One of my favourite podcasts is The Once and Future Nerd (follow at @onceandfuturenerd). This fantasy has frequent occurances of magic, but the exact system has not been fully revealed. I recommend giving it a listen (CWs for violence, abuse, mentions of past sexual assault, a fake-out of a lesbian character dying (she’s okay!), and themes addressing racism and colonialism).

Under the cut is my rather spoilerriffic Grand Unified Theory of how many works in the Once and Future Nerd, accounting for Nia’s theory, Jen and Arlene’s capabilities, and the implications of the existence of necromancy.







So, when I hear the phrase “Selbiric Shadow,” I immediately think of Plato’s allegory of the Forms as shadows on a cave wall. If you are unfamiliar with Plato’s allegory of the cave, basically the idea is that if you chained someone in a cave from birth with a light source behind them, and paraded objects between them and the light source where they could not see the actual objects, they would mistake shadows of the objects on the wall for the actual objects.

The idea is that what we perceive is not actually what is “real,” or rather are not real to the extent that the Capital “F” Forms are real.

What we observe as the world around us is actually the shadows of the Forms.

In later neoplatonic interpretations, the Good becomes the light that casts that shadows of the Forms.

In early Christian theology drawing from neoplatonic sources, God is the Good, the Forms are objects in the mind of God (or Heaven), and the world is shadows of that.

In the Once and Future Nerd, they are pretty clear that everything in Iordan has a Selbiric duplicate, and Selbirin is the divine realm where Galadin resides. I see it as a very similar model to the Forms/Platonism/Neoplatonism.

So the states of Selbiric objects in Selbirin defines the state of Iordic objects in Iordin. Changes to Selbiric objects automatically result in a change in the corresponding Iordic objects, because the Selbiric states defines the Iordic state. Therefore, thermodynamics and conservation of energy in Iordin can be ignored, because these laws either do not exist in Iordin (though they might in Selbirin), or it could be that Selbaric laws simply are infinitely greater. If you are watching the shadow of a bird on a distant wall, the shadow might appear to move with impossible speed when the actual bird moves, because distance and angle exaggerates the movement.

Now, a great book I won’t name (because it would spoil half of said book) had a very interesting variation on this. Basically, there were many universes, but they were serially linear, not parallel. And what happened in one universe echoed across all universes “downstream” of it.

So if in one universe, there was a revolt against scientists believed to have gone too far, that might echo down into the next universe as general anti-intellectualism.

Basically, each universe was the realm of the Forms for the next universe. (In this book, Forms have less absolute control between universes as Selbirin seems to have for Iordin).

So it is possible that there is the same kind of multi-universe flow of ideas between not just Iordin and Selbirin, but also between Iordin and Nelson and company’s world.

(I’ll call Nelson company’s world “Our World” for now)

So it’s possible that either stories in our world flow into Iordin as reality, or reality from Iordin flows into our world as stories.

In other words, either the door that opened to the word “Friend” exists in Iordin because Tolkin wrote about such a thing, or Tolkin wrote such a thing because it happened exists in Iordin

The order of the universes might be Selbirin >> Our World >> Iordin

Or Our World >> Selbirin >> Iordin

Or Selbirin >> Iordin << Our World

And a few other less likely configurations.

Therefore, Nelson’s knowledge of Iordin is either because he has read the stories that literally defined Iordin, or because what he has read was subconsciously drawn from events in Iordin

Given the focus in Once and Future Nerd on the importance of narrative, I think that the order is Our World >> Selbirin >> Iordin.

Narratives in our world enter Selbirin, which appears to be a realm of ideas rather than matter. Those ideas/narratives then cast shadows into Iordin, or rather cast shadows that ARE Iordin. Iordin is our world’s third-hand ideas.

And again, because the physicality of Iordin is defined by the ideas of Selbirin, ideas in Iordin can alter Selbirin, which necessarily cause changes in Iordin

The Selbiric plane doesn’t technically manipulate anything. Rather, objects in the Selbaric plane are manipulated, and this produces necessary changes in Iordin.

What is real is Selbarin, and Iordin is just it’s shadow. Changes to the object casting the shadow necessarily produces changes in the shape of the shadow.

