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<span class="mu-i">The Animist snaps her fingers and a chittering horde of rats - thirty of the furry things - skitter down the way and she waits for Mock to follow. The shadows flutter. The light warps. Or that could all be the stress and the adrenaline and the sheer exertion of dragging a man through the streets, feeling his blood stain your hands. Did that light just blink and go back?
Animists.
The Whispered Trade.
The Grand and high Icons, and the Theurges that ward and guard them, the High Art of Iconotheurgy. Oh, but softsoul, to get high one must also have the Low. So, the Low Art of Animancy is the push and pull of the Mesh. That is: the intentions and secrets of the whole wide world, treated as a currency. They can put a sliver of your soul inside a knife, for a while, or grant the memories you've never lived. You can sell pain - and Waxworm has that, in abundance - and buy joy (it's a precious commodity) and if you talk to the right people in the right place you can barter your favorite childhood memories for ten more years of youth. Or so the stories goes.
Animists are a secretive lot. The Theurges didn't ban their trade, as such, because the Theurgical Council knew that to speak of certain things invites questions. Their form of censure was so insidiously subtle that after they've gone from our fair city, we still don't know all they changed. They didn't ban Animism. They merely made it a thing unknown, a dead-end, burned a thousand little tomes and had quiet little words with every active practicioner, and spun a web of quiet ignorance around the whole affair. Sent the Rebus Agents, and drowned it all in a sea of paperwork and permits.
No need to censure something people hardly believe exists.
But now there are no Theurgic Council, and the Empyreal Emissaries that tend the faith and the fire have all sworn their oaths to the Senate and the City that they will not try to rule the affairs of state. So now we can speak of all the things we didn't even know we knew and no acolyte will look askance and report us to the Watchers for a quiet corretion.
Our grand city is becoming something else, bit by bit. And you can too: all the memories of other people, bought for all your own experiences, changed and bartered and warped and wrapped.
Even so, Mock, this friend of ours looks down at the thing you've brought to her not-quite Hospital and can't quite decide between appreciation or contrite irritation. There are laws against Animancy, you know. It's why the whole FIELD has a BAD REP sometimes. You start putting memories of lived glory inside things that shouldn't have intentions and they start changing. Moving walls, storms that hunger, wooden mannequins that desire, enormous scorpions of driftwood spun out from the Hunger of hateful men, yeah yeah, look, this thing is bleeding all over my table
--
Abnegation gets the drop on a --
woah
woooah
Voidstar, that ones quick with a knife. Get the flame-spitting hell out of that alley, woah.</span>
