Further belaboring the perimeter of the hedges

 [one sultry summer night in '18, after one or three nights without sleep, your humble Satrap was inspired to make a video of a dramatic reading of some Sorq stuff: street corner conversation on the underworld, just some surface dwelling humans giving their views on living above a vast labyrinth full of monsters and ritual spaces, upon which your city's water supply depends: a dialog that i used to gin up cultural, religious, magical, power/political views of this queer state of affairs. I like doing voices, i was deep in writing-hypomania and sleep-deprivation-magic, why the heck NOT make a video without bothering to read the whole thing through first?

[For the brave or bored, here are links to the foundation of my youtube fame and riches: 

Sorqite Sampler of Sunblessed Speculation in re: THE UNDERWORLDS — Sorqite Symposium: Derailed by a Heretic! ]

The Underworld, Underdark, Abyss of Wisdom, City Without Streets, the Fief of Prince Thighbone, the Demesne of Sir Oubliette, Where Monsters Rule, The Landlord's Flat: countless names and titles show the reverence, wonder, dread, and inferiority the vast Underworld stamps upon those who live on the planet Sorq. Sorq has quiescent geology, no volcanism, and the hard lithosphere extends half-way to the planet's cooling core. Before the conquest by Humes, Shén, and allied galactic species, the Sorqite chthonic realm already dwarfed the surface in area, biomass, species density, and variety of ecologies. There are vast oceans and intricate rivers, caverns larger than mountain chains, and the tunnels and warrens of organisms who prefer air to rock. After the conquest, the invaders dug fortifications and tubecar lines, and the surface autochthons fled to the protection of their cousins and kin-races below. Then the cataclysm pulling Tékumel, Sorq, and hundreds of other planets into pocket dimensions and cul-de-sac worldlines, and the long march into barbarism and ignorance. Sorq's Cavern Continent gradually became the Abyss of Wisdom, the abode not just of monsters and the dead, but a living, shifting, unmappable realm of symbols and magic. Magic, as every educated person knows, is the art of reliable manipulation of energies and natural qualities stronger in adjacent planes than our own. Where witches and sorcerer priests must strain for years merely to sense the planar flux, apprentices in Underdark academies routinely explode, transform, or go mad from the alien maelstrom. Something in Sorq's underworld draws the energies and attentions of many planes: its mystical potentiality? Eldritch structural effects? The character of its denizens, so congenial to Them Beyond? Or the result of pacts, bargains, covenants and bindings by the ancients?

Actually, these two are very, very, very rough drafts, and I'll probably take them down as I make better videos. Like, getting my voices straight before recording; not doing it near Maude, my former and unmourned air conditioner exhaust, who ALWAYS has 2 cents to put in; and maybe write a conclusion for my freethinker, who is pointing out the problems with the fun dungeon-crawl world I am just beginning to flesh out beyond the bones of tropes I enjoy, like vast Underdark ecologies and lizard people.

[The Satrap of 2022, they say: good bit of this is deprecated, Sorq has been a vibe and a sandbox for as long as i've banged at it, details change. Volcanism? ghosts? We don't know, tovarisch, we just channel this stuff in from the Ocean of Meaning.]