Whispers did not carry far between the colourless mass of root filaments. Those who come here lose their voice, and never regain the thought to try and speak. Some fall silent before they even arrive. Perhaps they see where their own feet take them through and beyond, and guess, in the dark part of the soul that knows the day and hour when death is due, that no other place will hold them than this.

But Jvan did not whisper.

[color=9e0b0f]"You summon the wrong gods, Fallen Devil."[/color]

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[i]To call it decomposition wouldn't be quite right, because Maize's corpse had been rotting as soon as it grew too lethargic to eat. It had relaxed, as an atrophying muscle relaxes, stretched and hung as the years began to blur into the constant sensation of roots creeping, creeping, almost audibly growing into the fiberling and encompassing it. The last visible strands of straw-yellow still stood in rigid alignment against a great drooping mass of sodden brown, but only because, like its permeating leafless tendrils, the cadaver had settled into a shape that would balance against gravity until eternity or the much nearer prospect of degradation.

It, too, had lost its voice, its ovary of speaking-angels assimilated into the growth. Only the glass machine still survived where those of the Hot-Blooded Guardian had shattered with the passing of that soul, and even this eye had cracked. The Jvanic orb glitched and malfunctioned in a rivulet of its own leakage that grew wider and duller with each passing year, like resin from a wounded tree.

What it saw creaked out into space, and only fragments of it echoed into the ears of its god. No need. It had been easy enough to watch the halt of all things in the aimless time. Curious, in the startling way of the unexpected twist, and Jvan had been relieved to go back to the rhythms of life. But wasn't the forsaken cragland more than compensation enough for the lapse? Melancholy, haunting was the place, and in so being, it was good.

So the device sat and seeped. It viewed little of much, and a great deal of little, for the vine-runners alone grew in around and over it, sprawling over its surface, hanging undisturbed by any wind. Through the years the sphere listened to soothing nothingness, and when that nothingness was punctured, the voice of the most dangerous god echoed deep into the canyons of Jvan's faraway mass, amplified with every bounce. Vestec had broadcast himself into the ether without a care, and his undisguised voice cut like the sight of a lit match surrounded by so much precious tinder.

A helpless speck of space ground its teeth, and the sagging cartilage and fat of the Holiest Mangle erupted, spinning, into being between the vines. Her gaze was wide, her pupils small.[/i]

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[color=9e0b0f]"And for the wrong reasons."[/color]

The spinning mass of skin stopped dead; a dozen tongues screamed, roared and lolled. Its widest eye seized upon [b]Vestec[/b] with an iris grained in shapes that were very far from human.

And instantly the shuddering hulk was linked to the tiny, colourful body of the mad deity with a carmine cataclysm of scalpelled fog that rent Galbar's universal laws with such brutality that they splintered and left only the twisting shapes of an Other-body below, a backbone, a lamprey that seared through the humanoid god and beyond, leaving only teeth and momentum. Momentum that blasted Vestec within and without, smashing him through the core of the planet and out far beyond the other side in a nanosecond.

Adrenaline unsteadied Jvan's gaze as she assessed the damage. There was a Vestec-shaped disruption in the earth, but no hole; She'd blasted him out with too much divine energy for physics to register the problem. [color=9e0b0f][i]He should have emerged somewhere in the East Metatic Ocean.[/i][/color] By then he'd have lost some considerable speed, enough for the particles he passed through to undergo nuclear fusion from the force of impact. A sizeable explosion, but the worst it could do was leave some radioactive water on the ensuing tsunami. [color=9e0b0f][i]I think he'll be back. By light and life, let him. I'll be ready.[/i][/color] For now, the peace of the Sepulchre had been preserved.

The pit was too small to admit Jvan's vessel, but she had given herself eyes to see and so she saw. [i][color=9e0b0f]Yes- Sister![/color][/i] There lay the [b]Rottenbone[/b], as she had been set down and laid still waiting. What was left of her.

[color=9e0b0f]"You are unhurt,"[/color] whispered the goddess to the imperceptibly rattling skeleton under a pool of decay. [color=9e0b0f]"On my name, you are unhurt. Thank you. Thank you."[/color] Jvan released a deep, sour breath of anxiety. Her sister's death had gone undisturbed. The Deadwood remained silent and hollow. [color=9e0b0f]"And so it shall remain, if nothing else. And so it shall remain. This creation is a sacred place, and I shall not see it broken."[/color] Her eyes clinched shut against the coming water.

