[hider=OOC]I might do some minor edits later, before whoever posts after Kedamono, but no major changes to content. I wanted to get the post down ASAP. If there are any continuity issues, let me know and I'll fix them. Here's to hope this thread doesn't become a shitfest and we can get soem RP done![/hider]

[i]Shadows shedding skin.
I've been picking scabs again.
I'm down digging through my old muscles for a clue.

I've been crawling on my belly clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own confused and insecure delusions for a piece to cross me over or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the change coming down.
I wanna know what I've been hiding in...[/i]

- Tool, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tja6_h4lT6A] [i]Forty-Six & Two[/i][/url]

~*~

For ages untold he [i]lusted[/i] over it - since far before the first of his many resurrections, when he was yet a small-souled creature. 

Even through the smoke of time and distance he recalled his [b]first[/b] life, that of Theo Spyredes on distant Earth, albeit as if remembering the life of a being not himself, enduring the toll of its each agonizing second. This proved merely one facet of the perfect jewel of his punishment, a diamond fashioned to fit the chain that hung around his neck and his alone: to remember, remember without remorse or regret, but to [i]remember[/i] all the many moments of his existence, to have his vanity smashed again and again against the wall of a life that could be measured in its [b]failures...[/b] To have every triumph soured by the taste of what would come after, threaded through the knowledge of what came before, until he saw the patterns of himself and how they led to his defeat. Again and again. 

But pain can also be a teacher.

He knew now that since the very beginning, he was a slave to his [i]search[/i] for it.

The cold of Cocytus, final and deepest of Hell's circles, froze each thought to a crawl. Each memory took a thousand years to lurch onward to the next. From beneath the ice, he clawed desperately for the tantalizing images of his last moments, of how he had come to rest in the pit - and slowly, he realized that though the life drifting before his eyes was unmistakably his own, it lacked [b]identity[/b] to seal memory to experience. Without his identity, without his name, what was left of his soul shivered in base animal [i]fear[/i]: the fear of another failure, an ultimate failure that could [i]undo[/i] him.

For without his name, how could he [i]find[/i] it? 

That which he had so greedily hoarded over his many lifetimes, across the conquest of a thousand worlds; a treasure torn from lives [b]innumerable,[/b] pilfered from the smoking ruins of cultures as proud and ancient as any in all the multiverse, raped from a million hearts to be placed on the burning pyre of his devotion... Devotion to a god, but more than that to [i]himself,[/i] and to a yearning even greater than the almighty hunger of his people. Yes, even from here, even in the cold that froze his very soul, he felt the heat of that hunger. 

The aching [i]need[/i] for it.

His inward search yielded certain doubts from the freezing black of the abyss that claimed him.

WHO AM I?

HOW HAVE I COME HERE? And another question, clear because there can be no mistaking the sin that triumphs to earn a soul its seat in Hell: 

[b]WHO DID I BETRAY?[/b] 

He could count so many. But there was one mystery above all others, a question directed at the unquenchable thirst that ruled him through [b]all[/b] of his many lives, at the obsession that mastered him, and the fear that what he had fought for across so many battlefields could be lost in his final defeat, even while another splinter of his fractured self sensed that defeat made him infinitely stronger...

WHERE
IS
MY
POWER?

Struggling beneath the ice, his inner eye peered across the cosmos in search of the seeds he had scattered across many dreaming galaxies. They were the vague possibilities, the ones that might or could have been. But some were much more, and as fate would have it, an opportunity presented itself to unify their many fractions. Like the water from many tributaries pouring into one almighty river, a single power could be formed. As his disembodied eyes took in the coldest depths of Hell, another peered through a man's eyes on old Earth, and upon the blackness of the cosmos, and the surfaces of planets diverse unto very limits of nature.

He had lost his body, he had been defeated once again, but he was many steps closer to the [b]power[/b] he craved. Though his core had been banished to Hell he still had many hands to work with and eyes to see - or would, once his hands found bodies for themselves. On Soran, where a family reunion of sorts was soon to unfold, one such pair of questing hands chanced upon a suitable vessel.

