Full Excerpt: Ilvarran Fragments - Origin

The following is a reconstructed translation of the so-called "Ilvarran Fragments"—the oldest known scholarly text concerning the entities now formally referred to as Origin Beasts or Origin Entities.

The original document predates the founding of the UHF by a considerable margin; its authors, by name and creed, remain unknown.

The text survives only in partial recensions, copied and re-copied across the past dozen millennia, and the translation presented here reflects the consensus reconstruction of the Calsoria Institute's Department of Pre-Federation Psychic Studies.

Readers are advised that the Fragments are, in their entirety, conjecture—a synthesis of thousands of years of observation, inference, and secondhand testimony concerning the phenomenon of Psykers.

Only a single passage within them derives from direct account.

It is marked accordingly.

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On the First-Shapers, Whom the Elder Scholars Named the Origin Enities/Beasts

Know first , o reader, that what followeth is not knowledge but the shadow of knowledge; not proof, but the patient gathering of ten thousand testimonies, weighed one against the other across a hundred generations of scholars, until from their agreement a shape emerged.

We who compiled these words have not seen the things whereof we write.

No living soul hath seen them and returned whole.

We write nonetheless, for the alternative is silence, and silence teacheth nothing .

Know second, o reader,  that the Void is not empty.

This the meanest awakened child knoweth.

But know also that the Void is not formless.

Beneath its churning there is law, and beneath its law there is architecture, and at the root of that architecture dwell the First-Shapers.

And lo,  at the root of every Path there dwelleth its First-Shaper.

Unknowable is its countenance, for it weareth a thousand shapes and abideth in none.

Ever-shifting is its form, yet bound is its essence—fettered unto the Path that it wrought with its own being. For the Path is the Entity, and the Entity is the Path, and neither may be sundered from the other, until the ending of all things.

Of their number,  we hold this: That they are singular.

One Beast unto one Path, and one Path unto one Beast, and never hath testimony credibly spoken of two First-Shapers dwelling within a single Path, nor of one Beast that ruled over two.

Where fire is, there is the Shaper of Fire, and it is alone . Where the reading of moments-yet-to-come is, there is the Shaper of that sight, and it is alone .

Each is the sole author of its domain, and each guardeth its authorship with a patience that hath outlasted galaxies.

Approach not the First-Shaper in weakness, for it doth not hate thee, nor love thee—it doth only guard . And that which it guardeth, no thief nor supplicant may take, save that the Path itself should name them worthy.

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On the Origin Paths, and the Nature of All Lesser Paths

And of the Paths,  know this: That which thy Warren holdeth is but shadow and echo.

For every Path that man hath walked, in every Soul that hath ever opened unto the Void, is a lesser rendering—a copy struck from the Origin Path, whence all its kind descendeth.

And within the Origin Path abide the Origin Runes, undiminished and entire, which are the first-written law of that Power. All else is transcription. All else is imitation. The Origin is the core, the foundation, the deep truth and law of the Void itself.

Consider,  o reader, the scribe who copieth  a great work by candlelight.

His hand is mortal; his copy is flawed; and the copy of his copy is flawed further still.

Yet the work surviveth  in its copying, and even the poorest transcription carrieth some  portion of the original's truth .

So it is with the Paths.

When a Psyker delveth into their Warren and claimeth a Path of light, or of far-speaking, or of the body's mending, they claim not the truth itself. They claim a rendering—struck from the Origin as a seal is struck in wax, true in its shape yet lesser in its substance.

And the Voidrunes that the Psyker then carveth into their Soul—those laborious glyphs by which Power is bound and commanded—these too are imitations.

Faithful, perhaps. Serviceable, certainly.

But imitations nonetheless, of the Origin Runes that abide untouched within the Origin Path, perfect and complete and undeniably terrible in truth.

This,  we hold, explaineth much that hath long troubled the scholars.

Why doth one Psyker's flame burn hotter than another's, though their Paths be named alike?

Because their transcriptions differ in fidelity.

Why do the Powers of the greatest Aces seem to touch upon laws their lesser fellows cannot reach?

Because their copies were struck nearer the Origin.

And why, in all the long history of the awakened, hath no Psyker ever exhausted the depths of their own Path, however deep they delved?

Because the Path in their Warren is a rendering of something which hath no bottom.

All of this, we confess plainly, is conjecture.

The agreement of ten thousand testimonies is not proof.

