Chalk Ritualism

The final realization of the system and power of The Hands as Chalk. Here we discuss Rituals; an advanced form of chalk-weaving that opens up an all-new realm of possibilities for Chalkstriders.

A ritual or chalk ritual under the Ritualism is simply a means of folding Chalk. Taken further, it is a number of exact steps followed that when done, imparts change via interaction with Chalk. While rituals follow fairly identical rules in their practice and steps in their execution, the requirements within those rules vary vastly, as well as the outcome of every individual ritual. As a discipline, it is vast and complex. As a power, it is unmatched in both potency and versatility.

The core principles every ritual adheres to are the provision of components and the execution of the cast. Beyond that are other principles that outline the types of rituals based on purpose, how rituals are formed, and how to counter them.

Foreword: The Relationship Between Equations & Rituals

Throughout the Samsara planning canon, the words ‘equation’ and ‘ritual’ have been used in various contexts and to mean various things. It is expected, then, that some confusion would arise as to what they actually are and how they relate to each other. Below, I will address that.

Firstly, equations and rituals both do the same thing - fold chalk. The differences in how they do so is where the major difference arises. Equations fold chalk at the ribbon level, and they too exist at the ribbon level. Switchboard equations are much like phenomena; things are subjected to them and change occurs. To use an analogy, they can be viewed as a machine that takes in flat sheets of paper and outputs paper cranes. The Switchboard runs on equations that exist somewhat amorphously throughout it, responsible for the endless computations performed to produce the nature of the Switchboard as we know it.

Rituals are performed by denizens of the Switchboard to fold chalk. As opposed to putting paper in a machine to produce a folded paper crane, a ritual works more like folding it with your own hands, or through some indirect means such as pulling on corners of it using strings. Another important point is that Striders cannot create Equations; they arise naturally through the mechanics outlined under Spontaneous Equations. Rituals can be made by Striders, performed, modified and countered by them, and often rituals are used to and are usually the only way to mitigate, alter or destroy an equation that exists in the Switchboard.

In a sense, an equation is a hyper-compressed ritual. Where an equation simply needs to be fed ribbon chalk and it’s arcane internal engines will do the rest, a ritual seeks to replicate that internal enginery, and doing so is what produces the complexity of the craft outlined below.

The Ritualism

Rituals Schematics

Ritual Schematics or ‘schema’ is a document that outlines the requirements before performing a ritual. They outline the components required, steps that need to be performed, as well as additional information such as means of modifying the ritual, countering it, certain parameters it adheres to in the casting, consequences for failed or mis-casts, and the like.

They serve effectively as instructional manuals for a ritual.

Ritual Components

Casting rituals typically has a material cost of some kind, which are consumed in the casting of the rituals. These materials typically need to be sourced from all over the Switchboard, with the number of components required as well as the rarity of each component dependent on the complexity of the ritual. Required components and often where to source them is outlined in the ritual schema.

Ritual components can be classified into consumables and non-consumables. Very few rituals - unless explicitly designed to around or to require them - make use of non-consumable components, which are typically requiring a certain relic or Tek. A ritual that has non-consumable components required in it’s schema are often designed around that non-consumable component, such as a ritualist designing a ritual that infuses the effect of that ritual in the non-consumable component. In other cases, some non-consumable components serve as facilitators - in that they make the ritual possible, or catalysts - they make the ritual faster or make it function under less than ideal conditions.

The consumable components are what we are most interested in, and they occupy two subgroups;

1. Every ritual requires ‘raw’ chalk in some form (such as latent chalk or a directed supply) as well as ordered or ‘patterned’ chalk that supplies the cast with some information, such as the location where it will effect it’s change.
2. The far more important group of the components that typically need to be sourced from all over the Switchboard, compressed to a singular phrase of ‘flowers, fire, maps and marks.‘

Chalk as a Component

Rituals consume Chalk, both to fold into the final product as well as expended in the actual process. Typically a ritual works off the latent chalk in the vicinity, creating a localized drop that’s swiftly balanced out by more chalk moving to fill the vacuum, keeping the ritual adequately supplied. However, the chalk demand of a ritual scales with complexity, and latent chalk may be unable to provide an adequate supply. Chalk will need providing from an alternate source.

One source is a Strider themselves. A Strider via information affinity can draw chalk from over a wide area and considerably quickly, siphoning it into the ritual. This runs the risk of Overwrite occurring however. A far safer method is providing chalk in some form that is densely packed, such as crystalline chalk, or something that contains considerable information which can be unwoven and consumed as fuel.

Ancillary Components; ‘Flowers, Fire, Maps and Marks’

Perhaps the most important elements of rituals and where they differ the most in their individual schema is in the ancillary components, defined by a litany of unique or nonspecific items that a ritual may demand. They can be seen as the letters that form words and the words that subsequently form sentences, these sentences being the rituals that are casted.

Another way to see rituals is as boards covered in differently shaped holes, and it is the aim of the Ritualist to find the components that fill these holes.

There is an element of arbitrariness to it. Though a ritual’s components do typically have some relation to whatever it is the ritual is designed to do, the grander mechanics at work of what satisfies the engines that drive them is lost to all. An amount of mystery exists around the craft, and while there can be measures of confidence, there can never be certainty.

The ancillary components are divided into groups outlined in the heading, ‘flowers, fire, maps and marks’. We’ll take a look at each.

Flowers

On the meaning of ‘flowers’ as employed in the calcic ritualism.

Arcane Floriculture

The weft-absorbing plants of the Switchboard tend to store and thus manifest the weft they’ve absorbed in their flowering parts, making it fairly easy to tell what plant it is and what they’ve absorbed. Considering that they need to perform this function to survive and thrive, and each is uniquely and varyingly capable of absorbing certain weft, it has resulted in the Switchboard’s species of weft-absorbing plants being greatly distributed across its many biomes, such that just about every blooming one is different from the others in a manner that allows for cataloguing them into a sort of floral alphabet.

Speaking to the strangeness of the calcic ritualism and the esoteric mechanics it contends with, nearly all ritual schema demand various ‘letters’ of this alphabet in their casting, seemingly to form ‘words’ that interact with the imperceptible background ritual logics in specific ways. Flowers seem to be utilized in the chalk and other ritualism in two ways; as letters, and for their ‘aspects’.