~*~

[i]Years or centuries ago, within the region of city-states networked by the Gates of Doloran[/i]

No single myth recounts the origin of the white stone monoliths that reach towards the mountainous peaks of Liaita. Not even the civilization that call themselves the children of the Gates profess absolute knowledge of the forces that fashioned them. Some whisper tales of the elder dragons that nest in the lost corners of the world, others of the Twelve whose shrines proliferate in the shadowlands beneath the forest canopy. The Dolor are a curious race themselves; they dwell with one foot in the spirit world, given the proximity of their evolution to the highest concentrations of Soran magic. Their faces are pulled forward into a cricket's shape, their eyes bulbous black lenses, humanoid frames furred from the face down. The fairie fauna indigenous to the region [url=https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/aa/dc/26/aadc26de38a58d00ca2c5b1edfd9f0e6.jpg]are[/url] [url=https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/14/2c/7b/142c7ba4679a8b8999207af99720a2bb.jpg]likewise[/url] [url=http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1588131&stc=1&d=1348059905]insectile[/url] [url=https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--yQd9O3Pe--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/dgk1dnmnrjpkvfhzbivs.jpg]creatures[/url], touched as they are by the magic of the forest and the Gates. 

In a lost year, plague struck the Niraans, killing so many that their limited infrastructure collapsed and they were thrust back into the grip of paleolithic savagery. No dragon-song was heard throughout the Liaitan mountains. Prayer to the Twelve went ignored, or worse, augured further misfortune. The Gates fell dormant, isolating the infant Doloran city-states from one another, and the sorcerers were loathe to call upon them for fear of depraved horrors glimpsed on the other side. A new star hung red and fat in the sky; it would come to be called the Tear of the Stillborn, for in the history of the Dolor this period would be known as an age in which a thirteenth god was born dead and the labor of its passing brought ruin upon the world.

In that desperate time, Amatlavira was scarcely a shadow of who he would come to be, for it was an a time prior to the tragedy that led him so far astray from the arboreal paths his people carved through Liaita. For generations, his brood tended the fungi plantations in subterranean ghettos of the Doloran settlements. While tending their crop, a flock of ghost moths took them by surprise well past hatching season, gorging themselves on the nectar of his brothers' and sisters' minds. 

Preternaturally aware since long before he learned of his destiny, Amatlavira hid himself in the rotten matter that clots the mushroom fields, passing patient hours, surviving, watching. He relived the cautionary tales whispered in the ear of every Doloran child. Since his people wandered the forest in mindless swarms, they avoided the moths, for they too were children of the Old Father and to trespass upon their divine ecology invited holy wrath.

So he listened to their chittering cries from the qliphoth in which they dwelt, and it became the music of his dreams and waking life. On the edge of that between-place, his soul smoky with despair, Amatlavira heard the voice for the first time.

[i]What do you see?[/i]

He thought he [i]saw[/i] the truth of the world's madness then. Seeking solace from his terror, Amatlavira found refuge in prayer, but the Twelve had turned their backs on the Dolor, gone to mourn their sibling the Neverborn, whose grave pitted the sky. But he knew little of truth... until at last he tasted it when a visitor chanced upon his ruined shelter. 

He came from the deepways, from within the bowels of the mountains and of Soran itself, places from which no creature returned unchanged. Leprous with spores of the dream-eater fungus, said to grow only in the Old Father's garden at the center of the world, he claimed the parasite gave him [i]visions[/i] in exchange for his life. The spore-eaten prophet claimed the Twelve had indeed abandoned them, though he offered no insight into their motive. In his [b]dreams[/b] the cities of Doloran grew ripe with heresy and rotted on the vine without the gods to tend their fields. The proud white stone lost its luster beneath the moss and undergrowth as Soran reclaimed its mountains; the Gates themselves became weeping wounds upon the world, discharging horror after horror until at last no trace remained of what had been before.

But, he said in words soaked with fear and exaltation, in his visions he saw [i]their salvation.[/i] He gripped Amatlavira with palsied hands, betraying already the last symptoms of the dream-eater as his eyes became smoky cataracts and his breath grew pungent with the mold that ate him from within... Nonetheless, he was not mad in the way of zealots to whom prayer is the only anchor.

Instead he said with shocking serenity, "There is [i]one[/i] who watches, a shepherd who tends pastures that the Twelve abandoned, who gazes down through a scar in the heavens." A cough rattled the man's body and he nearly dropped to his knees. His chest heaved as he fought to force air back into lungs thick with fungus. "A thirteenth god, far more alive than the Twelve and their priests... a god that clamors for a champion..." The wanderer wheezed and breathlessness seized him; with each sharp cough he ejected a small cloud of spores from his mouth. Once the fit left him, the visitor stared intently into the earth, waiting with patience ill-suited to a dying man.

