[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/0hpO2q6.png[/img] [b]Harbinger of the Natural Order, Guardian of Harmony, God of Kings and King of Gods, I AM THAT I AM Level 7 God of Order 7 Might 5 Freepoint[/b][/center] [hr] On the mountain slope of Mount Altai, the city of Talos burned. Fires raged unchecked, their smoke darkening the sky and blotting out the full moon hanging high overhead. What few Angels dared take to the skies to escape the heat were quickly overwhelmed by the noxious fumes and plummeted back to the harsh embrace of the earth. The panicked cries of thousands echoed across the ruins of the once mighty stone walls towards the hastily farms that surrounded the city. The Human, Roavick, and Hain soldiers that called the city home did what they could to block out the horrible sounds, but most would carry them to their grave. Standing far above the highest point of the city shone a terrible light. It made the great armies of the Amestrians tremble as gouts of white fire rained down upon them. Giant thunderclaps announced to the people that death was upon them each time spark was touched to air. Blinding flashes of light and clouds of acrid smoke were as trumpeters to their terrible inferno of volatile magics. When they found their new homes in the crumbling husk of the once great Amestrian city, some fire would burn all in their path whether stone, wood, or flesh. Others would explode on contact, throwing shrapnel in all directions to deliver the unwary and the unlucky to the unyielding grasp of the Endless Beyond. On the highest home of the city, the Reliquiem of Talos watched the carnage with empty, lifeless eyes. The wood beneath his feet each time the Realta unleashed her devastating fire. It was from her hands the fire lept, but it appeared she took little pleasure in it. She took no joy in anything, it seemed. Every building from the highest point up the mountain to the coastal wall had been systematically targeted. While not every structure was completely destroyed, the star was certainly working their way down the list. The elderly Hain suspected the star wouldn’t be satisfied until no two stones sat upon each other in good order. The casualties in the city were impossible to estimate, though it was certainly a matter of percentages now rather than a mere tally. Whether the significant statistic was the percentage of dead or that of those who still lived, he had no idea. In the distant sky, the world seemed to be ending. The stars seemed to ripple and detach themselves from the Firmament of the Heavens, and as the Requiem watched, they released themselves to the earth. Streaks of flame clawed grievous wounds through the atmosphere, their brilliance such that the late hour shone brightly as high noon. Fearsome banshee shrieks trumpeted their approach, and the ocean trembled in fear of the wrathful God’s might unleashed upon the world. This star was but the first to come down, but was followed in such close succession that the order became meaningless. Every star, the comforting lights that had guided and guarded all living creatures on a world far beyond this one since time immemorial, brought with them death. Their lives were simply the sacrifice upon an altar to the will of of their Father.. The destruction this single star was absolute. Hours of plasma blasts had reduced structures to rubble, but the overlapping craters of charred rock left nothing to testify that there had ever been anything but a field of burning glass. The peoples in the homes around the city huddled in their burrows, the scythe passing a hair’s breadth from their faces at times not daring to reach out for more. Eventually the parade of annihilation slowed and stopped. As seemingly endless as they appeared, the star’s fury were abundant, but finite. The time did finally come when the sky had no more fire left to give, no more stones to melt. It was no matter: her father’s will had been done. All that remained of the once-great metropolis, a center for trade and wonder at its height, was ashes. Soot and crackling glass would be the city’s tombstone, the abandoned rings of fortification its pallbearers. The calamity would be spoken of in hushed whispers, told over firelight as a parable to the coming generation as they sat under a night sky and gazed fearfully at the stars above. The Requiem would live to see none of these things. Little life remained in his body. His heart worked feverishly to pump what traces of blood remained, but its successes only served to push him closer to the end. The death of his city, and its people, was the Requiem’s final sight before he was claimed by the endless darkness of the void. [hr] Logos nearly glared down from his post, thousands of miles above Galbar as the scene replayed itself three thousand three hundred and thirty-two more times. A lesser God would have struggled to hold in his Temper. Logos had none. [s][i]Brother, come! In the heart of Lantea, we sing the thousand-year death-song for a fading galaxy. We shall gather its embers and bank them in the black hole at its core.