For example, if an apple is casting a shadow, and I eat half the apple, half of the shadow disappears. It might look like a violation of conservation of mass if you thought the shadow of the apple was actually an apple.

I have been using very large scale things as examples of Selbaric objects (birds, apples, etc), but atoms, electrons, etc should also exist in Selbirin, and the Iordic atoms are just shadows of Selbaric items, etc.

Lightning is just controlling the flow of electrons. Illusions (such as the Templars use) would be controlling photons, or lensing light. Changing voices and changing temperature would be changing vibrations of physical particles. So far, we have yet to see magic that isn’t particle manipulation, except for necromancy, and possibly Arlene’s emotional manipulation (I’m getting there).

In this model, Galadan and other gods are particularly big and important ideas that exist in Selbirin, and do not have direct physical manifestations in Iordin other than (hypothetically) avatars. Or rather they might be the principles by which Selbirin is organized, and only understood as gods by mortals. Or they might be the light that shines on the objects in Selbarin that casts the shadows that is Iordin, to throw back to Neoplatonism and early Christian theology.

Now, assuming that all magic, even necromancy, is rooted in the Selbiric realm, consciousness must exist in the Sebiric realm, or else once a person’s consciousness ceases (they die) it could not resume later (necromancy).The existence of necromancy and reincarnation mandates that consciouness does not only exist in Iordin, and is not (entirely) dependent on the meat of human brains.

Now, we don’t get the impression that the Undead have memories of the interval between death and unlife. This would make sense if the Selbiric realm existed temporally independent of the Iordin realm. That is to say, time might not exist at all in Selbirin, and even if it does, it need not correspond in any way with time in Iordin.

A key component of Neoplatonism (I don’t know where Plato himself stood on the issue) is that the Forms exist outside our linear time. From the perspective of linear time, they would exist in all moments concurrently. They are fundamentally atemporal.

So if the Selbiric realm is atemporal, we could imagine that the Selbiric object doesn’t just describe the state of the Iordic object in the present moment, but in every moment.

The Selbiric objects do not change with time, but are fundamentally timeless, and in their timelessness still describe the state of the Iordic object at every moment of its existence.

So if a Selbiric object was say… a text file. The text wouldn’t be constantly updating to describe the current state of the Iordic object, and go blank when the Iordic object was destroyed/died/whatever. Rather, the text file would have existed before the Iordic object existed with a complete, time-stamped log that describes it in every moment.

So when a person dies, their Selbiric counterpart still exists. Necromancy would be linking the Selbiric object of their consciousnesses back with their body, with consciousnesses resuming from the moment of their death.

Prophecy would just be reading the parts of the Selbiric object that describe events that have not yet occured within our perceived linear unfolding of time.

Interestingly, this also means that the future and past of objects should be just as malleable as the present. That people’s aren’t editing the past and future is just because of ignorance and the incompleteness of their understanding of Selbirin.

To indulge in a crack theory for a moment, if Iordin is the shadows of the ideas in Galadin’s mind, and Nelson is the Avatar of Galadin (or is partly Galadin), and causation between earth and Iordin is not temporally bound, then any amount of Iordin’s history might be composed of the ideas in Nelson’s mind while he was still on Earth. Selbarin might be Nelson’s subconscious outside of time.

Okay, that unlikely theory aside, the one thing left to cover if Arlene’s apparent mind control magic via song.

Early on, Nia explains that manipulating minds with magic is impossible. She also says that some people commune with Selbirin through music. So it appears that when Arlene sings, she is subconsciously communing with Selbirin. This appears to bypass the “no affecting consciousness “ rule, but that rule is obviously bogus because necromancy exists.

I theorize that songs are basically tools for the creation and manipulation of emotion. A song is effectively a symbol for a complex emotional state. One might even say that a song is a unit of emotion they way a gene is a unit of genetic information. Or an atomic is a unit of physical information.

So using music takes it out of the realm of neurochemistry, and into the realm of semiotics. How do you refer to a specific emotion? With a complex equation for neurochemical balance, or with a symbol? A song is effectively just an incredibly complex symbol that points to a very specific chain of emotional states. So an effective way to refer to a complex emotion might be to refer to the song that induces it. Therefore, to identify and access the Selbiric object of an emotional state, a song is more direct than a particle-based approach, such as that used by Nia and Jen.