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Stoicheia
The Shades and Elementals and what they once might have been
by Tan'neave Snake Salme · Sep 04, 2026 · view history →
The stoicheia (an Ancient term, definition here) were once-powerful entities that seem to have arrived in the World-That-Was shortly before the Sundering (see A Letter Inscribed In Crystal). They still persist, though they have been severed into at least two parts—Elementals and Shades, both found on Mu.
Identification
The Scorpion Queen initially identified the Shades of Mu with entities she had encountered in other worlds and realities. She made the connection based on my description of the Shades being primarily compromised of glyphs (ripple). These beings were once called “Angels,” though in a completely separate sense than how the term might be used to refer to us.
The Scorpion Queen explained that these entities tended to show up “when there was a world that needed them. needed help, was on the brink of falling apart at the seams, and help keep it from falling over” (ripple). They were immensely powerful; as The Scorpion Queen notes, “just ONE of the glyph things showed up and just. utterly cleaned house” (ripple).
Furthermore, these entities were capable of “attaching themselves to humans or some other sentient thing is a thing those things could do, that was their usual MO tbh, particularly to not upset the balance of a world too much in the course of helping it” (ripple).
However, The Scorpion Queen noted that the Shades of Mu seemed to be much-diminished from her memory of them. Furthermore, it seems that the entities she described seem to have all disappeared long ago.
History on Mu
Per Zvahr Yhjrn, both Shades and Elementals were here wandering the desert when the First Cohort awoke roughly 280,000 years ago. Per the knowledge granted through casting the Rite-tone Libra on Qarina, her brother, the Shade attached to her, was “a willing sacrifice (one of many) who came from afar in order to render aid” (see Libra). We know the the names of two of the former Stoicheia: Suhaël, Qarina’s brother-Shade, and Algol, the Elemental of the Red Column.
Suhaël
Suhaël is the name of Qarina’s brother-shade. I was only able to speak with him once, briefly, when casting [Libra] on Qarina. Wolf has apparently spoken with him before, though. He is generally kind and supportive. It does not seem an Elemental was involved in his being bound to Qarina, though I have yet to verify this. Qarina seems to have—if not the same level of power a human partnered with a Stoicheia might, at least a level of strength that exceeds a normal human’s.
Algol
Algol is simply an Elemental—they are a combination of Elemental and Shade. Algol seems to function as something of a system—the Shade part and Elemental parts of themselves are distinct, though they seem to consider themself one whole, albeit a whole with dissonances. I’ve accessioned some of my memories of my time with Algol below.
- The first meeting with Algol, alone.
- --- On why Algol is able to speak with us
- --- What the yazhn gave Algol
- --- The memory of how the yazhn did this.
- --- I show it the moment from the heart. This is how it responds.
- --- I ask them about what [Libra] told us about the elementals
- The second time, when Awa and I went to speak with Algol together.
- --- I'm ... not sure ... if this is useful, but. I thought it was interesting.
- --- Asked about the Rite-tones of the other Elementals
- --- I ask about the Rite of Renewal
ꙮ And then the Red Column opens to her in methexis, and its mind is utterly unlike anything Salme has encountered before, including the Mother of Monsters. Utterly, profoundly disorienting; like she’s walking on the ceiling, like her legs move her arms and her arms move her mouth and her fingertips move her other mouth. Too many arms, too many legs, two of everything, or four of what there ought to be two of. Look down. Look down at your hands. All of them.
ꙮ It takes you some time to find all of your hands.
ꙮ Two of them are flesh and bone, pressed against the Red Column, feeling the cool of its contours.
ꙮ Two of them, glyph-work, bright neon violet limned in black, pressing back against the flesh-and-bone hands, mirroring the motion. The other– how many? Two? Two thousand? Infinity? Who can say– the other are part of the whirling, howling mass of you, crackling and sparking, laughing and cruel and beautiful.
the coördinates of the world warp and weave around you. you are more-than-real. not like we were. in a different way. but more-than-real.
