The sky itself danced with mad colors, rippling and reverberating through the eyes and souls of man and god.  Beneath the steady, portentous tread of bedeviled thousands, the earth shook and the grass became juicy pulp like so many squeezed tears.  Through the aging atmosphere the wind howled and howled, a sonorous clamor of chaos, and little maelstroms of chaos danced across a cultivated world.  New abominations, loathsome brainchildren of the diseased consciousness, sought out the little chaoses as their spirits beat to their own tunes, and sucked from them their very existence til even the littlest breath held more power.  Above the particulate expanse hovered the bastion of change, keeping captive within its winding halls the arbiter of beauty, a triad of talents, and an empathetic lord.  Mutative poisons lashed from the gullet of the titan of the Venomweald; colossi of the sea drifted, flailing, into the abyssal leviathan's jaw.  Magic bled from stone into the floor of a forest buried alive, bones and ice conspired to stave off a damnable defeat, and perfection stood as the adversity of nicety.  Some of the old gods stirred in their self-made graves, like the reclusive warmonger, while the names of others vanished from the memory of even their kin.  Occupation consumed the world, and it left it stripped to the bone.

And so it was that in one year the season changed, not a fall to winter, but a fall to famine.  Robbed of substantiation, every living thing wilted.  Trees shriveled up and dropped their leaves, their branches reaching like bones toward an uncharitable sky.  Across Galbar the green grass became a carpet of rotting brown, while the opulent fronds of the Gilt Savannah lost their luster and took on a mantle of ash.  Creatures, be they of thinking minds or not, starved, but they did not die.  For an entire season there was no death—and no life.  Every being dwindled to a husk, a corpse not yet robbed of its movement and not susceptible to decay.  Even unnatural life fell still, as if caught in a trance.  In this season of profound stagnation, death lost meaning, time went unmeasured by mortal mind, dreams dwindled like dying fires, no mouth sang, no brain thought, no hand rose to gave thanks for light, no craftsman crafted, no warrior warred, and only ill winds, devoid of tiding, blew.

Of course, to a god or demigod, what was a season?  When spring came, the spell passed, and existence resumed as if nothing had happened.  No mortal, from peasant to warlord, remembered a thing.  Perhaps it was merely all a bad dream.  It sank away just as quickly.

Only on one corner of Galbar was the Aimless Time remembered.  At the mouth of the Mahd river, where it splintered through a great delta into the Fractal Sea, there lay a broken land.  It was a drab, deary, and temperate country of canyons, cliffs, bluffs, plateaus, mountains, fjords, and gulches, most hundreds of feet above sea level and the nearby desert, rising like misshapen giants above a web of fog created by the rivers far below.  On the tops of these structures stood little forests and towns, a blend of farming, fishing, and logging villages of the decadent backwoods variety.  In this place lived the wanderers, the explorers, the seekers, the pilgrims, and the lost.  Somehow, all of their journeys led them here—here, where the Aimless Time went unrivaled by any other conception of reality.  Every one of them, be they hain, human, angel, troll, tedar, goblin, seemed hollow.  They seldom spoke, and moved slowly, as if they had all the time in the world.  Even for this place, however, one settlement in particular stood out as strange.  At some point evidently a ring of houses and towers around a great pit in the ground, but the entire place had been suffused by enormous roots, vines, and branches.  The naked eye could not discern plant from bone still lined with dusty, clinging flesh, but still the plants lived and grew.  They grew through the bodies of the town's inhabitants, either pinning them in place for eternity or turning them into walking foliage of their own.  Nothing bloomed; there was no green.  At the bottom of the pit, this Deadwood Sepulcher lay the root-mangled corpse of a deer.  Strips of flesh hung on to its bones, but nothing else remained save a bog of putrefied biomatter staining it and the ground around it and an accursed soul.

In this very spot, long ago, life had been laid to rest, and by mortal and god alike she had been forgotten.  Though her tortured body cried out for the aid of any being, only her custodian remained by her side, mournful but powerless to help her.  He eventually went mad, his caring soul turned raving insane by the eyes on the inside, and he left her to die.  So many years went by that the earth changed around her, twisted, raised, lowered, and raised again into the broken country that now resided there.  When Slough's second death finally did come, a trace amount of the vast, unnamable curse within her eked out to bestow upon the forgetful world a semblance of death all its own, forever changing the Forsaken Cragland in the process.

Her curse had rotted the land, every man, woman, child, beast, bird, flower, and tree.  No life remained.  Vacant beings wandered the heights, tending to the land, the homes, and the tombs.  Graves littered these crags, their stones outnumbering the crows, and within some of these graves lay dimly shining souls in worthless and transitory cadavers, recalled through accursed undeath and never given a proper home.

Much in this profaned land was still, yet at the base of the Deadwood Sepulcher, the Rottenbone shivered and wished she could weep.

[hider=Summary]
~Slough lies unburied and unmarked at the heart of a blighted town in the Forsaken Cragland, where the delta of the Mahd river used to be
~Her resting place, the Deadwood Sepulcher, is a sort of holy site, and echoes with the tainted life power of the goddess.  Those who begin a journey or seek purpose without a specific goal in mind feel a tug toward this place, and those who finish their journey to the Sepulcher are granted undeath at the cost of a suppressed soul, and remain in the Cragland
~The seeping curse inside her caused a season of undeath, the Aimless Time, to befall the world.  To practically all beings, however, it never happened; those capable of remembering it are those who exist outside the span of normal time, and the effects of the defiled season faded as it did, leaving no traces behind outside of the Cragland
~In the Cragland there are numerous tombs with special souls stashed inside.  A visitor to the Cragland who opens one will be sapped to give the souls a proper body

Might Summary:
-0 MP for the Aimless Time, caused by Slough's inherent powers.
-10 MP for the 'holy site', Deadwood Sepulcher
-1 FP to recall a proud soul of a chaos-drenched lord
-1 FP to recall a proud soul of a crystalline dragon
-1 MP to recall a brave soul of a skybound sympathizer
-1 MP to recall a brave soul of a malevolent maiden
-1 MP to recall a brave soul of a charismatic warhound
-1 MP to recall a vast soul of the knowledgeable youth
-1 MP to recall a vast soul of the starlight scientist

5 MP remain[/hider]