‘Aspects’ are a slightly less concrete thing, but the general rule is that some rituals have motifs that map to certain flowers, and they are thus needed for carrying them out. A ritual that involves cold, for example, might need flowers from a plant that grows exclusively in cold locales. In this case, the mapping of motifs is fairly explicit; cold and cold. But a ritual that is meant to say - stop something from moving - might require the same kind of plant. The mapping of arresting motion on to cold is still fairly doable, but it has become somewhat more cumbersome, and it only gets worse from there. A ritual meant to influence a subject’s anger to calm them - such as to tame a beast - might require that same cold biome plant, in this case the motif mapping first requiring the viewing of anger as fire, and the reversal - calm - as ice or cold. Where black and white, thing and reverse-thing mappings like this aren’t present, the entire ordeal becomes offensively more complex, and learning the workings of it all takes ritualists plenty of costly and dangerous trial and error.

Sourcing the flowers is thus a major concern, as they are further modified by other factors. One such factor is that flowers further from the Astrolabe - and thus the center of the Switchboard - are more valuable by virtue of being able to soak up more weft, and thus they allow for increased potency when used in the calcic ritualism. Considering that the further one goes from the Astrolabe, the more dangerous the Dancirah becomes, and the fact that some ritual schema requires a quality of blooms to have exceeded a certain threshold means that ritualists are compelled to face non-trivial danger to practice their craft.

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Light & Fire; Stars

For this section, inspiration was drawn from the fact that actual rituals practiced in reality are usually done by candle light. As such, I sought out the meaning of candles and came to various conclusions; in some cases, birth and simultaneously death, resurrection and holiness. Taken further, it represents light in darkness, literal and metaphorical, vitality of the sun (an interesting one), the fickleness and uncertainty of life and living, as well as the defiance espoused by things that do choose to live and keep living. That candles produce their light by burning themselves, it also symbolizes sacrifice - specifically self-sacrifice - towards an end. Candles lit near death symbolize life beyond it, and a means of marking paths for those who’ve gone to the world beyond to follow.

There are aspects of divinity to fire and light itself. It is imagined our first encounters with fire came from natural phenomena; lightning strikes, volcanoes and lava, the like. Great, terrible things that brought men to their knees in reverence, and led them to conclude that light, fire - such things were from the sky - and that the sky was their home made them worthy of worship and deification.

Fire and light themselves were also thought to represent life, and that all life came from the highest, greatest source of fire and light there was - the sun. Cultures worshipped the sun as they believed its incomparable light flooded the cosmos with life-making fire. In the candle we observe the vitality and dynamism of the sun and life itself, and it was believed that fire and flame brings life-force into the world, with primitive men seeking to keep flames burning even long into the night, seeking to obtain nourishment for their souls.

Fire became a way of connecting human beings, in that it symbolized higher things common to all. These higher things are the source of all energy, all life, all light, nourishing and filling the soul, completing the being.

In candles, I saw stars. Specifically the armillary stars of the Switchboard, from which all chalk flows and sets all engines into motion and puts air into every chest.

What do candles represent in rituals then? My conclusion was that candles represent the Switchboard. The candles and candlelight in a ritual mirror the Switchboard where it takes place, and I pondered the idea that candles themselves would be responsible for directing the proper flow of chalk into the ritual set-up.

Analyzing the structure of a candle yields the wick and the solid fuel that composes it’s structure. In a chalk ritual, fuel would ideally be something sourced in the Switchboard, my conclusion being that candles must be made of the matter from Wellsprings; dug from their grounds, distilled from their water, chipped from their rocks, extracted from their air, to produce the solid cores of material most freshly output from the armillary stars, able to siphon the latent chalk in the environment, burning it as fuel to produce light like the stars they represent, and turning this chalk towards the ritual.

Additionally, a ritual may call for candles made from the matter of a planet instead, for certain rituals relevant to that particular planet. A particularly powerful ritual may call for the actual matter of a armillary star however, a substance prohibitively dangerous to obtain and even posses.

Astro-cartography

A ritual may ask for maps of the Switchboard. It is better to view this particular component as a ‘multiplier’ for a ritual’s potency, as the maps - rather than directly contributing to satisfying some requirement for the ritual - instead serve as a measure of the skill and experience of the ritualist as a Strider.

As maps serve as a currency-adjacent between Striders, they also serve to enhance a ritual by a measure equal to the complexity of the map; it’s detail, the length of the path it outlines and how many places are highlighted on the map, the danger of the path - all seek to demonstrate the skill of the Strider that charted those paths and created the map. This demonstration of skill yields the tangible results of mapped sections of the Switchboard, which can thus be fed to the ritual for additional power.

Additionally, maps also serve as a ‘negative’ multiplier for component costs, doing so by partially or wholly substituting for required components in rituals, meaning Striders with particularly valuable maps can expend far less resources in their casting in addition to increasing their effectiveness.

‘Marks’

This is the widest category of ancillary components as nearly anything can be used here. It encompasses everything else a ritual schema may require, the ‘everything else’ always being related to the ritual in question. Casting a ritual with the intent to ground a ship, for example, may require an actual model ship, or casting a ritual meant to find a person may require a photo of that person. These are ‘marks’.

Marks also follow some rules of their own, in that the potency of a ritual is improved by the ‘closer’ a mark is related to the subject of the ritual. Casting a grounding ritual against a ship, for example, would be fairly effective using a model ship as a mark, but considerably more effective if that model ship resembled the ship that was the target of the ritual. Similarly, tracking a person via a ritual using their photo may be effective to an extent, but greater success can be found in using one of their possessions, such as watch or pair of glasses, and even more effective using a piece of their person, such as hair.

Marks are the subject of individual rituals, and as such vary widely in all manners.

The Casting Process

A ritual is broken up into three distinct stages; the declaration, weavestep, and endstep. Different practitioners and schools of chalk and other ritualism do occasionally employ different names for these steps as they see fit.

Declaration

The cast begins. This stage is outlined in the schema, outlining mainly where the various elements of the ritual must be placed, and the various dimensions of the chalk lines that must be drawn to establish the chalk ‘boundaries’.

Rituals make use of the Weave Mechanics, particularly that of Ritual Geometry at the most elementary levels;

Ritual Geometry is a concept that dictates the way certain equations require a subject of that equation to be ‘bound’ in chalk straits for that equation to function. For example, to start a fire using the Five Straits, you may have to draw a singular, two dimensional circle around the source of fuel. To lockpick a safe using chalk, however, you may have to draw lines all over the the safe that intersect, ‘wrapping’ it. The Ritual Geometry used is reliant on the parameters of the equation. Encasements of chalk lines are called ‘Chalk Boundaries’

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In rituals, components must be placed in locations dictated by various chalk geometry drawn in the surface - or in advanced rituals - in the air. These locations and geometry are dictated by the schema of the ritual. Advanced rituals make use of the more advanced Weave Mechanics, or better put, Linear Dynamism. A ritual may have it’s ‘surface’ existing in three-dimensions, or have it’s chalk boundaries need real-time manipulation, Linear Dynamism facilitates this by allowing Striders to take control of the drawn chalk boundaries and move them as required by the ritual schema.

