[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/ZIEBEyW.png[/img] [sub]God of Death, Prince of Astral Fires[/sub] [img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/2b4925ee-b215-4b89-a794-5058a6c53e13.png[/img] [colour=lightseagreen][h1][b][i]Ashalla[/i][/b][/h1] [b]Goddess of Oceans[/b][/colour] [/center] The black night sky of Galbar was speckled with many pinpricks of incandescent light. Some of these lights were bright and some were dim. Some lights winked out while others came into being. Yet of all these stars, one was brighter than all the others and had persisted since the stars first appeared. Those with senses attuned to the metaphysical would see that below this brightest fire was the great Vortex of Souls, and falling from this fire was a great quantity of incorporeal matter best described as soul ash. Even to those not attuned to souls, the effects of this ash-fall were clearly visible. The plankton which Ashalla had seeded in the ocean multiplied abundantly underneath the Vortex of Souls such that this part of the ocean had many mats of green algae and swarms of drifting crustaceans and jellies. It were these signs which drew Ashalla’s attention. Ashalla swam through the life-filled water, amazed at how rapidly the plankton had bred here. As far as nutrients were concerned, this patch of ocean was no more special than any other patch. Focussed as she had been on the physical mechanisms of life, it took her some time to notice the slightly bitter ethereal taste in the water. She turned her attention to this new taste, and it did not take her long to elucidate its nature. She was tasting the substance from which souls were made. She had tasted similar flavours from the other gods, but their souls were richly flavoured by personality and divine essence whereas this soul-substance was formless, save for a bitter aftertaste of death. She watched as the soul-substance was taken in by the reproducing plankton and realised that the soul-substance was being used in the creation of new living things without any need for deific intervention. The souls of plankton had been so tiny that she had not noticed them before, but now that she knew they were there she could sense the tiniest speck of a soul, with hardly any more form than the raw substance it had formed from, within each organism. But where was this soul-substance coming from? Ashalla looked up, and now that she knew what to look for she could see soul-substance falling from the heavens, drifting down like ash. Ashalla towered up out of the water to feel the rain of ash, and out of the water she could detect a faint influence, like a gentle breeze or slow current. It spiralled inwards towards the centre of this algal bloom and pulled upwards towards the stars, and Ashalla could see that in the very centre of this ethereal Vortex was a star burning brighter than all the others. As Ashalla watched for longer, she could see stray, tattered souls being pulled up into the Vortex. She also sensed the flow of microscopic souls from countless plankton as they died, usually from being eaten, and drifted upwards. It was a peculiar vision. Yet despite the blooms of life around her, she still disliked the flavour of this soul ash. It was almost bland, yet it held the faintest scents of bitterness, agony, death and loss. In small amounts it was hardly noticeable, yet here the flavours were concentrated underneath the Vortex of Souls. It displeased her, and Ashalla made it known. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Why are you dumping all this ash in my ocean?”[/b][/colour] [hr] As he sat suspended in the void of his own Sphere, Katharsos meditated. Save for contemplating existence and watching the scattered memories that manifested in the flames, there was very little to do in the Sky of Pyres. The other gods all seemed busy with their creations or their quarrels, of course, but perhaps his lot was not to create. Once more, the faroff voice of a goddess stirred him. This time, it was not Seihdhara’s enthused and overly animated chattering, but rather another one’s irritated question. [i]Ashalla,[/i] he realized. The head of fire rotated effortlessly as Katharsos positioned himself to look down the Vortex of Souls into the voice’s direction. He could sense that Ashalla was somewhere down there on the blue world below. He was just about to offer his answer, but then he saw a few tiny lights. The souls of plankton and the other microscopic organisms of Ashalla’s make were as little more than motes of dust, but to his perceptive eye, they glowed like sparks. He was able to readily enough discern the nature of these organisms and identify them as sealife. Perhaps she would understand, then. [color=goldenrod]”Without this ash, there could be no life. Consider it my gift to you, sister. Where your ocean is, it will receive a heavy ashfall, so it will always be virile and vibrant.”[/color] [colour=lightseagreen][b]”I noticed that,”[/b][/colour] Ashalla replied, her voice carried across the aether to Katharsos’ mind, [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Yet your ash also carries the bitter taste of death.”