[/i][/s] Galbar had been beautiful, once. Had been being the key phrase of it all. It had once been barren, a seemingly endless plane of white sandstone. So very much like the tiny world he had found. This world, the world he had first laid eyes on, had seemed like a blessing. Empty, featureless, and devoid of everything. With it held endless potential, and endless perfection for a future. Their reward for a task well done by Fate. The Lord of Order had spurned it at first sight. He had foreseen what was to come, for how could anything natural survive in endless chaos. Briefly, in his long treks across the featureless surface of his own world, back in the dark and emptiness a universe away, Logos had doubted, if for the briefest of nanoseconds, if he had made the right decision to abandon his brethren. Now, upon looking at their perversions, Logos’s resolve hardened. Dark reds and greys and blacks obscured large swaths of land now. A vast desert ran against grey waste, and battered mountains framed the world. Poisoned swamps and alien jungles. Ice caps that seemed broken from reality itself. A few sparse forests lay within grasslands, and within those grasslands were found the many sentient races of this world. Logos was not impressed. So many spur of the moment creations. No purpose to any. The Rovaick were crude. Mishappen monstrosities spurred to breed and destroy. The Packmind were ripe with the stench of Vestec’s poisonous influence. The Urtuleem were unnatural, as were the Djinni and the Pronobii. Creatures of artificial life, stone, ice and air. Within them was simply the trappings of a mind and a life, the ghosts of the necessary neurological processes. They had no place. His eyes turned at last to the creatures of his own making, the stolen humans from his garden. They too had become flawed, stolen to sate the whims and fleeting fancies of his brothers and sisters. If there was but one race that passed any modicum of approval in Logos’s all seeing eyes, it was the Hain. Strange design, and an even stranger maker, but within them he felt the pull of his Order. His brother Toun, had done well in their creation. But they were not the design of Logos’s making. Therefor, they were flawed. Every so often was the flare, the sign that another one of his children had either landed or found another of Jvan’s foul creation. In a few minutes, the area would swiftly become covered in black, or still smoldering reds. In many places, even the seas were poisoned; potential pristince waters deep, sickly greens. Galbar itself, the home of the gods and goddesses that had created the universe itself, stood as a testament to their prides, their lusts, and their ignorance. Foul works of Jvan orbited the upper atmosphere, and even the natural satalites pulsed with the chaotic essence of Vestec. Toun had secluded himself within a fortress on the sea. And many of his brothers and sisters seemed quiet… almost as if… [s][i]We shall circle its fatal horizon and bathe in its death-glow. We will sing the song of making as we dive into its gravity well. We shall meet at its center and re-kindle its fires, and a new galaxy shall be born. Join us, Father![/i] [/s] Another flare of white light down below. It mattered not. City, forest, desert, mountain, plains: all were being slowly reduced to rubble and molten glass to purge the virus that was the Cancer the Grew from the world once and for all. And Logos was staring right at the cause of all of this destruction. Hidden beneath the waves, secreted away from all but his eyes, was that monster from beyond Reason. Logos was not angry. Within a single thought Logos was upon the surface of Galbar for the first time. Whirlwinds of dust rose up and fell back to the ground as the wind surged erratically. The tiny bits of dirt and pebbles kicked up in the gale were harsh against any mortal’s flesh, for it was here in the Firewind Desert that he would correct all wrongs. He was not alone. One of his children stood close, arms aflame as it prepared to strike down its intended; a woman wrapped in layers of rich red cloth. A tattered pack hung from her back, a gourd of water, and sandals that had perhaps never known better days. The Realta paused in its task to glance at its father, who merely raised a hand to stall its judgement. The woman stopped to stare. Her patchy skin was stretched over her skeleton like thin rubber. Saliva and blood dripped from her crusted mouth, which opened into four wedges to reveal layer after layer of razor tooth. [s][i]Come, my lovely white dove. I remember when you danced the death of Eta Carinae, how your feathers whipped in the solar wind as you hands spread its heart across a hundred stars. [/i] [/s] [b]“Find another,”[/b] came Logos’s command. The Realta obeyed, leaving a trail of fire in its wake as it took to the skies, to find another of Jvan’s twisted worshippers. For a second, the woman just stood there, as if trying to make her mind. Finally, she rummages through her stained, smelly saddlebag. A chunk of stinking, bloody meat plops out; the woman quickly tucks it back in and pulls out a crude knife chiseled from bone. With that, the Lord of Order methodically climbed down the ash dunes, letting the foreign sun soak its light upon him. The Sculptor chased after the God like a timberwolf chasing a rabbit, slashing wildly with her ivory knife. He did not even exert the effort to even think of dodging her. The blade chipped and fractured with every thrust on his ebony skin as Logos walked tirelessly through the dunes. Eventually, he came to a wide running river flowing southward. He splashed into the ash-choked river, sending up sprays of slate-grey water. The