Cosmere fanfiction in the style of Coppermind entries

[Ripheus23]

One way I'd like to write a fantasy story is by making a bunch of Wikipedia-like articles about objects, events, belief systems, etc. in some setting. Now, maybe if I tried long and hard enough, I could emulate Sanderson's writing style, but I'm not really confident about that on my end, so... But mimicking the Coppermind? "Count me in..."

However, I've never found a good/free Wikipedia-style generator program/app/website. So, the following are not formatted as I would most like. Maybe someday, though.

Outside-the-fourth-wall stuff: the planetary system is considered a backwaters in the cosmere. No Shard has deliberately, massively Invested in any celestial object in the system. There is an opaque possibility that the "Survival" Shard might've been in the system while on the run, but this is not confirmed to have actually happened. A Sleepless would have a cameo, but not to any real effect as I don't have the textual knowledge I'd need to confidently write out a Sleepless plotline. No Dawnshard has ever been here located here. Khriss is not especially interested in the system, though at least one essay has been written, in Silverlight, about it. Hoid is not known and not believed to have been here, at least not for a significant amount of time. There is one shade here, on a continent on the main planet, but it is imprisoned in an Invested silver contraption that is actually vaguely torturing it as the shade is held.

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The Chthornos system is the name given to the planetary system containing the planet called Hiphanad. It comprises three planets, all of which are inhabited, as well as a mineral/ice cloud near the heliopause (called the Halo of Grace and Hell), and three moons, two for Hiphanad and one for one of the other planets, Torbrae. Since the Shattering, the star, Chthornos, has been subject to a tidal disruption event by a gravity well known as the Dark Sanctuary, though the process of the star's inspiral, and the collapse of the entire system, has been held in check for almost 10,000 years by forms of Investiture known as the Shields, the design for which was left behind by Adonalsium's providence.

Shields, the. Adonalsium foresaw that, given its rough proximity to the Dark Sanctuary, the star Chthornos would be pushed into the gravitational field of the Sanctuary upon the Shattering. Ironically, it turned out that the provisions Adonalsium made for this event, in altering the system's Spiritweb, implicitly encoded temporal-gravitational anomalies into the system so that Chthornos experienced the Shattering as a Physical (gravitational) shockwave that drove it into the zone of danger.

For over 700 years after the Shattering, before the Houses of Silver and Gold, the Invested towers that manifest the Shields in outer space, were built and activated on Hiphanad, the survival of the system was upheld by the Sovereigns of the Sun, who bore an artifact directly created by Adonalsium: the Argent Helm, an electrum diadem with an inset composed of a metal known as adamantinium, which was slowly consumed as fuel for the Helm's own Shield until the completion of the Houses.

Underground lakes of adamantinium are the sites of the Houses aboveground. All the Shields are slowly depleting the lakes to maintain the defense against the Sanctuary's pull.

The Shields work by weakening that pull, variously attenuating it or "slowing it down." If a more powerful solution is not eventually found, however, they will run out of fuel and the Chthornos system will collapse into the Sanctuary entirely.

There are seven known Shields and their Houses, one for each known moon and planet, and the one star. An unknown House called the Durance of the Apocalypse is encased in a lake of plasmatic adamantinium somewhere above the star's surface, and has the ability to generate a Shield for the Dark Sanctuary itself, though why such a thing would ever be desirable is even less known than that the place exists at all.

The Dawnshield's House, the Dawntower or Sentinel of the Sun, is divided into sixteen major compartments, each containing a sample of metallic hydrogen. There are also small traces of Honor's godmetal embedded into this House, which like the others is made primarily from literal gold and silver. Whether these traces were drawn to the system by the gravity of the Sanctuary or were converted into this state as of the Shattering is unknown (and ultimately irrelevant). Complementing this, then, is the signature of Preservation's Intent in the sixteenfold hydrogenic compartmentalization of the Dawntower, so that it is a combined echo of Honor and Preservation's signatures that helps reinforce the design left by Adonalsium.

The Starfriend was the Sovereign in command at the time when the Houses were finished.

Hiphanad. The most populous world in the system. It is divided into five continents that taper off as convergent peninsulae near the center of the world map. The continents are Weur, Ertyra, Thoyghrig, Lesser Quixolk, and Greater Quixolk. The central region is known as the Sunrealms because the Sovereigns of the Sun are located there.

Weur has two Houses of the Shields to its name, adjacent to each other in the same city, one for the planet of Torbrae and the other for Torbrae's moon. Ertyra Houses the Shields of Hiphanad itself, and one of its moons. Lesser Quixolk Shields the second moon of Hiphanad, while Greater Quixolk Shields the ocean planet of Xezzel Xza. The Dawnshield, which protects Chthornos, is Housed technically in Thoyghrig, but in the equatorial peninsula, so it is usually politically recognized as a Sunrealm office rather than a Thoyghrigian one at large. The City of the Argent Helm, Eirdais Raimierien, is the place of the Dawntower in the Sunrealms.