How do we aid understanding the purpose of placing certain components in certain locations relative to the chalk boundaries? It helps to imagine rituals - quite literally - as they are; a means of folding. If we imagine we have a sheet of paper, and we place dots of color at points all over the paper, when the paper is folded in certain ways, these dots of color will appear in certain places on the final folded paper result. Rituals are similar; we aim to make a folded product and that product is only achieved when certain components are in certain areas. A schema, then, tells us where to place these components on the initial flat ‘sheet’, and how to fold that sheet bearing the components to ‘move’ those components into the position we desire on the final product.

Imagine if there was a means to make a car via origami, and what you need was to first place all the parts in certain locations on a large sheet, and then fold them according to a set of rules. This is the crux of how rituals work.

To go somewhat more in depth, this is where the The Five Straits, come into play, particularly the potential, interface, and computational lines. When the star-analogue candles in the ritual burn the chalk they are supplied, they go into and ‘charge’ the potential line of the drawn chalk boundaries, putting power into the system for the ritual to take place. The interface line communicates with the components it typically envelops, unravelling them into woven chalk ribbon, to be assimilated by the computational line. The computational line of the chalk boundaries is what does the actual ‘folding’ as we know it, and how it does the folding is influenced by further actions taken by the Strider during the ritual process.

Weavestep

The actual ‘casting’ as we know it. Delving back into study, a ritual as we’ve seen them performed feature input from it’s participants, in the form of gestures - such as hand movements or full body performances such as dances, speech - particularly recitation of script from holy texts or significant mantras, using tools/implements on components of the ritual, on other participants or on the self. These are the major means by which a ritual is interacted with by it’s participants.

Taking from this, I decided Switchboard Rituals would feature similar, with a particular insistence on hand gestures and spoken words. Narratively, it accomplishes two things; one is that it plays well into the ‘shape of the Strider’ a guiding philosophy pursued in the making of Samsara. Secondly, in the actually act of writing, they are easy and quick to describe, as well as carry impact through their usage in context, association with certain characters, and repetition throughout the canon.

I also decided that the need for certain gestures would somewhat scale with the complexity of the ritual, as well as be dependent on the schema and nature of the ritual. Bodily gestures may be needed for group rituals performed by multiple Striders making a very large cast. Interaction with the ritual, other participants and the self with implements may also be employed if the ritual specifically demands that implement be used, or that the ritual be directed at a something.

That said, hand gestures and speech - incantations - remain the premier way Striders interact with their rituals.

”What is spoken?”

The incantations spoken in a rituals are ultimately demanded by the schema, but to give examples;

• Static words dictated by the schema and only useful within the context of it.
• The name of the ritual of itself.
• Reiteration of a tenet of some doctrine.
• Retelling of some story/lore of some figure/place/thing in the Switchboard.
• Somewhat random script; words that simply work for nigh incomprehensible reasons.

”What hand gestures?”

The sheer number of permutations of hands and fingers makes any kind of discussion on it a futile effort, as thoroughness is simply unachievable. It is simply too vast, ironically, to be relevant. From a writing perspective, a hand gesture will be chosen and described when necessary, and when not, it will simply happen ‘too fast to be discernable’ by the observing character and thus, not of much importance to the readership.

Inter-step; The ‘Seal’

The ritual ‘Seal’ is a gesture performed by a Strider between the Weavestep and Endstep, serving to close a ritual cast. It is a gesture that marks the end of a ritual cast, and usually upon performance of this gesture is the ritual actually ‘cast’ - as in - deployed into the wider Switchboard to take the effects it’s designed too, or produce the intended result.

While some ritual schema can demand the employment of certain seals, some do not, and instead the caster of the ritual employs one

pNarrat: Handsigns

Chalkweaving is a very physical thing, the practice of weaving chalk being quite literally the weaving of discordant ribbons into more cohesive wholes. Even when play with weft becomes decidedly more abstract - the projection and control of immense quantities of ribbon using only the cognition and control exerted over local space - there is still both a mechanical and aesthetic significance played by the hands in the entire ordeal.

Folding chalk can be likened to the children’s game of cat’s cradle. Chalk ribbon is - quite literally - folded back and forth in a number of ways and patterns to eventually form elementary - and complex, eventually - chalk constructs. Employment of more complicated means of weaving chalk allows for adding equations and the like to the medley of chalk ribbon, granting it enhanced effects. While this does mean that perhaps the most important aspect of chalkweaving is very, very teachable and learnable, it does present a problem in the form of being lengthy, cumbersome and easy to interfere with - you can counteract a lot of elementary chalkweavers by just targeting their hands. Considering that chalkweaving sees extensive application in combat - where speed, accuracy and efficacy are the three metrics by which a methodology is judged - compromising on any one of theses, speed in particular, is generally inadvisable.

Of course, this is firstly an issue of skill; if you are fast at doing the folding needed, then you simply are better than everyone else who can’t. Considering that proficiency can be cultivated by deliberate practice - such as cultivating muscle memory and learning to perform the movements without having to look at the weft between stages - and cheating somewhat (such as modifying one’s own fingers to be unnaturally long and/or flexible) a weaver can still go decently far without employing anything more than what is generally the absolute baseline. However, a ceiling that everyone has attained is just another floor, and breaking free requires a complete change in methods.

Handsigns in the Switchboard are otherwise meaningless somatic gestures given power by their conception and repetition, which are in turn elevated above their mundane function by the ledgerial enginery of the Astrolabe. More simply put, handsigns are possessed of ledgerial clauses which are dictated when they are conceived and reinforced when repeatedly used, and employing them triggers effects that are facilitated by the protocols of the Astrolabe. The effect triggered primarily is causing chalk to spontaneous fold under certain conditions, turning otherwise lengthy and cumbersome games of cat’s cradle into a single moment of somatic expression.

The advantages of this are obvious; complicated feats of chalkweaving can be performed with swift, singular or few gestures rather than repeatedly playing with the hands. In combat, advanced techniques can be deployed much faster than is conventionally possible, giving combatants the edge needed to break free of the floor of chalkweaving proficiency, and tower over others.

