every so often to keep itself relevant to humanity,^[13] this 'meal' can last them any where from a few decades to several centuries.^[14] These absorbed humans will then be in the driver's seat, so to speak, their memories and Self are 'fuel' which they 'burn' in order to be more flexible and unpredictable, to depart from their mechanistic role.^[15] Without them, they become entirely rule-bound and mechanical, a part of the mechanics of the world.^[16]

Similar to a powerful Spirit but possessing a physical form,^[4]^[3], in some cases, an Incarnation's physical form might be an artifact rather than a person.^[4] Ritual and Pomme Incarnates can take more diffuse and immaterial forms.

Abilities[]

It is an idea given life and thus unkillable with weapons. It is supported and fed through certain ideas, and weakened by taking the strength from that idea.^[17] Multiple copies/versions/emanations exist concomitantly and can absorb the lesser versions of themselves for strength.^[18]

Incarnations will have abilities based on the thing they embody.^[9] They are among the types of Other that can become powerful enough to affect the area they inhabit as a sort of pseudo-Demesne.^[19]

Incarnations and related Others tend to be somewhat "inevitable",^[20]or at least give off that impression, tapped into overwhelming power sources or growing stronger each time they're rebuffed.^[21]

Origins[]

An incarnation can come into being when a person summons and melds into it, or a major event helps crystalize it.^[22]^[23] Another scenario would have an echo, one that gained enough power and influence, which might become a site for an Incarnation to emerge.^[24]

Nascent Incarnations in the Ruins may absorb neighboring Others, such as appropriate Echoes, that are associated with their concept until they have enough strength to emerge in reality.^[5] Upon emergence the pseudo-Incarnation matures and clarifies itself.^[10]

Incarnations with enough strength to take human, sapient form are always fairly powerful; Practitioners generally accommodate them rather than fight them.^[17]

Varieties & Servants[]

There are a variety of beings which are creations or, in some sense, extensions of Incarnations.^[7]

Anthro[]

In wiki term for those incarnations that are anthropomorphic personifications of their incantation literally. Some cults actually form to turn an individual into an incarnation.^[25]

Envoys[]

Main article: Envoy

Messengers which make deals, usually following a pattern and inevitably skewed so that they further the Incarnation. May reside in the Paths when inactive.^[7]

Leftovers[]

Scraps of concept-stuff that fall onto the Paths and pick up concepts and symbolism, becoming a sort of weak and alien Incarnation. Unwittingly tend to further their "parent".^[7]

Locus Incarnate[]

Incarnations that inhabit a location that impresses upon reality making a well so that everything is downhill and hard for anyone to get out.^[26] Things are pulled into such a incarnation include echoes and more but what causes the incarnation to manifest is a 'heart' within the location, which if disturbed can allow escape.

Pawns & Playing Cards[]

Extensions of an Incarnation who wanted a servant for something. Generally a group of similar beings, and not very intelligent. Tied to the Incarnation and will be Lost to reality if it dies.^[7]

Pomme Incarnates[]

Also know as Kernel incarnates are a concentration of Incarnate power found somewhere in a immaterial realm, non-sapient, sessile, not even a rudimentary personality guiding it, tend to accrue over hundreds of years.^[27] Most who try to 'eat' a Pomme's power are overwhelmed and absorbed or too addled by the experience to use their new abilities as intended. Any attempted use will cause the Pomme to relocate, size changing whether it absorbed or spent power on a person, someone who secures the unalloyed boon will use up the Pomme.^[28]

Ritual Incarnates[]

Possibly some overlap with Nex Machina or Envoys.

Also known as Incarnate Rituals. These are rituals which are (generally) created by Incarnations and leaked to Innocents to entrap them. The clear warnings and a possibility (if slim) to fairly "win" the ritual and be rewarded help to temper the karmic backlash. Some Practitioners will find the way to win the ritual, then repeatedly do so until it's drained of power and destroyed.^[3] Some can manifest what appear to be Others, but these are merely a person-shaped symptom of the ritual itself.^[29] Being rooted in the Incarnate, abstract, they can find themselves linked with and drawn to the Ruins.^[30]

Although generally associated with Incarnations, they can also form naturally^[3] or be created by something on a par with a powerful Incarnation, such as a lesser god or greater goblin.^[31]

Omens[]

Main article: Omens

Incite events that are linked to an incarnation, while this can be a death they are equally likely to be things such as heartbreak or the gaining or losing of wealth.

Items[]

Main article: Cursed Item

Similar to Incarnate Rituals, some Incarnations create items which - when some attached warning is ignored - inflict a fate on the Innocent victim which furthers the Incarnation.^[3] This behavior is not exclusive to Incarnations, e.g. Faeries have been observed doing this for amusement.^[32]

Token[]

Main article: Tokens

Similar to cursed Items but meant for different purposes.^[33]

Dogs of War[]

Main Article: Dog of War

Patchwork members of a large group that died under chaotic circumstances, usually war. Although classified as Anima^[34] these beings may stem from Incarnations (War, Famine, Hate etc.)^[35]^[36]

Leathermen[]

Main Article: Leathermen

Notable Incarnations[]

Conquest of Toronto
Hungry Choir
List of Incarnations
Monique Pope, Incarnation of Time^[15]

References[]

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1
Going off of incarnations, could a country be a incarnation? Would these incarnations engage in battle to save their own hide, or were they powerless to do anything?

A country could not be an incarnation, as an incarnation is generally an idea. Death, war, famine, faith, conquest, dream, desire, destruction, etc. - Wildbow on Reddit
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 He’s used to interacting with incarnations, often lesser ones. Incarnations are literal, they are personifications of concepts, and are stubborn, single-minded, even short-sighted. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.2
↑ ^3.0 ^3.1 ^3.2 ^3.3 ^3.4 Lost for Words 1.4
↑ ^4.0 ^4.1 ^4.2 “The Lord is an incarnation of Conquest. He’s a sapient embodiment of a concept, and he’s been here for some time, in one form or another.”
[...]
“A living manifestation of conquest?” I asked.

“I would hesitate to say ‘alive’.”

“He’s the horseman? One of the four riders of the apocalypse?”

“Yes and no. There are other Conquests, who take different forms based on their history and the eras and events they drew power from. For all intents and purposes, you can consider incarnations to be powerful spirits, often ones with human hosts or an attachment to an object of particular design, an implement without an owner. Some agencies contrive to bring these incarnations into being to suit their devices. Is there an agency invested in the apocalypse and Conquest’s part in that? Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.”- Excerpt from Collateral 4.1
↑ ^5.0 ^5.1 “The Others native to this place are predators that feast on echoes,” Miss said. “Echoes will find their roots here, what you see in reality as the tips of the icebergs, if they’re complex or multifaceted enough to have icebergs. When they’re spent, they dissolve out here, reduced back down to spirit stuff, if they aren’t taken apart for other purposes.”

“What purposes?” Verona asked.

“Some might make Others and send them out. Others might be similar to Alpeana, building nightmares or scenarios, like a funnel spider might build a web, but using scenes and memories instead of webbing. Nascent incarnations might seek out echoes that tie to their natures, an Incarnation of Innocence eating child and elderly Others until it has the strength to take form in our world. [...] Incarnate practitioners who specialize in things like the Hungry Choir ritual or dealings with a specific Incarnation, such as Dream or Bondage, will have cause to come here.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6
↑ When dealing with an Augur, a key point is that when they see, they open up a vulnerability for you to attack them through. [...] They focus primarily on immaterial things. Echoes, spirits, incarnations- often especially incarnations. Any sentiment or pillar of human nature can be something they specialize in. Alexander was good at seeing the kinds and shapes of Strife, capital S, and karmic flows. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.1
↑ ^7.0 ^7.1 ^7.2 ^7.3 ^7.4
As for the general Others that they'll run into & operate with, they're from the immaterial and interaction tracks. So...