Hiphanad is the location where most of the Sanctified grow. These are trees with Invested leaves that can capture microscopic quantities of Shardically-influenced particles as these are pulled towards the gravity well of the Sanctuary while the system moves throughout the cosmere/encompassing galaxy.

Weur's northern empire is a quadrumvirate, consisting of three false Awakeners and the personage, usually a Weurean man, whose eyes and mouth have been falsely Awakened. This personage is known as the Judgment of Glory. The quadrumvir of the Judgment's mouth is known as the Speaker of the Houses (of Torbrae and its moon), the quadrumvirs of the Judgment's eyes are the Silver and Gold Seers. The Judgment can detach their eyes and have them roam the empire like spies, and their mouth speaks words imprinted on the Judgment's mind from a mystical source. The opinions of the Judgment per se must be conveyed through other means than speech.

Torbrae. A planet closest to Chthornos, with a moderately volcanic/geothermally agitated environment. Several thousand years after the Shattering, legends tell that an army from Torbrae found a way to go to Hiphanad and attempt its conquest. However, less than a millennium later, it is believed that the Crucifixion of Torbrae desolated most of the planet and its population when particulates of Hemalurgic charge and Intent, transmuted into wooden stakes carven from the Torbrae Sanctified which had captured the particulates, were used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people on Torbrae during the Hours of Torture, which atrocity so Spiritually warped the planet that most human inhabitants became gravitationally dis-Connected from Torbrae's Shield and were raptured off the planet and into outer space, where they died before their corpses were absorbed by the Sanctuary.

One of the main survivors of the Crucifixion was a dragon, Rexilius, who took on a large number of technically-malatium spikes (though the number of atium particulates involved is orders-of-magnitude smaller than you'd find of oxygen particles in the average drop of water) and continues to this day to administer one of the few remaining cities on Torbrae.

Xezzel Xza. A mostly oceanic world, between Torbrae and Hiphanad. Because it has no moon, it has no normal tidal movements in its waters. It has more or less just one prominent island, where almost all the human inhabitants of the planet reside. There is also a Sleepless on this planet, but it is not known why it is there or what it hopes to achieve.

Xezzel Xza is home to half-cetacean, half-avian creatures known as the h'Selimir or Windwhales.

The Quixolk regions on Hiphanad are culturally individuated by their relations to humans on Xezzel Xza, as there are paths from the two continents, through Shadesmar, to the other planet, so that various kinds of marine life and treasures or resources from Xezzel Xza can be found in the Quixolk regions.

There is also a Shadesmar-path from Xezzel Xza to a "space station" on the perilous threshold of the Dark Sanctuary's overwhelming gravitational forces. The organization in control of the path, and to some extent the station, is known to rumor as the Lost Hand, and to itself as the Dark Gauntlet. There are performing experiments on the edge of the Sanctuary's firewall, trying to generate samples of plasmatic godmetal combinations similar to the malignant entity known as the Dreadshard (which was long ago born when a conflux of microscopic amounts of atium, ulium (for Ambition), raysium, and dominium (for Dominion) at the firewall entered a cohesive plasma-like state akin to the Dor, but fully sapient and filled with rage and fear).

The Azure River, also known as the Occult Crown or Occult Corona, is a relatively thin ring of quasi-metallic dihydrogen oxide circling Xezzel Xza outside its upper atmosphere. It is not usually highly visible, but some can see it at times and there are random, obscure myths and legends surrounding its existence and influence.

The Forsaken Moon. An occulted moonlet in the space between Hiphanad and the inner edge of the Halo. How it is Shielded is as unknown as that the place exists at all, except to the Dreadshard, which tried unsuccessfully to mimic Shardic planetary Investment there, accomplishing the production of only the Fane of Loss, a castle superimposed on both the Physical and Cognitive Realms at the same time, which generates a Shield that guards the Dreadshard itself (which is Spiritually un-Connected to the celestial Shields, so that it would be consumed by the Sanctuary had it not its own Shield system in place). Because of this, the Dreadshard uses some of its exotic, but very limited, power to prevent the Forsaken Moon from falling into the gravity well.

Silver Labyrinth cult, the. A mysterious group whose founders were possessed by the Dreadshard in Weur in the second half of the Dark Antiquity. They were so called because of their belief in a path through Shadesmar known as the Silver Labyrinth, which supposedly allowed for travel to a barely-habitable cluster of asteroids and comets in the Halo, where a weapon or other implement in which the Dreadshard was interested, was said to be found.

Dark Antiquity, the. Period from 0 YAS (After the Shattering) to 6,666 YAS.

Second Antiquity, the. Period from 6,667 YAS to 7,776 YAS.

