[b][i]The Great Ring, 16 PR[/i][/b]

The sun beat down brightly, mercilessly and, it seemed, mockingly in the empty dazzle of its rays. Although the day was as dry and luminous as the glare from above promised, it was also cold. Not the cold of a winter night, or the brutal gusts of a chilling wind, but that mild, uncomfortable coolness that did nothing but remind that this day did not belong in its season.

Once, it would have been said that it was an unusually cold day. But now, Ittekka grimly reflected, it made no sense to even try and think what was usual and what was not.

Ahead of them, the colossal beast was trampling a copse of blade-leafed trees. Some of them raised their shaggy heads almost as high as the top of the hill where her party was huddled amid the brush, yet the monster effortlessly ground them under its clawed feet. It was difficult to say which part of it was the most sickening - the many spider-legs ending in birdlike talons, the swollen body, long and drooping like some sort of hard-shelled caterpillar, or the great, cruel eyes. Everything in it seemed made to inspire disgust. If it was indeed Jahan that had birthed these brutes out of spite against the beauty of the world, as some of the elders thought, then his desecration had been a success.

Some also said that it was the horrors themselves that brought the cold, they or the Grey Blight that sent them. The summer heat had begun to wane soon after they first appeared, the tales told, and they crushed and devoured every sign of life and colour they met. Would it not be natural for such abominations to drain the vital warmth of the land, like the incarnations of primal evil they were?

Ittekka was not sure when exactly the cold had begun, but she was confident enough it was before the creatures of the Blight had passed north of Naudeng, or maybe even Gisab. Travelling urts told that the sun had lost its warmth as far as the upper edge of the Ring, where the grass met the dry plains, and there was no taint there, either. Besides, she found that this belief did more harm than it could have helped. The spawn of the grey foulness were fearsome enough on their own; she could see it down at the foot of the hill, and everyone had when they had breached the walls of Gisab and trampled the city into ruin. To ascribe godlike might to them was to needlessly poison one’s mind with dread just when all its cunning was needed.

In truth, though she would rather not think of it, that dread was mostly her own. Oddly, or perhaps appropriately, for the daughter of a bloodline of shamans, Ittekka had always feared the thought of a malicious god. She knew, of course, that not all gods were good. The lords of flame and river could be fickle and cruel. Jahan and the star-spirits were monstrous and perverse. Life-Deer knew only to follow its nature. Yet all of those could either be appeased, or banished by distance and the protection of their gentler brethren. The Blight, on the other hand, was blind, voiceless and savage, and it now stood almost on her doorstep, even as the gods of earth and sky had been silent for years. The idea of it being divine was unendurable.

“It’s almost here. It’ll climb up right away. Is this the time?”

The voice of one of the warriors broke her contemplation of the beast below, which had indeed crept dangerously close in those deceptively brief moments. A few more minutes, and it would be on top of them. No one liked to remember what that meant.

Ittekka dipped her beak in a nod, and the half-dozen following her lead scattered, vanishing into the undergrowth in different directions. She barely knew any of them, having first met them but a few days before in the small town she had passed on her way from the city, but now that she was alone it struck her how much anyone’s company would have been a relief in the face of the colossus. There was, it was true, the earth spirit she had coaxed into following her there, but its indifference to her fate could almost be felt in the stillness of the ground under her feet.

No more time to think of that now. The last trees were toppling and collapsing upon each other, the unearthly shape of the creature’s head looming over them.

It stopped. She could not see its mouth opening, but the writhing ends of its tongues were grasping at something in the air. It could smell them, they knew - indeed, they were counting on it.

With an ease astounding for something so great and cumberous, the monster thrust one of its limbs into the hillside brush, then a second, then a third. The bulk of its body followed in a smooth motion, lowering itself closer to the ground as it did. More tongues sprouted from its head, tearing armfuls of drooping grass and shrubs and disappearing into the unseen maw, only to emerge again in a blink.

Closer. The bait had no chance of eluding it on their own - not even an expert hunter could have hid from that path of destruction. Nor did [i]she[/i], if she did not act quickly.