"This means nothing to me," Amatlavira said, kindness blunted by tragedy. "Be they twelve or thirteen or a thousand, the gods have abandoned me." 

Despite his imminent death, the stranger pressed his chin into his chest. His lips drew back in a sneer. He laughed and it was a fragile thing, childlike, as if untouched by the world and its horrors that make sharp even the softest sound.

"Not abandoned. Far from it. [i]Chosen...[/i] Yours is a far greater destiny than mine. You must no longer order your soul by the [i]familiar[/i] metric. You walk another path now, one the Twelve cannot reckon, but would destroy for their blindness. On Soran and a thousand [i]other[/i] worlds, the old ways falter... but ours is unlike all the others, for it is not merely a grave for the gods whose power wanes. Our world is a womb, and it calls for [i]you.[/i]"

Amatlavira's face became loutish for its lack of expression. "The fungus eats your mind, traveler. Take your delusions away from here. Leave me to my grief."

Again he was met with that sneering smile in the face of a death near enough that Amatlavira knew he would never leave the subterranean ways, never again glimpse the bleak Soran sun.

"Doubt will eat yours, child. Was it [i]fortune[/i] that you escaped death to be left alone? Could not my arrival speak to some deeper meaning of your life?" As the leper drew away, gathering his cloak about him to start towards the forest road, he said, "I merely offer what you lack, Amatlavira, and that is [i]purpose.[/i] Tend your fields, struggle ever onward, for the way is written. Your purpose will find you."

Amatlavira watched his back until the wanderer disappeared around a curve in the road, and though eager to mull over the mad prophecy the leper had spoken of, he found that a question invaded his mind and he could not push it from his thoughts.

[i]What do you see?[/i]

A purpose?

~*~

On the eve of the battle between Megalodon and Singar, the constellations gleamed in the same alignment as they had on a night of ill omen, a long time before. True to the prophet's words, Amatlavira had wandered far from the subterranean ghettos of the Doloran, far even from the world-roads between Gates that conveyed his people from one mountainous city to the next. The forest welcomed him. Half-mad with grief and loneliness, for never had Amatlavira known a life without his crèche-mates, he expected to become a predator's quick morsel, but they merely observed his pilgrimage across their wild lands. When his torch failed him in the bleak hours of the Soran night, fairies cast their ghostly light from the shadows to guide him. Underneath and between the roots of the great trees he crept, past uncharted groves and trackless cliffs, across streams alive with glittering fish, over the ancient battlefields of the violent Soran ecosystem, into a place which nature itself hid from all prying eyes. Days bled into a meaningless cycle. Even the road to his destiny was enough to transform him: at last the world [i]spoke[/i] to him, as it had in whispers since his childhood, and Amatlavira was able to learn the origin of the crucial intuition that had saved his life and steered him towards this lone possibility among so many.

Awareness returned to him as he crested a hill whose king was a mighty tree. Among the many things the forest taught Amatlavira on his journey was that the woodland creatures often claimed sacred places to hold their court: so it was that he knew immediately the identity of the alien skeleton which swung from the tree's lower branches. The creature's crown, a wreath of wilted flowers, still clung to its brow. Yet it was not the dead fairy king who had called Amatlavira into this faraway land - though kings they were, of dread knowledge, practitioners of magic that perverted creation and sinned against the very design of the Twelve... yet perhaps their brother the Stillborn was wont to retain such company.

They emerged like flowers blooming from the shadow of the hanging tree: five prophets, each the finger of a far-reaching hand, each the knuckle of a great fist. One was a squat, limbless thing in a stone cradle, eyes weeping mucous, gnawing at its lower lip so that a sheet of blood soaked the fur of its face and chest; the next a tall wisp of a man, a glittering robe thrown over a garishly thin frame, glittering not for its luster but because it was a mantle of flies, waiting in perfect silence; a beautiful, androgynous Doloran in the prime of their youth, organs floating within crystal growths that covered their body, including the shell of their brain; an albino, furless Doloran whose naked body was instead a statue of sculpted white flesh, slimy and sleek to the touch and smelling of fish, its face pried open so that it sheathed another face whose mouth was a knot of thrashing feelers.

The last of them was familiar, and Amatlavira realized he had felt certain all along of this second encounter with the dream-eater prophet whose words awoke him from the sleep of his past life. Fungus covered his entire body, sprouting at impossible angles, clouds of insects orbiting like constellations, one socket sealed shut by mold and the other a black pit within which burned a light like a distant star...