Where do handsigns come from? Generally, handsigns are created, and the means of creating them is via a moment where weft collides with weft in a manner that evokes the calculus that synthesized life itself from inert calcic manner, and the manifestation of this is the flashing bolts and flares of burnished gold reminiscent of Astrolabic barristeel; this, is a moment of weftcrash. When chalkweavers trigger the explosion of gold, they gain the temporary ability to weave a ledger into being, and thus elevate a mundane function to all-encompassing law by means of Astrolabic writ. While some choose in the moment to empower an ability and crush the opponent before them, others choose to think more long-term, and use the moment of ledgerial power to write a Switchboard-spanning law; a new handsign. By dictating the handsign and the writ of what it does, it is realized into the Current and thus the canon of the Switchboard as something usable by all its denizens.

Handsigns could be said to carry the Astrolabe’s power with them, and their employment is reminiscent of this; causing chalk to spontaneously fold as one sees fit. Because they are created by specific persons in the Switchboard however, and bestowed with specifically chosen functions, how useful a handsign is outside of its creator’s use case is anyone’s guess. Making maximal use of a handsign that you didn’t create might require structuring a calcic ability around that handsign, employing traditional weaving before or after the handsign to position the weft for commencement or completion by that handsign, or employing multiple handsigns strung together, interspaced by traditional weaving. As a rule, creating handsigns with more broad applicability does conversely mean they’ll be less powerful in every use case, while handsigns made for laser-focused feats of chalkweaving will yield expectedly proportional benefit.

Considering that handsigns are created, it begs the question of who has and can create them. The rule is fairly simple; all handsigns can and have been created by;

• bearers of the Weave Protocol…
• …who have triggered the gold flares implicit to Weftcrash

To give a non-exhaustive list of those who’ve created handsigns as well as categories of persons most likely to have done the same;

• All Nine Skydancers
• Various Old Danseers
• The Amaranth Sultan
• Various Sil’khan Skydancer Apostolics
• Various high-ranking members of the Spyndl Academy
• Denizens of the Switchboard who have become Infamous and have thus taken titles and wield titular powers
• Noteworthy members of the great families
• Powerful chalkweavers just about everywhere, irrespective of origin or alignment, but necessarily in the uppermost echelons of weft proficiency

Depending on the raw calcic proficiency of the subject in question, it is possible to use moments of ledgerial power born from Weftcrash to inscribe the writ for multiple handsigns at a go, additionally facilitated by the fact there is no limit to how many handsigns a denizen of the Switchboard can make. Extensive effort has been made to find and catalogue handsigns, as there is nontrivial power to be gained by knowing as many as possible, but also incentive to conceal them as there is a power imbalance that arises from knowing more than a hypothetical opponent.

Some difficulty with cataloguing handsigns does arrive, however, with regards to the fact it is easy to steal a handsign - you need only look at the hands, after all - but considerably more difficult to actually determine what a handsign does or how it must be positioned to make adequate usage of it. Like ripping any odd piece out of a bit of machinery, it is easy to deduce that it is a component of something mechanical - by virtue of being metal, artificial, deliberately shaped, etc. - but far more difficult to deduce what specifically it does or where it needs to be or what needs to be around it for it to function. The only real recourse is wrenching the answer from the one using it, or using trial and error guided by observation.

As a final note, while handsigns are used primarily for expediting the weaving of chalk, depthstriders also make use of them for their power over the depths. All operating under an imposition, the entirety of the depthstrider collective siphon the gold they evoke from Weftcrash to the Amaranth Sultan, and in turn he uses it to grant power to the handsigns used by depthstriders. With it, they can guide and expedite the function of their black boxes to perform feats of summoning and curvature, particularly with regards to forming spatial barriers and erecting a Hollow.

Endstep

Performing the Seal typically ends the ritual, and the Ritualist can move to the Endstep. This usually involves cleanup; recovering non-consumables leftover consumables not wholly consumed, and drawing left-over chalk towards them if they choose, otherwise it dissipates into the environment as latent chalk.

Often the nature of the Endstep depends on the schema and nature of the ritual. A ritual could work to summon something that a Strider can control, in which case the geometry and components responsible for the summoning will resolve, leaving behind some form of mechanism the Strider can use to control the summoned entity. Some rituals may need channeling, in that once the Seal is performed, they must be continually supplied with chalk and possibly consumable components. A ritual could also be chaotic and unstable, in which the Endstep is spent maintaining stability and control over it.

A true ‘end’ of the ritual is achieved by performing the Seal again, this time with the intent to dismiss. This unravels all active weaving in the cast, causing the cast to end.

Types of Rituals

Rituals are naturally varied immensely as what can be done with a ritual is theoretically without limit. Worth mentioning again that a ritual is merely a means of folding chalk; if a ritualist can envision a folded chalk result, they can concoct a folding process to reach it. You could argue then that there are as many rituals as is the vastness the creativity of the Strider.

Classifying rituals then, is best done by what they aim to do. That gives us, fundamentally;

• Formation Rituals
• Combative Rituals
• Utility Rituals

Formative Rituals

Formative rituals can also be called ‘crafting rituals’. These rituals aim to combine chalk and components together according to a schematic to form or engineer some kind of object. Components are provided according to the schema, folded and assembled accordingly, with finalizing touches put in place to create the final result.

This is the means by which artificial relics are created. These relics aren’t always weapons, and can be all manners of devices, trinkets and tools that are granted all manners of powers during the ritual forging process. Schema for these kinds of rituals are widely circulated, and it is common practice to modify and improve them before casting and realizing them into being.

Functionally, the marks in these kind of rituals are usually mundane components. If for example, I was trying to make a relic grappling hook, the ritual would almost certainly demand an actual grappling hook, or parts of one such as a motor, strong rope and hooked metal.

Combative Rituals

These are rituals used to fight. A relic is a Strider’s weapon, their Teks their unique abilities; combative rituals are the many tricks in their back pockets and aces up sleeves used to widen gaps, equalize playing fields and secure considerable advantage over an opponent.

These rituals typically only need chalk supply and the flower ancillary components to perform, and are supercharged by anything more that is added.

Candles require an amount of stability to their deployment, and maps are a fairly valuable resource, such that using multiple in multiple instances of the ritual in the fight runs up the economic cost of the engagement. Typically, asides from flowers, only marks are used in the casting of combat rituals. A consequence of this is that combat rituals are usually immensely quick to declare, weave and cast - exactly what is needed in Strider Combat.