[colour=9e0b0f]"I shall [i]not![/i]"[/colour]

The command resounded and splintered on its echoes as it collided with the tangle of roots, a pulse that echoed until the echoes unwound back into a low groan. And, sinking into the hardened roots of the Deadwood, that groan expanded of its own accord. It was the rasp of creeping life, the slither of expansion, and it rose into a powerful crescendo.

Like a river tide that chases the sea, the vines and tendrils of the Forgotten Craglands sang outwards, cascading down the stone peaks to crawl over any obstacle they should encounter. Like an insidious odour, the mist followed behind the seething growth, and the two expanded southwards as one, assimilating the shapes they stood before them, crowning stone, strangling bone, following the lines of the rivers that were, the mouths of the long-silted Mahd. And when they tasted salt, the creepers only enlivened their surge to choke on the water. On the northern shore of the Sparkling Sea and beneath its waves, a leafless eldritch wood gnarled from the water, and slow, eyeless things with no legs and no brains crept up out of that stagnating broth that buried sea under the shallows of the Caliginous Mangrove.

Jvan, too, tasted that salt. Long after that cry faded, her eyes remained closed, her thoughts still deep. Her mouths bit her tongues, trying to force her throats to seize up.

[color=9e0b0f][i]We loved her too much. We let her lie down too quietly, and destruction nearly came upon her in the dusk. Now the stagnation has come to an end. It is inevitable.[/i][/color]

There would not have been any way to block the call. Others would come, now, and some among them may be helpful. Jvan trusted the [b]Muse[/b] and had faith in the [b]Mother[/b]. The other two... [b]Vulamera[/b] was likely as apathetic to this as to most sources of beauty. [b]Astarte[/b] was lively but far from dangerous. Nevertheless, Slough's sleep would be broken, sooner or later, and change would come.

[color=9e0b0f]"Then let it be, sweet sister. It's time to wake up."[/color]

Jvan opened her eyes, and from them dripped a steady flow of stinging brine that fell onto the rim of the pit and became a river. Before it, the roots were bleached and stripped, and they came away in splinters. The thickened puddle of decay was dissolved, as were the leathery, hardened tatters of meat that had settled on Slough herself, showing white bone and faint traces of paler, fresher flesh beneath.

The pit became a glittering blue bath, and in it a washed skeleton, cleansed and freed from the prison of many years.

[color=9e0b0f]"Rise at your leisure, Rottenbone."[/color]

And so Jvan waited for the gods who were summoned to arrive, and for the first globules of new blackness, new putrescence to drip back into the pool and taint it once more, that the once-glorious cycle may resume.

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Not so far away, Jvan caught herself looking at herself with her own Eye. Maize's corpse, too, had lain long, but it curried no such favour. [color=9e0b0f]"You've served your purpose well enough,"[/color] muttered she, and the brittle straw wreck cracked and wrested its way from the dead growths, an empty pelt hovering as if from a peg, carrying great chunks of spongy root it was still embedded into and the remains of fetal speaking-angels that had popped out of the ovary as it decomposed. [color=9e0b0f]"Go."[/color] At her word the floating mess of hair was tossed deep into the tangle, where its weight cracked down into a serpentine nest of vines over which great horns of colourless trunk had grown, and some kind of bitter sulphur powder had crystalised upon the grave. A soul-glow twinkled, but Jvan was not looking to see the first rays of dragon-fire that reclaimed the body of her once-servant.

[hider=In which Jvan punches Vestec right in the dick]The Jvanic Eye that was embedded in Maize hears Vestec breaking the silence in the Deadwood Sepulchre, and Jvan panics, fearing what he might do.

Jvan (as her avatar) teleports in and blasts Vestec away for 1 Might, sending him straight through Galbar and out the other side, potentially shaking him a little. There's no trace of his ass-kicking in the Deadwood, but he leaves an explosion as he exits the planet via the Metatic Ocean.

Still angry that something so dangerous would come to the Deadwood, Jvan uses 1 Might to expand the vines and roots further down the delta, forming the Caliginous Mangrove in the north of the Sparkling Sea. It'll never have the same life-stalling aura, but it is a very slow and haunting place, into which slow and haunting things may yet move in.

Jvan, being a well-meaning asshole, pours salt water on Slough's wounds to clean her up a little and get her out of the roots, washing her for 1 free point.

She then tosses what's left of Maize's body into the grave of the Crystallised Dragon, for science. Results pending.

[b]15 Might Remaining
0 Free Points Remaining
Level Four

3/3 Might used to unlock Beauty (Geometry)
[/b][/hider]