Concept-driven Others - especially the riff-raff surrounding things like Incarnations. The agents or soldiers of Dream, Death, Fate, Nature, Ruin, Innocence, etc.
- Envoys - These Others persist by making deals and furthering the ends of the incarnation they represent/are. They may be urban legends or itinerant Others. The deals are usually tricky or really loaded. "Did you hear? They say that there's a way to summon a little old man who will ask you for a name. He'll destroy a person you name, but he'll take what you cherish most from you in exchange. Everyone always regrets it." A girl with strangely colored hair finds people in enough torment that they've lost their senses- the sleep deprived, the maddened, the drunken, and she offers them a deal. She'll take the memory of whatever it is that is maddening them out of their head and the heads of everyone around them, but they're given the task of re-enacting or forcing that same agony on three other 'deserving' people, or she'll give them the memory she took from the last person she visited, and somehow it's always worse than (and somehow related to) what they were dealing with before. These Envoys visit our world and seek out targets who fit their schema and generally push deals that net an overall positive contribution to [incarnation], but when they aren't here, they're somewhere, and that's often the Paths. If found or visited, they may offer similar deals, or barter with whatever it is they've collected or done.
- The Leftovers - these are like incarnations, but writ small. Isolated bits of 'incarnation' that splintered off or exist in isolation. Especially common in the Paths because there's a whole lot of isolation there. Characters (and 'character' is the operative word here) that are defined by single attributes and personalities. Shored up by spirits and other things. A fragment of Regret splinters off due to circumstances, gets isolated in the Paths (where it naturally ends up), and gathers up enough pieces of other things, like a mask of a mouse and a party dress, picks up on ideas and the tatters of echos surrounding those things, and builds up a persona as the Cringing Mouse, a girl with a mouse head and a garish dress, who can't help but do cringeworthy things at the worst moments and then agonize over them. Once they solidify as such, they tend to resist being absorbed elsewhere. Leftovers love to attach themselves to others as traveling companions, or recur on the paths. These form some of the 'wildlife' in the Paths. Not all are sentient or sapient. Unwittingly, they tend to further the cause of their parent Incarnation.
- Pawns & Playing Cards - The forms these guys can take is impossibly varied. Extensions of an Incarnation with some power that wanted soldiers, messengers, servants, builders, or whatever else, they end up in the Paths if their parent Incarnation dies and they don't go with it. Tend to congregate in groups, all with a theme. The Victims of Innocence, who are wide eyed children, beautiful, all dressed in pristine white clothes, with a penchant for hurling themselves into the most horrible fates available, if there's any chance it'll break people's hearts to see it. The Rats of Plague, who wait and multiply in anticipation of a chance to deliver a plague worse than the Black Death upon humanity- except they're quarantined. All they need is an open door or for one rat to sneak through and they can do just that. Tend to be really, really stupid, however, while appearing in great number, leaving diplomacy as the key to dealing with them.
Echoes & remnants. Ghosts, vestiges. Because they intersect with the Paths, they might deal with other kinds of echo.
- Wild Echoes - Overlaps with Incarnations, above. Echoes (ghosts) of humans who were done away with by very dramatic Incarnation-type events. Tend to be flavorful, hard-to-deal-with echoes who don't follow the usual tropes or tools of necromancers, so most necromancers won't bother. Tools and approaches with Death in mind don't apply if we're talking about an Other who was done away with by Ignonimity or Lust.
- False Echoes - Echoes of people who didn't exist, except by rumor. A real pain in the ass for necromancers, but not so much a problem for Finders.
  
  Spirits - Spirits are bread & butter, and not exclusive to the Paths, but frequently found are...
- Petitioner Spirits - Spirits consolidated around a question or set of questions. They often ask people they see and then may get power to act if the answer is right or wrong. Can be hooked into echoes or have echoes as central points, depending.
- Abstract Spirits - Spirits of consolidated Path-trash, may be even less defined or consistent than usual spirits, but can be useful as a kind of wet clay for those looking to mold them. The problem is that if these guys are a blender of weird, well, sometimes that blender has blades inside. The trick is finding out what's at the center, holding them together. - Wildbow on Reddit
↑ They were of the incarnate. They came from a principle, ideas largely unique to the framing mankind gave them, and the fact it was so defined by man was a crude and cruel insult, drawing on her background. They were of Hunger, and they were eating her. - Excerpt from Summer Break 13.3
↑ ^9.0 ^9.1 “But if there’s no war-”

“He isn’t War, but Conquest. Massed forces, takeovers, forced change. He continues to find power in other ways. Yes, he prefers warfare and bloodshed, but he can draw power from the steady expansion of civilization into nature, from real estate, from business takeovers, government, law, and other small forms of tyranny. As an Incarnation, he can invest his power. Where Death might bring death to things by touching them, or Love might strike a couple through their hearts with a metaphorical arrow given form, Conquest can do the same.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.1
↑ ^10.0 ^10.1 Incarnations and incarnate things aren’t even a single clear concept when they emerge, and absorb a lot from their surroundings in early days. If a Desire isn’t healthy, she can reflect something stunted, something frustrated, or something loveless.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6
↑ The Incarnations or The Pillars are the forces that govern those things that are universal to the human experience. The core incarnations are Death, Nature, Time, Fate, and War, with Fortune sometimes included as a sixth. There are subordinate incarnations of various forces such as Conquest, Instinct, and Youth, who operate in very similar ways, and are ultimately structured very similarly to spirits. More granular forces may be subordinate to broader, more important concepts, with the core forces being dominant.

What makes these forces distinct from spirits is how integral, essential, and universal they are. For something to be Incarnate, it must apply, whether it’s to ten people on a deserted island or a modern city. Being as essential and worked into the human experience as they are, these forces are fairly non-negotiable, occupy their own spaces, and are sometimes called Inevitable forces because of how they and any practices that result from them tend to be much harder to adjust or work around. Rooted in the Ruins (a good field for any would-be Incarnate practitioner to familiarize themselves with), Incarnations and Incarnate practices are as heavyweight as echoes are diffuse and adjustable, being hard to ‘kill’, more unwieldy, more inflexible, and utilizing power in ways that must generally be evaded, because few forces stand directly up to them. - PACT DICE
↑ Conquest stopped, weapon poised. The blood formed a line between us.

Blood of a free man. I thought, still backing away. Once captured, rescued and given liberty. By you, no less.
[...]
“Freedom may run contrary to my nature, but blood doesn’t,” Conquest said. His deep, eerie voice felt like it could carry across the neighborhood, over a good portion of the city, even. “Suffering doesn’t. Death and dying don’t.”

He stepped over the line of blood.
[...]
He can’t turn down a fight, I thought. He has to crush the weak.

The mirror stuck in the middle of the circle I’d drawn. The blood of a free man, Laird.

The circle would be lined with Rose’s hair. Hacked off. Caught by Conquest, freed by myself.

Maggie had torn out the pages of Black Lamb’s Blood, weighing them down so they wouldn’t fly away. I couldn’t afford to lose them. The pages that had bound an Other, now free.

Thrice bound - Excerpt from Void 7.7
↑ “I prefer subjugation over death. I surrender my self,” Canfield said. “It’s my understanding that an incarnation needs to root itself in humanity from time to time, to stay relevant and rooted in the doings of man.”

“Yes.”

“All I ask is that my daughter is taken care of.”

“You’ll have it.”

With that, the Incarnation stepped forward until it intersected Canfield.

For an instant, Canfield was the one wearing white.

Then, a moment later, the one wearing white had a trace of Canfield’s features.

Those features were soon swallowed up in a greater ocean. - Excerpt from Interlude 5
↑ “Incarnations of major, inviolable concepts run into an issue where they calcify. They get so set in their ways and routines, they start missing wrinkles and issues. They become mechanical, they stop handling things they should handle. They slow down. They work less. So… that’s when they reach out, they find a vessel, absorb a person. That person gets a lot of freedom to interpret their duties, maybe fix a problem in their old life. A soldier becomes the new War, gets to spend a good chunk of the power they’re given to save their hometown as part of the deal for assuming a huge responsibility, maybe gets to emphasize certain duties over others, then settles into the role for a good few decades, maybe a century or two, before they start calcifying too.” - Excerpt from In Absentia 21.6
↑ ^15.0 ^15.1 Time happens but we experience it in different ways and that experience of time is something that can be managed, fudged, bent, or broken. The daily grind, how time flies when you're having fun, the punchclock of work, the trains running on time, the moments you're in the zone and everything seems to slow down, the eras and phases of society, deadlines, and saved time, all are subtle but important. This punctuation and fluctuation of time forms a big part of the background fabric of society and how society holds up, or doesn't, and how society changes or holds onto things.
Time is very much an enabler and supporter of other forces. Someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the opposite) for Fate is critical. Death can't do its work if people don't run out of time. Nature can't work if the seasons and cycles don't happen.

