It is impossible to discuss the Coterie without acknowledging its sovereign.
For what is a troupe without its master, a carnival without its ringleader? Sybil the All-Seeing does not call herself Queen or make any attempt to hold territory. She does not broadcast her Blessing, or reveal herself in public, ever. In fact, her prestige is so concealed that her very status itself has transcended that of living humanity and become legend. She is a phantom, a bogeyman, a machiavellian commander who controls all from afar.
Is she truly as powerful as stories claim?
None can know. None, even amongst those who occupy the Coterie’s highest echelons, will admit to having ever been in her direct presence. The contentions that her Blessing is omniscience itself are ridiculed by many of my peers, who decry the mere existence of such an overwhelming power.
And yet.
I, alone, amongst them have had the heavenly fortune to enjoy the divine presence of our august Emperor. If the universe can abide such a Blessing as the Divine Dragon’s, perhaps truly anything is possible.
Does the Troupemaster even exist?
Who can say. Certainly, the Coterie benefits greatly from her mythos. Certainly, the organization demonstrates a truly uncanny prescience. But, is their seeming inability to be stymied, to be foiled at any turn, truly a result of a Godlike Thinker or is it merely a self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps the rumors are just that, and nothing more.
And yet.
Despite its abundant associated prestige and intrigue, the Coterie is a fairly young organization. It gained traction upon the international stage in early 400 AC, during the abominable period of strife, war, and death that was the Bloodletting. This indicates the Coterie to be younger than the Faith, but older than the Devoted, and our own Celestial Empire. Indeed, what few records the Vault of Glass willingly reveals to the public state the exact date of their institution’s genesis to be 433 AC.
And yet.
And yet, I find that I cannot help but…question. The Coterie arrived quietly, subtly, without pomp or circumstance, yet at the same time changed everything almost immediately. To a wounded world, it offered respite.
Perfect respite.
The wilds of nearly every continent were overrun by monsters. In the early 400s, Maws of the World Titan were still novel prospects, scarcely explored, barely understood. As a result, massive Overflow made even short-distance travel between city-states unsafe and turned poorly-defended villages into lush banquet tables for the merciless hordes born of the Labyrinth.
Until the Coterie came, and with them, the Delvers. They plumbed the Maws, culled the hordes, felled monsters by the droves and in their place brought back crystals to the people.
The decades of war and violence had left nations scarred and ruined. Dead fathers and mothers led to disenfranchised sons and daughters, bandit Blessed who formed great mercenary parties that roamed the earth, sacking and pillaging when and where they pleased.
Until the Coterie came, and with them, the Sons of Dainsleif. Noble knights, errant adventurers and do-gooders, led by the indomitable Wergar, fought the raiders at every turn, tracked them back to their lairs and grottoes and slew them to the last.
The damage, though, remained. The world was isolated, divided, a hundred disparate nations leagues apart from one another. Cities were destroyed. Families were split apart. What little knowledge remained, post-Collapse, was lost. Communication was impossible. Food rotted in granaries, unable to make it to those that needed it most. Wares, commodities, and raw resources could not be bought, sold, or traded. The world had ground to a halt.
Until the Coterie came, and with them, the Magnates, the Runemakers, and the Chroniclers. Grimnir’s chosen craftsmen descended upon destroyed cities and dilapidated infrastructure and, from the ashes, began anew. Entropic architecture filled homes and hearths with light. Runic golems plowed fields and mined quarries for materials. Great trains and portals allowed goods to be transported, connecting an isolated world. The Magnates delivered food and luxuries to the needy, and the Chroniclers provided them with education.
An education designed by the Coterie, of course.
The world rejoiced, and the Coterie became legend, even stronger and more beloved than the Faith, a new cornerstone, a blazing beacon of light which heralded the beginning of a New Age in Blessed history.
And yet.
And yet, just where, I wonder, did these people come from?
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Legions of Blessed, conjured from naught but air. Resource reservoirs well-stocked enough to feed nations, runic technology that must have taken decades to develop. Warriors and craftsmen, merchants and architects, adventurers and scholars, and above all, an intelligence network developed enough to keep all of its own secrets.
All because of the Troupemaster.
All roads lead to Sybil. All questions, all theorems, all answers start and end with her. She, more than anyone or anything else, is the Coterie. Which begs the question, how?
How did she do it? How did she know?
