Axiomite
According to the axiomites, their kind rose from the raw mathematical underpinnings of the universe, manifesting as great builders who created the ancient, colossal cities of the Outer Sphere and gave life to the mechanical inevitables. According to the aeons, axiomites are part of the Monad, having both risen from and rebelled against it long ago. Since the Convergence, most axiomites have recognized this as a fundamental truth, particularly after the aeons showed the axiomites how the Utopian language has formed as an amalgam of aeon envisioning and formulaic mathematical expression. Most axiomites live in the perfect city of Axis, which they continually act to improve, thus refining the concept of perfection itself.
A particular axiomite may look like any humanoid creature, though the particular form it takes on does not affect its abilities. Beneath this assumed form, all axiomites are the same—clouds of glowing, crystalline dust that constantly swirls and congeals into complex tangles of symbols and equations, evincing their existence as literal creatures of pure mathematical law.
Axiomites arise from the souls of lawful neutral mortals, particularly those who were, in life, mathematicians, architects, crafters, or philosophers. While these souls do not retain any memories of their lives in the transition into axiomites, their life skills and experiences nevertheless serve a valuable metaphysical resource during formation. Unlike virtually every other outsider race, axiomites appear to encompass only a single base form—that of an exalted petitioner resembling a particular mortal soul, elevated to axiomite status by the Godmind itself at the Threefold Pillar of the Axiomite Godmind in the Plaza of Triune Concordance in Axis. Dwelling deep within Axis, rarely interacting with non-axiomites and rarely taking corporeal form, non-humanoid axiomites also exist. They are accompanied by those axiomites who were among the firstborn of their kind, claiming to have predated mortal souls and arrived from “outside.” These axiomite hierarchs take increasingly abstract, alien forms such as golden fractals, and they have difficulty interacting meaningfully with non-axiomites, as their increased age and power means they effectively house portions of the Godmind’s processes that continue running and parsing data even in the absence of its full manifestation.
Mirroring the Threefold Pillars from which axiomites first emerged into Axis, axiomite society is broken into three distinct groups, each organized by a single compelling maxim of identity: Knowledge, Enforcement, or Administration. The First Pillar, Knowledge, focuses purely on research, studying both the underlying laws of the cosmos beyond Axis and the history of those planes and reality itself. The Second Pillar, Enforcement, focuses on the creation and maintenance of Axis’s great armies of inevitables and the axiomites’ other servitor creations. The Third Pillar, Administration, occupies itself with the management of Axis and diplomatic relations among the Perfect City’s resident gods and visiting outsiders.
While the Godmind rules Axis as something conceptually perched between creator divinity and collective consciousness, it rarely manifests at its full deific potency. It instead runs in the background of every axiomite’s mind, its functions distributed across the entirety of the axiomite species. The most powerful and important of the Godmind’s processes are split between the reclusive ruling hierarchs and the demigod primal inevitables that the axiomites created. These primal inevitables are technically more powerful than the axiomites themselves, but they are subservient in many ways given their roles as creations, guardians, and servitors.
Most axiomites dwell within Axis, operating with perfect precision among its courts and libraries, only rarely venturing beyond its golden walls out into the comparative chaos of the multiverse. The bravest of their First and Second Pillars venture beyond for several reasons: to proselytize order, rationality, stability, and structure to all with ears to listen and rational minds to comprehend; to crush and pacify chaos; or simply to understand and know. Axiomites of the Second Pillar and their gleaming armies are expansionist in every sense of the term, but they act neither out of fondness for spreading ordered benevolence like archons, nor as conquering tyrants like Asmodeus and his devils: they wish solely to regulate.
Outside of Axis, axiomites frequent Heaven and Hell, Pharasma’s courts, and the domains of lawful gods throughout the multiverse, acting as ambassadors and collaborating with researchers of their flawed but appreciated fellows. Curiously, axiomites have a larger presence than one might expect at the Spire of Golden Concordance in Nirvana, studying the agathions’ history and methods of cooperation and mediation among celestials. They also have a significant presence on the Material Plane, where they guide the advancement of lawful societies and cultures, and extensive activities on the Elemental Planes, with axiomite embassies of varying sizes in the capital cities of shaitans, efreet, and fire mephits.