woman apparently didn’t care about getting wet, following him into into the river, her glazed eyes filled with ravenous hunger. Logos turned to her when he reached the opposite bank and shook his head at her her, almost in disappointment. [b]“You know not who I am,”[/b] he said. It was a statement, not a question. The Sculptor gave an intelligible hiss, her mind clearly shredded beyond knowing by that [i]thing’s foulness. [/i] Then his eyes flash like the flashbulb of a mountain-sized camera. Clouds of superheated dust and ash were lifted skyward. When the light cleared, all that was left of the woman was a charred skeleton and the smell of burning pork. [s][i]No man’s laughter ever made the stars twinkle so brightly as yours did then![/i][/s] They were so delicate, his humans. Speed up the frequency of their individual atoms, boil the water within them, and they reverted to the soil from which they came. Across the silent desert, a breeze began to pick up. The skeleton slowly started to disintegrate into grey, flour-like ash. Logos paid no heed to it, and knelt down and begin digging into the dunes with his hands, shifting soil until an adequate hole had been formed. From within a pocket of carefully concealed space was his flower of beautiful crystal brought out, its roots buried deep within the unforgiving desert soil. The Acalya flower’s petals did not so much as twitch from from the fiery gale. It stood rigid, self-contained, flawless. Logos reached down, his finger lightly caressing the base of the flower. This was simple. It had already been designed. All that was required now was to set the machine into motion. [b]“Grow.”[/b] Something solid, a seed, formed from his magic. He lowered it into the ground, burying it deep beneath the earth, into the roots of the flower. The sand glowed with white magic, and then a small winding stalk pokes out of the soil, raising the flower. Its growth enhanced its Lord’s behest, the stalk continued to grow as its crystal skin roughened, formed ridges and grooves along its length as it grew past his shoulder height, the stalk continuing to grow wider and rougher. The stalk split and branched into all different directions, and those split split again, and again, and they grow wide and flat pieces of shining glass that hang from the branches on short stems. The tree grew to five times his height by the time Logos cut off his magic. Logos approached it slowly and lifted a hand to touch its skin. [s][i]Hold in your brilliance no longer. Let me see your skin glow like the furnace at the heart of Mu Cephei. Let me gaze into your eyes, lit with the light of a hundred suns, while I breathe upon the neck, and hold you tight while a thousand novas burst within us.[/i][/s] Logos stood there for a moment. His eyes traced the leaves and branches, and the grain of the flawless crystal down to the base of the tree. The leaves rustle in the wind from the dunes, their music a thousand chimes, but hold fast to their branches. He sensed the roots spreading beneath beneath the sand and soil, changing the land beneath his feet. It no longer required any further input from him, its biological programming would see to its completion. Wherever its roots touched, the soil fused into crystal quartz and rose from the earth in hexagonal columns, the prospective saplings upwards as the tree spread its influence. All around the desert, stalks began to grow out of the ground, winding their way up out of the earth, and stretching high into the sky. The ground glows white with Acalyian magic, and the clearing becomes surrounded by trees. The trees’ trunks grow thick, and their skin roughen. Leaves sprout along their branches, and soon the Logos could could no longer see past the trees to the land surrounding. Blades of razor grass brush against his feet, bending away from their creation. It was like a garden of sparkling, shimmering glass growing out of the ground, with the vines and flowers upon the trunks, and a lush canopy overhead. Everywhere he looked, light shimmered and sparkled right back at him. Logos sat on one of the raised platform, legs dangling off the side and rested his head against the diamond bark of the center tree, bathing in a soft glow of pale blue from all around. The trees had even now begun released their terrible gift to the world, which would follow upon the arid wind to the furthest corners of this world. Wherever they landed, the Acalya would crystallize and spread, purify and convert. [s][i]Come drift with us. Remember all, then forget it, forget yourself, forget the borders between minds and drift, feel, see, be![/i][/s] His Realta would purify this planet’s people, and the Acalya its flora. He would rectify the mistakes of his siblings. The first move in the Divine Game had been made. Logos, King of the Gods, the only one to remember, waited for the next. [hider=Summaration]The Realta begin their assault on Galbar. Logos lands in the Firewind Desert and walks across the Mahad, to the South of Vetros. There, in the desert, he plants the Acalya flower and uses 2 Might to Bless the area and spur on its rapid growth, seizing a significant chunk of territory under its influence. Some flashes into the Time before the Before Time, and Logos waits for the Spores to settle elsewhere in the world as his Realta continue their purge. 2 Might Spent to Bless to Acalya Flower's Spread[/hider]