Radix was at school. A dusty chalkboard of half wiped away notes formed the wall to his front; large windows at his sides showed a dozen or so kids playing ball while on their free period. He recognized his classmates all gathered in their little circles of friends and chatting away about superfluous pleasantries. It was all exactly how Radix remembered school. That was the key, it was how he remembered it, not how he thought it objectively was.

  Radix was not at school. That irritating Cicerone was just trying to get under his skin again conjuring illusions of his past. If there was one solace Radix could find in his forced compatriot Cicerone, is that the one person he liked to tease more than Radix was Lenity.

  Lenity stood at the front of the classroom in a tight fitting outfit that could only be described as an-ill remembered facsimile of a teacher. She wore thin rectangular glasses that rested too low on the bridge of her nose and carried a long wooden ruler for some reason in her free hand. Cicerone had even made an illusion so that her voice came out in that expected monotone drone one would expect from a bored teacher going over the same lecture over and over again.

  “So, the higher order of devadoots have informed me Radix that you are unfamiliar of the aether system correct?”

  Now the reason for why he was in a fake classroom became unnervingly clear to Radix. “Now I have to dream about school too? This is the last time I study before bed.”

  “I’d like to clarify once more Radix that this is not a dream. And I would like it if you could at the very least entertain the idea of this reality for us.” Lenity scolded but her voice didn’t carry any of the emotion to show that she cared one way or another.

  Radix let his head fall onto his desk with a loud thump recalling the past twenty-four hours of his life. “Look lady, I can assure you that entertaining the idea that any of this is real is the LAST thing I will ever do. I don’t think dreams are supposed to last this long and I’m starting to get worried. My current theory was getting hit by that truck wasn’t a part of the dream. That was real and now I’m in a coma.” Radix saw that Lenity was about to retort so he quickly expanded on himself. “I don’t know if you remember, but your Tournament title literally has the word warden in it. So just keep that in mind before you say anything like how I should treat this all as real, because if this is real; then it’s hell. That, and the whole situation is absolutely ridiculous! In a way, I should be thankful, because it makes my coma theory less idiotic in comparison. But do you seriously expect me to believe that a bunch of morons who think some high-school kid can kill god are also the same people with the power to summon someone from across space and time?”

  Radix was expecting Lenity to mouth off some kind of devadoot patriotic propaganda like she always did but was surprised to hear Cicerone actually answer. “You say it’s unbelievable, but that’s just because you still think they actually expect you to succeed.”

  Radix opened his mouth ready to retort about the stupidity of the situation when what Cicerone said finally clicked in. “Wait! I’m not some thinly veiled sacrifice right!?... I hate Occam’s razor.” Radix drooped further into his seat falling into a depression. He tried to convince himself, Cicerone was just messing with him, that’s what Cicerone always done. Just a bad joke, he was in a coma, definitely a coma. But the thought stuck.

  Lenity on the underhand was just happy that she could finally get on with her lesson. “Our superiors told me you know absolutely nothing on the system so I will start with the very basics. Aether is the ever present cosmic medium, just like how sound needs air to travel, so too does light, gravity, anything really. Nothing can move in a vacuum. Aether is the medium which envelops the entire universe for which these forces may travel. Aether is the most fundamental entity of reality and it is everywhere, in you, in me, in air, in space. As beings made of aether, we can, with practice, flex this part of ourselves, or at least parts of this part of ourselves.”

  Lenity eyed Radix scanning for his understanding but saw that clearly, he wasn’t really getting it. “Let me clarify. Everything is made of aether and aether itself is comprised of many constituent parts. This is the simplified aether model.”

  With a wave of her hand Cicerone begrudgingly conjured an image of a square comprised of four triangles that met at the center. About two thirds the way up the triangle was a horizontal line that bisected the image creating a smaller triangle near the center of the square.

  “Beginning from the top triangle and rotating clockwise these sections are called earth, cold, soul, heat.”

aether-simple [https://i.ibb.co/tHzvKHQ/aether-simple.png]

  “What about the triangle in the middle?” Radix asked as he realized there was no point fighting against these beings, as ironic as that was.