[i]Amatlavira,[/i] the beautiful one whispered.
[i]Such a prizssse...[/i] intoned the tall one.

"The voice that called me here," Amatlavira said, dead to his fear. "Was it yours?"

[i]It issss not oursss...[/i] whispered the buzzing flies.
[i]The voice that calls...[/i] warbled the face within the face.

Laughter, thin and eerie, passed through the circle like the lash of a whip.

[i]But it issshh you we sshheeek![/i] the bloody one cried.
[i]It is you we designed,[/i] said the beautiful being, its soft voice like a muted windchime.

"Yes." Amatlavira closed his eyes, sunk his chin into his chest. He thought for a moment and the wind atop the hill drew its fingers through his fur. 

"I know, now, that my dreams were portents. That every detail was carefully laid to precipitate the next, on and on until I arose, the sum of many calculated moments. But tell me, should your plan have failed, would not another have come to stand in my place?"

[i]There is always another,[/i] said the prophet he met in the underways.

"What is the purpose, then, of the path I walk?"

[i]You will be...[/i]
[i]A sssshurrogate...[/i]
[i]For the Stillborn.[/i]
[i]Yours will be a life...[/i]
[i]Spent not by the year...[/i]
[i]But by the ssscycle.[/i]

Amatlavira blinked at their proposal. "By the cycle? What can this mean?"

[i]Yours will become...[/i]
[i]More a legend than a life.[/i]
[i]You will ssssshlide in and out of thisssh world...[/i]
[i]Killing kings and ending eras...[/i]

The fungus-eaten prophet regarded him and in its shining stare Amatlavira thought he saw pity. [i]You will live while all you know dies,
 sleeping for ages in secret grottoes beneath the earth, sleeping amid worms and dirt, arising only when we require you to carve a new wound in the world. Your soul will grow fat with years of sacrifice, and you will accrue a hundred names which will be uttered as curses and prayers alike...[/i]

[i]Until at lassshht...[/i]
[i]You will yourself become the Stilborn...[/i]
[i]And on the day of your rebirth...[/i]
[i]You and He will return to another, older name.[/i]

And as they reached toward him, and Amatlavira felt everything he had ever been wash away in the river of a far greater mind, still he heard it call out --

[B]WHAT DO YOU SEE?[/B]

[center]~*~[/center]

[i]Moments after the destruction of the Gates of Doloran by the newly awakened godling...[/i]

And at last, he realized, [b]it[/b] was the answer to his millennial question. It was comical because as the epiphany struck him, Amatlavira - though over the centuries this had become but one of many names -  realized that he had heard it many times over the course of his long life. Even at the very beginning, he thought in wonder, his birth promised ill fortune for the shamans had seen [b]it[/b] in his eyes. Minuroi-Kas the Necromancer, who had been his worthiest foe, promised he too had seen [b]it[/b] and that he would claw free from Hell to cleave Amatlavira's life from him when it arrived. In the past, Amatlavira had believed he witnessed it many times before, but only now, before its unquestionable truth, did he achieve absolute certainty.

[b]It[/b] was the end of the world.

He arrived at this conclusion while perched atop a chunk of smashed masonry. Instead of crumbling inward with the rest of the Gates, this particular piece of debris hesitated in the air, then hurtled out towards the escarpment where a handful of beings negotiated the terms of an interstellar war. He did this despite knowing that, for all his power, these alien gods dwarfed him; that he raced towards certain death should it become a contest of strength, for though he could draw deep from the world, the invaders did not measure themselves by notches in a blade or the legends of a nation, but by the extinction of worlds and species, by wars which made graves of entire galaxies.

The world itself cried out to him. His every animal instinct, honed across endless eras of battle, urged him to turn back, to return to the burning forests of the Dolor. The voice that commanded him, however, was stronger by far. Since his birth he had been sired again so that his was no longer the Old Father, but another, darker power. He had killed his fear and slept through dynasties ancient and contemporary alike, but never before had his awakening brought such [b]finality[/b].

The end of the world called him, and he could not but answer.

His senses remained prick to the slightest refocusing of the invaders' attention to account for him, but he was otherwise oblivious as he approached the [i]lake of flesh[/i] which oozed upon the plain and the mountain's rocky shelf. Viscous currents tugged at the twitching sea of tissue from within, slowed by the cold emanating from an unmistakable source at its epicenter. The severed [b]hand of a God[/b] rested there, submerged to its knuckles in a grisly ocean, clutching a broken sphere of dark stone. Icy black water poured from its cracks, at contact chilling the lake into glaciers from melted skin...