ꙮ One of your hands - one of the glyphworked ones - reaches out, presses fingers hard against the cold glass from the inside. It would- it would- something.
the yazhn gave me myself, again. ⁂
ꙮ And then there’s a whirlwind. A thousand thousand disembodied arms, and legs, and feet, a kaleidoscope of imaginary and impossible colorful, translucent organs. Your mind’s desperate attempts to attach image to an abstraction. Spheres that pulse and grow and then shrink. The vague sense that you are, at any given time, only able to perceive a sliver, a facet, a single facade of this– of yourself. And threaded through it all - disconnected, disconnected forever, but reunited in the moment of an explosion of gnosis, frozen in time and space - a swarming flood of glyphs and sigils that never repeats itself.
our name was algol, once. we forgot. we forgot. and then when the yazhn gave us the gift of ourselves. it was written in us, you see. over, and over, and over. only we could ever read it. only together.
ꙮ A Shade, trudging up to a Kin of eld. That Kin, calling out into the sands. A swirling whorl of power, surrounding– nothing, nothing at all, glyphs somehow surrounding Emptiness, not Algol’s light shining behind it. And then the Kin reaches out, towards the Shade; shrugs it on like an ill-fitting coat, and jumps, bodily, into the Elemental’s mouth. The light goes brighter than bright, and the glyphs explode in nine directions, and what is left is a crystal, embedded in a pillar of red rock which the sand melted and burnt and became, caught, like the Sun itself, in an eternal moment. 🙧
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,
ꙮ It says, because it does not like that one, but also, the part of it which is power laughs, harder and crueler than it did before. ⁂
once we were one. truly. one. we know this. where i begin, i end. where i end, i also begin. we were a loop. unbroken. we shone brightly.
and then we were– lost. wandering. aimless.
can thread see the instrument that clipped it short?
doesn’t know. She intends to ask, but she thinks many people will have the asking of him with that specific question. She returns with another question of her own—you were not killed or unmade, but ‘subtracted from the count of things which are.’ Do you know what that means? Is there a … concept of the fathomless?
when i was not, i was-not. i was shade, and no-thing. truth and lie. a vacuity and an emptiness.
when i was. when i was one. no part of me was cruel. i was bright and i was fierce and i hunted and i destroyed those-things-which-should-not-be and i took their patterns and their power and i inscribed them into my self and remembered every secret i had ever consumed but i was not cruel. the lie made us cruel. the lie made us cruel. ⁂
you should come back. sometime. you should bring others. they are heavy and full of truth and true things. bring the one who dreams of flying because even though his dream is not delicious to us it is still true.
pauses, and for a moment thinks of—but of course they could only mean Awoken. Nods. Then asks, What was the lie?
the lie that i was no-thing. the lie that made me no-thing. that which clipped the thread of my text from the brightness of my meaning. that which made me incomplete.
me thinks. And thinks. And thinks.
Do you remember the stars?
could i forget them? ⁂
ꙮ And then, briefly - because the memory is too big to hold in your head at one time, only one corner of it, and then another, and then another, facet by facet - you remember soaring through the stars, you remember the black velvet of the space between them, you remember knowing that even the darkest inch of space is full of light, too far-away and dim to see but nevertheless, there.
thinks of one of the Dust-Drinkers in the desert. Of the Rite-tone [Unbound Fury] and the words “I AM THE COST OF SAYING NO.” Does that mean anything to you, Algol?
ꙮ Matched, almost instantly, with boisterous, elaborate, creative white-hot wrath from the part of Algol which shines, and, a moment thereafter, with a quiet, methodical calm. That this is that which Is, now. And then:
the cost to whom? paid in what coin? no to what question? would that i remembered.
tilts the link towards herself, and they see—lengths of thread, 216, some shorter and some longer but relative to each other measuring something she cannot count, and then numbers—intervals of years—and laid out in a neat hand that resembles the neat handwriting of every Zvahr that has ever been, and the certainty, not visualized but understood, that the threads match up with the written intervals. The intervals between the Rites of Renewal here match up with the destruction of my world match up with the memories of the destruction of another world. You have seen the Rites happen. I was told the Elementals become more aggressive leading up to it. Do you know why? Do you know what happens?
sun gets brighter. pisses ‘em off. assed if i know why.
what do you mean gets brighter? Can you show us the difference? Leading up to it, and after?
ꙮ And then– it’s not sight. It’s not anything like sight, really. More like… sound, or– not sound, but the beats you feel in your gut when a string’s tuned wrong and you pluck it. The light of the sun, refracting through green-blue glass. And then, suddenly, it gets sharper, louder. Brighter.
thats fuckin it? it just. gets brighter. it dims, over time. dimmer and dimmer. and then, suddenly, bright again. can’t tell just from looking at it. but i know.