From the Files: The Great Guide and Estantia
If you stay around the Rift for any length of time it is relatively inevitable that you will hear the name ‘Estantia’ mentioned. It is not a name that should be used lightly, as it can attract a great deal of attention in a remarkably short time, and not the kind of attention that your rookies can probably handle.
However what makes her so significant is the title and duty she bears - The Great Guide. In order to properly explain the significance of her role I must start at the beginning.
At the beginning what the Great guide did, and still appears to do, is to go to random places and times, go on adventures and generally help people out, having fun and learning magic as they go. If you ever see them it will look like this, and in some ways that is all it is.
As this particular one’s journeys continued they started to notice a pattern. They were being pulled in to intervene when outside influences would have changed the canon or the timeline, and found her main limitation in this time - she cannot directly intervene in major events. What they do is assist with plot holes, working invisibly around the edges to assist.
Then their awareness took another step up when they were able to comprehend what has been dubbed the Tapestry - a representation of reality as the interactions between people, each ‘thread’ a life/story. It is... hard to describe, as it constantly reforms itself and changes depending on what you wish to focus on, for example you could follow the story of a pencil to see who had owned it or what had been written with it.
As with any large concentration of magic/life, the tapestry has formed a dim sentience of its own, enough to want knots to be straightened out and holes to be fixed, and so either that consciousness created or is a figure I know of as the Weaver. To my knowledge, Fate is somewhere in that system, though whether the Weaver, the Tapestry itself, a mix or the sum of them is unknown.
The Great Guide factors into all of this as someone to act as an agent/tool of Fate, or in some theories, as the ‘human’ part of Fate, as the Tapestry/Weaver/Fate cannot think/comprehend in the way a living being can and make moral decisions. This ability can go to the point of literally being the weaver, of instinctively understanding the threads and how they interact, even being able to move them directly.
This gives a new perspective to the ‘random’ adventures, as their method of travel will naturally or by ‘chance’ gravitate where they will fix a knot as interaction with anything physical requires acting through someone or something. This is by no means uncommon, the Dr. Who Universe has a similar surmised system, with the Vortex being the Tapestry and the Tardis stopping when they come across a snag.
Need I mention how plagued we are by ‘coincidence’ of late?
The reason why Estantia in particular is so significant is because of how long she has been acting as the Great Guide. Most Great Guides only last a few years, meaning that they never get past the first stage of understanding precisely what the role entails. Estantia became the Great Guide earlier than she should, and so had the relative safety of children’s books to learn before getting into dangerous situations. She can and has merged with the Weaver on more than one occasion.
While we are not so sure of this, it appears that taking up the office of the Great Guide seems to result in a shift of some kind in their magic, effectively working to allow them access to any kind of magic. For example in the aura system a naturally Light mage would end up gaining a Dark part, mean they became a Light/Dark hybrid.
From my own knowledge of Estantia I can say that she, at least, acts like a mimic of sorts using the following process:
Read/follow a story. This allows her to live as/alongside the character.
This means that she can understand them and how their power works by virtue of having lived as them.
This creates an avatar of sorts in her mind which she can then use to write as them (effectively channelling them).
Her own magic is based on imagination and willpower. If she can work out how to do something (it must make sense to her mind) then she can do it.
This means she can now use her power in the way a character does, even if it only looks like it and the method behind it is different.
She can go to or read any story.
This method makes her disturbingly powerful, particularly when she can also travel to her own stories.
I would imagine that most other Great Guides have similarly overpowered methodology, given how much work they have to do, and that Great Guides usually operate alone. It may also be the reason why traditionally Great Guides never meet or train each other, as having all of them be fully aware of their position and so highly powered would quite possibly make them unstoppable except by Fate’s intervention and their own morals. Given that they may be able to change or influence Fate, particularly if lacking in morals, this is not foolproof.
Given the potential for disaster and the Multiverse’s wish to continue existing it seems likely that this is factored into the choice of who becomes the Great Guide, as the Tapestry would naturally cycle through the possibilities for candidates until it came to one that gave a favourable outcome. I do not presume to guess that Fate thinks a ‘favourable’ outcome is, but I would imagine ‘keep existing’ is part of it.
(Note: This ‘reset’ style phenomenon I can guarantee has occurred at least twice in our universe, mostly because I remember it happening. I do not recommend the experience.)
In summary: The Great Guide is a very powerful and still somewhat mysterious position, given that the information we have on it I have written in this document and has either come from the Great Guide or candidates for the position. Estantia is a powerful mage in her own right even without it, and the scale of trouble that she follows/ follows her is big enough that even using or giving out her name should be done with caution. Do not reveal how much you know if you can help it, you are likely to be assumed to be a close friend of hers if so.
