Wanderers

The Wanderers are an enigmatic group of people that seem to circummigrate across many (perhaps all) worlds and cosmoi, performing some incomprehensible mission. They are sometimes called the Wenders, and there are those who say that this is the correct term and that the "Wanderers" is merely a corruption, but the Wanderers/Wenders themselves will answer to either, and call themselves neither. When they must refer to themselves collectively, they resort to circumlocutions such as "all of us" or "our fellows".

Each Wanderer is multipresent, existing in multiple corpora, which may vary in appearance and even in gender. One corpus of a Wanderer does not know of the current activities or experiences of other corpora, but does share memories of (some if not all) other corpora up to a certain point in the past. Just how far back that point is is uncertain, and may vary by Wanderer or even by corpus of the same Wanderer; evidence suggests, however, that it is not less than a year, and not more than a century. The exact number of corpora of each Wanderer is likewise unknown, but may be very large... since they wander over all the planes and cosmoi, even if they numbered in the billions they would still cover only a tiny fraction of the available territory. A few æalogists believe the Wanderers' corpora to be literally infinite in number—given that the planes and cosmoi are likely themselves infinite, this is certainly not impossible.

The Wanderers have no names, in the conventional sense, but are merely distinguished by adjectives. (For this reason, they're sometimes called the "Nameless Wanderers"—or (rarely) "Nameless Wenders"—when it's necessary to distinguish them from wanderers in the general sense.) One, for instance, is the Silent Wanderer, who never speaks; another is the Legless Wanderer, who lacks lower extremities. This adjective may refer to a behavioral quirk, to a physical property, or to any other distinguishing characteristic. The Wanderers refer to each other by the same adjectives, but without the "Wanderer"; the other Wanderers would refer to the Clockwork Wanderer, for instance, as "our clockwork fellow", or by similar circumlocutions. Although different corpora of a particular Wanderer may vary in many details, the quality that is defined by the adjective is a constant. This does not mean that no other Wanderer can ever have that quality; for instance, there may be corpora of other Wanderers who have red hair, but all the corpora of the Red-Haired Wanderer have it (or the nearest equivalent in their species). As much as the corpora of the Wanderers may vary, the characteristic that gives each Wanderer their name is not necessarily the only constant among their corpora, merely the most notable. For the most part, the Wanderers seem to be of a dominant ellogous species in the areas they travel through—which means that most corpora of Wanderers seen in human-dominated areas are human, though sightings have been reported of Wanderers of more exotic races.

A very few æalogists devote themselves to studying the Wanderers, hoping to divine patterns in their peregrinations, or to learn more about their principles and purposes. This rare discipline is called erronology.

Behavior and goals

As the name implies, the Wanderers wander the planes, staying in one place seldom more than a month or so (though rarely less than a few days). Sometimes they do so by using known portals—the Wanderers seem to somehow be aware of portals near their location, whether or not anyone else in the vicinity knows about them. More often, however, when they need to move to another plane they seem to somehow create crepatures in their vicinity, to cause their origin and destination planes to temporarily impinge and overlap so that they are temporarily in both before the planes separate again and leave them in a different one than they started.

There are at least a score or so of Wanderers, and maybe as many as a few hundred, but they rarely if ever all travel together. At least one of them, in fact, the Lonely Wanderer, never travels with other Wanderers, which is how she gets her name. (Her path does frequently cross those of the other Wanderers, however, even if she doesn't travel with them.) In most cases, though, the Wanderers travel in groups of three to ten or so—sometimes on foot, sometimes in wagons, sometimes in more elaborate conveyances. Occasionally the group splits, or two groups of Wanderers meet and travel together. Multiple corpora of the same Wanderer, however, are never known to meet. This seems to be less because of conscious effort on the part of the Wanderers as just a result of some casual enchantment that some celemologists have tied to the Law of Necessity—though it's unclear just how the meeting of multiple corpora of the same Wanderer would violate this law.

To the extent that the Wanderers have any sort of clear goal, it is simply to put right injustices, make the world better, and fight for good where they travel. Given the vastness of the cosmoi and the small number of Wanderers (even taking into account their multilocation), this may seem ultimately insigificant, but there is one important factor that gives the Wanderers' efforts more impact than they would otherwise have. The Wanderers' destinations are frequently—perhaps always"umbrils, locations that have some sort of intermundane resonance such that what happens there echoes and affects happenings elsewhere throughout the planes and cosmoi. There have been theories that the Wanderers' presence converts a location temporarily into an umbril, but there's little evidence of that; it seems more that the Wanderers' travels take them to preexisting umbrils, or places where umbrils are about to arise. In any case, the fact that the Wanderers do their deeds in umbrils ensures that their effects rebound and resonate across the worlds and planes.

