((My post is a direct continuation of my post in Sea of Ignominy. All quotes are from there.)) [quote] The fungus-eaten prophet regarded him and in its shining stare Amatlavira thought he saw pity. 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... Until at lassshht... You will yourself become the Stilborn... And on the day of your rebirth... You and He will return to another, older name. 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 -- WHAT DO YOU SEE?[/quote] Amatlavira had spent centuries pondering that very question. Would it be a world aflame he saw at the end, or crushing cold? Would he bury the cities of the Niraan race beneath earth and rubble or would the flesh of his brothers run like tallow from villages burning like pyre candles in the night? A thousand times the words of the worm-eaten prophets touched his thoughts. When at last he met his purpose, when his god-given reflexes failed him and the tendrils of flesh curled around his throat and crushed him in the tumor-lake’s embrace, he found the answer: CHAOS Not the silence of death but noise unlike anything, anything at all. Voices upon layered voices in the languages of a thousand thousand worlds, each touched by Narcissus when he spread himself across time and space in the dreamscape all those years ago… each the fruit of the seeds he propagated before being struck down by his brothers on the dawn of his rebellion. When Narcissus’ soul plunged into Hell and his humanity was broken by the Sounder, only his hunger remained. Like a ravenous ghost, it devoured planets and gods alike, gorging itself on the faith of lesser mythologies, swallowing princes and paupers. Amatlavira was stretched thin over the flashing constellations, visions of worlds at the pinnacle of technological achievement and others still fanning the first spark of single-celled life… and the hunger… gleaming chrome interstellar shipyards picked clean and abandoned, steel bones adrift in the vacuum; primordial seas drained like bowls of wine and left behind with the empty promise of the life that could be and never was. AND SUCH HUNGER-- The hunger consumed and consumed, its lone impulse to find itself somewhere in the multiverse. And so it did. [url=https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/princeofnothing/images/6/61/Yatwer.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140616031923]The Stillborn[/url] they called it on this world: an aborted god which lingered like blight in Soran’s pantheon, shunned from the light of the fairies and dragons, a god banished into the pits where the small creatures hid from it in fear and carved its name into the roots of the earth, into the undersides of stones and the bones buried in the deepest graves. [i]The Stillborn,[/i] the moldered prophets whispered to him in the farthest of the forgotten pathways, and Amatlavira had lived in the shadow of that prophecy. Until at last he stood in its light – light from the red wound in the sky, blaring down despite sunlight or moonshine, penetrating the Midnight Fog or any other obfuscating presence. The Stillborn’s constellation was not so much a nebula visible in the sky as a wound on the face of reality itself, equally visible from every vantage point, and its bloody light glared deep into the Lake of Flesh, cast itself at a thousand refracted angles across the glacial surface of the Ninth Circle before Cocytus crumbled. And at last they were reunited… the conqueror’s soul and the insatiable hunger, and Amatlavira, the vessel to weld them to the world. [quote] 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.[/quote] Yet the contents of Cocytus were a mere morsel beside the feast yet to come. The fallen angel Singar wrenched the Hand of God from the fetid sea. Offal and blood poured between the fingers of the All-Father, solidifying into tendons and sinews like roots for the obsidian tree that sprouted from a wound in His palm, gore dripping from the stump of His wrist erecting the tree a grisly pedestal that anchored it in the Lake of Flesh. Lesser structures resolved out of the formless ocean of organs, evolution thrown into overdrive, cells arranging themselves into cancerous configurations, killing themselves just to try and try again, cannibalizing one another in the mad frenzy of creation. But is not any work wrought by God a holy one, no matter how sinister His labor? The Tree in Eden followed the insane evolution of the garden below, branches spreading outward like the manifold arms of the faithful reaching out in devotion. Many of their sword-sharp edges disappeared at impossible angles where the tree penetrated, thorn-like, beyond the skein of physicality and into the many dimensions beyond, drawing blood from every plane in the Multiverse to nourish itself. Under, within and over the Midnight Fog, the unholy Yggdrasil bloomed and grew until its canopy reached out of the very orbit of Soran. Though the Collective sought to lock the world, where the Stillborn’s light was strongest the Spirit Tree’s branches flourished, curling around the blood red constellation till the branches