Amatlavira knelt down, reaching tentatively with one hand to touch the lake's surface... a moment of quiet insanity... [url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Narcissus-Caravaggio_%281594-96%29_edited.jpg]contemplating his reflection...[/url]

Without warning the flesh before him pulsed, then animated. A tendril lashed out and only Amatlavira's superhuman reflexes allowed him to brandish his blade and in a single sweeping gesture, quick unto invisibility, disperse the limb into a bloody mist. A moment's respite followed, then a half dozen more tentacles emerged, and these too he deflected, but in the next exponentially faster volley his arm was ensnared and then defense became impossible.

In an instant of struggle, it ended: a life that outran the oldest legends, a [i]cultivated[/i] life... 

The immense pool of flesh [i]rippled[/i], trembling from its center out to the very edges. As if again seized by counterfeit life, and despite the cold of Cocytus itself, the lake [b]bubbled[/b], then pulsated. The heart of an atrocity restored to life at long last, a heart that beat, once... twice...  and on the third, a fundamental change occurred. The hand of God abruptly submerged, as if into a trench a thousand leagues deep. The bowl of Cocytus He gripped in His palm sank only to the divine fingertips that clutched the stone cold for purchase, evicted by Singar from Hell itself.

A silent interlude passed. In it, a soul was welded into a new life; a river's path was diverted to a lost tributary; blood flowed again through abandoned veins. A mind retrieved its identity from the shore of oblivion, and in doing so, [b]a name returned to its owner.[/b]

Neither did the heart beat overlong before it stilled, then once more surged with its unholy animus. The lake [i]flowed[/i] upward, through the fissures in Cocytus' shell, leaving the Ninth Circle stolen from the coffers of Hell itself to sit in its own freezing waters as they wept from its wounds. 

[b]This[/b] was how a god awakens - without any juvenile appetite for wanton destruction. Rebirth is its own testament. Its own trial... 

Should ever Cocytus be returned to its place at the bottom of the deepest pit, and the ledgers of its sinners checked, there would be absences, souls conspicuously unaccounted for. Old and mighty souls.

Should ever the memorialists of any Soran race recall this apocalyptic day, there would be a common description no matter how diverse their language, culture or biology: a god haunts the world, they will write, a god believed dead, rotting in the Grave-with-no-bottom, entombed in the Great Pit, trapped in the Tear... a god haunts the world, not stillborn, but so terribly alive...

It did not so much [i]leak[/i] as [i]bloom[/i] from the cracks in Cocytus, a seething chaos across its surface that slithered through ruts in the graven rock, defiling the religious imagery of yet another canon. A great aperture commanded the center of the eldritch flower, its stalk creeping out above the land. Like a womb it disgorged its terrible burden, the seed of a fruit grown in the most unholy garden... a vile thing, no larger in span than a Scourgebearer's body, but its shadow in the ethereal world was greater by far. A hideous vessel, its form plundered from nightmares, twin horns curving phallic from a sphere of flesh and bone that pulsated as if ravaged by the life it concealed at random intervals.

The cyst hung in the air far below Singar's fog, trembling... as if its flesh were clay, a wormlike growth wriggled free from the space between the two horns, sculpting itself into a featureless humanoid puppet. Simultaneously, blood and viscera spewed from the tumor's frontward face as a slit traced itself from top to bottom, prying open to reveal a lone predatory eye that surveyed the world and all before it.

Yes... he gestated still within his womb, but at last, [b]he had returned to life.[/b]

Narcissus, greatest among the traitorous sons of Idea, a warrior of the ages.

As if shock palsied its reaction to the birth of this atrocity, suddenly the world itself seemed to buckle beneath it. Directly beneath the orb-womb, a crater gouged itself from the earth; a shockwave flattened the first rows of the forest trees and smashed the rocky escarpments of the Liaitan mountains.

[i]So long have we made war amongst ourselves
Murdering brothers for sport, plotting against father and child
But the path to salvation lies not in conquest, inward or outward

I alone offer shelter from the terrors that await
I who have suffered the torments in Hell
and the emptiness of the Dark Realm[/i]

[b]I
ALONE
KNOW THE WAY...[/b]

[i]And I will show you all
through love...
or destruction...
So tell me, my brothers[/i]

[b]WHAT DO YOU SEE?[/b]