Provisional timeline:

1. 777 YAS: the raising of the Shields.
2. ~3,500 YAS: the invasion of Hiphanad by an army from Torbrae.
3. ~4,200 YAS: the Crucifixion of Torbrae.
4. ~5,000 YAS: the Descension of the Apocalypse (appearance of the Dreadshard), when the Betrayors of Glory, the Shoahim, took up the mantle of the Dreadblade and attempted the Ruin of Hiphanad (starting with Weur, and an effort to bring down the House of Torbrae's moon there). (The Dreadblade was designed by the Dreadshard in Spiritual mimicry of things like Nightblood and the Honorblades were/would be, but it does not have their kind of power nor was it charged by Physically or even Cognitively similar processes. Its serrated component is made of electrum and has some kind of power to "cut through the fabric of time.")
5. The Betrayals would recur every 700 years until 7,700 YAS, after which it would be 1,400 more years until the last Betrayor set to work on collapsing the Shield of Torbrae itself, which he accomplished (and the Dark Gauntlet would watch Torbrae's destruction by the Sanctuary firewall, from their covert near thereto).
6. ~9,100 YAS: the loss of Torbrae and the final crisis of the Sanctuary. Resolved ultimately at the site of the Durance of the Apocalypse.

The Dreadshard is a small composite of aggressively charged godmetals welded into a plasmatic homeostasis by contact with the Sanctuary firewall. Because the actual number of particles is so small, the entity is barely more than a para-organic nanorobotic manifold, consumed with echoes of the fears had, by the relevant Vessels, for Adonalsium (e.g. whatever Ati feared about Ado, the Dreadshard fears too, without knowing that Ado is dead).

This entity is difficult to "hit" using Physical attacks, because of how (microscopically) small it is. However, it is extremely weak in terms of available inner Investiture, which amounts to the equivalent of only 7 BEUs. It appears in Shadesmar as the embodiment of creatures feared by those who encounter it.

Voidgem, the. As part of its final attempt to collapse the Shields, the Dreadshard possessed a man in the Sunrealms and had him carry a fragment of the Durance of the Apocalypse to the Sovereign of the Sun and the Electrum Court. This fragment was the Voidgem, made of something like "gravitonium," which if placed into the Adamant Inset (where a geode of adamintinium used to reside, dissipated by expenditure in the days of the Starfriend) was claimed by the possessed man such as to result in the permanent salvation of Chthornos and Hiphanad. A major early phase of the final crisis of the Sanctuary was the debate, in the Electrum Court, over agreeing with the Voidgem's bringer and testing his proposal. When the proposal was accepted, the result was a peculiar corruption of the Argent Helm, which started to cause time in the Sunrealms to slow down more and more, towards a point of extreme stasis (in depraved mimicry/mockery of Preservation's indirect role in the functioning of the Dawnshield).

Great Betrayal, the. As of ~9,100 YAS, an empire in Weur's north had entered a sort of magical "cold war" with two others, an Ertyran and a Thoyghrigian one. Weur's capital featured a number of the Sanctified which had harvested particulates of spren Investititure, specifically decayspren, as well as Breath. These allowed the elite soldiers of Weur to either inflict magical decay on their enemies or pseudo-Awaken the skin of people they touched, causing the skin to rip itself off its original body, killing that body, followed by the skin going off to pseudo-Awaken another target's skin, etc. until the channel of Investiture dwindled and no more false Awakenings of skin could be performed in the chain (usually after dozens of deaths in a row). However, despite their ferocity, the imperial Weureans failed to stop the last of the Shoahim from using the Dreadblade to bring down the House of Torbrae's Shield in their own domain, and an aspect of this failure was also their decrepitude in their intercontinental war.

Nameless Angels, the. Bizarre entities straddling the threshold of the Cognitive and Spiritual Realms. They carry the Dreadshard's pseudo-soul to the Spiritual Realm when the Dreadblade is used by the repentant Betrayor to cut through the Dreadshard's Connection to Physical time. Revered if not worshiped by some of the Pillars of Light, who are those who live in or near, and protect and work in, the Houses.

* * *

New desiderata: the Laughing Glory was an unusual Weurean emperor-quadrumvir whose ears were false-Awakened, and capable of emanating sounds that the overlord heard in his imagination/dreams. This was most often a chuckling or outright laughing, and some resonated with it as a cheerful, reassuring noise, whereas others, including those who attempted to assassinate the Laughing Glory, found it unsettling/eerie/menacing in the extreme.

His personal name was Toryan Celisser, and he had interactions of murky character with one of the Shoahim in his time. He is not widely believed to have participated in the Betrayal of that dark antiquity (for it was in those days...) but there is a possibility that he did make a serious, maybe even heavily Invested mistake upon being approached or attacked by the ancient Betrayor. Toryan's Lay is the most popularly known (and interpreted) record of the Celisser empireship, and seems to claim (so some say) that he was caught Laughing about something in some very disturbing context, and evidently for a plainly malicious reason. This is counterbalanced by a depiction of the quadrumvir as performing numerous acts of peculiar valor at the time, with at least neutral and sometimes conscientious motives clearly enough in play.

It is eventually found out that the Dreadshard attempted to outright possess him, as it often did the Shoahim. He almost completely fought off its Cognitive assault but was delicately contaminated by a dim paranoia that haunted him to the end of his days.

There is a decent inn in the central Weurean area of Frrolstos known as Toryan's Hammock. It is named after a unique local legend about the quadrumvir sleeping in a hammock on the site, before he took office at the head of the realm.

Edited January 31, 2025 by Ripheus23