Monique Pope hit the ground running, was an industrious and obedient child, and did everything she was told. She excelled at her homework, pleased her teachers, did her chores, and helped raise her younger siblings. It got to be a lot when she was a teen, but she managed to balance school, her boyfriend, friends, a part time job and helping to care for her siblings after her mom got sick. In the rush and everything, she didn't find the time to buy condoms, decided to risk it, and nine months later, two months after graduation, she had her first kid.

Monique gave it her best, she carried on, and juggled husband, kids, classes, friends, and her job, where she rose to the rank of middle management before she had a brain aneurysm and died. Death came to act as psychopomp and deliver her to her destination, and she asked for a moment to take in the stillness and quiet before whatever came next. Death gave her that moment, leaving her in custody of another figure she hadn't realized was in the background, while doing its rounds, promising to return. And that figure, Time, offered her a deal. More moments. An extended one. The current Father Time was getting stale and losing touch, and the schedule dictated it was due to pass on the mantle. So Monique became Time, and would remain Time forever, though she might later be sublimated by others as she passed on the mantle, fresher perspectives taking the reins, but with her and her memories there as part of the greater entity.

As Time, she meets with other Incarnations on the regular, to coordinate and keep them organized, with an eye on society as it goes through its measured, time-punctuated paces. Fate focuses on key events, the order of things, and weaves together a narrative, but Monique as Time has an eye on rhythms, what comes past the end of a snipped thread, and how various people will adjust and change in their patterns and schedules in reaction to that difference. A flap of a butterfly's wing can lead to a change in an era, and Time keeps an eye out, to manage that.

When not working with Incarnations, Monique will do her own business with Time. On the rare occasion, every few years, someone will go and practice something and muck with time itself, altering history, but mostly it's about keeping track and adjusting the numbers on how fast the days seem to go by and how everything fits together in the moment-by-moment sense. Just as often, she helps other Incarnations keep numbers balanced, with micro-adjustments across the board.

In the guise of Time herself, outside of those duties and contributions, she'll use the opportunity afforded her to adjust things in a way that comes from her, from Monique Pope, and she spends of herself to do it. At least in her area where she manages Time, more people find time away from homework to be with dying parents. More teenagers find they have the extra few minutes in their detours to go see a boyfriend or girlfriend to buy a condom, averting a life change. Some find their commutes in a busy work week faster than expected, and catch a child's recital they would've missed, or find the time to throw the ball with their kid and talk about something important. All of these things ripple out and have consequences, time not a line but waves that rise and fall, sometimes tranquil, sometimes fleeting, sometimes violent.

Standout among those things she does and gives to people, are moments. She puts her emphasis on that in particular, spending what she's earned doing her job to give them out where she sees fit, so people might have a moment of quiet or a moment away from the hustle and bustle of it all before they die, instead of after. - Wildbow on Reddit
↑ “He isn’t human,” I thought aloud, interrupting the conversation between husband and wife. “He follows a set of rules. There are things he can do, but there are an awful lot of things he can’t.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “But any Incarnation will tap the ranks of humanity for fitting subjects and sacrifices, to give themselves a reservoir to draw from. Pride might be able to perform actions that don’t raise its standing or gain the ability to bow to others in a pinch. If they go too long without sacrifices, they start to become more… I don’t know how to phrase it…”

“Mechanical,” I said. “They become more mechanical.”

“Basically. Parts of the overarching machine of reality.”

“Well,” I said, “That’s a weak point. How often do they need sacrifices?”

“Depends how often they break their own internal rules. Once every thousand years? Once every hundred years? Daily?” - excerpt from Collateral 4.4
↑ ^17.0 ^17.1 “And nobody’s about to remove the local Conquest from the picture, to keep that from happening?”

“There are bigger things at play, and an Incarnation isn’t a monster you defeat with a sword or gun. It is an idea given life. You support it and feed it through certain ideas, and you defeat it by taking the strength from that idea. Most often, you accommodate them. But anything powerful enough to become sentient and sapient isn’t something that’s going away anytime soon.” - excerpt from Collateral 4.1
↑ Some agencies contrive to bring these incarnations into being to suit their devices. Is there an agency invested in the apocalypse and Conquest’s part in that? Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking. [...] Such agencies want a narrative, and an Incarnation of Conquest arising from Toronto is a weak narrative at best. If such things come to pass, speculation suggests that another, greater Conquest would find, best, and absorb all its lesser kin for strength before taking action. - Excerpt from Collateral 4.1
↑ “To be in Conquest’s domain is to be in a constant state of transition. Emotions rise and fall, there is fire and rebellion at first, then we make peace with the state of things. Broken things erode away, and then there is only defeat. But to be the Conqueror is not a simple thing either. They either take on a different role, which my lord cannot do, or they find new territory to seize, people to subjugate. The territory changes as he finds new ground.”

“I didn’t know a demesne could be this… out there. I mean, I read about apartments covered in flesh, but…”

“This isn’t a demesne, as you understand the term,” he said. “Some beings are strong enough to influence their surroundings simply by residing there.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.2
↑ “That may be the case. In any event, we need protection and security while we call her out and bind her. She’s rooted to a huge power source, and that, to my understanding, makes her rough to deal with.”

“If her origin is Incarnation related,” Alexander said, “she’s going to have power like that. Incarnation related others tend to have something inevitable about them.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z
↑ “The Doom would come back stronger each time. Incarnations and things stemming from them, like omens and the doom, they lean heavily into the inevitable, or the illusion of the inevitable,” Matthew said. “It’s in their makeup.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.5
↑ “He’s an incarnation,” Rose said. “A being tied to the intrinsic workings of the world, at least on an abstract level. They have no technical beginning or end. They just are. What we see is kind of a crystallization of that essence. Some jackass decided to invoke a force and absorb the force in question into themselves and fucked up, they gave themselves over to the force for some reason or another, or a big event helped it come into being. Now it’s autonomous. You can weaken it, but you can’t really kill it. He’s… major enough to count, I think.” - Excerpt from Subordination 6.1
↑ “And the host?” I asked. “I learned my lesson last night. Fuck of a lot easier to deal with something that’s human at the core.”

“Conquest was human once,” she said.

“I almost forgot,” I said.

“Kind of similar, really. Let a mote get carried away, you end up with something that isn’t recognizable as human. Our advantage is if this thing isn’t that far gone, there might be something human at the core.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.4
↑ “A boy drowned in a dip in the river, when the water level was high enough the flow was pronounced. There was a drop in the water flow, and it formed a tube that trapped him inside, flipping end over end. Enough of a violent and remarkable end to create an echo. Enough left unresolved around him that it encouraged spirits. He became a petitioner spirit, plaguing people by the water with whispered questions.”

“Like a ghost by the side of the road who asks for a ride,” Verona said.

Verona sounded so casual, in the midst of this. Like she didn’t care about where they stood. Avery was unsure if she was a good actor or so focused in on the practice that she’d lost sight of the danger.

“Yes. But he wasn’t mature or coherent enough to ask good questions. If such a spirit learns to ask questions with a design, or to attach a pattern of action to the questioning, the actions can gain strength. Your roadside spirit could gain enough strength to punish the wrong or unwanted answers with a push, putting the victim in the way of incoming traffic. He wasn’t that strong. He whispered nonsense about being caught in the wash. Left to his own devices, he could have become a wraith, a spectre, a malign spirit, or connected to a thing of the Abyss, or enough collective sentiment to become a spot for an incarnation to emerge. I burned him, ending him.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.5
↑ Incarnations traditionally choose or naturally come across vessels that allow them to refresh themselves. These can be those who are well suited to wearing a mantle of a particular concept, it can be an agent of the Incarnation that works as a kind of underling grim reaper or custodian of time (etc.), and it can be a way of dealing with 'wrinkly' individuals who have, by practice or circumstance, become very difficult to deal with, existing outside of Nature, Time, Death, War, etc. By absorbing the (sometimes unwilling) individual the incarnation can better understand the wrinkle.

There is another means, however, and it is one that has seen exploitation. The Incarnation can be made, often by choosing a representative vessel and preparing them with the tropes, symbols of office, and some process that distills the incarnation in them. This is rarely pleasant, and depending on the approach, can mean scourging and altering the individual to reduce the individuality and make them a better vessel, and/or it can mean creating a state through ritual, surgery, and the efforts of community. Chemicals fed into the body to maintain a sustained primal state, being held on the threshold of death for a prolonged time, etc.