There are many powerful Thinkers in the world. All successful organizations, all powerful states and nations, all indomitable parties must employ at least one to survive. I would even, if you will permit me this vanity, consider myself to sit amidst their hallowed ranks.
But, what does it truly mean to be a world-class Thinker?
This question has occupied the minds of, ironically, Thinkers, for centuries. After all, the manifestations of our Blessings are myriad indeed. The mind draws strength from many sources. Perhaps more so than any other manner of Blessing.
Without a doubt, though, one type of Thinker in particular rules the roost. The type that all Blessed, Thinkers or not, have come to fear.
Precogs.
Thinkers with precognitive capabilities are exceptionally rare and near universally hailed as the most potent, and dangerous, of our kind. And not without good reason. The ability to see the future is frightening not just on a practical level, but a philosophical one as well. For a Blessing that predicts alternate futures must necessarily be capable of simulating those within its auguries.
The idea that countless copies of our very selves are, at any and every moment, being created and destroyed by precogs is an unsettling one indeed. What torture, what suffering might alternate versions of ourselves encounter at their hands? Who, or what, gives these Thinkers the right to meddle with our souls? Even more than Immortals, it is precogs who play God.
Is Sybil, then, precognitive?
History suggests it, to say the least. And if so, is there even a way to defeat her? When two precogs fight, the one with higher Attunement typically wins, and Sybil has been alive for at least 300 years. Probably longer. Does this mean she may never be defeated?
As Imperial Warmaster, I am obviously barred from disclosing confidential strategies, and certainly in something as mundane as a historical account, but perhaps I may leave the reader at least with this.
When I was a young man, my father and I would play together.
He was a quiet fellow, mundane, and not particularly strong of arm, but his mind was sharper than any blade. Even now, I wonder sometimes if I have truly become his equal.
We did not spar with weapons, my father and I. We sparred with intellect. We did battle with wisdom, with intuition.
We played Go.
Go is an old game. Something of an ancestral one in my homeland, one of the few antique traditions not lost to the Collapse and the Horror that followed. Perhaps one of the oldest games in all the world, supposedly dating back thousands of years, to long before even Gold Morning.
Go is a strategy game.
Players begin with an empty board, and attempt to capture territory using white or black pieces. Go is a difficult game, difficult to play and difficult to explain how to play. Games take a long time, and thus require both patience and confidence.
There are many locations in which players may place their pieces, but they may only make one move per turn, in an alternating manner. If a player surrounds the opponents pieces with their own, the player may capture them, and all the corresponding territory. In this sense, Go rewards those who are capable of seeing the long term, who are fixated not on the present, but the ever-shifting future, who are willing to lose a battle in order to win the war.
Fertile ground, as I’m sure you can imagine, for precogs.
And yet.
Despite not being a precognitive Thinker, myself, I have yet to lose a game of Go to one of the few that serve our Empire alongside me. Just as, I’ve no doubt, I myself would stand little chance against my father, were he to somehow rise from the grave one final time to play me. Because I, like my father, know the truth.
In Go, as in life, victory is not found at the end.
Precogs are obsessed with the end. It’s all they ever see. It’s all they ever think of, or consider. They while away countless hours, countless years, dreaming of infinite endings. And in doing so, they lose themselves. They miss the forest for the trees.
In Go, victory is not won at the end. Victory is won in the middle. The outcome is decided far before the match concludes. The victor may not even know, even understand the precise move that won or lost them the match.
Occasionally, when I review the games I played with my father in my eidetic mind, desperately searching for the move that defeated me, I am incapable of finding it. And those few times that I do, that I manage to divine the exact decision that ruined my strategy, and ask the man who raised me how he knew to make it, he simply smiles. And he says that it ‘felt right.’
And when considering precogs, I think of this.
When considering the omnipotence of Sybil, or any other Thinker like her, I think of this. They see the end. They see the victory. They see the future as clearly as you or I see the present before us. They may see it a hundred times, or a thousand. They may see millions of futures that all end the same way. And so, they consider victory a foregone conclusion. They lose sight of the path, for, after all, the ending belongs to them.
But victory is not found at the end. Victory is found in the middle.
And all it takes to win, or lose,
Is a single step.
-Excerpt from Carnival: The Shrouded Origins and Meteoric Rise of the Coterie by Goro Hironaka, otherwise known as Tzu the Enlightened, Warmaster of the August Sect of the Celestial Dragon.