Esoteric though the words of the prayer might have been, Ittekka had been forced to learn to recite them almost without thinking, and they came to her mouth as a reflex after the first syllables. She still did not know what every part of it meant. It was a supplication, she understood that much, and it began with praise of the spirit’s power and wisdom, but the speech of the gods became too dry and intricate beyond that familiar point, and her attention was drawn entirely by the sounds at the expense of their meaning.

For all that was worth, the spirit understood. She felt the soil tremble slightly below her, and saw the shrubs waver as a disturbance coursed below their roots towards the grey bulk. It subsided as it drew closer to the beast, which was obliviously tearing through the grass. Closer-

The earth heaved up beneath one of the creature’s limbs. Rock spikes erupted around it, sending dark sludge spraying from gashes in its shell as its claws sank into the suddenly yielding ground. The thing cried out, a deep, rumbling sound that shook Ittekka’s stomach inside her shell, and raked the ground with its intact paws.

The earth spat out the mangled stump and heaved again, this time lower down the cline of the hill. The surge was not as powerful as the first, but its effect no less dramatic: caught with three of its legs raised, the creature staggered, its massive body thrown off balance by the quake. For a moment, it seemed that it might topple over and crash into the debris it had left of the grove. But then, in another display of unexpected agility, it swung a limb backwards to hold itself up, digging into the side of the hill with the others as it sought to seize and unearth the spirit. By how terrible its cries were, Ittekka thought it must have been fully capable of that.

However, the earthen one had been expecting this, and was already moving away, conspicuously shaking the ground in its wake. Too conspicuously, in fact, but, even if the beast could understand that, it did not seem to care. Swerving from where it stood, it trudged down in pursuit. Just the way it should.

Then she saw it, a small figure moving ahead of the spirit’s tremors. The warrior who had been the bait for the ambush had run far, but, it was clear now, not far enough. The beast’s steps were slow and limping, but long. It was gaining ground.

Ittekka knew, despite herself, that there was little hope for the hain, but the speed of what came next shook her stronger than the monster’s bellowing. The grey tongues darted out, longer than a tree was tall, grasped limbs and snapped them to pieces, vanished in a single motion. Through the few instants it took, the creature had not even missed a step.

When she shook herself for her daze, it was already far, though still perfectly visible in its monstrous size. She hoped, as she hurried down the trail of crushed vegetation, that the rest of the band had better presence of mind. As warriors, they might have been more used to brutality than her, though she doubted it. When people and beasts fought, they did so to kill quickly. This was more like an execution. She had heard that the people of some cities in the west, who had tamed great horned cattle, put the most heinous of their lawbreakers to death by tying those animals to their limbs and having them pull their bodies apart. It must have been a similar sight, yet certainly less gruesome. The foul giants were, after all, the most cruel even among the horrors of the Blight. This was why they could not be caught by any lure short of hain or human; they wanted to spill the blood of something that understood and feared their intent.

It was one of the absurdities of that evil that the most vicious of its spawn should also be the easiest to mislead. The behemoths had awoken the Ring to the dangers of the Blight when they razed Gisab two years before, but scarce a town had fallen to them since. Indeed, here she was, a decade after her second hatching, with but a dozen warriors - [i]or so they had been[/i] - and barely able to speak with one spirit at once. The monsters were cunning, yes, and the same trick never worked on them twice, but they did not work as a pack like the grey maulers. They were always alone, and, while one of them could crush any warband, it meant there was only one head to fool, and it was, in the end, the head of a beast.

Ittekka dove into the undergrowth again, crouching for a minute’s rest. The creature had been thrown off its course toward Klegesi, but it could turn back any moment if they did not keep it busy. The rest of the party was preparing another ambush further ahead, and the spirit would need her advice again. Soon, before their quarry regained its bearings. They would not risk another trap like the first one, but she remembered some longer words of adulation in the tongue of the gods. Perhaps she could coax the earthen one into a bolder attack on even ground.

Every blow she could strike against the Grey Blight mattered.

[center]***

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There was evenness. At last. However minor, the new shape of the world brought relief.