Combat rituals are a means to basically craft additional power, simulating Teks in behavior but often far exceeding them in raw power and versatility. Most combative rituals are the creations of the Striders that wield them, seeking to augment the ‘fighting style’ created by the interplay of their Relics, Teks and additional powers. A Strider’s rituals are typically their most powerful weapons, and are often what earn a Strider notoriety in the Switchboard.

Further Notes: Quikasting

Spynjacks under Switchboard Technology is mandatory reading for this section.

Combat rituals are necessarily cast faster than most other rituals as that is a requirement for effectiveness in combat. The means by which they do this, however, is through the practice of ‘quikasting’, a variation of regular ritual casting that works via consolidation of the casting process and the usage of simpler ritual schema, producing both a library of faster-cast rituals and a discipline around their usage.

At the core of quikasting is the spynjack, a complex, storied apparatus engineered for the casting of quikasts in the midst of combat. They exist to solve the problem of using conventional rituals in combat - that being the vulnerability that comes from having to be stationary for long periods of time to both prepare and execute a ritual cast. Spynjacks allow for mobile ritual casting, thus eliminating this flaw in their usage.

Quis - rituals designed for quikasting - round out a Strider’s arsenal, as they allow for augmenting existing abilities with a wide array of auxiliary functions at the cost of consumable components. The library of quikasts is far more vast and deep that what any subject could accomplish even with the most pliable of teks, and thus quis are of use to just about every actor in the Switchboard who hopes to survive and fight in the Switchboard. Better-outfitted spynjacks in the hands of skilled practitioners of the craft allow for quis to be used to noteworthy effect.

Most important however, remains speed. A qui that can’t feasibly be deployed in combat has failed at the design level. Qui ritual schema are typically forks of baseline ritual schema that are stripped down of just enough of their casting intricacies without removing too much of their efficacy, such that they can be cast faster and cheaper by spynjacks

Utility Rituals

A sort of odd-sock drawer for rituals, which are in this category because they don’t create anything, or explicitly serve as weapons. These rituals are the various rituals a Strider encounters to do all manners of things that much like a multitool or swiss-army knife, solve many small but monumental problems in ways that simply cannot be done by anything else.

Most problems in the Switchboard have two solutions: their actual solution and the ritual that was made to solve it by someone who didn’t have the actual solution. They can serve as shortcuts, underhanded methods, quick fixes, duct tape and WD-40, a vast toolbox of things - that is rituals. Utility rituals solve problems; there’s little more to it.

Further Notes: Property Weave

The Property Weaves heading under Calcodynamics is recommended reading for this section.

As such, nearly all property weave that exists must be extracted from things that possess it. Unravelling pattern in the Switchboard with a fair bit of delicacy and precision can yield property weave proportional to the amount present in the pattern; there is more hardness weave to be found in steel than rock, and in rock than wood. Extraction and utilization of property weave is thus done primarily through the chalk ritualism. This is of course subject to a number of factors ranging from how easily an object in the Switchboard can have some property extracted, to the ritualist’s own proficiency in the Weave Protocol and the calcic ritualism.

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Property weave combined with the chalk ritualism is perhaps the most concrete example of calcic chemistry practiced in the verse, as the various kind of property weaves one can harvest from the various patterns in the Switchboard can be utilized in rituals to bestow their properties on other patterns. Done rightly and delicately, additional properties can be conferred upon patterns as one chooses, a very effective means of realizing various metamaterials that combine the benefits of their existing nature plus additional modifications to serve various end.

Certain quikasts and even elementary weavings can make use of property weave as well, conferring additional… properties on the various quick-use weft implements a weaver might make.

Ritual Formation

Creating rituals is complex.

It begins first with the fact the grander logics they adhere too are obscure. Flowers in a plate, candles in a formation, a burning map, an assortment of randomness, linked together by chalk, and the result is something wholly separated from all of those things - and yet not - as they are all chalk.

Going back to an analogy used earlier, a ritual is like knowing where to put things on a sheet of paper so that they will appear in calculated locations when that paper is folded. The reverse, then, should be possible; that I might paint eyes on the paper crane and give its wings drawn feathers, and when I unfold it, I find them at all new positions on the plane sheet. That’s assuming I even have a finished product to work backwards from. In most cases I simply have a lock and I aim to concoct a key for it. So how?

I concluded that making a ritual is mostly interpretative, considerably abstract, and can very much be seen as an art. Just like in art there are some more hard principles like perspective and spacing, but much of it is throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, letting as much knowledge you can muster guide what you throw, how you throw it, and more along that line.

Let’s discuss the interpretative part of it. Suppose in a crafting ritual, one of the marks was a fired clay brick. What about a brick is useful in a ritual? What are the qualities of a brick? We could point out its shape; very exact and uniform, or the fact it’s heavy and hard to break, or the fact that it’s a smaller part of very useful wholes, versatile in how it can be used, or it’s earthiness that comes from the clay makeup of it, or the fact it’s touched fire, or the fact it’s survived fire. What of those qualities is useful in a crafting ritual? What could possibly be at the end of the assembly line if a brick is among the things going down the hopper?

We can take the thought experiment further. Suppose I wanted to make a sword capable of emanating waves of fire on every swing, what ‘parts’ of the brick would I want? Perhaps the quality of the brick that is the fact it has survived fire, so that my sword doesn’t melt under it’s own heat. Also clay and metal share some earthiness to it, so the brick is also a good addition in that regard. And the fact the brick is hard and strong - we want the sword to be that too. And the fact the brick is part of more things like it? Maybe I want my sword to be part of something similar yet grander too.

How would I do this in a ritual? I would look for what other qualities I need in the form of more marks, flowers and enhance the power of it all with a map that displays my proficiency as a Strider, all under the candlelight of the Stars of the Switchboard, guiding pure, powerful chalk into my work. Things such as the ritual geometry I have to use are subject to harder principles, but those principles themselves are not hard and fast, as they warp somewhat in context, relative to the aims, the components in use, everything. Making a ritual simply is not like building a car, and more like coding a program, in that it is simply impossible to document every possible eventuality during the process, but rather employ general, guiding ideas and principles that I have to adapt to what I aim to do, often on the fly.

For a ritualist, making a ritual is guided trial and error; intelligent guessing. Proto-rituals are drafted and cast, adjustments made with each step until the desired final result is achieved in some capacity. From then on, it is established what the right things to do are, and creation of the ritual can move to refinement in finding the absolute best possible components to use, words to say, gestures to perform and the like. From then on, the schema can be drafted up.

