Updated my journal - Planescape Torment : Enhanced Edition (Android version)

[Zaxares]

What came first? Sigil or the Lady?

I think your comparison to Ao could be in the right neighborhood. This makes me think of something that has come up from time to time in Alan Watts' lectures. Here's an example. However, this is incomplete. This often gets coupled with the idea of metaphysical relativity. The eye cannot see itself, a tooth cannot bite itself, a mind cannot think itself. Putting it together, we are beings who exist interdependently and our existence is an activity, not a stable state of being.

On top of that, Sigil is a rather metaphysically sensitive place. Isn't there a part of the narrative where gods only exist if people believe in them? Perhaps Sigil itself only exists if a force believes in it. It's not really part of any of the other planes, but more in it's own space in between the planes (hence the idea that it may be the center of everything). Perhaps that is what the Lady is. She is a metaphysical force that exists to believe in Sigil. She is not a goddess herself, as then she would need worshipers to exist. If anything, Sigil is the god-being and the Lady is the faith-source that supports its existence. It would definitely explain how she can shape the city by thought alone. The Lady is Sigil's only faith-source (or at least has a majority share of it, since its residents can potentially make small changes to things), so Sigil becomes an extension of whatever she believes.

This could be why she doesn't accept followers, and to worship her has disastrous results. Were she to take the role of a deity, she would then need to conform to the rules of existence for gods. However, this would break (or at least be very damaging) to the Sigil-Lady synergy.

So, as Sigil is not a place that is a part of other places and doesn't play by the rules of other places, The Lady is a being that is not connected to other beings and doesn't play by the rules of any other beings.

My question is, why the Lady of Pain. Pain seems to just be an incidental consequence of foolishly trying to worship her. If the core of her existence is this metathought cycle between her and Sigil, wouldn't that be the foundation of her name? The Lady of Dreams? The Thoughtweaver? Something like that?

I really like that idea that the Lady of Pain does not want to be worshipped because if she accepted it, it would mean that she would BECOME a deity and thus be bound by the other rules that deities must accede to. It's never been stated if she and Ao are similar beings, although the parallels are certainly striking. That said, she does seem to be LESS powerful than Ao in the sense that powerful beings or even mortals have been able to challenge her in the past, whereas anyone trying to go up against Ao simply seems to fail/get destroyed before going anywhere.

I personally like to think that the Lady of Pain is a survivor of What Came Before, a time before the Great Wheel even materialized, and is only briefly hinted at by what few materials have been released about the Far Realm (which may actually be a bigger "universe" encapsulating the Great Wheel. It's been alluded to a few times that the Great Wheel was created long ago out of primordial Chaos by the first deities, who themselves were randomly spawned out of nowhere through sheer random chance (Chaos spawning its own very antithesis, in an act of supreme irony), and decided to impose "Order" on Chaos. The result, ultimately, was the Great Wheel Cosmology). If this is so, then as you suggested, the Lady of Pain is probably bound/governed by very different rules of existence, the same way that common certainties we often take for granted tend to just break down if you travel to the Far Realm.) Whatever she was/is, she obviously seems to have some affinity for pain/torment/suffering, so she keeps it as her identity.