Way of the Divide

The Way of the Divide is a monastic tradition taught by the Monastery of the Divide, a collection of schools and monasteries in the Shiverdrift Snowfields.

The Monastery is an organization dedicated to teaching and carrying on this tradition, equipping their disciples with the Way of the Divide for its own sake. They teach the virtues of balance and of wielding this power responsibly, but for the most part the only times they involve themselves with global politics is when a former disciple of theirs falls down a dark path towards evil, or when some other being wields the powers of Entropy in a way that threatens the world or the people in it. Their primary motive is to take in students and teach, but the potency of this dichotomy that they wield means that there are no shortage of problems out there for them to attempt to deal with.

### History

“In the year 105 CE, a lone monk was wandering the northern snowfields when he stumbled across a curious artifact, which lay smoldering in a crater of melted snow. The artifact leaked energy, chaotic and destructive to anything that drew near, but the monk’s curiosity was great, so he watched it from afar.

“The more the monk observed, the more he saw patterns in how the artifact behaved---though the energy itself was chaotic, the shell which contained it was predictable, like clockwork. After watching the patterns for several weeks, the monk chose his moment to approach. With held breath, he stepped into the crackling crater, and though bolts of energy crashed to his left and to his right, the monk passed through unscathed. When he reached the artifact and laid his hand on it, it responded to his touch as though it had been awaiting his command for a hundred years. In an instant, the artifact became dormant, and the field was quiet once again.

“That monk was named Kaishi, the First Teacher and founder of the Monastery of the Divide. He took the artifact with him, and spent the rest of his life studying its nature. From it he learned of the inevitability of chaos in this world: the chaos from which we came, and to which we shall return. And yet, he also learned of the order, that which lies between the primeval past and the distant future, the paradoxical structure that binds our present into what it is. Kaishi learned of the divide between order and chaos, between existence and oblivion, between the present and, well, everything else. And he learned how to manipulate this schism to achieve Balance. Enlightened by his treasure, Kaishi knew he could not keep what he had learned to himself, so he began to teach. He built the very first Monastery of the Divide with his own two hands, and with it he began a legacy that we carry on to this day.

“But alas, Kaishi’s story does not end there. He was a man of great kindness, wisdom, and patience, but he was also a man of secrecy. The First Teacher did not allow anyone else to so much as see the artifact that had enlightened him, and as he aged, he became less and less trusting of the lesser teachers with whom he worked. One teacher in particular, a prodigious woman named Jawei, drew Kaishi’s frustration more than any other, to the extent that they were seldom seen together without at least one of them yelling belligerently at the other. You see, Jawei’s curiosity matched Kaishi’s own, and she believed that the First Teacher’s artifact held more secrets than he let on. She made many efforts to persuade him to let her see it, but his conviction was unshaking.

“Jawei’s speculations turned to suspicions, and her suspicions turned to certainties as she became convinced that Kaishi was hiding something from the rest of the Monastery. She swayed the other teachers to confront him as a group, in hopes that if they challenged him together, he would at least give them a straight answer. Perhaps predictably, the confrontation went sour quickly. In his paranoia, Kaishi interpreted their collective intervention as an usurpation of his authority and, more importantly, a threat to his relic. Kaishi fled into the blizzard, artifact in hand, and was pursued by Jawei herself.

“For three days and three nights they ran through the wilderness, blinded by fear and jealousy, until Jawei finally caught up with her former teacher, who waited for her on a rocky glacier of ice. Each of them pleaded with the other to back down, but both stubbornly refused. And so they fought. The two most powerful wielders of entropy this world has ever seen battled one another, and the echoes of their blows could be felt for miles away.

“Nobody knows which one of them opened the Chasm. Not that it matters; it swallowed them both either way. All that we know is that after a long pause in the fighting, there was an earthquake so thunderous that there are reports of its aftershocks reaching as far south as Atheron. And that neither of the two masters were ever seen again.”

Unbeknownst to anyone except for Kaishi himself, the artifact he possessed was the time-copying device that was responsible for the Blazing Sky. Incredibly, it had survived the explosion, but only after sustaining heavy damage. It responded to his touch because it was built to respond to human commands, and Kaishi had recognized that it was artificial and developed a good idea of what its controls might be when he was studying it.

The Chasm was opened after Jawei defeated Kaishi in combat. She did not kill him, but managed to forcefully take the relic from him. As soon as she touched it, it began to spark and charge, volatile and destructive as it was to someone who did not know what they were doing. Kaishi knew that it was about to explode into another Blazing Sky, so he siphoned its power through himself into something else: creating a rift in space and time, to the void between the planes, which swallowed both monks and the relic whole.

They both remain in the void to this day, outside of time and space, ever fighting over the device. Kaishi believes that the world needs to be kept safe from its power, while Jawei thinks that it is their only ticket out of there. They remain locked in an eternal stalemate deep in the Chasm, and will likely never escape.