Someone researching these processes is likely to come across references to various *pilaster* sects. These sects, not necessarily related to one another, tend to manifest from the same core ideas and feelings, which is that the commonly recognized major pillars have an obvious absence that they need to fill... commonly faith, almost always the *pilaster sect's* faith, sometimes tradition, and rarely something else such as liberty or a counterpoint to one of the major pillars. The rule of thumb is that the pilaster sects are fanatical and unflinching.

Unfortunately, the rule of thumb is also that they as groups or larger communities will attempt to forge an incarnation, often by choosing someone from the population to 'raise up' onto a pedestal. Wildbow on Discord
↑ Locus Incarnate

The Locus Incarnate is a location that has become a 'well', where power, presence, and the impact of events drive the location into a metaphysical depression, such that power of a certain type and theme gathers within. The 'incarnate' aspect is due to the locus's trend toward pitching heavily toward a theme, which in the modern day is often death, murder, or madness, in residential areas, but could in the past be nature or some such in a place in the wilderness.

The areas take on a particular cast and tone, things gain a certain pronounced nature, and the people who find themselves within will often find it difficult to leave; the depression makes all paths and connections outward an uphill trip. More likely, those connected to victims will be drawn in, following trails or retracing their steps until they arrive at the location, and fall prey to the trap. Can be mistaken for a 'haunted house', but echoes are incidental, not at the root of the place (or if they are at the root, aren't responsible for the design and nature of the space). Successful escape requires finding what ~is~ at the heart and weakening it sufficiently to make the depression less steep. In the most severe cases, when the place is forgotten and nothing within has a connection to the outside world, it often falls to the Abyss, taking the contents with it. - Wildbow by Discord
↑ The Pomme Incarnate is a kernel of Incarnate power, typically manifesting in Earth-adjacent realms, from a 'seed' of some kind of power, be it an item representative of an incarnation, an item in one of the echo-touched realms that has stored sentiment and power (such as a Ghend's treasure), or something left behind by a practitioner. It draws echoes to it and grows in size and power. Typically very powerful, the most notable thing about the Pomme Incarnate is that it doesn't have motive force. It doesn't move, attack, or defend itself. They range from the size of a baseball to the size of a house, but trend smaller, and often have intense appearances, throbbing with power while being framed with echoes. Pommes take centuries to mature to even the smaller forms.

Those who meet the Pomme halfway (taking a bite of the 'apple', inserting one's arm into the aperture, or passing within, as examples) will be confronted with the Incarnation's force majeure, the full weight of the inevitable. The most unworthy are absorbed into the Pomme in a merciful end, the most worthy, should they be willing and able to face the Pomme's power to the end, are granted wisdom, power matching or dwarfing typical embodiments of the Incarnate, and/or the ability to rewrite events, past, present, or future. This isn't an easy task, and many will only pass halfway between the two extremes, often destroying themselves or going mad, but gaining the ability to change events or perform a great act in the process.

Would you be able to reach within and keep hold of the power inside, if you had to experience every childbirth ever to occur in human history, one after another, in what seemed like a million or more years to you but were minutes to others? Would you be able to bear the full weight of every individual dying around the world over the hours you spent in the Pomme's embrace, without tearing yourself free? To have an impossible child? To bring one person back? - Wildbow on Discord
↑ - Wildbow on Discord
↑ "Choir knew already. Could smell ’em coming.”

“You could smell them coming, or they were already there?” Lucy asked.

“Couldn’t say, dearie,” Toadswallow said.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re not a group or anything like that. They’re like a storm or a clog in the sewer. The kids you see? They’re just the raindrops or the bad smell that comes with. The whole thing? Bigger and vaguer.”

“The storm was already there? Gathering? On its way?”
[...]
“We need to check in with the Choir. Figure out what they are, try to interview them.”

“Even if those kids are raindrops from a storm,” Verona added. - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.5
↑ “The bleakness of this place reminds me of the Hungry Choir’s realm,” Avery said.

“If you were to map out the connections between worlds, that one would be a close sibling or child of this one. The Ruins are a place of the eroding abstract. Incarnates and echoes. The Hungry Choir is of that abstract, a living ritual rooted in the Incarnate.”

“Case in point,” Avery said. She pointed.

There was a figure that could have been mistaken for an echo, but it didn’t flicker.

A waif, standing in the rain, watching them.

“The bleakness of this place reminds me of the Hungry Choir’s realm,” Avery said.

“If you were to map out the connections between worlds, that one would be a close sibling or child of this one. The Ruins are a place of the eroding abstract. Incarnates and echoes. The Hungry Choir is of that abstract, a living ritual rooted in the Incarnate.”

“Case in point,” Avery said. She pointed.

There was a figure that could have been mistaken for an echo, but it didn’t flicker.

A waif, standing in the rain, watching them. - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6
↑ That much power that fast has to come from somewhere, and then be given form as a ritual by someone or something. A strong incarnation, a lesser god, a great Goblin. If it had appeared in the last month, I might think it had something to do with the current state of the Carmine Beast. That could be a big enough power source… perhaps. [...] There are things that have that kind of power, like gods and strong incarnations, but I’m not aware of anything that strong that could have any connection to the Choir, and I’ve done some extensive searching. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.2
↑ She was pretty certain that presents and boons like the ones Keller was giving out were traps. That they’d be wonderful and fantastic up until the point that things turned sour. Maybe they became too much of a good thing, maybe there was a rule that had to be followed, with some horrific backlash if it wasn’t. Maybe there was a catch.

Exiled Faerie weren’t allowed to go after innocents, not directly. But, Maggie was fairly certain, they weren’t forbidden from doing something like giving a kid a flute that would summon a sprite to do their chores for them, with the caveat that the sprite would blind them if they ever tried to watch it while it worked.

End result? The kid would be stupid, the sprite would eat the kid’s eyes. People, the kid included, would rationalize it away as an accident, an infection, or just a freak occurrence. Life would go on as normal, and the local Faeries-in-exile got their jollies without breaking the rules. - Excerpt from Signature 8.2
↑ “Call Brie,” Jessica said, pulling something from a tree trunk. It looked like a coin, but it was lumpier.
[...]
“What’s that?” Avery asked, indicating the bit of metal.

“A token. Certain inevitable forces will leave them places. Like an Other closely related to Love leaving behind roses or rose petals, or an Other related to Mania leaving a pitchfork embedded in something.”
[...]
“What’s got you guys spooked?” Avery asked. “Does it have to do with that token? The bit of metal?”

“A group of lesser incarnations,” Jessica said. She reached out, holding the token like she was going to drop it. Avery put her hand out.

The bit of metal, slightly triangular. A squashed bullet, edge sharpened. It was wrapped up in cord.

“My best guess is this is Hunt,” Jessica said.

A bit of glass wrapped in more cord, curved and smooth on one side and broken on the other, like it was from a magnifying glass or marble. There was blood on the pointiest corner, worked into the cracks.

“Inquest or Inquisition.”

And a ring, snipped, the band twisted so it formed a curl, where the snipped ends didn’t meet but crossed instead. There was a heart shaped hole at the center of the band, opposite the mis-aligned ends. The cord was threaded through the hole and around the ring itself.

“Which one is this?”

“I don’t know. But it’s compatible with Hunt and Inquisition, that token represents it. If you let them drop from your hand, they fall into a position that forms a triangle. Don’t actually drop it. I don’t want to waste the time.”

“Okay,” Avery said, holding the tokens in her hand.

“They fall equally distant apart. The triangle shape appears in the tokens, too. They’re a team of three.” - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3
↑ “The Carmine Beast predated us,” the Aurum said. “But not the Alabaster Doe.”

“She was an Animus, a walking intent,” the Alabaster said. “Much as your Dog of War is one.”

“I- I’m not familiar with that.”

“Forces between spirit and incarnation that exist for purpose. Often malign, but not always. Physical. They are defined by the task they accomplish. The Swordbearer animus exists to find the noble and heroic, equip them, and send them on their path. The Dog of War exists to perpetuate the senselessness of war. Muses inspire art.”

“What did she do?”

“Before she was the Carmine Beast, she reminded civilized men who had come here why their ancestors were so afraid of the deep night,” the Alabaster said. “Henhouses emptied, livestock slaughtered. Howling that shook hearts, and fangs that took the lives of people who were in the midst of discovering just how dark a forest can be without the torches, candles and lamps of a nearby city.”

