Guild
Thornmouth is one of the six magimystic guilds. The following is the text which is presented to newly realized Thornmouths:
It tears at you, doesn’t it? The void you cannot fill. The itch in your mind that you can’t scratch. Have you ever felt a single night stretch endlessly on and on, as you lost yourself within the pages of a fascinating book? Did you realize at the time that you were performing magic, a rare, innate incantation called The Endless Night of Learning? You were born with a gift, a light that burns inside you, a fire that feeds on knowledge. The more you learn and seek the truth of this world and worlds beyond, study the ancient deeds and lost accounts, or the great forgotten histories, the more brilliant the Mindflame grows.”
You are a lantern in a diminished world, lifting your light high, pushing back the shadows with the brilliant fire of knowledge.
You are a beacon for the world, to help remember the past, understand the present, and shape what is to come. Perhaps you will be an historian, a scientist, astronomer, scholar, teacher. You might long to unravel The Great Historical Unknown, or perhaps explore the connections and systems that underlie this world and what lies above, below… Beyond. All who carry the flame are welcome to share in our solitude of learning, those who carry within them the burning wish to know all are beckoned forth. Hold aloft the light of the Mindflame.
In time you might learn the magimystics to decipher forgotten languages, unravel ciphered texts, piece together the shattered shards of secret ages. You may incite a book to speak its words to you as you coax another to reveal its subliminal subtexts. You will study great magic and learn more than a common mind could ever hope to hold. Knowledge is the ultimate prize in this existence, your life’s reward to find the truth in everything, and to shine all you know down upon the world.
Motto
“Explorers of then and to come, the reaches beyond, and the source within. We are Thornmouth.”
Magic Affinity
- Time Shifting
- Philosomancy
- Second Mind
- Astral Thinking
- Tome Kindling
- Peering Arts
Known Members
Other Attributes
Thornmouth’s cardinal direction on the chronocompass is southeast, and its primal element is Thought. Its governing time of day is Night.
Guild Bearings
The Bearings of Thornmouth are as follows:
Sun Bearing: Luminast
Affinity: Verelian’s Delve
Guide Description:
The rows of overflowing shelves beneath the crooked spires of the high mountain have become your sanctuary, the cobbled arches of the cavernous halls where you have spent hours poring over volume after borrowed volume comprise your most cherished havens. These places have become so intertwined with your love of all things literary that no matter where in the world you travel in your voracious search for knowledge, you need only open a book and breathe the familiar scent of its pages to immediately feel transported home.
On most days, though, you can still be found in one of countless long and candlelit halls, gathered together with peers to read and think in relative quiet. Quiet that is only occasionally disturbed by a chuckle here, a whisper of a gasp as a story unfolds or a revelation is gleaned. The book you hold is as dear to you as the friends you sit alongside, offering counsel and comfort, opening doorways to worlds and ideas beyond your own and giving you the tools to go out and seek them. As soon as one is finished you are on a quest for another, eagerly exchanging stories and tomes with friends who are equally relentless in your hunger for more.
Few things in this world excite you more than the thought of sharing these ideas between yourselves, transporting you and your loved ones to times and places as of yet unexplored. Here, surrounded by the collections of generations, you have amassed a treasury of your own: beloved stories, cherished words, memories of sharing in your delight with those who appreciate its intricacies as you do. You are a product of all of the narratives you have spent entire days and nights devouring as if there was a hunger within you that only that particular combination of thoughts and ideas could satisfy. That hunger has a name: it is the ever-ravenous Mindflame, and it has shaped the way you think, and act, and are, more so than any school or teacher ever could have done.
You are a Luminast-bearing Thornmouth, born of the sun, destined to carry that eternal Mindflame of imagination throughout the long days and nights of your lifetime. Nurture that fire within you and hold it high, for you are destined to provide a light for all those you meet to read and learn and create by, for as long as your candle burns.
Eclipse Bearing: Lunivox
Affinity: Catalyst of Creation
Guide Description:
It seems as though the echoes of the great minds who have come before you are always around you, a legacy that lingers in the sound of your steps on the flagstones and in the scratching of your pen in an otherwise silent room. You have been drawn here to these peaks like the thinkers of old, enticed by the wealth of stories and histories safeguarded within these walls, magimystic tomes and works of genius preserved for the benefit of future generations of readers, learners, and dreamers. While your guild kin are eager to learn from and be inspired by the ancient thinkers and stories of old, you seek to know what they didn’t, create what they couldn’t, and to question what they never considered.
You find that the words of your intellectual predecessors ignite the Mindflame of your soul with the fervent desire to consume and be consumed, driving you to make your contribution to the silent city of words wherein you now reside. You do not presume to match them in their status, yet you simply cannot help leaving your mark in the margins when the words move you beyond constraint. More often than not, it is as though the spirit of thinkers past moves you directly, moves within you, encouraging you to take liberties with their words that others might deem sacrilegious.
You have only the highest respect for these works, but it is against your nature to take things at face value, which is why you feel impelled to keep asking Why? And What if? You seek to strengthen old ideas through these questions, to reinforce that which you have found so impactful in your own experience. It would be a disservice to let them languish; in the face of obsolescence, your handfuls of line notes and minor constructive edits can do no harm. This impulse to adapt, to update for the modern world, is one of preservation rather than personal gain, for it is done in the hopes of reaching more eyes and touching more hearts as yours have been touched. You and your peers have followed this impulse into the very core of the mountains, for within each of you is a special story to tell. Be it original to your own endeavors or ages old and bound for rediscovery, never doubt that this story belongs to you all the same. Your legacy is whatever you make it to be.
You are a Lunivox-bearing Thornmouth, born of the eclipse, destined for a noble eminence as of yet unknown to all but the brilliant Mindflame that flickers away within your core, just waiting to be released.
Moon Bearing: Umbranor
Affinity: Encyclovation
Guide Description:
If the high mountains had secrets, you would know them all by heart. You have devoted your life to the uncovering of ancient mysteries, to the dissection and preservation of the very core of knowledge, itself. There is little within this corner of the world or beyond that is not known to you or your peers, as you have dived deep into the ancient texts, have pulled apart the foundations of the magimystic word by word, letter by letter. To discover which combinations of sounds and intentions create light, create power, or simply create. The act of creation is no small thing, as the sprawling libraries and archives which you call home can attest. Yet to trace this act from its very beginnings, to seek the trajectory of its evolutions and the patterns of its metamorphoses, that is an undertaking for which only few are equipped.
The ability to look past the content of a work itself, to not get caught up in its dynamic histories and captivating tales but to dig between the lines and underneath the very words themselves to discover the precise timing and origins of their inception – that is the true wonder of your work. You find this keen eye extends into other aspects of your life as well, for you are able to understand the hidden truths in ways no one else can.
The potential and purpose of other things, thoughts, and people become clear to you as words printed upon a page. You are eager to understand both method and motivation, purpose and perspective, to see through the mist of ego and eloquence to the truth that waits beyond. Though your careful eye for detail and fastidious patience will be tested, they too will be strengthened with each day that passes. Your insight into the obscured wonders of life grows with every passage you read, and every sight you set your eyes upon.
You are an excavator; you see the world and its inhabitants as an endless well of information to be unearthed, as each generation buries and builds upon the last. Most would be intimidated by the ceaseless, cyclical nature of what you see, but for you, an Umbranor-bearing Thornmouth, born of the moon. You cherish your work, your power to see what others cannot, as both a pleasure and a privilege.