  “That is magic.” Radix’s eyes glowed at the word magic. He had guessed that magic would be a thing in this world but to hear it actually said was still a surreal situation.

  “We will discuss magic in more detail later. For now, the square. The square can be read from top to bottom as complete tangibility to complete intangibility, and from left to right as complete creation to complete destruction. The four primary triangles that make up this square are known as the four fundamental forces of the universe: The most tangible force earth, the most destructive force cold, the most intangible force soul, the most creative force heat.”

  “Everything you see in the world around you is comprised of all four of these forces. What defines one entity as different from another, a rock different from a blade of grass, different from a river, different from a human, is the ratio and amounts in which you find these forces within the entities.”

  “Now this horizontal line you see roughly two thirds the way up the square is called the division of loka…” Lenity turned her head back towards Radix to see his completely lost expression. “Do you know what loka are Radix?”

  “No idea.” He deadpanned.

  Lenity let out a sigh and with a wave of her hand Cicerone moved the illusion of the simplified aether model away and started drawing on the board with a floating piece of chalk. Something which Radix noted was entirely unnecessary since both the chalk and board were illusory.

  “A loka is a dimension of existence. In the most rigorous definition, a loka is a set of unique mathematical dimensions that together form a productive property. A loka of n dimensions is said to be an nth degree loka.” She turned back to Radix again. “Do you know what a productive property is Radix?”

  Radix shrugged. “Something that does work?”

  Lenity took that as a no. “A productive property is defined as a mathematical value or values of real consequence.

  For example: 26 is not a productive property, 26 sheep is a productive property.

  Another example: (2,4,7) is not a productive property, A box whose dimensions are (2,4,7) in centimeters is a productive property.

  I’ll just go ahead and assume you also don’t know what a mathematical dimension is and explain.”

  Radix quickly interrupted getting caught up in the excitement. “Ooh ooh I know that one! A mathematical dimension is the minimal number of coordinates required to specify a point. Like how a point is usually thought of as a 1-dimensional (1D) line and therefore can under certain circumstances define a dimension. Or how a line is usually thought of as being comprised of two points (1D lines). This can be said as being 2 dimensional. So if this line was describing something real or ‘productive’, would that mean that the line was a second degree loka?”

  “Very good Radix. So they do teach your people things where you’re from.” Radix harumphed at Lenity’s condescending statement and simultaneously bawcked at how a group of people non-ironically declaring the world works because of magic were saying he was uneducated.

  Lenity continued. “In terms of the aether model there are two defined loka. The physical loka and Logoic loka.”

  The physical loka is a third degree loka. This loka is said to encompass all of physicality, which is to say space and tangibility. This loka is the easiest to comprehend since it can be visually identified. A human is positioned in the physical loka taking up all three of its dimensions: length, height, width.”

  “The logoic loka is a loka of u+4 degrees. The u in u+4 is a stand in for an unknown value since it is not actually known how many dimensions make up the loka. But we know it must be at least 4; of those 4, only 2 are actually explicitly understood, and even then not in much depth. The two known dimensions of the logoic loka are time and monad. Time is simple to understand as it can loosely be defined as the interval of states of the physical loka. Following the same logic as time, monad can be loosely defined as the interval of states of entities (more colloquially known as souls) within a loka.

  For an example of time let us ponder over a man that stands on one end of a room. The man walks and is now on the other side of the room. The interval between his first state (standing on one end of the room) to his next state (standing on the other end of the room) can be said as travelling through the dimension of time.

  For an example of monad let us imagine a child who enjoys sweet chocolate. The child grows up and his tastes change so as a man he no longer enjoys chocolate. The interval between his first state (liking chocolate) to his next state (not liking chocolate) can be said as travelling through the dimension of monad.

  Now, as I’m sure you can already see, these definitions for the dimension of time and monad are by no means rigorous as the examples already show. Just like in the first example, the man did not have to move across the room to traverse through the dimension of time. Even if all of the values of the physical loka remain unchanged, there can still be said to be an interval of physical loka by the changing of value of the time dimension in the logoic loka. That is to say that though time and monad are often described as intervals of states, the states that they separate do not necessitate being different.