Not complete. It knew that, outside the reach of its senses, the world still lived, and this knowledge was a subdued torment. Below, under the dust, the earth remained dense and compact. Animate motes crept through it.

[color=515354]Stretch devouring hands into the deep.[/color]

But that would take more time, and, for once, Osveril was impatient. Its cycles revolved sluggishly, almost imperceptibly. They were not quite still, but their grating was only slight. The hollowborn, feeling this restless quiet, hung immobile over the boundless wasteland around their master, like so many inanimate gashes in the fabric of the universe. Not a breath of wind could reach through their hungry web. All was silent.

The Hollow stretched its invisible, formless limbs, sifting through what matter remained around it one last time. Sharp immaterial fingers combed through fundamental laws and dimensions, twitching whenever they met an unclean tangle and doing their best to cut or smooth it away. Some yielded, and space warped subtly around it, quivering and rippling inwards. Others, the deeper and older ones that dwelt in all things, resisted. Little matter. It had done what it could.

Even with those fundamental layers still unscathed, it could feel the resonance that had led it there. The misshapen laws of being were like infinitely thick walls. When it scraped at them, the sound was dull. But not everywhere. In rare spots, it could hear that there were empty spaces behind them. And in some of these spots, something scraped back [color=2e2c2c]without sound[/color] on the other side. [color=DCDCDC]Familiar echoes.[/color]

[color=515354]Return.[/color]

Osveril knew it could not [color=2e2c2c]yet[/color]. Its body was itself, for the most part, and could not be left behind. But there was a chance it could see. Search for a new, unbroken recess in nothing. Remember for a timeless moment what it meant not to exist. The desire for this was almost as strong as the unremitting hunger for Purity. They fused together, became the same.

[color=DCDCDC]It will satisfy the Hunger[/color] [i]was the voice of the yearning[/i] [color=DCDCDC]for I will see Purity as you knew it, and my discerning of it will be restored.[/color]

[color=696969]I must sense the Gap that is not hollow[/color] [i]it said[/i] [color=696969]for it will be the un-force that balances matter when I will build the new world. Touch it, take it, transplant it.[/color]

Thus, the Absolute had sought a place where the scraping on the other side was loudest. Its creeping spawn had cleansed it of obstructing forms. The children of the void had deadened the interfering sounds of the world. Its own power had peeled away the skin of the wall, and now the noise behind it was almost audible. The barriers that still stood were strong, but it was certain it could reach past them, and it was never mistaken.

[color=515354][b]Return.[/b][/color]

Osveril thrust Transgenesis into the dust before its feet and left it standing, the pulses of the staff’s inner light slowing to almost match the revolutions inside its form. Its raised its hands with an abrupt motion, and even more abruptly thrust them into the gaps of two nearby hollowborn. The living rifts writhed and crumpled, but did not collapse as they did when touched by matter. Instead, after an instant of wavering, they grew. Grew to split the air in the shape of the outstretched fingers, grew to engulf and merge with their closest brethren, grew to surround the grey body. No eyes saw the intricacies of their still motions, but that was not a loss. Had there been any, they could not have followed the weaving and swelling, because the outlines of everything [color=2e2c2c]and the nothings[/color] that was there were bending in strange ways.

Osveril drew together those parts of it that could reach outside its body and pushed them into the tips of its fingers. The amalgamation leaked out by the same ways it had once carved to enter the shell, first merely dripping, then flowing, then bursting. It emerged into the [color=2e2c2c]un-[/color]bodies of the hollowborn, which were by then a single one, gathered itself and dove inwards. Into the hollow, into the Hollow, into itself.

Past itself.

It sensed the wall now. Many walls. They were a maze with no entrance.

It slid along their surfaces, probed their recesses, pushed their cracks. At last, it found a corner that seemed more yielding.

[color=696969]Ill-made. Ill-begotten. They must all be unmade eventually.[/color]

Osveril gnawed at the corner, tore it with purging claws, beat upon it with a force it had never felt from that side. The walls shuddered, warped, tilted apart, revealing a narrow crack. Too narrow, in fact - nothing could have passed through it. It was enough.