“Was she evil? I know we asked, but- before?”

“She wasn’t good or evil so much as she simply was. Just as she was the Carmine Beast. The role precedes all.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.1
↑ The queen at the center of this particular hive is a black dog. It’s derived from an incarnation of famine or something, took the form of a young girl in the middle of the war in Afghanistan
[...]
“I ask a second time! Black Dog Yalda! Casualty of war and child of Famine! Come!” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z
↑ Hang Dogs [...] Stem from hate rather than war - Wildbow on Reddit

[:7-1] 1.0 ^1.1
Going off of incarnations, could a country be a incarnation? Would these incarnations engage in battle to save their own hide, or were they powerless to do anything?

A country could not be an incarnation, as an incarnation is generally an idea. Death, war, famine, faith, conquest, dream, desire, destruction, etc. - Wildbow on Reddit

[:10-2] 2.0 ^2.1 He’s used to interacting with incarnations, often lesser ones. Incarnations are literal, they are personifications of concepts, and are stubborn, single-minded, even short-sighted. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.2

[:1-3] 3.0 ^3.1 ^3.2 ^3.3 ^3.4 Lost for Words 1.4

[:6-4] 4.0 ^4.1 ^4.2 “The Lord is an incarnation of Conquest. He’s a sapient embodiment of a concept, and he’s been here for some time, in one form or another.”
[...]
“A living manifestation of conquest?” I asked.

“I would hesitate to say ‘alive’.”

“He’s the horseman? One of the four riders of the apocalypse?”

“Yes and no. There are other Conquests, who take different forms based on their history and the eras and events they drew power from. For all intents and purposes, you can consider incarnations to be powerful spirits, often ones with human hosts or an attachment to an object of particular design, an implement without an owner. Some agencies contrive to bring these incarnations into being to suit their devices. Is there an agency invested in the apocalypse and Conquest’s part in that? Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.”- Excerpt from Collateral 4.1

[:5-5] 5.0 ^5.1 “The Others native to this place are predators that feast on echoes,” Miss said. “Echoes will find their roots here, what you see in reality as the tips of the icebergs, if they’re complex or multifaceted enough to have icebergs. When they’re spent, they dissolve out here, reduced back down to spirit stuff, if they aren’t taken apart for other purposes.”

“What purposes?” Verona asked.

“Some might make Others and send them out. Others might be similar to Alpeana, building nightmares or scenarios, like a funnel spider might build a web, but using scenes and memories instead of webbing. Nascent incarnations might seek out echoes that tie to their natures, an Incarnation of Innocence eating child and elderly Others until it has the strength to take form in our world. [...] Incarnate practitioners who specialize in things like the Hungry Choir ritual or dealings with a specific Incarnation, such as Dream or Bondage, will have cause to come here.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6

[6] When dealing with an Augur, a key point is that when they see, they open up a vulnerability for you to attack them through. [...] They focus primarily on immaterial things. Echoes, spirits, incarnations- often especially incarnations. Any sentiment or pillar of human nature can be something they specialize in. Alexander was good at seeing the kinds and shapes of Strife, capital S, and karmic flows. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.1

[:0-7] 7.0 ^7.1 ^7.2 ^7.3 ^7.4 As for the general Others that they'll run into & operate with, they're from the immaterial and interaction tracks. So...

Concept-driven Others - especially the riff-raff surrounding things like Incarnations. The agents or soldiers of Dream, Death, Fate, Nature, Ruin, Innocence, etc.

Envoys - These Others persist by making deals and furthering the ends of the incarnation they represent/are. They may be urban legends or itinerant Others. The deals are usually tricky or really loaded. "Did you hear? They say that there's a way to summon a little old man who will ask you for a name. He'll destroy a person you name, but he'll take what you cherish most from you in exchange. Everyone always regrets it." A girl with strangely colored hair finds people in enough torment that they've lost their senses- the sleep deprived, the maddened, the drunken, and she offers them a deal. She'll take the memory of whatever it is that is maddening them out of their head and the heads of everyone around them, but they're given the task of re-enacting or forcing that same agony on three other 'deserving' people, or she'll give them the memory she took from the last person she visited, and somehow it's always worse than (and somehow related to) what they were dealing with before. These Envoys visit our world and seek out targets who fit their schema and generally push deals that net an overall positive contribution to [incarnation], but when they aren't here, they're somewhere, and that's often the Paths. If found or visited, they may offer similar deals, or barter with whatever it is they've collected or done.

The Leftovers - these are like incarnations, but writ small. Isolated bits of 'incarnation' that splintered off or exist in isolation. Especially common in the Paths because there's a whole lot of isolation there. Characters (and 'character' is the operative word here) that are defined by single attributes and personalities. Shored up by spirits and other things. A fragment of Regret splinters off due to circumstances, gets isolated in the Paths (where it naturally ends up), and gathers up enough pieces of other things, like a mask of a mouse and a party dress, picks up on ideas and the tatters of echos surrounding those things, and builds up a persona as the Cringing Mouse, a girl with a mouse head and a garish dress, who can't help but do cringeworthy things at the worst moments and then agonize over them. Once they solidify as such, they tend to resist being absorbed elsewhere. Leftovers love to attach themselves to others as traveling companions, or recur on the paths. These form some of the 'wildlife' in the Paths. Not all are sentient or sapient. Unwittingly, they tend to further the cause of their parent Incarnation.

Pawns & Playing Cards - The forms these guys can take is impossibly varied. Extensions of an Incarnation with some power that wanted soldiers, messengers, servants, builders, or whatever else, they end up in the Paths if their parent Incarnation dies and they don't go with it. Tend to congregate in groups, all with a theme. The Victims of Innocence, who are wide eyed children, beautiful, all dressed in pristine white clothes, with a penchant for hurling themselves into the most horrible fates available, if there's any chance it'll break people's hearts to see it. The Rats of Plague, who wait and multiply in anticipation of a chance to deliver a plague worse than the Black Death upon humanity- except they're quarantined. All they need is an open door or for one rat to sneak through and they can do just that. Tend to be really, really stupid, however, while appearing in great number, leaving diplomacy as the key to dealing with them.

Echoes & remnants. Ghosts, vestiges. Because they intersect with the Paths, they might deal with other kinds of echo.

Wild Echoes - Overlaps with Incarnations, above. Echoes (ghosts) of humans who were done away with by very dramatic Incarnation-type events. Tend to be flavorful, hard-to-deal-with echoes who don't follow the usual tropes or tools of necromancers, so most necromancers won't bother. Tools and approaches with Death in mind don't apply if we're talking about an Other who was done away with by Ignonimity or Lust.

False Echoes - Echoes of people who didn't exist, except by rumor. A real pain in the ass for necromancers, but not so much a problem for Finders.

Spirits - Spirits are bread & butter, and not exclusive to the Paths, but frequently found are...

Petitioner Spirits - Spirits consolidated around a question or set of questions. They often ask people they see and then may get power to act if the answer is right or wrong. Can be hooked into echoes or have echoes as central points, depending.

Abstract Spirits - Spirits of consolidated Path-trash, may be even less defined or consistent than usual spirits, but can be useful as a kind of wet clay for those looking to mold them. The problem is that if these guys are a blender of weird, well, sometimes that blender has blades inside. The trick is finding out what's at the center, holding them together. - Wildbow on Reddit

[8] Envoys - These Others persist by making deals and furthering the ends of the incarnation they represent/are. They may be urban legends or itinerant Others. The deals are usually tricky or really loaded. "Did you hear? They say that there's a way to summon a little old man who will ask you for a name. He'll destroy a person you name, but he'll take what you cherish most from you in exchange. Everyone always regrets it." A girl with strangely colored hair finds people in enough torment that they've lost their senses- the sleep deprived, the maddened, the drunken, and she offers them a deal. She'll take the memory of whatever it is that is maddening them out of their head and the heads of everyone around them, but they're given the task of re-enacting or forcing that same agony on three other 'deserving' people, or she'll give them the memory she took from the last person she visited, and somehow it's always worse than (and somehow related to) what they were dealing with before. These Envoys visit our world and seek out targets who fit their schema and generally push deals that net an overall positive contribution to [incarnation], but when they aren't here, they're somewhere, and that's often the Paths. If found or visited, they may offer similar deals, or barter with whatever it is they've collected or done.