  The two loka can change without there being any change in the other; this is why the five dimensions are separated into two loka. All things in the universe are founded in both loka but they each have a different amount of 'presence' in these loka. A wizard will have more presence in the logoic loka than a normal peasant, and that peasant will have more presence in the logoic loka than a rock. Also to note, a blade of grass will have more presence than a mountain in the physical loka since presence is more tied to influence than individual value; in terms of the physical loka, movement is more representative of presence than size. So a blade of grass has a much larger capacity for movement than a mountain and therefore has a larger presence in the physical loka. In terms of the logoic loka something that can change its soul will have much more presence than something with a large soul.”

  Cicerone made the image of the simplified aether model return to the front of the room and Lenity continued. “So everything above the division of loka is a physical force and everything below is a logoic force. From this you can see that earth is entirely physical, soul is entirely logoic and both heat and cold are mostly logoic with a small physical component. You can also see from this that the logoic component of earth is called magic.

  This is the simplified aether model and is what most citizens with an education understand as an accurate portrayal of the fundamental components of our universe. There are those in the elite wizarding community who have taken to a more detailed version of the aether model known as the expanded aether model which is what I will teach you now.”

  Cicerone expanded on his first conjured image of the aether model dramatically.

Aether-model-words.png [https://i.ibb.co/gtps83v/Aether-model-words.png]

  “Similarly to the simplified model it is read from top to bottom as a gradient from complete tangibility to complete intangibility and from left to right as a gradient of complete creation to complete destruction.

There are three important distinctions in the expanded model from the simplified.

  First, is that the division of loka is no longer a line but a curve that can be defined by the curve that connects the complete creation of incalescent fire and fire to the complete destruction of snow and water through the tangent formed by magic and magma and the tangent formed by magic and ice.

  Second is the drastic changes made to magic. In the simplified model, magic was depicted as completely logoic, but in the expanded model it is shown to actually be mostly physical. The practical reason why the simplified model is so obscenely incorrect is simply because essence is how nearly all wizards and laymen will interact with magic and unless they delve deep into the theory they would never need to think of arcana and so the simplified model just pretends that arcana does not exist. In laymen terms, essence is the elemental component of magic and arcana is the physical component of magic. In this sense, all magic that is 'seen' is arcana; the act of 'casting’ a spell is actually a wizard going through the process of transforming essence into arcana, the wizard will interact with the essence forming it as they please and once they transform it to arcana the spell is considered cast. It is possible for a highly skilled wizard to influence arcana directly, but as of the end of the year 3999 this can only be done under very specific laboratory conditions and through the ritual casting consisting of many dozen individuals.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Third is that the four forces were further divided to describe how they change across the creative and tangible gradient.

  Earth: Earth has been divided into a more creative and destructive half: aer and therra respectively. A slightly misleading way to describe these would be as gases and solids but it would be more accurate to say pure gas and pure solid.

  For example, air is an entity that is almost entirely present in the physical loka and mostly comprised of aer; but air is not equal to aer as air is littered with 'impurities' which are the minor influences of the other components of the aether. If you remember as I said earlier everything in the world around us is comprised of all the fundamental forces; that is what makes them fundamental after all.

  Similarly, therra is not the earth/ground that life walks on. Once again, all entities are comprised of all components of the aether, individuality of entities is defined by how much of each component makes them up.

Moving on to Heat. Heat has been divided to describe the changes that occur as it becomes tangible. Heat is divided into four segments. From the most intangible segment to the most tangible it is heat, incalescent fire, fire, magma.

  To avoid confusion, we will from here on out call the umbrella term 'heat' as 'simplified heat' and the aether component 'heat' will continue to just be called 'heat'.

  There are a few things that tie all four of these components. There is the fact that they are all chiefly creative yes but the more interesting relationship between these components is that they all cause a rotational field of essence when in extreme concentrations. This means that essence begins shifting between the dimensions of the logoic loka when near extreme concentrations of these aether components.

Now let us delve more deeply into each of these four segments of simplified heat.

