“
They are unyielding truth, with no whisper of empathy, no issue of regret. Despite all their violence, they have no interest in causing harm. They simply do it because it is what they do. And without interest, there can be no debate. This is an Axiom.”
The Axioms are Divine-like or post-Divine beings created by the moon Volition (sometimes with assistance from the Iconoclasts) and conceived by the Independents and Iconoclasts, who were fascinated by the idea of Divines that did not require an Excerpt.
Axioms, in contrast to Divines, are totally divorced from people and essentially amoral. They embody single ideas outside of the context of personhood. They can be considered Aristotelian forms made real, or at least an attempt in that direction, due to Volition's belief that "for there to even be a thing like ‘horseness’, you need the perfect horse".[1]
Because they don't have the idea of people at their core, they can sometimes pose a problem to those who encounter them, if not a serious threat. The Axiom Bountiful caused considerable damage to the Divine Fleet's ships that wanted to pass it to land on Quire, while Axioms like Schism and Aperture were potentially apocalyptic on an even larger scale.
Like Divines, Axioms have a seed or heart;[2][3] the essence of an Axiom can be altered using that heart. When Bountiful was first encountered, it was proposed that it could be made into a machine which could produce a large amount of food for the citizens of the Fleet. Another proposal, and the one which was employed, was changing Bountiful from an Axiom into a Divine, a process that was later repeated by the Method of Apotheosis, though how this was accomplished is unknown.
Just as Axioms can become Divines, Divines may be turned into Axioms as well. It was implied in the Living Library entry for "One's Own Right" and later confirmed incidentally that during the Miracle of the Mirage, Volition built something that turned the deceased Divine Memorious into "an Axiom version of itself".[4]
Known Axioms
- Ache
- Aperture
- Barricade (converted into a Divine of the same name)
- Bountiful (converted into the Divine Bounty)
- Compel (converted into the Divine Compulsion by the Waking Cadent)
- Disaster (mentioned as a possible Axiom)
- Ebullience
- Memorious
- Polyphony
- Schism