[9] The Leftovers - these are like incarnations, but writ small. Isolated bits of 'incarnation' that splintered off or exist in isolation. Especially common in the Paths because there's a whole lot of isolation there. Characters (and 'character' is the operative word here) that are defined by single attributes and personalities. Shored up by spirits and other things. A fragment of Regret splinters off due to circumstances, gets isolated in the Paths (where it naturally ends up), and gathers up enough pieces of other things, like a mask of a mouse and a party dress, picks up on ideas and the tatters of echos surrounding those things, and builds up a persona as the Cringing Mouse, a girl with a mouse head and a garish dress, who can't help but do cringeworthy things at the worst moments and then agonize over them. Once they solidify as such, they tend to resist being absorbed elsewhere. Leftovers love to attach themselves to others as traveling companions, or recur on the paths. These form some of the 'wildlife' in the Paths. Not all are sentient or sapient. Unwittingly, they tend to further the cause of their parent Incarnation.

[10] Pawns & Playing Cards - The forms these guys can take is impossibly varied. Extensions of an Incarnation with some power that wanted soldiers, messengers, servants, builders, or whatever else, they end up in the Paths if their parent Incarnation dies and they don't go with it. Tend to congregate in groups, all with a theme. The Victims of Innocence, who are wide eyed children, beautiful, all dressed in pristine white clothes, with a penchant for hurling themselves into the most horrible fates available, if there's any chance it'll break people's hearts to see it. The Rats of Plague, who wait and multiply in anticipation of a chance to deliver a plague worse than the Black Death upon humanity- except they're quarantined. All they need is an open door or for one rat to sneak through and they can do just that. Tend to be really, really stupid, however, while appearing in great number, leaving diplomacy as the key to dealing with them.

[11] Wild Echoes - Overlaps with Incarnations, above. Echoes (ghosts) of humans who were done away with by very dramatic Incarnation-type events. Tend to be flavorful, hard-to-deal-with echoes who don't follow the usual tropes or tools of necromancers, so most necromancers won't bother. Tools and approaches with Death in mind don't apply if we're talking about an Other who was done away with by Ignonimity or Lust.

[12] False Echoes - Echoes of people who didn't exist, except by rumor. A real pain in the ass for necromancers, but not so much a problem for Finders.

Spirits - Spirits are bread & butter, and not exclusive to the Paths, but frequently found are...

[13] Petitioner Spirits - Spirits consolidated around a question or set of questions. They often ask people they see and then may get power to act if the answer is right or wrong. Can be hooked into echoes or have echoes as central points, depending.

[14] Abstract Spirits - Spirits of consolidated Path-trash, may be even less defined or consistent than usual spirits, but can be useful as a kind of wet clay for those looking to mold them. The problem is that if these guys are a blender of weird, well, sometimes that blender has blades inside. The trick is finding out what's at the center, holding them together. - Wildbow on Reddit

[8] They were of the incarnate. They came from a principle, ideas largely unique to the framing mankind gave them, and the fact it was so defined by man was a crude and cruel insult, drawing on her background. They were of Hunger, and they were eating her. - Excerpt from Summer Break 13.3

[:8-9] 9.0 ^9.1 “But if there’s no war-”

“He isn’t War, but Conquest. Massed forces, takeovers, forced change. He continues to find power in other ways. Yes, he prefers warfare and bloodshed, but he can draw power from the steady expansion of civilization into nature, from real estate, from business takeovers, government, law, and other small forms of tyranny. As an Incarnation, he can invest his power. Where Death might bring death to things by touching them, or Love might strike a couple through their hearts with a metaphorical arrow given form, Conquest can do the same.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.1

[de5-10] 10.0 ^10.1 Incarnations and incarnate things aren’t even a single clear concept when they emerge, and absorb a lot from their surroundings in early days. If a Desire isn’t healthy, she can reflect something stunted, something frustrated, or something loveless.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6

[:PD-11] The Incarnations or The Pillars are the forces that govern those things that are universal to the human experience. The core incarnations are Death, Nature, Time, Fate, and War, with Fortune sometimes included as a sixth. There are subordinate incarnations of various forces such as Conquest, Instinct, and Youth, who operate in very similar ways, and are ultimately structured very similarly to spirits. More granular forces may be subordinate to broader, more important concepts, with the core forces being dominant.

What makes these forces distinct from spirits is how integral, essential, and universal they are. For something to be Incarnate, it must apply, whether it’s to ten people on a deserted island or a modern city. Being as essential and worked into the human experience as they are, these forces are fairly non-negotiable, occupy their own spaces, and are sometimes called Inevitable forces because of how they and any practices that result from them tend to be much harder to adjust or work around. Rooted in the Ruins (a good field for any would-be Incarnate practitioner to familiarize themselves with), Incarnations and Incarnate practices are as heavyweight as echoes are diffuse and adjustable, being hard to ‘kill’, more unwieldy, more inflexible, and utilizing power in ways that must generally be evaded, because few forces stand directly up to them. - PACT DICE

[:11-12] Conquest stopped, weapon poised. The blood formed a line between us.

Blood of a free man. I thought, still backing away. Once captured, rescued and given liberty. By you, no less.
[...]
“Freedom may run contrary to my nature, but blood doesn’t,” Conquest said. His deep, eerie voice felt like it could carry across the neighborhood, over a good portion of the city, even. “Suffering doesn’t. Death and dying don’t.”

He stepped over the line of blood.
[...]
He can’t turn down a fight, I thought. He has to crush the weak.

The mirror stuck in the middle of the circle I’d drawn. The blood of a free man, Laird.

The circle would be lined with Rose’s hair. Hacked off. Caught by Conquest, freed by myself.

Maggie had torn out the pages of Black Lamb’s Blood, weighing them down so they wouldn’t fly away. I couldn’t afford to lose them. The pages that had bound an Other, now free.

Thrice bound - Excerpt from Void 7.7

[13] “I prefer subjugation over death. I surrender my self,” Canfield said. “It’s my understanding that an incarnation needs to root itself in humanity from time to time, to stay relevant and rooted in the doings of man.”

“Yes.”

“All I ask is that my daughter is taken care of.”

“You’ll have it.”

With that, the Incarnation stepped forward until it intersected Canfield.

For an instant, Canfield was the one wearing white.

Then, a moment later, the one wearing white had a trace of Canfield’s features.

Those features were soon swallowed up in a greater ocean. - Excerpt from Interlude 5

[14] “Incarnations of major, inviolable concepts run into an issue where they calcify. They get so set in their ways and routines, they start missing wrinkles and issues. They become mechanical, they stop handling things they should handle. They slow down. They work less. So… that’s when they reach out, they find a vessel, absorb a person. That person gets a lot of freedom to interpret their duties, maybe fix a problem in their old life. A soldier becomes the new War, gets to spend a good chunk of the power they’re given to save their hometown as part of the deal for assuming a huge responsibility, maybe gets to emphasize certain duties over others, then settles into the role for a good few decades, maybe a century or two, before they start calcifying too.” - Excerpt from In Absentia 21.6

[mpi-15] 15.0 ^15.1 Time happens but we experience it in different ways and that experience of time is something that can be managed, fudged, bent, or broken. The daily grind, how time flies when you're having fun, the punchclock of work, the trains running on time, the moments you're in the zone and everything seems to slow down, the eras and phases of society, deadlines, and saved time, all are subtle but important. This punctuation and fluctuation of time forms a big part of the background fabric of society and how society holds up, or doesn't, and how society changes or holds onto things.
Time is very much an enabler and supporter of other forces. Someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the opposite) for Fate is critical. Death can't do its work if people don't run out of time. Nature can't work if the seasons and cycles don't happen.

Monique Pope hit the ground running, was an industrious and obedient child, and did everything she was told. She excelled at her homework, pleased her teachers, did her chores, and helped raise her younger siblings. It got to be a lot when she was a teen, but she managed to balance school, her boyfriend, friends, a part time job and helping to care for her siblings after her mom got sick. In the rush and everything, she didn't find the time to buy condoms, decided to risk it, and nine months later, two months after graduation, she had her first kid.