  Heat can be a little confusing as one of the components that defines simplified heat because it too is called heat, this is because most higher academics would completely reject the simplified model as so simplified that it borders on being outright wrong. These academics would argue that the divisions of simplified heat do not add up to a whole ‘simplified heat’ but rather are each distinct components of the aether, and heat is merely a small segment that is highly intangible and extremely creative. Heat is an extremely abstract component of the aether that can be thought of as the existence of temperature itself.

  Incalescent fire: Very little is known about incalescent fire mainly due to the fact that all found forms of it have been in extreme concentrations, so study is hindered by the rotational essence fields thusly created. It is due to those rotational essence fields that incalescent fire was identified as a part of the aether but other than that nothing is known of it other than the fact that the ancient civilization somehow used it to power some of their technology and that it can be slightly more destructive than heat.

  Fire: Although many academics disagree with giving an umbrella term for all of these components like the simplified model imply it should, the academics that do see a benefit to this idea agree that the umbrella term should then be fire since it is the most common of the four components as well as being very generic and diverse. Fire has both a logoic and physical component and is the most destructive that any of these four aether components get. Fire is also one of two non-magical components of the aether that humans have managed to influence. This was accomplished by the reigning lineage of the sodality of cinder. The sodality of cinder can influence fire in a very similar way that wizards influence magic, which is to say to influence the logoic component and transform it into a physical component in order to 'cast' spells.

  Magma: Magma is a bit of an anomaly among these four aether components since it is almost entirely physical with only a very slight logoic component. It also ruins the trend of these components getting continuously more destructive as they become more tangible since magma is more creative than fire. The other interesting thing, is the tangent it forms with magic at the division of loka. The division of loka is thought of as an asymptote, something that the aether components can infinitely approach but never quite get to, this means that it could never be practically tested but magma is interesting that theoretically there is an infinitely small part of magma that is pure magic. Because magma has both a physical and logoic component it too in theory could be manipulated by a practitioner but this has never been successfully done before as of the year 3999.

Now let us look at Cold:Cold is a lot like heat in the way that the text can be confusing so we will also reword it to simplified cold and cold for the umbrella term and the aether component respectively. Simplified cold just like simplified heat is divided into four components along the tangibility gradient. Those components are cold, water, snow, ice.

  Cold: Cold is highly intangible and very destructive. Cold is very strange among all of the expanded aether components because it alone is less of an existence and more of a denial of existence. Heat can be loosely described as temperature and similarly cold can be loosely described as a lack of temperature. It is an existence which itself is founded in the destruction of existence.

  Water: Water tends to cause the most confusion among students initially learning of the expanded model since it seems to push against what is casually observed. Water is completely logoic even though it can be seen and touched; water is less tangible than fire even though fire cannot be touched in the same 'tangible' way that water can; water is the second non-magical component that humans have managed to influence even though it cannot be made physical nor does it form a tangent with magic. This is mostly due to people not fully understanding what they are observing; water cannot be seen, the color of liquid in rivers and oceans is from physical aer and therra being reflected; water cannot be touched, what is touched are the impurities of other physical aether components very similar to how air and aer are not the same. In the case of everyday water that one drinks and swim in, it is actually mostly arcana and therra that makes up the physical feel of water. It is exactly that extremely high concentration of arcana that are how the sodality of rain managed to influence water. Elemental/aether-component water is very attractive of arcana and so the sodality of rain has discovered a way to manipulate the logoic force of water to collect ambient arcana and easily compress essence to cast their spells. Since water is much more intrinsically tied to magic than fire is, practitioners of manipulating water tend to also be wizards.

  Snow: In theory humans can influence snow similarly to how fire is manipulated but such methods have not been found yet. It is believed that some form of augmentation to a human's blood must be done to grant this boon similarly to how the original family of cinder was transformed by the mythical phoenix.

  Ice: just like magma is another strange outlier within its group. It too, like magma is almost entirely physical and also forms a tangent with magic. Though ice is also strange in the sense that under very specific laboratory conditions it is possibly to magically manipulate ice. How this is done is a little above what this lesson will entail but it has to do with that tangent ice forms with magic, that infinitesimally small point where the aether is both ice, essence, and arcana, both logoic and physical.

