Cauldron-born
In Celtic myth there are cauldrons galore - some, like that of the goddess Ceridwen, brewed the draft of inspiration from which Gwion tasted before he became Taliesin. In the Mabinogion it is the cauldron of regeneration that attracts the most attention, the cauldron that could bring the dead back to life, although they could not speak of the experience... It has also been written that the cauldron could be destroyed if a living being was placed inside it, rather than the bodies of the dead.
In the history of the 13 Worlds, no technology has been as controversial as the cauldrons. Even their origins are shrouded in myth. Some say that they were the creation of the sorcerer Gwydion, others that Gwydion only recovered the devices from the ruins of one of the earliest
dragon-born settlements in the Alliance, and learned how to use them. Whatever the truth, they have played an important part in the history of the 13 Worlds.
The cauldrons are simple enough in structure: a central control station resembling nothing so much as a cat's cradle of "threads" allows the cauldron or "vat" master to manipulate the nutrient flow, biomass, memory-patterns and (in the war-vats) the level of cybridisation and other technomantic grafts required. Two types of cauldron-born can result from these devices:
The first are the true "revenants" - these are the reconstructed forms and memories of the dead, the memory and "soul" transferred at the point of death (if suitable incantations have been put in place before hand). The result is a true rebirth of the original, although variations in the physical form are not unknown. Most sorcerers who chose such a method of immortality however prefer to reconstruct their own form in every detail.
The second are the "constructs", and usually this process was only used in the creation of
cybrids such as the cybrorses and the Wild Hunt. In this process only a very basic memory-pattern is recorded, to provide a simple template for behaviour. Masters of the Wild Hunt have used this for centuries, to maintain the continuity of the pack, and reduce the necessary training time.
However this process has also been used to provide shock troops in times of war, the basic patterning being used as a template for a very basic personality for such troops, who were often blended with outrageous cybridisation protocols - organic weaponry and impervious, inbuilt armour being the least of it. Experimentation even took place with the basic time-aware protocols used by the Wild Hunt, although this line of experimentation was quickly abandoned, as the results proved to be largely psychotic and uncontrollable. It is also known that certain dragon-born bloodlines (the House of du Lac being the most public) have used construct templates to keep their bloodline "pure". No-one is quite sure how many times they've utilised the templates of their most famous scions, Lancelot and Galahad, occasionally adding the personality templates of worthy successors to the protocols. The most infamous example of such incestuous cloning is, however, the druid known as "
Calaitin" - a contemporary of Merlin who copied himself 27 times, creating a gestalt creature capable of thinking and acting either as one "cluster", or as individual units.
The social attitude towards the cauldron-born is mixed. Some worlds, notably those most damaged by the mage-wars in which indiscriminate cauldron-cybrids were used, have outlawed the practice and the devices, and will destroy any creature or person thought to be of "unnatural birth". Others tolerate the cauldron born, but few, if any, are at ease in their presence. Revenants (such as the bard Gwion, who claimed to be Merlin reborn) are regarded warily, and philosophic debate is divided as to whether or not they are the dead returned, or simply a "copy". Either way, they make many people nervous. The constructs are perhaps a little more acceptable, being effectively totally "new" personalities based upon the donor memories, but it has not been unknown for constructs to suffer from catastrophic memory cascade, in which the donor memories overwhelm those of the body's own personality, an affliction which can lead to madness, psychotic delusions, and coma, followed shortly by death.
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