The Prescient, The Great and All-Seeing Eye, Reverberation, Watcher of Far and Near, She Who is Ever at the Shoulder
Aspect of Prescience
...the Sight...unimaginably potent perception...to see things that have already passed, things happening now yet far away, and things that may yet come to pass...
All of reality is a tapestry, many-colored and wrinkled and ineffably vast. The threads of reality are woven not by one seamstress that dictates Fate, but by immeasurably numerous needles driven by the actions of every being. There is much discord and mayhem in the sewing, but a potent enough mind with the gift of powerful sight can shatter through the illusory veil of the physical world and look across creation from the edge of reality. So then, given enough discernment and perception it is only natural that one can begin to capture glimpses of the Grand Design of the universe -- this is prescience, the Sight, seeing the unseen and coming to know the unknowable.
Prescience entails careful examination of the needles’ motions to guess at the Grand Design and predict the future, or possible futures, with some accuracy. Attaining complete certainty in the foresight garnered through such means is an impossible feat, for free will is a fickle thing and the motions of the needles can be ever changing. In particular, an incomplete understanding of another’s intentions -- especially if that person themself is undecided in their desires and does not know what they will do -- is anathema to accurate and precise foresight. The impulsivity and free will of mortals and divines alike can change the course of fate and make careful predictions worthless within mere moments. Further, there are so many needles that it is unthinkable to account for the motions of them all, but it can be much easier and more practical to identify and examine a select few needles and threads to guess at what their future holds. In general, foresight becomes exponentially more difficult as one seeks to look further into the future, as well as to account for larger areas and the influence of more beings.
Fortunately the power of prescience is far from its end there, with dubious predictions of the future. Through it one can also loosen the shackles imposed by Time’s eternal march: then, the prescient one may turn their back to the ongoing needlework and cast their gaze back across the tapestry in the opposite direction. Through witnessing the stitchings far back, woven in the past, it is possible to attain an understanding and knowledge of events that have already transpired, even if one was not there to witness them. Here there need not be any uncertainty either, for the threads are already sewn and one can come to make sense of their tangle to gain a perfect and objective understanding. Know that the ink is dry upon the page of histoires, so to speak -- changing the past is an incredibly dangerous folly, and likely impossible too, for the threads of the tapestry are woven together tightly and made all but immutable.
Know also that Time’s eternal advance cannot be stopped by any -- even He Who Turns the Flow is merely capable of setting the time of the beat to which it marches -- so for every moment spent crawling back across the tapestry to wallow in the past, a moment of the present is spent. Further, to invoke prescience is to look through the veil and project’s one’s mind into the edge of reality, but the body does not follow, for this is a journey that it could not possibly take. That is to say that while one wallows in the past or tries to determine the future, their corporeal form remains vulnerable and in place throughout the whole ordeal; there is no fleeing to the past or future, but paradoxically, slipping into a prescience-induced coma need not be a great risk. Though the prescient are made vulnerable when using their Sight, so too are they made aware of their own needle and thread, and the wise among them will be sure not to become so caught up in the majesty of the tapestry that they ever lose sight of their own manifestations within it. If some adversary sought to harm them in this vulnerable state then said being’s own needle and thread would invariably be drawn close to that of the prescient’s. That then would be all the warning that a vigilant and cautious prescient would need to know to recall their mind back to their body and look to their defense.
Awareness of the true nature of reality and of this power is the first step to awakening prescience, but even afterward, one must have an extraordinarily sharp and powerful perception in order to find any practical use in it. But Yudaiel is a reverberation in the fabric of the tapestry; by her very nature, she is as eminently attuned to and aware of the needlework as any being could possibly become. Yudaiel’s powers over the aspect of prescience grant the unimaginably potent perception that is hers, and enable her to see things that have already passed, things happening now yet far away, and things that may yet come to pass. Further, she is the most powerful prescient being in existence and that ever could exist so long as her aspect remains hers. Like a spiderweb, the fabric is ever-present yet nearly invisible unless lit just right, and the Reverberation that is Yudaiel is what illuminates these mysteries to other eyes. She has pierced the veil and enabled prescience for all others with the eyes and the mind for Sight. Even those who lack the discipline or faculties are sometimes gifted temporary prescience, most often in their dreams when the mind is more malleable, if the Lady of Far and Near wills it.
Persona
...enigmatic…...Machiavellian...facade of generosity...tantalized in perpetuity with visions of grandeur...
Yudaiel rarely speaks, even to fellow deities, for she thinks the act beneath her. Words are surely for the blind, as those who can see should surely rather be shown than told. She prefers to communicate instead by invoking bouts and flashes of prescient thought, essentially projecting vivid imagery laced with raw emotion into the minds of others. She calls these potent messages of sorts
’ideabstractions’. Communicating through ideabstractions has the side effect of making her highly persuasive, even if she lacks true charisma -- what better way to manipulate someone into doing what you want than by thrusting upon them a sense of urgency and a compulsion to do just that thing, and by showing them a superreal vision of the pleasurable and good outcome that will inevitably follow? She definitely knows what she wants -- though others certainly don’t, not even the Monarch, for she purposefully masks her enigmatic intentions -- and is Machiavellian and supremely manipulative in her pursuits of these ambitions and desires of hers. Presumably there is a certain possible future or futures that she has seen, and her grand ambition then would be to ensure that such a Fate comes to pass. She is pragmatic and utilitarian in philosophy, more than willing to commit evils in order to bring about good as she perceives it.