More secretive than archons or devils, axiomites conduct their most dangerous research far beyond Axis itself, at hidden sites usually named simply “Iteration” followed by a number. Some of these research grounds are more prominent, however, such as the astral demiplane of Liracaenia’s Cradle, named for an axiomite hierarch of the First Pillar, where the axiomites hide an inimical entity they study in the hopes of understanding their enemies. The nature of this captive is unknown, rumored to be anything from a nascent demon lord, a primordial qlippoth, a corrupted azata lord, or even the lost daemonic Horseman Yrsinius (whose fate the axiomites promptly and successfully blamed on the Maelstrom’s proteans ).
Axiomites have reached out into the surrounding cosmos with their servitor armies, created in Axis’s Adamantine Crucible to their every immaculate specification. While the gleaming ranks of inevitables are the most obvious and prominent of their creations, they are far from alone. Scrivinites act as specialized adjuncts and aides to their axiomite creators, tasked to preserve and archive knowledge within the fabric of their beings, and it is rare to find a powerful axiomite beyond the walls of Axis without one or more scrivinites in tow alongside its inevitable bodyguards. Aphorites are less servitors and more free-willed fellow travelers, an attempt by the Godmind’s to fashion faces and minds capable of better understanding less ordered beings—especially the scattered and illogical minds of Material Plane natives. Most of these axiomite-touched native outsiders are dispersed throughout the planes, left to their own devices, but the Godmind subtly watches, learns, and guides like a parent to a beloved child. The axiomites’ most powerful creations are the mythic apkallus, the living sphere of annihilation known as the Ghost of Departed Quantities, inevitables forged into living armor for axiomite generals, and other, stranger things that blur the line between inevitable and axiomite, servitor and master, and exalted amalgamations of metal and mathematics.
In addition to their own myriad creations, axiomites have long-standing partnerships with Heaven’s archons and Hell’s devils alike, with whom they frequently work to battle the denizens of the Abyss and the innumerable choruses of the Maelstrom. Axiomites also have a deep and mutual respect for the dutybound psychopomps and the mercantile-minded mercanes. Axiomites have increasingly sought out collaborations with mortal-led lawful religions and organizations such as the Riftwardens, though the latter is made difficult by that order’s acceptance of non-lawful operatives.
The Godmind’s desire to understand the cosmos informs the actions of its eyes, hands, and individual synapses—the axiomites themselves. Axiomites often find it difficult to interact with other beings, mortals especially. They often fail to understand that one solution may not fit all circumstances, and so their methods and approaches tend to blunt, often radical extremes lacking in nuance. Their actions are guided by cold pragmatism, not benevolence or malice, and their actions on the Material Plane are often in two camps: to study or to punish.
While their inevitables are tasked with punishing transgressions against fundamental universal laws, axiomites themselves rarely do so themselves—at least not for petty, individual transgressions. They watch and record, and eventually they task and dispatch servitors, but they usually do so on the geological timescale of immortals. They insinuate themselves as advisors, administrators, judges, and planners to empires and ordered societies, with the most cited example being their presence as aides to Emperor Xin of Thassilon throughout most of his reign, prior to Thassilon’s descent into corruption under the runelords. Ever reticent to take direct action on their own, and accustomed to having their own creations at their beck and call, axiomites on the Material Plane frequently avail themselves of mortal adventurers as agents. They see such action not as outside of lawful means, but rather as operating in accordance with their own law that supersedes any others. So complex is the axiomite mind, that interactions between an axiomite employer and hired adventurers can be difficult, though axiomites always act to the letter of any bargain. If axiomites can be said to work on a cosmic timescale, then the Godmind works on a level beyond the scale even of most outsiders. Should events ever become significant enough for the Godmind to take notice, axiomites arrive in the millions amid the crackling lightning of artificial gates and, pursuant to accords negotiated with the gods of any given world, lay apocalyptic waste to any threat--though such threats are almost always of chaotic origin. Such instances are virtually unheard of among mortal scholars, with only hints of hints existing that such a thing is even possible. While Axis’s armies pour endlessly into the Maelstrom and the Abyss, they have done so on the Material Plane in only a handful of instances, none of which are common knowledge or openly discussed among planar scholars of other races. Any records of such occasions are methodically erased. Even the axiomites’ deific allies are not given access to the Godmind’s internal debates: the Godmind has authorized much more in secret. The axiomites place few limitations on what they will do to halt the advances of the Abyss or the screaming, infinite chaos of the Maelstrom, going so far as to bring an end to more than one now-forgotten divinity deemed a threat to order and stability.