But it is the best lamp we possess against the darkness of that which is not known, and we lift it as high as we dare, that our searching be not wholly blind.

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On the Obtaining of an Origin Path, and the Ways Thereto Rumoured

Here  we tread upon the thinnest ice of all, for of this matter there existeth no confirmed account whatsoever, save one, which we shall relate hereafter in its place.

The testimonies speak—quietly, fearfully, and never twice in the same words—of avenues by which a mortal Soul might come to hold not a rendering, but the Origin itself.

We record them here not as instruction but as inventory, that future scholars may know what hath been claimed, and weigh it.

It is said,  first, of the esoteric rituals: That in the elder days certain circles of the awakened did gather in conjunction, pooling their Gates in configurations now lost, to call upon a First-Shaper directly and petition it for its Path.

Of these circles, no member is recorded to have survived the attempt, and it is unknown whether any petition was ever heard, let alone granted.

It is said,  second, of sacrifice: That the First-Shapers, being the authors of law, respect only what is paid in kind—that a Path of fire might be bought with what fire holdeth dearest, and a Path of sight with sight itself, and so forth in grim proportion.

What manner of payment might purchase an Origin entire , the testimonies do not agree upon, save that all agree it would be beyond what any sane Soul would tender.

It is said,  third, of the sacrosanct offerings: That there existeth a manner of gift which is made not to the Beast but to the Void itself—the surrender of some portion of one's own Warren, freely and irrevocably given, as a tenant might return land unto the landlord in hope of greater tenancy.

This claim we regard as the least credible of the three, and we record it only for completeness.

Let it be written plainly : None of these avenues is confirmed. No ritual hath been verified. No sacrifice hath been witnessed to succeed. No offering hath been answered.

He who readeth these words and conceiveth ambition from them readeth as a fool .

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The Account of the Magnet-Bearer  

Yet one account  we possess that is not  rumour, and upon it this entire text is founded.

In the generation of our grandmothers' grandmothers, there lived a Psyker whose name we do not preserve, by their own dying request.

This Psyker walked the Path of Magnetism, as it was then rendered in their Warren, and was accounted  skilled but not exceptional among their peers.

And it came to pass—by what means they would not say, and we suspect could not say—that this Psyker delved deeper than any before them, and came out from their delving changed . And they testified, before witnesses whose names we do preserve, that the Path within their Warren was no longer the rendering they had claimed in their youth.

It had been replaced, unveiled, exchanged—their own words wavered between these—for something vaster , at whose threshold stood a Beast they would describe only as " the one who wrote magnetism, before there were atoms to obey it. "

This, o reader, is the first known obtaining of an Origin Path in all the history of the awakened.

And it is also the last.

For the Magnet-Bearer could not wield what they had gained.

They testified that the Runes within the Origin Path—the Origin Runes, first of that name, whence our term deriveth—were beyond  the carving of any mortal Soul.

They attempted the carving thrice.

Of the  first attempt , they said only that they had "misread a single stroke, and unwrote a fundamental law of magnetism upon a world I have never visited—where iron now falleth upward, and shall do so until the ending  of that world's days."

Of the  second attempt,  they would not speak at all.

Of the third attempt, there is no testimony, for it was the third attempt that ended them—slowly, across the space of eleven days and eleven nights, during which they delivered unto the gathered scholars the descriptions upon which every passage of this text is built.

They described the Beast. They described the Path. They described the Runes they could not carve—their scale, their depth, their terrible completeness, the way each Rune seemed to contain its own thousand renderings folded within it, as a word containeth every voice that shall ever speak it.

And then they died,  and the Origin Path of Magnetism passed out of mortal keeping, and no Soul hath held an Origin since to this corum’s knowledge.

Everything else  within these Fragments—every claim concerning the singularity of the Beasts, the architecture of the Origins, the avenues of obtaining—is extrapolation from those eleven days and eleven nights of testimony, married unto ten thousand lesser accounts of glimpses, dreams, and delvings half-remembered.

We say again,  as we said at the beginning, for it cannot be said too often: This is not knowledge, but the shadow of knowledge.

Shadows, however, are cast by something.

Of that much, we are certain .

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[Reconstructed translation of the Ilvarran Fragments, consensus edition—Department of Pre-Federation Psychic Studies, Calsoria Institute, PFC 333. The original fragments are held in the Archives of Terra itself. Access to this translation is restricted to personnel holding Runepriest-equivalent classification or above.]