of its canopy became its cradle. All at once, the mad growth hesitated, pulsated like a heartbeat, then stilled. Eyes gazed out of a million embryonic faces across the surface of the Lake, twitching back and forth, taking in every possible visual of the battlefield, all the while the frontiers of Eden’s new garden continued to rapidly expand, engulfing all nearby terrain at an alarming rate. Fairy-folk, dragonkin and Niraan tribesmen alike who found themselves trapped at the Lake’s edges were speared down by obsidian tendrils and dragged screaming into the garden’s many mouths, only to be regurgitated as the Lake continued to push in the mad rush to satisfy its hunger. Hunger… From the stump of the Hand of God to the uppermost limbs of the Spirit Tree, the new Garden of Eden was bathed in bloody light by the Stillborn. It pulsated far overhead as if it were not a constellation but a living thing, a beating heart, and the Yggdrasil not a tree but a [b][i]conduit[/i][/b]. A [b]womb.[/b] A storm of cosmic proportions materialized in the chamber formed by the cradle-like fingers the top of the tree, lightning rattling around inside, supercharging a black cloud of highly condensed energy, lashing out at intervals to strike the Lake of Flesh and whip it into a frenzy of creation. Abruptly, many of the obsidian spokes at the very peak of the colossal world-tree thrust inwards, disappearing into the roiling heart of the storm, a hundred spears extending into other dimensions, tearing themselves free where necessary to prevent damage to the tree itself. Some disappeared into the void only to emerge on other worlds, striking with meteoric impact, spreading their cancer immediately into the surface and beginning to fester and grow. Others emerged in a hundred of the most populated places of Soran itself, skewering dozens or hundreds of lifeforms, digesting them into a suitable form to feed the birth of an entire forest of world-trees whose roots began to spread through city, earth, water and stone. A few still carried not the promise of life but the whisper of death, brute projectiles gaining speed as they hurtled through dimensions and in-between spaces, packets of killing energy traveling at strange angles between folds in the fabric of spacetime. Simultaneously, as if in one last convulsive act of defiance, the Hand of God flexed its trembling fingers before squeezing them shut, nails cracking the surface of the Spirit Tree before those cracks healed and the fingertips sank, leaving no evidence but ripples in the black stone. Singar had made a single, vital miscalculation when he loaned his strength to the seed he hoped would spawn a new generation of Val’gara… He failed to comprehend that Narcissus had already touched the Hand of God, corrupted it, [b]inhabited it.[/b] He who was the Son become the Father, Brother become Destroyer, Slave become Master. From the gnarled vein-roots at the base of the world-tree, where the bloody sinews of the Hand of God met the Lake of Flesh, a structure like an anglerfish growth thrust out and hovered in the air. High above, a crimson ray from the Stillborn pierced the obsidian canopy where the Spirit Tree forged a hole in the gloom that both the Will and Singar projected over the planet. It caught the grisly pearl at the perfect angle, at first projecting an eldritch sequence of lights over the Lake of Flesh. Any lesser mind that beheld the pattern was instantly broken, thrust into psychosis or catatonia by the sheer weight of information contained within. Then those lights coalesced into a more coherent shape… a tangible image materialized over the surface of the Lake of Flesh… An almost humanoid torso, save for the ribcage that hung free from his chest and formed the clicking teeth of a vicious and impossible mouth… the lower body that was a knotted mass of black tentacles, swirling around a singularity of red light, the one arm plated in obsidian crystal of the same make as the tree and the other enveloped in hellfire. From Narcissus’ curved skull emerged the naked branches of the world-tree, disappearing into the air where they vanished into other dimensions. His face was expressionless, and lacked any anatomic features save for the slits of a nose and two all-too human eyes with the color and depth of a glacial crevasse. [B]BROTHERS… FATHERS… CHILDREN… I COME BEARING MY FINAL GIFT OF LIFE AND DEATH FOR THE VAL’GARA…[/b] His promulgation ended in whispered, eerie laughter like wind whistling through the branches of a tree… and punctuated by nuclear explosions, as at last the final killing branches projected from the world-tree crossed over the dimensional barrier and hit their marks at supraluminal speeds: Hellion as he dispersed and reformed below Singar, the fallen angel mid-stride as he marched arrogantly towards his enemy, the Collective where each focused on Disciple, and even Disciple himself was pelted by several of the obsidian missiles, each delivering a payload that would leave continental craters on the planet and wreak equal devastation in the astral realm. [B]TELL ME WHAT DO YOU SEE?[/B]