A particular axiomite may look like any humanoid creature, though the particular form it takes on does not affect its abilities. Beneath this assumed form, all axiomites are the same—clouds of glowing, crystalline dust that constantly swirls and congeals into complex tangles of symbols and equations, evincing their existence as literal creatures of pure mathematical law.
Axiomites arise from the souls of lawful neutral mortals, particularly those who were, in life, mathematicians, architects, crafters, or philosophers. While these souls do not retain any memories of their lives in the transition into axiomites, their life skills and experiences nevertheless serve a valuable metaphysical resource during formation. Unlike virtually every other outsider race, axiomites appear to encompass only a single base form—that of an exalted petitioner resembling a particular mortal soul, elevated to axiomite status by the Godmind itself at the Threefold Pillar of the Axiomite Godmind in the Plaza of Triune Concordance in Axis. Dwelling deep within Axis, rarely interacting with non-axiomites and rarely taking corporeal form, non-humanoid axiomites also exist. They are accompanied by those axiomites who were among the firstborn of their kind, claiming to have predated mortal souls and arrived from “outside.” These axiomite hierarchs take increasingly abstract, alien forms such as golden fractals, and they have difficulty interacting meaningfully with non-axiomites, as their increased age and power means they effectively house portions of the Godmind’s processes that continue running and parsing data even in the absence of its full manifestation.
Mirroring the Threefold Pillars from which axiomites first emerged into Axis, axiomite society is broken into three distinct groups, each organized by a single compelling maxim of identity: Knowledge, Enforcement, or Administration. The First Pillar, Knowledge, focuses purely on research, studying both the underlying laws of the cosmos beyond Axis and the history of those planes and reality itself. The Second Pillar, Enforcement, focuses on the creation and maintenance of Axis’s great armies of inevitables and the axiomites’ other servitor creations. The Third Pillar, Administration, occupies itself with the management of Axis and diplomatic relations among the Perfect City’s resident gods and visiting outsiders.
While the Godmind rules Axis as something conceptually perched between creator divinity and collective consciousness, it rarely manifests at its full deific potency. It instead runs in the background of every axiomite’s mind, its functions distributed across the entirety of the axiomite species. The most powerful and important of the Godmind’s processes are split between the reclusive ruling hierarchs and the demigod primal inevitables that the axiomites created. These primal inevitables are technically more powerful than the axiomites themselves, but they are subservient in many ways given their roles as creations, guardians, and servitors.
Most axiomites dwell within Axis, operating with perfect precision among its courts and libraries, only rarely venturing beyond its golden walls out into the comparative chaos of the multiverse. The bravest of their First and Second Pillars venture beyond for several reasons: to proselytize order, rationality, stability, and structure to all with ears to listen and rational minds to comprehend; to crush and pacify chaos; or simply to understand and know. Axiomites of the Second Pillar and their gleaming armies are expansionist in every sense of the term, but they act neither out of fondness for spreading ordered benevolence like archons, nor as conquering tyrants like Asmodeus and his devils: they wish solely to regulate.
Outside of Axis, axiomites frequent Heaven and Hell, Pharasma’s courts, and the domains of lawful gods throughout the multiverse, acting as ambassadors and collaborating with researchers of their flawed but appreciated fellows. Curiously, axiomites have a larger presence than one might expect at the Spire of Golden Concordance in Nirvana, studying the agathions’ history and methods of cooperation and mediation among celestials. They also have a significant presence on the Material Plane, where they guide the advancement of lawful societies and cultures, and extensive activities on the Elemental Planes, with axiomite embassies of varying sizes in the capital cities of shaitans, efreet, and fire mephits.
More secretive than archons or devils, axiomites conduct their most dangerous research far beyond Axis itself, at hidden sites usually named simply “Iteration” followed by a number. Some of these research grounds are more prominent, however, such as the astral demiplane of Liracaenia’s Cradle, named for an axiomite hierarch of the First Pillar, where the axiomites hide an inimical entity they study in the hopes of understanding their enemies. The nature of this captive is unknown, rumored to be anything from a nascent demon lord, a primordial qlippoth, a corrupted azata lord, or even the lost daemonic Horseman Yrsinius (whose fate the axiomites promptly and successfully blamed on the Maelstrom’s proteans ).
