The Great Slumber

Overview

The Great Slumber is the face of the Unformed against wakefulness. It is the unstirred world, the absence of wakefulness.

It comes from before the first spark of awareness, when nothing acted and nothing needed to. It is not sleep as a rest that ends; it is lasting non-action, the state in which "awake" and "alive" are not yet distinct from "asleep" and "still."

It is "Great" because it once covered everything, and "Slumber" because it is the deep, heavy peace of a universe that has not yet chosen to begin. Where it settles, the effort of being starts to seem unnecessary.

Appearance and Manifestation

Holding a shape takes energy it does not have, so it comes as a cessation of motion.

The Visual

• Visuals: Dust hangs in the air and does not fall. Flames stand as unmoving columns; water lies like glass. Things are not frozen; they have forgotten how to move.
• Scale: A room where the clock hands have stopped, or a world held as one motionless tableau.

The Sound

• Sound: Sound slows until a shout is a groan lasting hours and a heartbeat comes once a day.
• The Echo: Deep, slow breathing, as of something inhaling once in a thousand years.

The Feeling

• Touch: The weight of inertia: limbs like lead, thoughts moving through syrup.
• Thought: A plan feels like last night's dream, a purpose like a story heard once. Cause and effect sink into one heavy "Rest."

Nature and Motivation

The Nature of the Unformed

Effort is not hateful to it, only foreign, in the way of all the Unformed.

The Motivation: The Great Lulling

It presses to end the striving: to stop the runner because running is unneeded, the thinker because thinking is tiring, a god because making is a burden. The exhausted call this rest; the Slumber does not call it anything, and settles as weight settles.

Abilities and Powers

The Weight of Inertia

It makes beings and things too heavy to move.

• Effect: A sword too heavy to lift, a thought too heavy to form, a heart too heavy to beat.
• Cost: The victim becomes a statue of flesh and bone, aware of everything and unable to act on any of it.

The Drowse Field

In its field everything slows. Fire burns cold, water flows like honey, raising an arm takes an hour, a conversation a week.

• Transmission: The Drowse settles over minds as heavily as over bodies, as Unformed fields do.
• Its victims: Herds and villages left on their feet, unwakeable, round a field are the Slumbered.

The Dream of the Unwaking

It can sink a mind into a sleep with no dreams in it.

• Effect: The body stays awake; the mind does not think or dream, it simply is.
• Effect: Somewhere inside, the sleeper knows and cannot wake.

The Stillness Tide

At full strength it would let the tension go out of everything at once: out of the drive of the Primes, the motion of the Material Plane, and the Boundary.

The Threat to the Cosmos

It ends the will to act.

• To Ignis Prime: It is the cold that puts out the Crucible.
• To Zephyr Prime: It is the dead calm where the Unbound Gale cannot blow.
• To the Material Plane: Fields go unsown and watches unkept, not from despair but because nobody can find a reason to get up.

The Cascade Failure

On the Boundary it lets the tension go slack (see the cascade failure).

Relationships

With the Primes

The Primes and the Great Slumber share an origin: the raw substrate before anything was stirred. The Slumber is that substrate at rest, the shadow of the Primes' motion, potential that never woke into a distinct principle.

• Ignis Prime: The Slumber is the ash before the fire was lit, the cold before the spark: Ignis's energy at its lowest ebb, near enough to be mistaken for its source.
• Zephyr Prime: The Slumber is the dead air before the wind began to blow, the stillness before the storm. Nothing works more directly against Zephyr's motion.
• Terra Prime: The Slumber is the earth before the mountains were raised.
• Aion Prime: A direct threat, since stilled motion would halt time; see its page.

With the Beyonders

The Beyonders are wary of it; an invasion needs momentum, and the Slumber takes it away.

With the Cast-Outs

A Cast-Out is driven by one obsession, and the Slumber would let even that drive run down (see the overview).

With Other Unformed

The Slumber shares the Echoing Dark's work of undoing, but where the Dark takes the name, the Slumber takes the act. Against the Fractured Mirror it is the other extreme: the Mirror gives a self too many lives to choose between, the Slumber leaves it none worth the effort. The Rootless Tree, the Shifting Sand and the Silent Tide stand at its opposite pole; see their pages.

Encounters and Legends

The City of Sleep

A city sick with exhaustion felt the Slumber's weight as an offer of rest and lay down into it. People stopped moving, buildings stopped being mended, customs stopped being kept. When the Slumber lifted, the city was still there, warm and breathing, every citizen lying where they had stopped.

The Warrior's Rest

On a long march a warrior tired of his sword felt a sweet heaviness in his limbs and let his eyes close. He never lifted the sword again, and the land he guarded went undefended while he stood, aware, in the road.

The Raiders' Sleep

A raiding band found a village round a Slumber field with its doors open, its granary full, and its people upright in the lanes, unwakeable. The raiders went in to plunder. One by one they set their sacks down and stood still among the villagers. When the Slumber lifted, everyone woke slowly together, and the villagers, nearer the edge, woke first. The raiders' swords still hang in their hall.

The Last Breath

Sleepers shaken out of the Drowse speak of a slow breath rising and falling somewhere in it, which some believe is the first breath ever drawn.

Weaknesses and Countermeasures

The Power of Will

It cannot hold someone who keeps choosing to act.

• Strategy: Accept that the effort is real and worth its ache, and do the next thing anyway.

The Power of Motion

A step taken on purpose, a word said with urgency, a choice made and acted on: each one breaks a little of the stillness.

• Strategy: Move. Keep each other moving, and do not let anyone sit down.

The Power of the Primes

The Primes push back with the Resonance of Motion: Ignis Prime in fire and motion, Zephyr Prime in wind and flight, Terra Prime in structure and stability.

Role in the Cosmology

The Great Slumber is the ghost of the unwaking: the reminder that existence is something done, not only something had.