Soul: Soul changed from the simplified to expanded model by being divided into two parts, the soul sea and the mind.

  Soul sea: There is a lot of contention around the soul sea, what exactly it is, and how exactly it works. It is thought that nature spirits, some mokoi, and other similar spiritually bound entities can manipulate the soul sea. It is also believed that when someone dies their existence is wrenched in two, their body left to return to pure physicality and the consciousness to return to the soul sea, due to this many call the soul sea the afterlife. Other than this, very little is known about the soul sea since it is completely logoic, cannot be influenced by humans (and the creatures that can manipulate it are less than cooperative with humanity), and unlike incalescent fire it is not intrinsically connected to anything that is more widely understood.

  Mind: The mind is even less understood than the soul sea, this subject has been left more to philosophers and religious leaders since there has been very little in successful science regarding it. All that academics know is that there is something more tangible than the soul sea and is closely related to essence yet is neither. This mysterious anomaly is called the mind.

  Now we have completely gone over the expanded aether model but there are still some points I would like to go over before you ask anything.

  There are some things in the universe that we have still yet to see how it fits with this model. Namely this is mercurial essence and divine power.

  Mercurial essence is an odd thing that is found in thick quantities at ancient ruins and on the other side of the edge of the world. The problem with mercurial essence is that it is extraordinarily toxic to all living things and also contagious. Those that have come in contact with mercurial essence have either died or been transformed in horrific ways.

  Divine power is a very unfortunate thing. I was trying to keep this lesson on the science and avoiding history, but it is here that we reach a roadblock with this method. As you know Radix, you have been summoned here to defeat the white witch also called by many as a godkiller. This is because she killed a devadoot, not just any devadoot but our patriarch. Before this incident we were worshipped as gods and so our abilities were considered divine and above the eyes of science.

  After the death of the devadoot patriarch and subsequent fall of the devadootian church, our divine powers were no longer restricted in being researched. The problem is we have only ever been in this state for about three hundred years now and without their loving worship and adoration, most devadoots see no need to interact with humans at all giving them no samples to experiment with. The only other source of divine power humans could look at for research would be the dragons but that too poses its own set of difficulties.

  Before finishing up this lecture I want to tell you how this aether model may have changed our view on human biology compared to your world.

  I have been informed that the concept of the soul had only ever been a theory in your world, here it is fact. A common misconception however is that the soul is an individual thing, like some loose conceptualization of what makes us us. We of course can form a much more rigorous understanding of the specifics of the soul.

  The soul is not an isolated subject which is why academics prefer instead to call it the soul system. The soul system is just like any other organ system in the body, nervous, digestive, etc. The only difference is that the organs that make up the soul system are completely logoic; because of this, some also call the soul the human’s logoic body. The soul system is comprised of seven organs called the crown or logoic brain, the third eye, the throat or logoic spine, the heart or logoic heart, The solar plexus or logoic solar plexus, the sacral or logoic gut, and the root.

  The crown, throat, solar plexus, and sacral are the simplest organs of the soul system as they each have a physical counterpart. These organs are not wholly new concepts to you as they are simply the logoic component of a greater whole. They each correlate to the brain, spine, solar plexus, and gut respectively.

  The other soul organs however are purely logoic objects and with such do not exist in physicality or location. These organs are the third eye, heart, and root.

The third eye is believed to be the intermediary organ that converts the soul sea component of our souls into a mind component. The third eye is said to be the human mind itself. In addition, the third eye is also known as our inter-organ; an organ that forms another biological system with the third eye of every other human and living being in the world. Together all of these third eyes form a network amongst life creating a cosmic unity of entities. Everyone's third eyes are connected together by what are known as soul strings, a logoic bind that connects seperating entities. As mentioned earlier in this lesson, the logoic loka contains the change of states of entities. For this change to occur, an outside force must be capable of affecting it. This logoic force travels through the souls strings that bind us. The more influencing two entities are to each other, the stronger and larger their soul string.