Axiomites have reached out into the surrounding cosmos with their servitor armies, created in Axis’s Adamantine Crucible to their every immaculate specification. While the gleaming ranks of inevitables are the most obvious and prominent of their creations, they are far from alone. Scrivinites act as specialized adjuncts and aides to their axiomite creators, tasked to preserve and archive knowledge within the fabric of their beings, and it is rare to find a powerful axiomite beyond the walls of Axis without one or more scrivinites in tow alongside its inevitable bodyguards. Aphorites are less servitors and more free-willed fellow travelers, an attempt by the Godmind’s to fashion faces and minds capable of better understanding less ordered beings—especially the scattered and illogical minds of Material Plane natives. Most of these axiomite-touched native outsiders are dispersed throughout the planes, left to their own devices, but the Godmind subtly watches, learns, and guides like a parent to a beloved child. The axiomites’ most powerful creations are the mythic apkallus, the living sphere of annihilation known as the Ghost of Departed Quantities, inevitables forged into living armor for axiomite generals, and other, stranger things that blur the line between inevitable and axiomite, servitor and master, and exalted amalgamations of metal and mathematics.
In addition to their own myriad creations, axiomites have long-standing partnerships with Heaven’s archons and Hell’s devils alike, with whom they frequently work to battle the denizens of the Abyss and the innumerable choruses of the Maelstrom. Axiomites also have a deep and mutual respect for the dutybound psychopomps and the mercantile-minded mercanes. Axiomites have increasingly sought out collaborations with mortal-led lawful religions and organizations such as the Riftwardens, though the latter is made difficult by that order’s acceptance of non-lawful operatives.
The Godmind’s desire to understand the cosmos informs the actions of its eyes, hands, and individual synapses—the axiomites themselves. Axiomites often find it difficult to interact with other beings, mortals especially. They often fail to understand that one solution may not fit all circumstances, and so their methods and approaches tend to blunt, often radical extremes lacking in nuance. Their actions are guided by cold pragmatism, not benevolence or malice, and their actions on the Material Plane are often in two camps: to study or to punish.
While their inevitables are tasked with punishing transgressions against fundamental universal laws, axiomites themselves rarely do so themselves—at least not for petty, individual transgressions. They watch and record, and eventually they task and dispatch servitors, but they usually do so on the geological timescale of immortals. They insinuate themselves as advisors, administrators, judges, and planners to empires and ordered societies, with the most cited example being their presence as aides to Emperor Xin of Thassilon throughout most of his reign, prior to Thassilon’s descent into corruption under the runelords. Ever reticent to take direct action on their own, and accustomed to having their own creations at their beck and call, axiomites on the Material Plane frequently avail themselves of mortal adventurers as agents. They see such action not as outside of lawful means, but rather as operating in accordance with their own law that supersedes any others. So complex is the axiomite mind, that interactions between an axiomite employer and hired adventurers can be difficult, though axiomites always act to the letter of any bargain. If axiomites can be said to work on a cosmic timescale, then the Godmind works on a level beyond the scale even of most outsiders. Should events ever become significant enough for the Godmind to take notice, axiomites arrive in the millions amid the crackling lightning of artificial gates and, pursuant to accords negotiated with the gods of any given world, lay apocalyptic waste to any threat--though such threats are almost always of chaotic origin. Such instances are virtually unheard of among mortal scholars, with only hints of hints existing that such a thing is even possible. While Axis’s armies pour endlessly into the Maelstrom and the Abyss, they have done so on the Material Plane in only a handful of instances, none of which are common knowledge or openly discussed among planar scholars of other races. Any records of such occasions are methodically erased. Even the axiomites’ deific allies are not given access to the Godmind’s internal debates: the Godmind has authorized much more in secret. The axiomites place few limitations on what they will do to halt the advances of the Abyss or the screaming, infinite chaos of the Maelstrom, going so far as to bring an end to more than one now-forgotten divinity deemed a threat to order and stability.
Genetic Ancestor(s)
Geographic Distribution
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