The Five Burdens

The Five Burdens are malformed components of Ūrkléan's Memory, Change, Emotion, Nature and Pressure. They leak from five permanent cracks in his Lodestone body. Mortals do not receive these functions as beneficial gifts; their souls counter the damaged resonance and store its physical cost in flesh.

Mechanism

Each living soul-body pair provides an independent path through which fault output can be opposed and moved into ordinary matter. Larger cracks require larger populations. Memory and Change therefore correspond to the numerous Aelven and Mankin peoples, while the smaller Emotion, Nature and Pressure cracks require fewer Dires, Drywid and Dvergr.

Burden accelerates biological ageing and eventually loosens the soul-body connection. The specific symptoms depend on the current, but every overload shares the deeper problem of declining conscious integration.

Population and war

When a population shrinks, the same output is divided among fewer bodies. Survivors age faster and develop severe current-specific failure. Genocide is consequently a cosmological crisis as well as a demographic one.

Death also deposits already-filtered burden into corpses, soil, water and scavengers. Battlefields both remove active filters and contaminate the passive ground. Crops grown over dense grave sites may carry diluted burden; cannibalism concentrates it directly in the eater.

Historical knowledge

The original purpose of the peoples is forgotten during the Forever War. Modern human science generally treats burden symptoms as unrelated diseases, while religion preserves distorted language of duty, balance and corruption. The Dawn Dominion retains the clearest continuous understanding.