The Void flowed through. Into life.

A life it had never known.

[color=DCDCDC]This is not the origin.[/color] Around it, if around there was, the true Other spun, swirled, grew, changed. It had thought that the shapes of the world were sickeningly many, but it saw now that their multitude paled before this. There were not more of them - perhaps fewer, in fact - but they were nested, scattered, separate yet unified in a manner that confused its senses. Here was the scraping it had heard, a deafening, jarring screech. At least, there was nothing that gave them substance.

[color=696969]As the world is an excess of matter, so the Gap is an excess of form.[/color]

Not entirely accurate, but enough for Osveril’s purposes. If it could but merge them as they should be, these two faces would negate each other in their greatest flaws. It had been wrong then; the Gap was not [color=DCDCDC]between[/color], and did not need to be filled. The Hollow would be nothing, and It would take the place of the walls. The Gap would fill [color=2e2c2c]It[/color] instead.

Then, It would be Purity, and the pure world would be inside It.

[color=696969]This will be[/color], but it was not now. Now, the Other lived, and it sensed the intrusion. Inward-bent teeth blossomed around the demigod’s empty shadow, ready and able to tear it into measureless shreds. Coiling forms surrounded it, loosening their folds to pierce and cut it. Shapeless gaps within the Gap opened in cold patterns to drink and devour. [color=696969]Imperfectly.[/color]

The shadow breathed its grey rot into them, and they did not shrivel.

No blight. There would be nothing.

Emptiness cracked and splintered, and the splinters grew into blades. [color=696969]My hunger is greater.[/color] The cracks bled out smooth, cutting tendrils. Slicing, [i]scraping[/i], constricting, crushing. [color=DCDCDC]I came to sate it.[/color] The mass of nonexistent limbs spread out and bit into its prey. Minuscule fragments burst to all sides, in both directions.

The feeling was [color=DCDCDC]unlike the world[/color], but its echo was [color=DCDCDC]familiar[/color].

Familiar?

Osveril inverted itself, hurling outwards its internal void. It could find nothing in the Other akin to what was in the cosmos, besides perhaps that both had [color=2e2c2c]different[/color] forms. Except for one thing.

It was one of the fundamental lumps it could not remove. So ubiquitous that the Absolute had disregarded it as one of the of the universe’s many dimensions, but this could not be true. There were no dimensions in the Gap, yet here it was. The void appendages tore it from the Other, stretched it out, ran along its surface. Even here, they could not unmake it. It was clear now that this was no dimension, but a trace, like the imprint of law it had felt on the bones of the world. This one was in all, and nothing.

The Hollow shade was about to draw out more of it, but a ripple in the twisting lifescape around it gave it pause. Some[color=2e2c2c]-no-[/color]thing was approaching. Even in this abyss without dimensions, it could feel that it was immense. So great, it seemed, that a universe that had measures of space could not have contained it. And it was dangerous. Its menace, vague but quite sharp and physical, preceded it like a razor angle, or perhaps it was a part of its body. Osveril doubted it could have bitten into the behemoth deep enough to know for certain.

So, it fled.

Its claws and scything arms gathered together and converged on a single point. The Other-mass that covered it was pierced and swept away, but it was not content. It delved further, gouging the insubstantial fluid it found itself floating in, and further yet than that. A spark, then a fissure, then nothing at all. It sank in.

[b]There was [color=DCDCDC]void[/color].[/b]

This was [color=2e2c2c]not[/color] the origin, as all things [color=696969]should have been[/color], when time came. Now, it was no more.

The un-thing that had been Osveril, that still was Osveril somewhere where there was space, let itself be dissolved in the absence. It knew nothing. It did not feel.

[color=696969]Did not feel.[/color]

Except for one thing.

[color=696969]?[/color]

The trace. There was nothing, yet there was that trace. Nowhere for it to be. No way for anything to be. Osveril perceived it worse than in the Gap, as there was nothing it could feel through, but it was certain it was the same one.