For any Strider aiming to get into making rituals, it is often the case that similar aims as theirs have had the means to accomplish them published in ever-growing bodies of literature on ritual creation. Skilled ritualists reverse-engineer other rituals and use the conclusions drawn from them to provide guides for others, accumulated alongside information gathered by creators of fresh rituals in their repeated experimentation.

Ritual Interference

The power of a ritual naturally prompts the question of how to fight them. Methods to interfere and shut down a ritual are of great importance to Striders as allowing an enemy to case one can put the target at immense disadvantage. Fundamentally, attacking a ritual is done by exploiting various vulnerabilities in the casting process, or flaws in rituals that have already been cast.

Method #1: Targeting the Caster The most elementary means of combatting a ritual is to direct efforts against caster. Typically a ritual requires focus and precision from the caster, and aiming to reduce those things can cause them to make mistakes, causing miscasts or the ritual to fail altogether. Directing attacks at the caster is an easy way to do this, though most Striders that aim to use a ritual complex enough to require being focused and stationary for a considerable period of time, usually have methods in place to ensure they can do so.

Method #2: Marring the Geometry Interfering with the physical structure of the ritual itself is also a viable strategy. Rituals are reliant on things such as chalk boundaries and components occupying very exact positions, marring the chalk lines or moving components out of position is almost guaranteed to cause a miscast, if not crash the entire ritual.

Casters expect this however, and if they expect that their ritual itself is going to be interfered with, they often erect shields around it, or set other mechanisms in place to dissuade an attacker from making any kind of contact with the ritual in progress.

Method #3: Chalk Starvation A ritual will fail utterly if not enough chalk can be supplied to start it and/or keep it running. If someone opposing a cast found a means to starve it of chalk, they could indirectly prevent the ritual from being cast. A Strider can do this by aggressively drawing the latent chalk in the environment to themselves, though this comes with the expected consequences of saturation and Overwrite. Usually chalk is vented as it’s accumulated, often as heat, but ultimately this is a fairly risky maneuver.

The risk is entirely nullified though, in the case of Depthstriders, whose power of curvature allows them to create localized regions of extreme depth, ‘siphoning’ chalk away from the environment and into the Challenger Dark, something they can do rather easily, and is often the only way for a Depthstrider to counter a Chalkstrider using the Ritualism. Tools and other devices exist to do similar things, as ultimately the aim is to make as little chalk available to the ritual as possible.

The effectiveness of this strategy flags in the face of more powerful ritualists though, who can extend their draw and siphon chalk over vast locales, or who can simply supply chalk from their own internal supply saturating their potential lines, or from information-dense objects on their person.

Method #4: Lattice Bombardment A sort of extension of Method #2, lattice bombardment aims to oppose the ritual by assaulting it with a heavy onslaught of random chalk, aiming to interfere specifically with the Five-Strait lines in the chalk boundaries. The aim is to feed useless information to the interface lines, which then feed that corrupted information to the computational lines, disrupting their calculations and causing the ritual to miscast or fail.

Skilled Striders expect this however, and can either erect shields against bombardment or use real-time filtering techniques to dismiss useless chalk. It is a technique that can often backfire, as a Strider who counters it now has plenty of free chalk available to work with, replenishing their stores and empowering their ritual.

Method #5: ‘Counter-spelling’ A more precise, elegant expansion upon Method #4. Here, an attacker aims to feed information to the ritual that alters how it folds chalk, weaving unwanted parameters into the ritual to change how it functions when cast. An attacking Strider can direct the ritual to cast and affect the caster, or direct positive effects to the attacker, or outrightly self-destruct and fail upon cast. The lethality of it comes in when the attacker employs subtlety, affecting the ritual in ways that the caster does not immediately notice.

Only Striders of notable skill can counter such techniques, as it’s possible they are employed without even the knowledge of the Caster. It can require analyzing the Five-Strait lines mid-ritual, adding length to the cast time and taking focus away from casting and the environment, buying time for attackers and opening the caster up to opportunistic attacks.

Method #6: Counter Rituals If a Strider has a schema for a ritual, it is possible to prepare a schema for a counter-ritual; a ritual designed to defeat another ritual. If the Strider then sees the initial ritual being cast, they can employ the counter-ritual to fully shut it down. Particularly skilled Striders can observe a ritual being cast and prepare a counter-ritual on the spot, aiming to counter certain aspects of it they see in use, in hope that knocking enough pieces out of alignment will cause a miscast or fail.

A fully prepared counter-ritual though, cannot be stopped. A counter-ritual opposes a ritual on the levels of the arcane engines by which rituals function, a level that Striders simply cannot reach into and interact with. A counter-ritual is the most effective means of countering a ritual.

Consequences of Failed Rituals

Rituals can fail, miscasting or failing to cast altogether. Ritual schema often detail a possibility for a ritual to fail without cause, a chance exacerbated by poor execution. Higher complexity rituals and rituals that make use of particularly volatile components have increased propensity to fail if measures are not taken to prevent such from happening. Interfering with rituals also has a possibility of causing them to fail.

Failed rituals are divided into two categories; an abject failure to cast the ritual - a ‘failcast’, or somewhat successful cast of the ritual but with unwanted effects - a ‘miscast’. They all present varying levels of danger, and measures are taken to mitigate them as much as possible.

Failcasts

Failcast: Nothing The ritual simply fails to cast, with no additional quirks. The Strider is free to reattempt the cast.

Failcast: Vacuum The ritual fails to cast, instead forming a vortex that consumes all components involved, dissolving them into unordered dust chalk, dissipating into the immediate environment, wasting valuable components and requiring the Strider to attempt the ritual again.

Failcast: Maw The ritual fails and becomes an uncontrollable maw that rapidly begins consuming all the chalk in the vicinity, expanding in size as it does. The maw collapses upon itself once it cannot swallow enough chalk fast enough to sustain its ever-widening self. There are two results to this; all the chalk is drained to the Challenger Dark, or becomes trapped in solid crystal chalk.

Failcast: Backflow The components of the ritual dissolve into chalk that then begins to forcefully bombard the Strider’s lattice, causing risk of overwrite. Severing the connection with the ritual is necessary, either by rapidly creating distance or dismissing the ritual.

Failcast: Ground Zero The components reduce to chalk dust and the ritual morphs into one that folds chalk down to impossibly small dimensions without possibly the means to contain that much tightly-packed chalk in such space, leading to explosive results. The ritual detonates, the power of the blast scaling with the complexity of the ritual and modified to even more increased destructiveness based on the components present.

