The Vidient are the descendants not of Pandora herself, but of the shards of her Mirror, which shattered when she looked upon its forbidden reflection. Each shard carried with it a single, pure emotion untouched by mortal complexity.

Though the shards dispersed throughout the Pattern, time, memory, and the living world, some came to rest in human souls. Those touched by a shard awakened with the power to see its emotion in others and to bend that feeling: intensifying it, quieting it, or reflecting it back with crystalline force.

No Vidient perceives the entirety of human emotion; each carries only a fragment, as incomplete as the mirror itself. Yet in that fragment lies clarity beyond mortal ken.

“They see not the face, but the soul reflected therein. In them, the mirror endures.”

Powers & Abilities

I. The Seeing —
The Vidient perceives the dominant emotional reflection of their shard as it manifests in others, not through the eyes, but as a reflection in the mind’s surface.

II. The Shaping —
They may amplify the reflected emotion in others, as well diminish or redirect it. Each emotion works on a spectrum. The power it wields is subtle, not sovereign. Overuse, trauma, or corruption towards one end of the spectrum can push a Vidient themselves permanently toward one extreme.

III. The Echoing —
Because shards root themselves in memory and time, Vidients sometimes sense emotional echoes of events long passed. These are impressions and echoes only—never full visions. This ability is rarer, and not seen in all Vidients

The Mirror Principle

When the mirror looks away, the reflection ends—but what it showed cannot be unseen.”

The shards don’t change the Pattern; they refract it. Each bearer projects a temporary distortion, like a ripple on still water or a mirage in heat. When the influence stops, the reflection dissolves—but the world may still act on what it saw while the ripple lasted. The Pattern corrects, but not before choices are made and consequences unfold.

This is the governing rule of a Vident’s ability: a mirror doesn’t forge new light; it only reflects what already exists. They cannot invent emotion ex nihilo.

The Eight Shards

“Emotion is not singular. It is a spectrum, and each shard holds both of its faces.”
— Atharim Scholar, Commentary on the Shards

I. The Luminous Thread

“Attraction / Repulsion”

Formal Name: Axis Affinitatis
Spectrum: Fascination ↔ Aversion
Vidient Gift:

• Perceives bonds of attraction, ties of blood, love, loyalty, resentment or subtle rejection
• Can intensify connection or magnify distance between people
• Influences charisma, trust, and interpersonal draw
• Can see permanently connected souls

Vidient Perception: Vidients attuned to the Luminous Thread perceive the bonds between people as glimmering filaments of rose-gold light, stretching from heart to heart. Attraction tightens and brightens these threads; repulsion frays them into flickering strands. A skilled Vidient can pluck or slacken them with a thought, weaving closeness—or unravelling it. Threads pulse or recoil depending on the intensity. When two people are mutually drawn, the threads braid themselves

Risks: Those who wield it too often may lose their own preferences, pulled endlessly toward or away from others with no clear will of their own.

“The heart is drawn or driven. Rarely still.”

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II. The Crimson Falls

“Compassion / Cruelty”

Formal Name: Speculum Misericordiae
Spectrum: Empathy ↔ Malice
Vidient Gift:

• Sees where compassion blooms or where cruelty festers
• Can evoke mercy in the hard-hearted or stir coldness in the kind
• Often used to ease conflict—or ignite it
• The most skilled can perceive pain, and numb or magnify it

Vidient Perception: Those who bear this shard see it as waters flowing within every person. Compassion runs warm and luminous, a gentle cascade. Cruelty darkens it into thick, heavy rivulets. When strong emotions rise, these currents spill outward like spectral waterfalls. Vidients may warm the waters, stirring mercy—or chill and sharpen them into instruments of emotional harm.

Risks: Some Vidients become emotional mirrors, absorbing others’ suffering or cruelty until they fracture.

“Mercy cuts deeper than any blade.”

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III. The Black Mask

“Fear / Courage”

Formal Name: Fractura Fortitudinis
Spectrum: Terror ↔ Bravery
Vidient Gift:

• Reads the unseen source of another’s fear
• May dispel dread or conjure courage in its place, can induce panic or calm
• Powerful on battlefields and in moments of crisis
• Instinctive hazard sense

Vidient Perception: The Black Mask reveals itself as shadows clinging to the face. Fear condenses into dense, trembling silhouettes, while courage burns through it like wind through smoke, revealing the features beneath. Vidients can “read” a person as clearly as if they wore a literal mask of shadow or light. They may strip away terror or shroud a mind in darkness, granting bravery or bending the will with dread. In addition the Vidient often sees their surroundings waver when terror is near, like walking through a nightmare.

Risks: Fear suppressed too long becomes reckless bravery; courage amplified too far becomes suicidal resolve.

“Even heroes tremble.”

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IV. The Scorching Halo

“Justice / Rage”

Formal Name: Lapis Iudicii
Spectrum: Righteousness ↔ Wrath
Vidient Gift:

• Perceives the desire for fairness or vengeance
• Can sharpen moral clarity or inflame anger
• Righteous anger or uncontrolled violence results

Vidient Perception: This shard manifests as light encircling a person’s head. Justice appears in straight white-gold lines, forming scales or geometric patterns around the brow. When someone is righteous, the lines align symmetrically. In wrath the lines shatter, dissolving into violent sparks which branch and fracture unpredictably throughout the whole body, depending on the intensity of the emotion. The halo brightens or burns depending on the purity—or fury—of the emotion beneath. Vidients may temper the fire into steady purpose… or fan it into destructive wrath.

Risks: Justice and rage are twins; a Vidient who loses balance may mistake fury for righteousness.

