> WHAT ARE YELMIC ILLUMINATES LIKE?
This is gorgeous. I especially like "breaking the Compromise" as an image for the way the (Pelorian) mystic abnegates / transcends some aspect of the world. A lot more useful than the "counters" and "strikes" of previous models and tied right into what we know happened at Night and Day.
What I also like is that this strain of Pelorian mysticism is grounded in apparently mundane activity and cuts around the entire "ascetic renunciation" bugaboo of the East. You "catch" illumination in Peloria not from being alienated from the world but from being thrust into the dirt, confusion and realpolitik of slum living -- nearly all of which bends aristocratic Yelmic taboo one way or another (wearing pants, eating mushrooms).
You catch illumination by studying the "knots" or riddles of practicing mundane skills. (Maybe in HQ this would turn into keywords.) I always loved the notion that there was exactly one riddle per skill, and the better you were at a skill, the more likely you were to solve the riddle and move closer to illumination. At a certain point maybe gods and skills converge, or skills become new gods, or gods teach lost skills, or something.
Lately I would wonder about historical "Spolite" forms tapping the shadow rune but these would have evolved after the fall of the empire, during the fall at the earliest.
Where does Da(y)zatar come from, to you? His cult seems to have almost successfully vanished as the buserians tidy up, but this seems a natural place where illumination came and went in the sky pantheon.
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