Primeval

Primevals or Primeval Beasts are akin to ancient animals, so ancient that even spirits and gods have failed to understand them.<ref name="PD">Primeval Beasts (WIP) - Pact Dice</ref> Powerful (comparable to gods), dealing with them directly is very dangerous.<ref name="PD" /><ref>You can bind a god, which is technically on a lower tier than an Angel/Demon. You can bind a Primeval, again, on a lesser tier. But gods and primevals, even if bound, are little more than really big, really dangerous batteries to draw on, and they're a danger every time they're tapped. Usually you're just binding them to get them to be good and to restrain their impact on the world.

Making one a familiar (or hosting them, or forming any direct connection to them) is like having sex with a bear. You're not in a position of power and you're liable to get mauled. They don't understand your behavior and you really, really need to understand every last detail of theirs. When it comes to primevals there's just no reality where it's doable. They're a big fucking bear/wolf/bird/bramble, and they're always mad. - comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref> It might be helpful to think of them as gods from before humans came.<ref>Ray: All hands on deck. Let’s do this right. That means bringing Durocher and her pre-human divinities. Talk to Alexander while you’re at it. The school is a resource we maintain for just this reason. We’ll use it. - Out on a Limb bonus - SunnyDay Logs</ref><ref>[Durocher] taps into primeval spirits, things so old they predate human language, or even the pre-human conception of animals having categories. Beasts arguably older and more raw than any gods. No form or boundaries. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref><ref>Divine Others
A loose category, encompassing those Others who come from a higher power, which may or may not be a god. In this category, they may be Karmic Others, related to great spirits, or even be primevals.
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Familiars of Higher Orders
In chapter two we discussed Others who may prey on the connection formed by the Familiar relationship. Others of great power are similar. Should they have a significant enough power source, the differential between Other and practitioner may be the equivalent of a small room underground and below a sizeable lake, with the smallest hole drilled between them. Pressure and the natural movement of water, our analogy for power, ensures that the spray will be violent and inevitable.

At the highest order are those Others who have few peers. God, Great Spirit, Primeval, the heads of Fae courts, and the Architects or Devourers of Creation require great power and the firmest of hands to manage, and one mistake, even a scratch on the skin, may be the opening that collapses the Self under their effective weight - excerpt from Famulus, quoted in Bonus Material: Famulus Text</ref><ref>“Samaniego has talked about things,” Elise said, glancing at her mom. “Beasts from a time before beasts had defined form. Forms fed by the imagination of savage humans.” - Excerpt from False Moves 12.a</ref>

They are large, shape-shifting creatures who hibernate for long periods. Difficult to kill, they are tied to the concept that they are the last survivors and grow more powerful on the rare occasions another like them dies, as well as having mystic weight to their environment and habits due to their extreme age. They are generally hostile to humanity and Practitioners for having overrun the primordial world they knew.<ref name="PD" /> They are immune to any ward they have previously broken, any ward already used on a Primeval anywhere on the same continent, and any language recent enough to be widely spoken. They are not immune to advanced munitions, but cannot be killed by them.<ref name=":0">They can be bound with old words, and they can be contained. Guns and advanced munitions will slow them down, but will never kill them.

Binding and Practice: Containment is the only vehicle available for handling Primevals, and most containment utilizes lost languages, as anything else is too far away from the Primeval to reach them, in the same way a fence made of smoke will not reliably contain a human. Old languages that no longer see any use may be inscribed as part of a ward, often with the last surviving user of that language or an expert in the language being tapped as a resource. Once used, a binding does not typically work for another Primeval in the same continent. Once broken, the same ward will not work for the same Primeval. - PRIMEVAL BEASTS doc</ref>

They exist on the fringes and/or bound within large areas as cryptids, or in the lost realms dealt with by Finder/Chaos Practitioners.<ref name="PD" /> Judges are known to step in to deal with those that threaten civilizations.<ref name=JJ/> They are somewhat vulnerable to bindings using ancient languages<ref name=":0" /> and representations of human history.<ref name=":1" />

They lost their dominant position when Titans, and eventually the "proper"gods, turned up.<ref>“I think primeval beasts only lost their dominant place in this world when gods started to spring up,” Avery said.- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.13</ref>

While they apparently can reproduce through mating and birth, which likely include laying eggs, they are much more likely to fragment into smaller pieces.<ref>The beast of shifting form charged into and through a wall of stone and wood, bowling it over. It flattened three stalls. Whatever wasn’t destroyed in the collapse was crushed when the beast stepped onto the fallen wall, prowling closer.