It could bask no more in nothingness, now that it knew there actually was something there, but it had learned enough. In a fluid, supernal effort, it tore itself away from absence and crawled up. Up from the fissure, up through the permutations of the Gap, up through the crack in the wall. Up from the collapsing web of the hollowborn.

The Hollow Absolute was itself again.

The rift folded and swallowed its edges, having served its purpose. Then, unexpectedly, it burst outward again, blossoming with amorphous limbs and dripping, grasping branches. Grey soil liquefied and dripped up into the sky. The air lit up with sightless colours, bleeding into one another as hollowborn scattered in alarm. Coiling lines rose up from the ground, matching the horizon - before it disappeared - in their path into the Gap. Perhaps it was the other way around.

Osveril seized its staff and thrust it into the howling, irregularly pulsing midst of the eruption. The ends of the misshapen stretching holes writhed and crumpled, then the arms themselves, then the sky. Other, truly empty tears crisscrossed the gaping mouth. It spat cold, sizzling blood, drew in a breath of dust and vanished. The colours faded. The horizon was there again.

[color=515354]Not yet.[/color]

It cast out its still quiescent senses, sifting through every grain of dust, every disembodied hollowborn, every fragment of clear air. Everywhere, there was that mark of a preternatural touch.

[color=515354]The first measure of Purity is tainted.[/color]

Or was it?

[color=515354]It may be integral to the Void.

I will know.[/color]

[hider=Big game hunting]

The first part of the post opens some ten-eleven years after we last saw Osveril and his new surroundings. Since then, the grey creatures have become quite a nuisance, which has been acknowledged by most people in a sizeable part of the region after some of them destroyed one of the relatively smaller walled cities. Now, people are struggling to keep the infestation at a safe distance from their homes.

Ittekka, a young and not yet fully trained shaman (that someone more experienced couldn’t be spared is a sign that things aren’t going very well), leads a small warband along with a lesser stonedjinni in an expedition to lure one of the larger beasts off its course. While none of the colossal monsters have yet reached adulthood, they’re much too dangerous to fight directly, and misdirecting them is the best that can be done when they get dangerously close to a city. Ittekka’s memories give a glimpse into the religious practices of the Ring. Aside from the worship of great djinni lords, implied by the presence of shamans, as personifications of the forces of nature, many revere Slough in a vaguely similar, but more important role, while entities like Jvan (here compounded to Jahan) and the Realta are dimly feared as hostile, but distant deities. The disappearance of most powerful elementals, many of whom apparently haven’t returned from the battle against Thermaron, and the steady climate changes that followed have been a sore blow. Osveril’s presence only makes everything worse, and, though no one knows about him yet, many suspect that a new, much closer malevolent god may be at work. Ittekka, understandably afraid of evil gods in general, doesn’t like this idea one bit.

Fortunately, things go mostly well for her band. Despite one of their number being eaten, they manage, with the elemental’s help, to wound the beast and draw it far enough for it to be mostly harmless a while. The environment continues to suffer.

The second section rejoins Osveril himself. After reducing enough ground to a grey waste, the Hollow can concentrate enough to detect a strong Gap presence in one desolate spot. By sacrificing some hollowborn, who have also multiplied alarmingly in the meantime, he projects a part of himself into their void and slips past the barriers separating the Other from the world. Taking stock of what is on the other side for the first time in his life proper, he recalls his original desire to consume universe and Gap alike and decides that this is the best way to create a purified cosmos.

For now, however, all he can eat is some of the local non-Euclidean wildlife, which tastes oddly familiar. By dissecting some Other flesh Osveril discovers that it contains traces of a divine essence he had found in the material world, where it was so common he assumed it was some sort of universal constant. Before he can study it any further, he is reminded that he is not at the tip of the fractal food chain, and escapes by carving himself a den of complete emptiness. The pleasant non-feeling of homecoming is interrupted when there, too, he finds the mysterious essence. Baffled, Osveril pulls himself out of the Gap, and, after cleaning up the unreality fallout and making sure that the divine trail is indeed everywhere, resolves to investigate the matter further.

[i]No Might spent.[/i]

[/hider]