Do keep in mind though, that there is a soul string connecting every entity to every other entity, it just may be that some of those soul strings are unbelievably small. Another protrusion of the third eye is what is called the string of fate. Every entity is born with a single string of fate, a soul string that is formed from blood. This is a bind to your life's greatest entity. It is an influence so powerfiul that it binds the two entities across time. Some entities with a skilled enough soul sight can gleam fate lines from these strings of fate and perform weak divinations.

Altogether, these third eyes of all things in the universe are just the organs of a single grander organic system bound together by soul strings. This transcendental organ system belongs to some indescribably omnipresent creature of allness that is called Dvandva, the living universe. Our third eyes can be thought of as the veins, or neurons of Dvandva, and we its hearts, livers, wombs, and brains.

  Before speaking about the heart also known as the logoic heart, I want to clarify that though these organs are all a part of the soul they are not entirely subjects of the soul sea. Yes, they are completely logoic but once again they each contain parts of heat, cold, water, incalescent fire etc. in addition to the soul sea. This is very important to keep in mind when talking about the logoic heart as it is almost devoid of a soul sea component, also keep in mind that it is not like the other organs that are the logoic component of a mostly physical organ, it is called the heart as it functions very similar to the physical heart, but it is in no way directly connected. The heart is the human’s magical organ, and it is with this organ that humans can manipulate magic in any way. The organ functions very similarly to how the physical heart pumps blood, the logoic heart pumps essence throughout the body. Though unlike the physical heart it is not an unconscious muscle. The logoic heart is much more similar to a bicep in this regard. A human must cognitively work the muscle and it can be strengthened with practice. How much essence someone can pump with their logoic heart is what we call their essential flux. Simply said it is the flux of essence through the logoic heart.

  As we know, the logoic loka is devoid of location as location itself is defined by the physical loka. We can roughly ‘say’ that these logoic organs are ‘located’ near to the physical components they are tied to through a complex interweaving of multi-loka connections. And yes, they are tied across the loka, if a logoic body was in no way bound to a physical body then wouldn’t that mean they were two different bodies? So, this interconnectedness of your two ‘bodies’ so to say, what is it? How does it work? This is what we call the root. In the most rigorous and theoretically potent description, the root is the rune work that defines yourself. Although you see many wizards cast spells without writing down the rune work with pen and paper this is because they ‘light up’ the shape in their root. In this way, every single spell feasibly castable by a living being is already ‘drawn out’ in their root. This also means that their root is the rune work of that person, in this sense everything with magic is itself a spell being cast. The root is the most important organ for a wizard to understand as it is this organ and it’s non-physical web of rune work that converts essence into arcana. Something also to note is that a wizard can only ‘cast’ a spell if the specific rune shape required exists in their root, this means that there are some spells that some people are literally incapable of casting without writing it down.

  I understand that I just threw the concept of rune work at you at the end there so let me explain it more adeptly for you. Runes are the written language of magic and also the most basic form of magic. In its barest form, a rune is a multidimensional shape that webs the gap between the physical and logoic loka. All of our roots are runes and in a way all of the runes we write down are simply synthetic roots. Looking at it in this lens roots and runes are synonymous terms. There is no such thing as casting a spell without an accompanying rune as it is that rune that brings the logoic essence into physical arcana. The only difference is whether the root is used to ‘draw’ the spell or if a pen and paper ‘rune’ is used. Of course, a rune is just a shape so any material can be used. Regardless of medium used it is the shape that bridges the gap between loka. So long as the shape is formed correctly the bridge is formed correctly. Rune writing is an unimaginably complex field of study, you could harken it to being equivalent to recreating a human by simply writing how every cell functions and interacts with every other cell, and this would literally be the case if you wanted to birth a homunculus, a spell which has yet to be successfully cast by the way. Well unless you count the spell cast by females of the species, but this is a debate for another time. The detail and attention required to successfully write a rune from scratch rather than just ‘finding’ the shape in your root is a ludicrously difficult task. Regardless, it can be done, but definitely not by you with only a month of training.”

  Lenity having finished her lesson let out a sigh of relief. “Now, do you have any questions?”

  Radix raised his hand, and Cicerone helpfully made the illusion of every one of his classmates raise theirs.