Miscasts

Miscast: Mirror Where applicable, the ritual will cast but the result will be a subjective ‘mirror’ or opposite of the intended result. A ritual meant to freeze a large area - for example - may instead immolate it, and a ritual meant to locate a distant target may instead mask them further.

Miscast: Stray The ritual casts but not on the intended target, be they person or location. The ritual meant to confer boons on the caster may instead be cast on an enemy, and a ritual used as an attack against an enemy may instead target the caster or an ally.

Miscast: Compound A ritual casts and warps, rapidly compounding and redoubling in upon itself, voraciously devouring chalk to magnify its intended result by increasing orders of magnitude, before finally resolving at many times the designed strength or efficacy. The results are ritual dependent, but expectedly, a ritual casting at multiple times its expected yield can be decidedly catastrophic.

Miscast: Amalgamate The ritual resolves and collapses into a conjugate of chalk and ritual components, from which proto-life is born with a singular directive; chaos. This amalgamate is granted powers by the components invested into the ritual and intelligence dependent on the complexity. Alongside its thirst for chaos is a hunger for chalk that it uses as fuel, causing it to aggressively attack Striders.

Miscast: Latticemark The ritual casts and warps the lattice of the caster and/or the targets. The nature of the alteration is vast and dependent - as always - on the ritual in use, though altered by an amount of randomness tossed into the mix as well. This alteration is often negative, and often permanent.

pNarrat: Ritual ‘Rigging’

Rituals are most commonly distributed by ritual schema, outlines of the materials needed and steps that must be taken to perform a ritual, as well as additional information that may be relevant to a caster such as means of modifying it, certain parameters or circumstances that must be just right for the ritual to be casted successfully, and often the consequences for poor casts.

However, ritual schema are complex things, and to an untrained caster, while they may have the skills necessary to perform a cast, it is entirely possible that they could not tell you what individual components or steps in the ritual do, or what they do in relation to others. More often than not this isn’t too great a concern - so long as a caster can procure trustworthy ritual schema.

But this gap in knowledge and understanding can often be exploited by less-than-savory characters, who’ve made it a point to distributed slightly modified - or ‘rigged’ - ritual schema, which contain additional clauses that could go undetected by the caster, and could have adverse effects on them by design. Just varied as rituals themselves are all the nasty effects an unsavory party could include, with the most elementary being clauses designed to make the ritual fail, clauses that allow the caster to be tracked, clauses that make the caster vulnerable to further clauses baked in, the list continues.

The only insurance against such a thing happening is either only acquiring schema from reputable sources - such as Fel-Arcad Versits - drafting all of one’s own schema, or becoming skilled enough to spot rigged schema reliably. Even with these measures taken, they remain a credible threat in the Switchboard to all wielders of chalk.

Ledgerial Casts

Ledgerial Rituals and the act of employing them - Ledgerial Casting - are a derivative from the Chalk Ritualism, and a kind of calcic ritualism defined primarily by;

• The colossal scale of the ritual as demanded by its schema, both in size and component/resource expenditure.
• The fact that they interface with the Ledger Protocol, to add or modify the contents of Astrolabic Ledgers.

For this reason, Ledgerial Casts are an immensely ‘big deal’ in the on-goings of the Switchboard, as they are primarily the only means to directly, consciously modify the functionality of the Astrolabe itself - albeit to necessarily limited extents.

The ‘limited extents’ are an amorphously-defined authorial caveat; for all intents and purposes, the denizens of the Switchboard can only ‘end’ the Switchboard in manners I allow them to. The in-canon explanation for this is that the Astrolabe’s systems via the Ledger Protocol vet the intentions of a ledgerial cast as well as their ramifications to a lesser intent, and the result of this is that any means of ‘ending the Switchboard’ via ledgerial cast is a result of the fallibility of the Astrolabe itself - or rather, my having chosen to open this path.

A means of understanding ledgerial casts is to view them as a suggested GitHub commit to the main branch that is the normal Switchboard. Should the Astrolabe’s systems vet the proposed change as compliant and suitable, they are folded into the main branch and the ledgerial cast is said to have succeeded.

This also means that there are circumstances where ledgerial casts can fail, and this is primarily due to rejection by the Astrolabe’s systems. However, it is entirely possible that a ledgerial cast only failed due to temporal context, and a proposed addendum to the Astrolabic Ledgers that isn’t welcome now could very well be welcome later. For this reason and the following, ledgerial casts are immensely -prohibitively - expensive, and any initiative to perform one is often the product of many many elements and persons in the Switchboard.

In practice, a ledgerial cast is a supersized ritual by all metrics. While the geometry required to perform a standard calcic ritual may only ever occupy a few square meters usually and affect a proportionally-sized region of space when resolved, ledgerial casts - by virtue of editing the very laws that govern the Switchboard - will necessarily be expanded in size and resource expenditure in order to be carried out.

Ledgerial cast’s being supersized rituals, thus have their demands scale similarly. Multiple Striders are often needed. Components are needed in bulk. Flowers can be replaced with fields of them, the ritual specifically designed to incorporate the harvesting point of those flowers in it’s declaration stage. In place of candles, braziers holding immense amounts of Wellspring fuel are burned atop high towers. Maps are often not even used, but if needed, they are often replaced with the very Strider that walked the path meant to be depicted in the map, though the Strider isn’t consumed in the cast. Marks vary, and are often the only thing that doesn’t scale with size, but often do in value.

Ledgerial casts come with an additional complication as well in form of marks; they always demand a measure of counterwoven barristeel - the physical material of the Astrolabe - to be carried out. For this reason, a ledgerial cast actually demands visiting the Astrolabe, or acquiring the material from someone who has.

In the current canon, the physical structure of the Astrolabe is under watch and defense by the Brass Monastery, who are the arbiters of what ledgerial casts can be performed in the Switchboard as a result. Acquiring counterwoven barristeel requires making a case to the Monastery, or acquiring it through clandestine means.

The absolute largest ledgerial casts may use armillary stars as their candles, and constellations of them as their maps, siphoning inconceivable amounts of chalk into its purpose. Flowers are replaced with entire planets, which can be stripped of them entirely and consumed without remainder. Coalitions of storied Striders, often title bearers, are the only ones capable of initiating and maintaining these casts.

Every single ledgerial cast in the history of the Switchboard was a history-defining event - expectedly - featuring organization and collaboration from Striders all over, who - recognizing the power and knowledge they held - employed it to shape the Switchboard as they saw fit. By all metrics it is the final form of chalkweaving as a power; power to shape - to an extent - reality itself.

