THE LAW OF CORPUS is the fundamental law of reality that states: nothing that once mattered is allowed to disappear without leaving weight behind. REALITY MUST ACCOUNT FOR ALL BODIES.

• CORPUS is any body, death, memory, place, or event that did not resolve cleanly.
• CORPORA are unavoidable.

MAGIC is what happens when someone or something interferes with how corpora are created, resolved, or stored.

Eden is God's first system, a self-sustaining framework created to manage the Law of Corpus through perpetual continuation. In Eden, all things continue in perpetuity so that no single body, death, or memory produces irreducible weight.

Prior to God's abandonment of the known universe, He created three angels to maintain His system:

• GABRIEL, who said it has begun;
• RAPHAEL, who said it must continue;
• and MICHAEL, who said it must end.

Collectively, they are named the HEAVENLY HOST.

Following God's departure, the Heavenly Host fractures, reimaging themselves as gods.

• GABRIEL becomes WITCHMAIDEN, who operates in hesitation, possibility, and interruption. She prevents corpora from forming in the first place.
• RAPHAEL becomes WITCHMOTHER, who believes permanance is safety and salvation. She attempts to stabilize Eden around a human core (see: Adam/Eve).
• MICHAEL becomes WITCHCRONE, who believes endings must be accounted for honestly. She manages corpora after death.

Adam and Eve, the first of mankind, were created as test subjects by Eden itself, to answer one specific question: can memory exist in a perfect system without breaking it?

Eden made three catastrophic assumptions in this experiment, namely: that memory could be introduced without ownership and autonomy, that suffering could exist without accumulation, and that choice could be allowed without consequence.

These assumptions collapsed when Adam, corrupted by the Witchmother, was killed by Eve. By introducing irreversible loss in Eden for the first time, his death creates the FIRST CORPUS and the point of origin for the Bloodletters.

Bloodletters are humans born of living corpus, with their lineage descending from Adam's original union with the Witchmother. The blood in their veins is the First Corpus, inherited and unending, making their magic both enormously powerful and enormously unstable.