Caution, perhaps to the point of paranoia, is ever present in the Great and All-Seeing Eye. Sometimes it may cloud her vision, but her fears are warranted. How could one with a nature so alien and a Sight so powerful as her
not evoke envy or fear or loathing in all others? For this reason she often seeks to make herself and her visions of some use to the other gods should they come to her for aid or counsel, and is sometimes wont to even show up to provide favors unsolicited. This facade of generosity is adopted with the intent of suppressing feelings of animosity and avoiding conflict, though admittedly she also hopes for reciprocity from the other deities should she in turn need their help. She doesn’t truly
like most of them, but she does respect them as powerful forces in their own right, players in the game that she would rather keep in accordance with her own machinations and plans than deal with as rivals or enemies.
Though she tries to show no outward signs of it, and probably succeeds in masking it quite well, Yudaiel craves power. Tantalized in perpetuity with visions of grandeur, how could she not be enticed by the prospect of becoming as awesome and beloved and feared and mighty as she could possibly be? She is not opposed to the idea of allowing calamity to arise (or outright
causing it to) rather than acting preemptively to snuff it out long beforehand, if only so that she then has the opportunity to arrive in the nick of time with knowledge and solution in hand to remedy the matter and be the savior. Such games, if they are not seen through by others, can only further heighten her perceived power and helpfulness. While giving prophecies that do not come to pass would undermine perceptions of her own accuracy and power and be very embarrassing, she may on occasion be willing to lie about what she’s seen with her Sight -- if giving the false prophecy would somehow work to her benefit, that is.
Omniscience, the state of having experienced every possible moment that passes, and of having seen everything in the past and the future, is something that Yudaiel would openly admit to longing for. Who wouldn’t? But she’s convinced that attaining omniscience is an outright impossibility, for Fate’s great irony and cruelty is that for every moment that one does experience, they miss out on innumerable others. Using prescience to experience the past loses much of its appeal when one realizes they sacrifice their time in the present, but on occasion Yudaiel likes to indulge herself by reliving, over and over, moments of great beauty or triumph or pride. The effect can be somewhat intoxicating, especially if reliving her
own fondest memories, but at times she may even go back into the past to secretly witness again and again the moments of
another’s life, to vicariously cherish
their feelings at the time. Occasionally this can take a darker or self-flagellating turn, if she is enraged or depressed she may force herself to experience her own failure again and again, with the hopes of perhaps gleaning something more from it with each time or of just wallowing in her own misery.
There is little that Yudaiel despises more than the insane, the impulsive and impetuous, the indecisive: in short, the
unpredictable. Such beings almost cause her physical pain, and they certainly tend to draw her ire, because their actions are erratic in nature and extremely difficult to account for in her Prescient visions of the future. Because they dampen her own powers of Sight, she in turn often seeks to suppress or remove
them from the picture. This sometimes involves trying to bring about their demise as implied, but other times it’s easier and almost as effective to merely convince or force them to go somewhere else, or commit to doing something more predictable and less disruptive to other events.
True Form
formlessness itself….ethereal and invisible to mundane eyes...a gargantuan eye the size of a continent...that bores through space and stone and reality itself, to gaze back and forth between the dark beginnings of time and the great unknown beyond...
Yudaiel is but a reverberation in the tapestry, a ripple in reality. Her true form, and the only form that she ever deigns to take, is formlessness itself. In this state she is ethereal and invisible to mundane eyes, existing as mere sound at most: whispering in the wind, a soft sigh, the hushing of a tiny waterfall, the gentle rustling of falling leaves in the breeze.
For all its subtlety this form is still an immense one, sprawling out as large as the sky itself and often touching much of Galbar; however, Yudaiel’s diffused spirit and divine essence are always most concentrated somewhere in a relatively small area, and it is from that fulcral spot that the rest of her essence hangs like a vast cloud. But there, at the heart of this colossal form, space itself can appear slightly bent and distorted by the Reverberation. Gods, or those beings with true and powerful sight, can make sense of her scattered ethereal essence and witness her full glory: she is a gargantuan eye the size of a continent, the ‘heart’ of her body the pupil. Hers is a piercing stare that bores through space and stone and reality itself, to gaze back and forth between the dark beginnings of time and the great unknown beyond.
Those who somehow approach the heart of her body, the pupil of the Great and All-Seeing Eye, are invariably touched and imprinted upon by her essence. Through this contact their perception is widened. The mind expands to shatter the carefully wrought walls that had confined it comfortably within the bounds of sanity and mundanity, their eyes consumed with visions of the chaos and marvels and horrors of the boundless tapestry as the Sight takes hold. Lesser minds cannot withstand these revelations and are broken in mere moments, the sanity of mortals tends to come unraveled like a loose spool of yarn tossed into a bottomless abyss. Yet those who can survive such a potent touch and the effects of Yudaiel’s imprinting have the potential of their minds unlocked, and they are made capable of becoming very powerful with the Sight.
When she thinks interfering with the affairs of mortals to be necessary, she is usually content to merely influence them from afar by touching their minds with dreams and ideabstractions. The less introspective might not even be able to distinguish these from their own thoughts. Thus assuming some alternative simulacrum to manifest before them is unnecessary -- she rarely even speaks to mortals, but if she were to do so, it would be as a disembodied voice that seems to emerge as a pattern from the sound all around, be that the billowing wind, the rustling leaves, the humming insects, or the rolling waves.
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