Monique gave it her best, she carried on, and juggled husband, kids, classes, friends, and her job, where she rose to the rank of middle management before she had a brain aneurysm and died. Death came to act as psychopomp and deliver her to her destination, and she asked for a moment to take in the stillness and quiet before whatever came next. Death gave her that moment, leaving her in custody of another figure she hadn't realized was in the background, while doing its rounds, promising to return. And that figure, Time, offered her a deal. More moments. An extended one. The current Father Time was getting stale and losing touch, and the schedule dictated it was due to pass on the mantle. So Monique became Time, and would remain Time forever, though she might later be sublimated by others as she passed on the mantle, fresher perspectives taking the reins, but with her and her memories there as part of the greater entity.

As Time, she meets with other Incarnations on the regular, to coordinate and keep them organized, with an eye on society as it goes through its measured, time-punctuated paces. Fate focuses on key events, the order of things, and weaves together a narrative, but Monique as Time has an eye on rhythms, what comes past the end of a snipped thread, and how various people will adjust and change in their patterns and schedules in reaction to that difference. A flap of a butterfly's wing can lead to a change in an era, and Time keeps an eye out, to manage that.

When not working with Incarnations, Monique will do her own business with Time. On the rare occasion, every few years, someone will go and practice something and muck with time itself, altering history, but mostly it's about keeping track and adjusting the numbers on how fast the days seem to go by and how everything fits together in the moment-by-moment sense. Just as often, she helps other Incarnations keep numbers balanced, with micro-adjustments across the board.

In the guise of Time herself, outside of those duties and contributions, she'll use the opportunity afforded her to adjust things in a way that comes from her, from Monique Pope, and she spends of herself to do it. At least in her area where she manages Time, more people find time away from homework to be with dying parents. More teenagers find they have the extra few minutes in their detours to go see a boyfriend or girlfriend to buy a condom, averting a life change. Some find their commutes in a busy work week faster than expected, and catch a child's recital they would've missed, or find the time to throw the ball with their kid and talk about something important. All of these things ripple out and have consequences, time not a line but waves that rise and fall, sometimes tranquil, sometimes fleeting, sometimes violent.

Standout among those things she does and gives to people, are moments. She puts her emphasis on that in particular, spending what she's earned doing her job to give them out where she sees fit, so people might have a moment of quiet or a moment away from the hustle and bustle of it all before they die, instead of after. - Wildbow on Reddit

[16] “He isn’t human,” I thought aloud, interrupting the conversation between husband and wife. “He follows a set of rules. There are things he can do, but there are an awful lot of things he can’t.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “But any Incarnation will tap the ranks of humanity for fitting subjects and sacrifices, to give themselves a reservoir to draw from. Pride might be able to perform actions that don’t raise its standing or gain the ability to bow to others in a pinch. If they go too long without sacrifices, they start to become more… I don’t know how to phrase it…”

“Mechanical,” I said. “They become more mechanical.”

“Basically. Parts of the overarching machine of reality.”

“Well,” I said, “That’s a weak point. How often do they need sacrifices?”

“Depends how often they break their own internal rules. Once every thousand years? Once every hundred years? Daily?” - excerpt from Collateral 4.4

[:9-17] 17.0 ^17.1 “And nobody’s about to remove the local Conquest from the picture, to keep that from happening?”

“There are bigger things at play, and an Incarnation isn’t a monster you defeat with a sword or gun. It is an idea given life. You support it and feed it through certain ideas, and you defeat it by taking the strength from that idea. Most often, you accommodate them. But anything powerful enough to become sentient and sapient isn’t something that’s going away anytime soon.” - excerpt from Collateral 4.1

[18] Some agencies contrive to bring these incarnations into being to suit their devices. Is there an agency invested in the apocalypse and Conquest’s part in that? Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking. [...] Such agencies want a narrative, and an Incarnation of Conquest arising from Toronto is a weak narrative at best. If such things come to pass, speculation suggests that another, greater Conquest would find, best, and absorb all its lesser kin for strength before taking action. - Excerpt from Collateral 4.1

[19] “To be in Conquest’s domain is to be in a constant state of transition. Emotions rise and fall, there is fire and rebellion at first, then we make peace with the state of things. Broken things erode away, and then there is only defeat. But to be the Conqueror is not a simple thing either. They either take on a different role, which my lord cannot do, or they find new territory to seize, people to subjugate. The territory changes as he finds new ground.”

“I didn’t know a demesne could be this… out there. I mean, I read about apartments covered in flesh, but…”

“This isn’t a demesne, as you understand the term,” he said. “Some beings are strong enough to influence their surroundings simply by residing there.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.2

[20] “That may be the case. In any event, we need protection and security while we call her out and bind her. She’s rooted to a huge power source, and that, to my understanding, makes her rough to deal with.”

“If her origin is Incarnation related,” Alexander said, “she’s going to have power like that. Incarnation related others tend to have something inevitable about them.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z

[21] “The Doom would come back stronger each time. Incarnations and things stemming from them, like omens and the doom, they lean heavily into the inevitable, or the illusion of the inevitable,” Matthew said. “It’s in their makeup.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.5

[22] “He’s an incarnation,” Rose said. “A being tied to the intrinsic workings of the world, at least on an abstract level. They have no technical beginning or end. They just are. What we see is kind of a crystallization of that essence. Some jackass decided to invoke a force and absorb the force in question into themselves and fucked up, they gave themselves over to the force for some reason or another, or a big event helped it come into being. Now it’s autonomous. You can weaken it, but you can’t really kill it. He’s… major enough to count, I think.” - Excerpt from Subordination 6.1

[23] “And the host?” I asked. “I learned my lesson last night. Fuck of a lot easier to deal with something that’s human at the core.”

“Conquest was human once,” she said.

“I almost forgot,” I said.

“Kind of similar, really. Let a mote get carried away, you end up with something that isn’t recognizable as human. Our advantage is if this thing isn’t that far gone, there might be something human at the core.” - Excerpt from Collateral 4.4

[24] “A boy drowned in a dip in the river, when the water level was high enough the flow was pronounced. There was a drop in the water flow, and it formed a tube that trapped him inside, flipping end over end. Enough of a violent and remarkable end to create an echo. Enough left unresolved around him that it encouraged spirits. He became a petitioner spirit, plaguing people by the water with whispered questions.”

“Like a ghost by the side of the road who asks for a ride,” Verona said.

Verona sounded so casual, in the midst of this. Like she didn’t care about where they stood. Avery was unsure if she was a good actor or so focused in on the practice that she’d lost sight of the danger.

“Yes. But he wasn’t mature or coherent enough to ask good questions. If such a spirit learns to ask questions with a design, or to attach a pattern of action to the questioning, the actions can gain strength. Your roadside spirit could gain enough strength to punish the wrong or unwanted answers with a push, putting the victim in the way of incoming traffic. He wasn’t that strong. He whispered nonsense about being caught in the wash. Left to his own devices, he could have become a wraith, a spectre, a malign spirit, or connected to a thing of the Abyss, or enough collective sentiment to become a spot for an incarnation to emerge. I burned him, ending him.” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.5

[25] Incarnations traditionally choose or naturally come across vessels that allow them to refresh themselves. These can be those who are well suited to wearing a mantle of a particular concept, it can be an agent of the Incarnation that works as a kind of underling grim reaper or custodian of time (etc.), and it can be a way of dealing with 'wrinkly' individuals who have, by practice or circumstance, become very difficult to deal with, existing outside of Nature, Time, Death, War, etc. By absorbing the (sometimes unwilling) individual the incarnation can better understand the wrinkle.

There is another means, however, and it is one that has seen exploitation. The Incarnation can be made, often by choosing a representative vessel and preparing them with the tropes, symbols of office, and some process that distills the incarnation in them. This is rarely pleasant, and depending on the approach, can mean scourging and altering the individual to reduce the individuality and make them a better vessel, and/or it can mean creating a state through ritual, surgery, and the efforts of community. Chemicals fed into the body to maintain a sustained primal state, being held on the threshold of death for a prolonged time, etc.

Someone researching these processes is likely to come across references to various *pilaster* sects. These sects, not necessarily related to one another, tend to manifest from the same core ideas and feelings, which is that the commonly recognized major pillars have an obvious absence that they need to fill... commonly faith, almost always the *pilaster sect's* faith, sometimes tradition, and rarely something else such as liberty or a counterpoint to one of the major pillars. The rule of thumb is that the pilaster sects are fanatical and unflinching.

