A world​-​challenger, also known as a harbinger or moon​-​demon, is a kind of higher entity, a enervate​-​based lifeform created by a majestic being. They are her children, agents, and extensions of her will.

The core constituent of a world​-​challenger is the god​-​heart, which outwardly resembles a sphere of highly reflective material about a kilometer in diameter. Each has a mass of roughly a hundred billion tons, and houses a fragment of a world​-​challenger’s mind.

Whenever several god​-​hearts are brought close enough together, they lock into a polytope configuration. The ideal polytope configuration is one where every god​-​heart is the vertice of a regular 4​-​solid. The symmetry of regular 4​-​solids allows the lines, planes and spaces of energy stretching between god​-​hearts to resonate. These configurations can undergo a process called platonic procession, which involves a sort of rotation or unwinding of the configuration which generates massive amounts of energy. It provokes a supremely blissful state of mind in a world​-​challenger.

The goal of a world​-​challenger is to help enact the Majestic Will, the life cycle of majestic beings. The first stage of this is the world challenge.

During it, one world​-​challenger is created for each of the six regular polytope configurations, and sent to a world in waves. Thus, each arriving world​-​challenger is much more powerful than the last. In sequence, the polytopes are the 5​-​cell pentatope, 8​-​cell tesseract, 16​-​cell hexadecachoron, 24​-​cell octaplex, 120​-​cell dodecaplex and 600​-​cell tetraplex.

The purpose of a world​-​challenge is provoke a civilization into reaching its maximum potential. This is done by continually presenting the civilization with dangerous problems they must solve to survive.

World​-​challengers are so powerful that, although it is within their power to directly manipulate the world with extreme precision, this is extremely wasteful – like doing chemistry with particle accelerators. To ease the energic burden, world​-​challengers make use of metalymphic interfaces.

Metalymph, also known as the true blood or gods’ ichor, is a substance the world​-​challengers use to repair themselves. If the majestic seed is the embryonic stem cell of the majestic beings, then metalymph is the adult lineages.

Metalymph is used to craft possession interfaces. Just as it’s easier to tell someone to make you a sandwich than to farm the wheat and animals needed to create a sandwich from nothing, it is easier for a world​-​challenger to influence other beings through possession interfaces than to act directly.

The target of a possession interface must be something that can cause trouble to a civilization, and ideally something renewable. For instance, a world challenger may graft possession interfaces onto ravenous wolves, and use these to torment a nearby village.

After forming a possesion interface, the metalymph calcifies, turning from something highly mutable into the minimum viable form that can interface with its world​-​challenger, and replicate itself. To continue the example, the possession interface will modify the wolves so that their pups will also have possession interfaces. But to create this requires enervate, and thus the wolves’ attack patterns will entail devouring any enervate the village has.

The Heartworld Abberation

The cycle as carried out by Majesty Tenebra on the planet containing the heartlands was abberant. The termites devised a forbidden technology, by mistake or by design, which caused the Celestial Conflagration, a catastrophic event that destroyed a significant fraction of the enervate in the solar system, including parts of Majesty Tenebra. Majesty Tenebra is now dormant, undergoing a convalescence process called Existential Re​-​manifestation to recover.

The world​-​challengers, seemingly forewarned, weathered the Conflagration behind material shielding.

The 600​-​cell, manifested but not yet released, was dispatched as a last effort by Majesty Tenebra, even as she was disintegrating under the effects of the Conflagration. The 600​-​cell was sent to the outer reaches of the solar system to hunt down whatever caused the Conflagration.

The 120​-​cell became the effective leader of the remaining terrestrial world challengers, like a regent for Majesty Tenebra.

The 24​-​cell, unlike the other world​-​challengers, was greatly damaged by the Conflagration. At the time, it had been in the middle of a kind of a communion with Majesty Tenebra, and both of them were vulnerable.

The 16​-​cell was a persistent foe of the termites during their assent. The termites had long battled its possessions, and began tracking down, capturing, and experimenting upon its god​-​hearts.

Much of the 8​-​cell had been enslaved by the termites as the final workhorse of their technology.

The 5​-​cell was integrated with the nascent numenculus constructed by the ambrosia weevils. Its god​-​heart were later seized by the Third Dominion to complete the Ambrosia Binding.

World Scars

When a god​-​heart is damaged in a specific way, it loses its ability to coordinate with other god​-​hearts or challengers, control its possessions, and its behaviors becomes chaotic and primitive. It can be liken to cancer in biological systems; a cell whose regulatory systems malfunction, and stops playing by the rules of the body.

The result is a world​-​scar. World scars were caused by exposure to the Conflagration, by termite experimentation, or by extreme damage. Because god​-​hearts are so vast and resillient, after the termites were destroyed none of the remaining sentients had technology capable of damaging a god​-​heart. Thus, most world​-​scars are creating by the rogue machinations of god​-​hearts which are themselves damaged.

World​-​scars ravage in the land in a vague mockery of their original mission, scanvenging for enervate and attacking each other if desparate.

Generally, a world​-​scars is composed of two aspects: a material aspect (the host of its possession interface) and a umbral aspect (magical effects that synergize with the host).

Some world scars (wip):

The ember and the gate:

• material aspect: mishapen fires and motile oil
• umbral aspect: long​-​legged, conjoined orbs that crawl from the flames, made of rho​-​nrv, degenerating with cold

The sparrow and the mirror:

• material aspect: like a bird extended in manner of a centipede. many wings.
• umbral aspect: laid eggs which ‘unhatch’, absorbing matter and altering it.

Moon Vessels

Metalymph creates possession interfaces when exposed to biological matter.

Sentients are crafty. What happens if they deliberately create a possession interface?

The process, refined over millenia, is the First Ritual of Tenebrific Darkness. Due to the high amounts of enervate in metalymph, artificial interfaces are usually induced near or in the soul.

An organism subjected to the First Ritual of Tenebrific Darkness becomes a moon​-​vessel. Part of the Ritual is deliberately compromising the interface in specific ways which cause it to send inaccurate information back its world​-​challenger. This provides a measure of defense against them (World​-​challenger have no instinctive defense against this, because outside of abberant cycles, sentients would never get near a god​-​heart, let alone extract its metalymph. But in heartworld, god​-​hearts are scattered like ancient cadavers.)

The Second Ritual of Tenebrific Darkness was devised by the Moonlight Empire, who first conceived of using moon vessels for war. It involves creating interfaces which are not just passive jammers for god​-​hearts, but actively channel a god​-​heart’s power. The attunement mechanics for this were revealed to researchers by the 120​-​cell.

The Third Ritual is a way of summoning world​-​challengers or world​-​scars. The Fourth Ritual was rumored to be a means of awakening Majesty Tenebra herself.