Life cycle and origins

The Wanderers do not age, but they are not immune to harm, and can be killed—or achresed—like ordinary mortals. However, they do have a way of replenishing their numbers, or rather their number of corpora—while there have been no verified cases of entirely new Wanderers being added within living memory, there have been many accounts of Wanderers "recruiting" new members—that is, not entirely new Wanderers, but new corpora of existing Wanderers. This does not violate the rule that two corpora of the same Wanderer never meet; the group of Wanderers recruiting a new corpus will never include a corpus of the same Wanderer being enlisted. While the "recruitment" is always voluntary, there is no known case of the new Wanderer turning down the invitation, though there have been some instances in which they considered it. The Wanderer-to-be at the time of induction—and usually at the time of their encountering the other Wanderers—invariably already conforms with the appropriate descriptive adjective: a prospective Hooded Wanderer will already be wearing a hood at the time of contact; a prospective Snake-Tongued Wanderer will already have a serpent's tongue for some reason; and so forth.

The Wanderers require sustenance like most other living organisms, but they get it by living off the land or by taking up temporary jobs to pay for their needs.

The origins of the Wanderers are a mystery; there is no reliable account of how or when they came into being. Even the Wanderers themselves cannot say how long they have been around, since the median current corpus seems to only go back a few hundred or thousand years. If any of the original corpora still remain, they have not made themselves known. That has not, of course, prevented a great deal of speculation. Some believe the Wanderers were created by some group of extremely powerful gods, or overgods. Others think they arose from human belief and needs (and that of other races) in much the same way that gods do—that in effect the Wanderers are a special kind of god, or quasigod. Whatever the case, it seems that the Wanderers have been around for a very long time, and perhaps there have been Wanderers as long as there were ellogous creatures.

There seems to be a link between the Wanderers and passivites, though the exact nature of that link is uncertain. Certainly some Wanderers are known to be aliteria of passivites, and very possibly they all are. Many æologists believe that there is a one-to-one correspondence—that every Wanderer is the aliterium of a passivite, and that for every passivite there exists a Wanderer. This has not been proven, however, nor have any convincing theories been propounded as to why this should be the case. A handful of pollachologists have speculated that in fact the Wanderers are the reason that passivites exist in the first place, that the primary purpose of the passivites' other aliters is to be potential Wanderers, but this belief, called meatorism, is not widely respected.

Relations

It is difficult for the Wanderers to form long-term relationships or alliances; their perpetual peripateticism puts them essentially in a constant state of xenization, always strangers wherever they arrive, and gone before they can become anything else. Nevertheless, while the probability of anyone encountering the Wanderers more than once on different planes by chance would seem to be negligible, there are some people who nevertheless do run into the Wanderers multiple times, their paths apparently somehow linked to the Wanderers'. Such people are sometimes known as synodites. As a general rule, a synodite will repeatedly meet the same group of Wanderers, or a group that shares at least some members the synodite has met before, and most if not all synodites become sympathetic to the Wanderers and help them on their missions. There is some evidence that the Wanderers are able to grant the status of synodite to people who have greatly aided them and whom they hope to meet again, but it seems that some synodites have attained that status without the Wanderers' intervention.

While synodites are usually friends of the Wanderers, and the Wanderers' good deeds help them win other allies wherever they go, the Wanderers are not without enemies. Perhaps their most mysterious foes are a group of beings called the Hight, who work a form of name magic that somehow functions in any (or nearly any) dition. The Hight all have multiple complex names, which due to their unique magic grant them special powers; they can induct new members into their number by bestowing suitable names upon them. The Hight actively hunt down the Wanderers, though their efforts have not notably diminished the numbers of the Wanderers' corpora. While the Hights' focus on names certainly places them in contrast to the Wanderers' namelessness, it's not clear whether this is at the root of their conflict, or whether it's just a coincidence; it may be simply that the Hight have plans for the cosmoi—and perhaps for umbrils in particular—and they want to prevent or at least minimize the Wanderers' interference.

That, at least, is almost certainly the motive of another enemy of the Wanderers, the cosmos-spanning Hyphatic Empire. Aspiring to spread its already considerable dominion further, the Empire certainly sees the Wanderers, with their opposition to tyranny and oppression, as an obstacle to its goals. At least some elements in the Empire also recognize the Wanderers' connection with umbrils, and seek the Wanderers out specifically with the hope that if the Empire attains a victory in an umbril that will increase its chances of victory elsewhere.

The Nithosa and their agents also come into frequent conflict with the Wanderers, though this seems to be more because these archdemons' activities put them at odds with the Wanderers' ends than because of any personal animosity.

Known Wanderers

The following is a partial list of the known Wanderers. This list is not necessarily complete.

• The Broken Wanderer
• The Clockwork Wanderer
• The Cold Wanderer
• The Dark Wanderer
• The Dead Wanderer
• The Devoted Wanderer
• The Ghastly Wanderer
• The Giant Wanderer
• The Golden Wanderer
• The Graceful Wanderer
• The Hooded Wanderer
• The Hungry Wanderer
• The Legless Wanderer
• The Lonely Wanderer
• The Long-Nosed Wanderer
• The Merry Wanderer
• The Naked Wanderer
• The Purple Wanderer
• The Red-Haired Wanderer
• The Silent Wanderer
• The Snake-Tongued Wanderer
• The Two-Headed Wanderer
• The Unseen Wanderer
• The Venomous Wanderer
• The Whistling Wanderer