“When the scales break, the sword rules.”

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V. The Golden Glimmer

“Desire / Ambition”

Formal Name: Ignis Desiderii
Spectrum: Want ↔ Aspiration
Vidient Gift:

• Discerns hidden longing or rising ambition
• Can temper dangerous desire or fuel dormant drive
• Influences creativity, hunger for power, or yearning for change
• Can inspire greatness or breed greed and addiction

Vidient Perception: Those attuned see flecks of gold drifting from someone’s heart or eyes, trailing behind them like motes caught in sunlight. Simple desire forms drifting sparks, while ambition organises them into purposeful constellations and stretches them upwards, as if seeking something unseen. In deep longing, the Glimmers cluster closer together. In ruthless ambition they tower until they scorch the air. Movements of the Glimmer reveal hidden wants, motivations, and drives. Vidients can coax existing desire into being—or sculpt scattered longings into fierce, unstoppable ambition. For them, the world is filled with small chemical lights—embers of want and bonfires of drive.

Risks: Ambition stoked too hot devours its bearer. Desire quieted too far leaves them hollow.

“Every empire begins with a spark.”

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VI. The Silver Drift

“Peace / Apathy”

Formal Name: Vitreum Quietis
Spectrum: Calm ↔ Indifference
Vidient Gift:

• Brings serenity where chaos reigns
• Can soothe turmoil or drain emotional energy entirely
• Valuable in healing halls, perilous in political courts

Vidient Perception: This shard appears as silver mist rising gently from the shoulders. Peace billows softly, shimmering and full of quiet depth. Apathy flattens the mist into listless, motionless haze until it atrophies to dust, collecting in hollows of the body where emotion has gone quiet. Deep serenity glows with pearlescent calm. Total aoathy looks like a statue crumbling from the inside. Vidients read a person’s stillness as either serene or hollow by the form of the Drift. They may soothe turmoil into peace… or press the world into muted grey, numbing all feeling.

Risks: Too much peace becomes detachment; too much apathy becomes decay. Some Vidients drift through life untouched by feeling.

“Still waters can drown.”

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VII. The Prism

“Truth / Deceit”

Formal Name: Speculum Veritatis
Spectrum: Honesty ↔ Falsehood
Vidient Gift:

• Reveals sincerity or detects subtle lies
• Can clarify truth—or cloak it in convincing deception
• Reveals lies or crafts hallucinations; perception distortion

Vidient Perception: The Prism fractures light around a person’s words and presence. Truth shines clean and white, with pure honesty brightening the air itself. Deceit splinters into irregular, shifting rainbows. Lies themselves show as hairline fractures crawling over someone’s reflection, sometimes visible even before they lie. It warps and distorts, like a reflection over reality. Vidients see the distortion as clearly as a crack in glass. They may sharpen truth until it cuts—or twist perception into convincing hallucination.

Risks: A Vidient may lose their own sense of truth, unable to trust even their reflection.

“A lie is simply the shadow truth casts.”

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VIII. The Flame

“Hope / Despair”

Formal Name: Aurum Spei
Spectrum: Aspiration ↔ Desolation
Vidient Gift:

• Nurtures hope in weary hearts or snuffs it out entirely
• Can lift spirits past breaking, or crush them under their own weight
• Revered and feared in equal measure

Vidient Perception: The Flame burns at the centre of every soul. Hope flickers as warm, ascending firelight, and rising hope caues it to flare with each heartbeat. Despair gutters downward in cold blue ash, and can become a smoke-like darkness which chokes the air itself. Vidients see the brightness, direction, and steadiness of a person’s inner flame as a direct measure of their spirit’s condition. They may rekindle even a dying ember… or smother hope into extinguished stillness. To a Vidient of the Flame, rooms brighten or dim as if carried by someone’s inner sky.

Risks: Hope magnified becomes delusion. Despair amplified becomes ruin. This shard is the closest to the original heart of Pandora’s Mirror.

“Where hope glimmers, despair waits behind it.”

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Other Mirror Anomalies

“When the Mirror shattered, not every piece cut clean. Some embedded too deeply; others left dust in the Pattern. Those grains refract light in strange directions, birthing seers, dreamers, and the blind.”

The unpredictable effects of the mirror’s shattering sometimes produce usual effects in individuals. Little is known about them, even by the Atharim. Possibilities include:

The Witness
Can perceive the reflections of others but can’t affect them. Feels like living in a hall of mirrors. Sees emotional light around people, knows when someone else is using a Shard, but has zero agency. Useful, tragic, voyeuristic. Sees the glow of connections, fears, and lies but is condemned never to touch them. People accuse them of coldness because he can only observe emotion as light, not feel it.

The Cross-Reflected
Vision splits across alternate outcomes—every choice produces a visible “ghost” of what might have been. Perceives overlapping timelines, lives slightly out of phase; sanity and identity erode over time. Their eyes catch alternate versions of events a heartbeat before or after they occur. In conversation they sometimes answers questions no one asked yet. Vidients find their presence disorienting because they collapse their reflections back onto them.

The Echoed
Inherits after-images of strong reflections. Their own emotions can replay scenes that never happened or bleed into dreams. Artists, prophets, addicts who can’t tell memory from mirage.

The Regulator
Immune to reflection effects. The Pattern refuses to bend near them. Serves as foil or stabiliser; Vidients find them calming or frustrating, a person whose soul resonates at perfect equilibrium. Around them, reflections flatten. The gods once used Regulators to stabilise the Mirror; now they appear unpredictably, often as ordinary humans who unknowingly suppress shard phenomena.