Unfortunately, the rule of thumb is also that they as groups or larger communities will attempt to forge an incarnation, often by choosing someone from the population to 'raise up' onto a pedestal. Wildbow on Discord

[26] Locus Incarnate

The Locus Incarnate is a location that has become a 'well', where power, presence, and the impact of events drive the location into a metaphysical depression, such that power of a certain type and theme gathers within. The 'incarnate' aspect is due to the locus's trend toward pitching heavily toward a theme, which in the modern day is often death, murder, or madness, in residential areas, but could in the past be nature or some such in a place in the wilderness.

The areas take on a particular cast and tone, things gain a certain pronounced nature, and the people who find themselves within will often find it difficult to leave; the depression makes all paths and connections outward an uphill trip. More likely, those connected to victims will be drawn in, following trails or retracing their steps until they arrive at the location, and fall prey to the trap. Can be mistaken for a 'haunted house', but echoes are incidental, not at the root of the place (or if they are at the root, aren't responsible for the design and nature of the space). Successful escape requires finding what ~is~ at the heart and weakening it sufficiently to make the depression less steep. In the most severe cases, when the place is forgotten and nothing within has a connection to the outside world, it often falls to the Abyss, taking the contents with it. - Wildbow by Discord

[27] The Pomme Incarnate is a kernel of Incarnate power, typically manifesting in Earth-adjacent realms, from a 'seed' of some kind of power, be it an item representative of an incarnation, an item in one of the echo-touched realms that has stored sentiment and power (such as a Ghend's treasure), or something left behind by a practitioner. It draws echoes to it and grows in size and power. Typically very powerful, the most notable thing about the Pomme Incarnate is that it doesn't have motive force. It doesn't move, attack, or defend itself. They range from the size of a baseball to the size of a house, but trend smaller, and often have intense appearances, throbbing with power while being framed with echoes. Pommes take centuries to mature to even the smaller forms.

Those who meet the Pomme halfway (taking a bite of the 'apple', inserting one's arm into the aperture, or passing within, as examples) will be confronted with the Incarnation's force majeure, the full weight of the inevitable. The most unworthy are absorbed into the Pomme in a merciful end, the most worthy, should they be willing and able to face the Pomme's power to the end, are granted wisdom, power matching or dwarfing typical embodiments of the Incarnate, and/or the ability to rewrite events, past, present, or future. This isn't an easy task, and many will only pass halfway between the two extremes, often destroying themselves or going mad, but gaining the ability to change events or perform a great act in the process.

Would you be able to reach within and keep hold of the power inside, if you had to experience every childbirth ever to occur in human history, one after another, in what seemed like a million or more years to you but were minutes to others? Would you be able to bear the full weight of every individual dying around the world over the hours you spent in the Pomme's embrace, without tearing yourself free? To have an impossible child? To bring one person back? - Wildbow on Discord

[28] - Wildbow on Discord

[29] "Choir knew already. Could smell ’em coming.”

“You could smell them coming, or they were already there?” Lucy asked.

“Couldn’t say, dearie,” Toadswallow said.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re not a group or anything like that. They’re like a storm or a clog in the sewer. The kids you see? They’re just the raindrops or the bad smell that comes with. The whole thing? Bigger and vaguer.”

“The storm was already there? Gathering? On its way?”
[...]
“We need to check in with the Choir. Figure out what they are, try to interview them.”

“Even if those kids are raindrops from a storm,” Verona added. - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.5

[30] “The bleakness of this place reminds me of the Hungry Choir’s realm,” Avery said.

“If you were to map out the connections between worlds, that one would be a close sibling or child of this one. The Ruins are a place of the eroding abstract. Incarnates and echoes. The Hungry Choir is of that abstract, a living ritual rooted in the Incarnate.”

“Case in point,” Avery said. She pointed.

There was a figure that could have been mistaken for an echo, but it didn’t flicker.

A waif, standing in the rain, watching them.

“The bleakness of this place reminds me of the Hungry Choir’s realm,” Avery said.

“If you were to map out the connections between worlds, that one would be a close sibling or child of this one. The Ruins are a place of the eroding abstract. Incarnates and echoes. The Hungry Choir is of that abstract, a living ritual rooted in the Incarnate.”

“Case in point,” Avery said. She pointed.

There was a figure that could have been mistaken for an echo, but it didn’t flicker.

A waif, standing in the rain, watching them. - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6

[31] That much power that fast has to come from somewhere, and then be given form as a ritual by someone or something. A strong incarnation, a lesser god, a great Goblin. If it had appeared in the last month, I might think it had something to do with the current state of the Carmine Beast. That could be a big enough power source… perhaps. [...] There are things that have that kind of power, like gods and strong incarnations, but I’m not aware of anything that strong that could have any connection to the Choir, and I’ve done some extensive searching. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.2

[32] She was pretty certain that presents and boons like the ones Keller was giving out were traps. That they’d be wonderful and fantastic up until the point that things turned sour. Maybe they became too much of a good thing, maybe there was a rule that had to be followed, with some horrific backlash if it wasn’t. Maybe there was a catch.

Exiled Faerie weren’t allowed to go after innocents, not directly. But, Maggie was fairly certain, they weren’t forbidden from doing something like giving a kid a flute that would summon a sprite to do their chores for them, with the caveat that the sprite would blind them if they ever tried to watch it while it worked.

End result? The kid would be stupid, the sprite would eat the kid’s eyes. People, the kid included, would rationalize it away as an accident, an infection, or just a freak occurrence. Life would go on as normal, and the local Faeries-in-exile got their jollies without breaking the rules. - Excerpt from Signature 8.2

[33] “Call Brie,” Jessica said, pulling something from a tree trunk. It looked like a coin, but it was lumpier.
[...]
“What’s that?” Avery asked, indicating the bit of metal.

“A token. Certain inevitable forces will leave them places. Like an Other closely related to Love leaving behind roses or rose petals, or an Other related to Mania leaving a pitchfork embedded in something.”
[...]
“What’s got you guys spooked?” Avery asked. “Does it have to do with that token? The bit of metal?”

“A group of lesser incarnations,” Jessica said. She reached out, holding the token like she was going to drop it. Avery put her hand out.

The bit of metal, slightly triangular. A squashed bullet, edge sharpened. It was wrapped up in cord.

“My best guess is this is Hunt,” Jessica said.

A bit of glass wrapped in more cord, curved and smooth on one side and broken on the other, like it was from a magnifying glass or marble. There was blood on the pointiest corner, worked into the cracks.

“Inquest or Inquisition.”

And a ring, snipped, the band twisted so it formed a curl, where the snipped ends didn’t meet but crossed instead. There was a heart shaped hole at the center of the band, opposite the mis-aligned ends. The cord was threaded through the hole and around the ring itself.

“Which one is this?”

“I don’t know. But it’s compatible with Hunt and Inquisition, that token represents it. If you let them drop from your hand, they fall into a position that forms a triangle. Don’t actually drop it. I don’t want to waste the time.”

“Okay,” Avery said, holding the tokens in her hand.

“They fall equally distant apart. The triangle shape appears in the tokens, too. They’re a team of three.” - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3

[34] “The Carmine Beast predated us,” the Aurum said. “But not the Alabaster Doe.”

“She was an Animus, a walking intent,” the Alabaster said. “Much as your Dog of War is one.”

“I- I’m not familiar with that.”

“Forces between spirit and incarnation that exist for purpose. Often malign, but not always. Physical. They are defined by the task they accomplish. The Swordbearer animus exists to find the noble and heroic, equip them, and send them on their path. The Dog of War exists to perpetuate the senselessness of war. Muses inspire art.”

“What did she do?”

“Before she was the Carmine Beast, she reminded civilized men who had come here why their ancestors were so afraid of the deep night,” the Alabaster said. “Henhouses emptied, livestock slaughtered. Howling that shook hearts, and fangs that took the lives of people who were in the midst of discovering just how dark a forest can be without the torches, candles and lamps of a nearby city.”

“Was she evil? I know we asked, but- before?”

“She wasn’t good or evil so much as she simply was. Just as she was the Carmine Beast. The role precedes all.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.1

[35] The queen at the center of this particular hive is a black dog. It’s derived from an incarnation of famine or something, took the form of a young girl in the middle of the war in Afghanistan
[...]
“I ask a second time! Black Dog Yalda! Casualty of war and child of Famine! Come!” - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z

[36] Hang Dogs [...] Stem from hate rather than war - Wildbow on Reddit

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