Alternate Ritualism

The calcic ritualism is the main form of ritualism that exists in the Switchboard, and is - in a sense - what is meant by ritualism at all. However, there are various other subsets of ritualism that exist, defined primarily by their usage of esoteric components that grant them new coverage over different domains.

Structural Casting

Structural casting is much like ledgerial casting, though different in two key aspects;

• Considerably diminished in the scale of the undertaking
• An inability to modify ledgers

This class of calcic ritualism is more so a descriptor for colossal rituals that very much encroach on what is needed to perform a ledgerial cast, though lacking in that final ledger-modifying component. These serve the function of shaping the Switchboard or bringing things to being in a more diminished manner.

They can be used, for example, to temporarily suspend certain unfavorable mechanics of the Switchboard such as the conventionally impassable nature of Veils, or the influence of a local equation. They can synthesize entirely-new planets into being by inciting the formation of planetary equations and expediting the growth process, or terraform existing planets via modifying their planetary equations. They can and have been employed for grand engineering projects in interplanetary space, such as stabilizing colossal flux storm regions, or moving entire planets and occasionally whole stars. They can and have been used to forge powerful relics and relic-weapons, or vaults to contain threats. At their most powerful, they have been used to bring equations into being that facilitate folding chalk in otherwise impossible manners.

Starless Ritualism

The gap in ledgerial spaces exerted by the Switchboard’s Armillary Stars are environments where Astrolabic laws - common enough as to be assumed present as a matter of course - are suspended to varying degrees. The result of this is many-fold, but primarily it manifests as a breakdown of the functionality of Astrolabe-devised mechanics, such as the Strider Protocol. These between-state environments however, do introduce a very interesting opportunity to calcic ritualists; the fact that actions taken in these ‘starless sectors’ often go un-recorded by the Ledger Protocol.

Like going incognito in a browser, rituals performed in a Dark Sector fly under the radar of the Ledger Protocol’s passive monitoring and indexing, meaning that it is possible to carry out rituals for which no record exists, and thus not be factored in to the Astrolabe’s calculus. This vacuum in the Indexer ledgers isn’t a major problem for the Astrolabe, that proceeds onwards with its calculus mostly unhindered, but the practitioners of the Starless Ritualism envision reaping considerable boons from this school of ritualism.

The true extents of the Starless Ritualism remain to be seen.

Horizon Ritualism

Horizon Ritualism builds off of the Chalk Ritualism by facilitating the use of Void-based components in the ritual’s execution, allowing interaction with the various subject matter of the Void, such as Giving and Taking, Forging Shaping, Curvature Manipulation, moving between planes, stardrip, Deep Hollows, skews, Depthstriding and temporal manipulation.

Horizon Ritualism makes use of Void components in the form of;

• Flowers native to the Void
• Liquid Stardrip
• Amaranthite, Depthstone and Pale Amara
• Boons plumbed from the depths

Additionally, Horizon Rituals have their ritual geometry be drawn with pale amara in dust form, as opposed to pure chalk. Horizon Ritual Schema indicate this and other bits of essential information as well.

Some Horizon Ritualism require an exhortation given to some aspect of the Void, such as the Amaranth Sultan or his Daughters as a component or seal in the ritual schema.

Vitric Ritualism

Glass is recommended reading before this section.

The vitric ritualism describes an esoteric school of ritualism that harnesses the negentropic properties of glass. Being otherwise prohibitively difficult to work with, glass’ exotic behavior is somewhat curtailed within the malleable between-state of ritualism, allowing it to be harnessed in novel ways.

History

In the final stages before what would come to be known as the Fourth Offensive and the attack on the Trinary Complex, the Third Kin were forced to confront the reality that was their inability to traverse the Vitric Shelf, the domain of the Trinary Minds that staged the entire offensive against the Third Kin. But the Third Kin’s unmatched resolve and dominion over the affairs of weft and the Astrolabe set about forging a solution; a grand ledgerial cast to skew the Astrolabe’s calculus, and incite into being a means to defeat glass and the Vitric Shelf.

Born with teeth of crystal and a star in his stomach, the Seventh Skydancer, Ryjik the Eater, arose. In his nature was the knowledge and ability to defeat glass, and with him in tow, Spyndl Academy and the Third Kin took the fight to the Vitric Shelf, struck against the Trinary Minds in their grand complex, and secured one of the most decisive victories for the Third Kin, and securing another - perhaps the greatest - foothold into the Era of the Third Kin.

But Ryjik could do more than just ‘defeat’ glass. His ability to defeat glass came from his strange ability to consume it, irrespective of purity, and in doing so, render it inert. This inert glass manifested in the various planets of the Switchboard as a biome written into their planetary equations. This inert glass - this, scintillate as it came to be called - became a fixture of the chromatic biomes that emerged following the rise of Skydancer Ryjik, and glass in this form came to be harnessed by the Third Kin, the mechanics of doing so taught by the Skydancer himself.

Compiled in a tome titled The Writ of the Eater, Skydancer Ryjik outlined the first rules and schematics of what would come to be the glass ritualism; chalk ritualism that used glass as a component, with scintillate acting as a buffer between the complex chalk ritual and the complexity-shredding glass it sought to utilize. He recorded the affects scintillate had on the lattice when consumed; glass would destroy the lattice of all who consumed it, but scintillate behaved differently - almost like a mind-altering ‘drug’ - dependent seemingly on the color of the scintillate.

Application

The Vitric Ritualism - the ritualism of glass - proved to be an essential part of working the various devices and appliances that would be used in the Switchboard. Glass’ ability to reverse entropy and thus convert heat created by chalkweave into motion thus enabled the creation of core components for many devices.

In particular, the vitric ritualism is used to interface with and thus control Glass, giving necessary command over the workings of such devices as the creators saw fit.

Praxis Ritualism

Recommended reading; The Blank-Slate Mind.

Praxis ritualism can be seen as operating in a similar space as ledgerial casts; wholly grand affairs working towards imparting wide-ranging change on the ledgers of the Switchboard. Praxis ritualism does similar, operating on the mechanics of praxis to impart change through rituals.

As with all rituals and ritualism, its scope is vast.

Performing praxis ritualism employs two additions by way of ritual components; a ritual mark, relevant to the doctrine one wants to invoke, and the very conviction in that doctrine of the caster. This conviction is necessary for the ritual to even work, and further more, enhances its efficacy in line with the depth of that conviction.