It howled, shaking stones free of positions sunken into earth where they’d been for a hundred years. More walls fell in the roar. Gilkey had to work to hold his form together.
[...]
The howl had brought other things. Creatures of this nature, beasts from a time before beasts had defined form or scale, they tended to splinter more than they gave birth. Great power was never destroyed outright, it took other forms. And a fragment of claw broken off on the ground, hairs, shed skin, they manifested in smaller versions.

Elephantine birds of shifting form scattering in the sky above.
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The beast would step on the stall. The splinters of the great, ancient pre-beast were descending here and there, picking over stalls and searching for food with serrated beaks. - Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.z</ref>

Durocher, a noted authority on Primevals, once classified them by mass or "E"s (E for elephant).<ref name-"7xii="" e2"="">The seven-E was a shorthand, initially joking, that Durocher had started to take seriously. Elephants. Each E was about six and a half tons of mass. At seven E, a little over forty five tons.

A sliver of primeval with the mass of a bull could kill a lot of groups of practitioner. Primevals sat comfortably at a tier where gods, angels, demons, and the highest spirits dwelt. Things that could be contained, but never truly defeated. - Excerpt from Interlude 7.x II</ref> Even a fraction of an E is a dangerous threat.

Known examples[edit]

Anura Nox, forcibly hosted by George Cull<ref>Sacrifices must be made. Something primeval dwelled within the lake, and it claimed the life of an innocent after a seven year wait, then a five year wait, then three, then one. One week after the last claim, it would bring flood and disease to the area, bringing disaster and claiming hundreds of lives. It continued as a cycle, until a visiting practitioner decided he had to intervene. George Cull took the primeval Anura Nox into him, then bound it tight. Every day is a battle, and in recent months the battles are becoming literal as he is being pursued by a famine-type Dog Tag and her soldiers, who feel a natural affinity for the disease-bringing Primeval. When he has to, he takes on features and uses the Primeval’s weapons to fight them off, with a warty, primeval hide to absorb bullets and a bilious vomit to drive the unkillable soldiers away. Seven years ago, he was able to avert the cycle, weakening the primeval. Now the next deadline is coming up - on that day, if an innocent dies because of him, the primeval will gain ground, and he’ll have five years, not seven, before the next deadline. - Hosts</ref>
Arctic dweller<ref>The Alabaster is often slaughtered, her hide or furs taken to establish a large protected area, like the practitioner school in Montreal, or further securing one dangerous primeval that was bound in the arctic North. - Excerpt from Dash to Pieces 11.8</ref>
Sinful Creature, A Lord of Montréal<ref name="ME">The Sinful Creature has been here for longer than humans. A primeval beast. It ate enough corrupted, twisted reflections of humanity that it can get by. Talk, understand. If you told it of the current situation, it would be eager to clean up the mess. Devour the five [...]Devour you. Me. It knows, I think, but the councils are supposed to manage their areas. It will give you a chance to do it. - Pact Dice: Mile End</ref>
Nemesis of Ted Havens' from Prince Edwards Isle<ref name="JJ">“Like another group of Judges stopping a great primeval attacking the East coast of Canada?” Avery asked, thinking of Ted Havens, the man who’d gone from birth to age thirty a lot of times.

“That is something we do now, that we wouldn’t have done in the more distant past, yes. That was handled by other Judges in another area because it would have caused untold harm and almost certainly made thousands or tens of thousands Aware.” - Excerpt from Dash to Pieces 11.8</ref>
Ms Durocher's many conquests
- A minor example in Norway that ate a goddess<ref name-"7xii="" e1"="" name=":1">“Her. We sank figurines into the muck around the portal. Figures for each of the seven ages of mankind. Others are doing more. But yes, I can call on her. She’s not very big, only a seven-E, but I think she’s very pretty.”
  
  “It’s hard to imagine, the way the others have looked.”
  
  “Oh, it’s not so different from that. No solid form, just everything you’d hope to see in a carrion-eating animal, and then some, twisting through itself in a way that’s never the same from moment to moment. But it’s got an elegance you wouldn’t expect to see in something that devours the dead.”
  
  “It’s that goddess, I bet.” - Excerpt from Interlude 7.x II</ref>
- Hunting Hound<ref>

- Excerpt from Fall Out 14.6</ref>

Spectator<ref>A beast lumbered in from off to the side, head ducking low to pass through the archway from the main concourse. It was canine and feline and lizard and none of those things, and the labels slipped onto and through it in a way that seemed natural. It radiated menace and danger and it moved with a slow, loping kind of grace as it moved behind the group. Below it, more Others came through, including a groom and his bride that were perpetually separated by the beast’s footfalls and by the passage of Lost. Both were intent on getting to the other and couldn’t.
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The shifting beast settled, lying down, and it still towered over everything, framing the back half of the scene. - Excerpt from One After Another 10.1</ref> at Avery and Snowdrop's familiar ritual (speculative)

References[edit]