Promontories

A ‘promontory’ is what we’ve chosen to call a stable place in the endless primal chaos. Imagine a mountain rising out of the sea of Primal Chaos - that’s why it’s called a promontory. That endless primal chaos is called the Sea of Chance.

Grand Unified Theories

There are many ways to look at the universe, and all of them are right and all of them are wrong. Here are some speculations based on various things learned (both truth and lies) around these views.

One way is to consider a book: two cover and pages in between. One cover is Amber, the other cover is Chaos, and the pages in between are Shadow. People who can travel Shadows can step from one page to another, eventually ending up at one of the covers. The covers are thicker and “realer” than the pages in between.

Another way to consider it, is that it is all either pebbles or clay. Pebbles are real, but the clay is infinately sculptable, bending it to the will and whim of those from the pebbles with the power to shape it. What was and will be depends entirely on the will of the shapers. This tends to lead to a very large ego, and a disregard for the lives and sensibilities of “mere shadow folk” who “never would have existed without the shaper,” in the first place. And if the shaper makes a mistake? Oh well, just walk to the next slate and start again. No real consequenses, since the clay just gets reshaped.

Yet another way is to consider Jell-O: imagine a bowl of jello with fruit added. The jello is the Sea of Chance, the primal Chaos that all the worlds are soaking in. Each piece of fruit is a stable place in the Sea of Chance, which some player characters decided to call a “promontory”. Imagine a mountain rising out of the sea of Primal Chaos - that’s why it’s called a promontory.

There is a story that some dragons tell. The story is that in the beginning, there was only Void, endless and without light. There were Things in the void, but no places.
Tiamat, the first Serpent, lived in this void and knew that her children would starve. She tore herself open with her claws, spilling the first primal chaos into the Deep Spaces and creating the Sea of Chance.
The descendants of Tiamat are dragons who prosper in the world that she made and hunt in the Sea she created with her life. But if you fly in the Void, you can still feel her scream of pain and birth.

Stable places in the Sea of Chance

What makes a stable space in the Sea? One common answer is a kind of plantlike creature dubbed a ‘kraken’ that grows in the Sea of Chance and feed while accumulating ‘stuff’ on top and becoming a stable place. Another answer is a Serpent that has curled up and accumulates material from the Sea of Chance. The difficulty is that occasionally a Serpent move, or a Kraken gets eaten, or a wave of the Sea of Chance washes over everything that is stable. It is known that such waves have happend at least once (and according to some more than once) to the Courts. The top of the birth-pole is acknowledged as the marking of the last wave, and all those “on the platform” are those old-lords who survived the last wave.

Working Forces

Another set of philosophies is to consider opposing and balancing forces and their centers. The focus of a power, like the Pattern of Order, may have an opposing focus located ‘nearby’. The interaction between these powers creates Shadow (saran wrap around two pieces of fruit in our bowl of jello). Or like the Matrix and Faerie. Other foci like the Spiral of Magic don’t have an opposite focus that generates power.

A variant on the last speculation is a thought that there is a deliberate act needed to reach out, between the foci, and deliberately create a connection between them, like stealing the eye of the Serpent, and dragging it to another promontory, and using that connective piece to pull taut the saran wrap, if you would, so only a deliberate act would create shadow between those two poles of power.

A sufficiently large area of Shadow may overlap with other promontories, allowing cross-shadow travel to them. There’s no obvious way on “top” to figure out which area is a promontory, except that these areas are much Realer and that most power foci are located on promontories. And they tend to continue to exist when Shadow go away.

It doesn’t seem required that power foci are on promontories, but foci not located on a promontory may be in trouble if something happens to the Shadow they are in.

At times, a power foci was centered on a promontory that was created by an unwilling Serpent (See also the Black Council’s complaints.)

Still another speculation is that power foci (not necesessarily even primary once) tend to create stability, and order, which means that the areas around them (close shadows) tend to become more real as the place with the foci itself becomes even more real. The greater the power of the focus, the larger the pool of stability around it. That pool of stability didn’t initially stretch all the way from Chaos to Amber, so Oberon had to plant another foci (named Yggdrasil) to bridge the gap between, so Shadow stretched all the way across.

Cracks in the Multiverse

One of the overarching plot arcs in the earlier part of the game were ‘rifts’ between realities. Many of these rifts went to alternate Ambers, similar but different multiverses. The popular theories are:

• Cracks are created by multiple opposing or balancing powers in the same multiverse. If powers can’t naturally find their balance/natural distance, that creates the ‘rifts’ between realities.
• A flight of related dragons all became Serpents, and the similarity between the Serpents created a similarity in the worlds they created.

The evidence for ‘rifts’ is that when the Patterns were undrawn and Shadow was destroyed, many promonotories moved off into the Sea. When the new Pattern was drawn, a new Shadow was created and some promontories were ‘towed’ through the sea to the outside of this new shadow. Thus far, no cross-reality rifts have been reported since this was done.