The Sartan of Abarrach also discovered this limitation during their research into Necromancy.[12] The limits of the runes they defined as the “Runestate Boundary” in necromantic writings. Other advanced research writings in Patryn magic talk about the “Barrier of Uncertainty,” beyond which runes are too coarse in structure to pass. Both of these terms speak to the same limits written of by the Patryn Klausten: the inability to define any magic beyond the grain of the runes themselves.
Both magicks attempted to come to grips with this Runestate Boundary or Barrier of Uncertainty, and how to pass beyond it in different ways and for different reasons.
Sage Rethis[13] established the laws of Patryn rune magic. While Patryn magic certainly existed before Rethis, his attempts at defining the magic itself became the touchstone for Patryn magical thought for many ages and included the writings of Klausten in their definition. His thoughts shaped Patryn approaches to the barrier from that moment on. His basic laws are:
First Law of Rethis: An object’s name has balance. For a Patryn rune to work—or that of a Sartan, for that matter—the rune structure must be balanced. A pillar whose base is not square with its sides will not stand upright. Nor will that pillar stand if one side is heavier than the other. So it is with rune structures.
The problem came when the “true name” of the object—the name that was fully balanced—extended past the Barrier of Uncertainty, where the rune structure could no longer fully define it. No matter how carefully the rune was constructed, it remained unbalanced because the true name required a balance that had a finer grain of definition than the runes could provide.
Rethis reasoned that if this alone were true, all advanced and intricate magic would be unbalanced and, therefore, could not work. This he knew from experience was just not true. His research at this point was taken as somewhat ridiculous by some fellow Patryns and as bordering on heretical by others: Why did Patryn magic work at all? His research turned in astonishing results and led him to his second and third laws.
Second Law of Rethis: An unbalanced name tends to balance itself. This has also been called the Equilibrium Factor. He found that the Wave of probabilities from which all magic was born was not a static state entity but rather a dynamic force that obeyed laws of its own beyond the Barrier of Uncertainty. The Wave itself—from beyond this barrier—acted to correct for any small imbalances and imperfections of the rune structure itself.
Third Law of Rethis: No rune has infinite balance. In the end, I believe, Rethis gave the equivalent of a shrug in his third law. Essentially he was saying, since no rune has infinite balance and since the Wave will correct for any small imperfections anyway—well, why worry? Make your magicks, trust that the Wave will correct for any small flaws in its balance, and get on with getting out of the Labyrinth.
It was this Third Law of Rethis that attracted the attention and the praise of Patryn researchers and popular thought. From that time on, Patryns explored ways of influencing the Wave in their approaches to the barrier in order to bring the exact probability they wanted into existence.
Forgotten in the thunderous clamor over the third law was the astounding implications of the second law, that the Wave itself may have something to say about the fate of all creation.
In their attempts at Necromancy, the Abarrach Sartan had more success in penetrating their Runestate Boundary than the Patryns had with their Barrier of Uncertainty—although both proved to be the same thing.
The first major insights came from an aging Sartan mage named Delsart Sparanga,[14] who discovered the Delsart Near State, or Delsart Similitude. Delsart said that the “spiritual state of all things is a much finer reflection of the physical state. All things that exist in the physical are also expressed in this spiritual state. Delsart taught that no thing exists in what he terms the coarse physical state except that it also have existence in the spiritual state."[15] This spiritual reflection of all things was thought to exist beyond the Runestate Boundary; thus all things existed in a coarse physical state (accessible by runes) and a spiritual state (beyond runes).[16]
The mensch have had many gods in all their wonderful and varied lands. They have always believed in the spirit state. We—the Sartan and the Patryns—thought such whisperings to be foolish and childlike imaginings. How could we have known that in our ignorance of such things we would cause such misery on an unprecedented scale.
Both Sartan and Patryn had considered the working of the universe to be something like a Geg machine: If you turned the wheelie then the lifter-arm would raise. The universe was absolutely predictable. No matter how often you turned the wheelie, that lifter-arm would raise just the same.
All of this was fine in the coarse state—that crude physical world that we had increasingly come to recognize as the domain of the runes. However, the runes’ power shattered entirely at the Runestate Boundary. Beyond that lay a realm of Chaos where entropic forces were at work. It was truly an “Uncertainty Barrier” in that nothing that happened beyond it could be predicted with any surety.
However, this image of complete chaos was incongruent with Delsart’s teachings of the Near State as a finer reflection of the physical state, as well as with the Second Law of Rethis. If complete chaos reigned beyond the barrier, why then did the spiritual effects of Necromancy work? Further, why did the Omniwave, which by definition existed on both sides of the barrier, act dynamically toward a stable, ordered state when chaos and entropy were the accepted rule beyond the barrier?
The problems of spiritual essence were not confined to the realms of rune magic alone but were also reflected in the lesser magicks of the mensch as well. The Kenkari elf practice of trapping the souls of their ancestors[17] for the enhancement of their own crude magicks touched on this spiritual world beyond. They, too, had no context in which to put their discoveries and, like both the Sartan and the Patryns, covered their ignorance with cobbled-together theory that either masked or excused the truth.
The Sundering, in the light of the knowledge we have gained since that time, was an arrogant folly of unparalleled proportions. In structuring the complex runes to sunder creation into the realms, we had supposed that the magic would be perfect in all its detail. Yet the magic was coarse even in its finest detail when it came to the Uncertainty Barrier. Its magic had no choice but to extend itself beyond that boundary and into the spiritual realms. In doing so, the Wave corrected as best it could to such a catastrophic inclusion.
Part of that correction, I believe, involved the rune structures that gave name to “Death’s Gate.” Imperfect as it was and heavily intrusive into the realms of the finer spiritual structures, the calling of Death’s Gate into reality was more apt than the original designers had supposed.
Death may well be a gate: a spiritual gate through which our finer selves pass on to other realms and other realities. Indeed, I am left to ponder if we truly exist more in that spirit state than in this physical one. Who is to say which is real and which is ephemeral?