[/b][/colour] That was an unexpected objection. In truth he shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that others found the ash anathema to their senses, for those who were not yet dead or attuned so closely to death as he was were bound to find the smoke and aura of the Sky of Pyres to be nauseating at best. It was not hard to believe that some of that would linger upon the ash. [color=goldenrod]”Has it caused ill effects to manifest in the living?”[/color] Katharsos asked. Ashalla paused to inspect the waters around her more closely. Eventually she replied, [colour=lightseagreen][b]”I do not notice any ill effects, but I still find that it tastes unpleasant.”[/b][/colour] [color=goldenrod]”It is not in my nature to antagonize or create offense, but you surely understand that the ash must fall. To cease its descent and inadvertently harm all life, on little more than a whim, is beyond consideration.”[/color] [colour=lightseagreen][b]”I ask not for the ash to cease, but for it to be cleansed of its bitter impurities,”[/b][/colour] Ashalla said. [color=goldenrod]”Perhaps such a thing is possible,”[/color] Katharsos conceded. But he grew silent as he contemplated just [i]how[/i] one would go about creating it. Even for him, there were still many mysteries surrounding the soul ash. This conversation was already demonstrating that he didn’t understand it nearly as well as he’d thought. Ashalla did not have the patience to wait for Katharsos to finish his contemplation. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Can you do it?”[/b][/colour] Her question seemed to echo back, once, twice, thrice in the canyon of mental space between them. Katharsos’ silence remained, but as she continued to stare impatiently above, there was the dim light of a falling star that seemed to rapidly grow in size. This was Katharsos himself of course, rappelling down the Vortex itself to race through space and the upper Spheres at a blinding speed. Even so the journey took longer than he’d have liked, but he used the time to think. The Sky of Pyres could carry on its work for a time even if he was not present, though it nonetheless distressed him somewhat to leave the place unattended. Still, there were too many pyres to count, and so at any point in time the majority were always unattended. Perhaps he would do something about that in the near future. As the looming orb of Galbar grew larger in his vision, he confined himself once more to the present. To date, he had yet to ever even witness the glory of Galbar in person; it had always been through the lenses of an unfathomable distance or the garbled memories and strange perspectives of some of the confused spirits pulled into his pyres. He suddenly was met with the air of Galbar’s atmosphere, and at such high speeds it all but extinguished the fiery mass of his great head. But he persevered through the rapid entry of the planet, and upon coming to a halt just a short ways above the water surface where Ashalla rested, he regenerated his fiery flesh. His head flared and metamorphosed from some red globule into the incorrigible visage resemblant of a tiger. His rapid descent had allowed him to shed away the worst of the foul smoke and toxic aura that clung to him, but some scent of the Sky of Pyres stubbornly remained nonetheless. In truth, he couldn’t notice it, though Ashalla did even from such a distance. Katharsos looked down into the water and regarded Ashalla for a moment, who had manifested a face at Katharsos’ arrival. He greeted her with a slight and wordless nod, then concentrated his attention upon the soul ash that surrounded them. The countless flakes of infinitesimal size aligned themselves to his will, and they quickly came together, arranged themselves into a lattice, and coalesced as a pallid mass floating in the water. That represented all of the ash in quite a sizable area around them, but already more of the stuff was falling from the Vortex above or diffusing from other waters to fill in the void that he’d left behind in sequestering this chunk. The chunk of ash began to slowly levitate up from the water until it came to be suspended before the god of death. Katharsos eyed the crystallized substance and exposed its intangible mass to a great deal of scrutiny, visibly aggravated by something. Though they were small, yes--so small that perhaps no other god would have noticed through mere inspection, he sensed impurities in the ash. They were things that hadn’t entirely burned in his pyres, like tiny bits of charcoal. In such minute quantities he expected that they would be harmless enough, save for the minute possibility of an organism having a noteworthy such ‘charcoal’ inclusion in its soul and consequently finding itself born with a faint recollection or two from another life. Perhaps [i]this[/i] was the source of whatever foul taste Ashalla was sensing. The impurities tore free of the crystalline structure, leaving behind a few microscopic holes. The chunk of soul ash then crashed back into the ocean without even creating a splash. The impurities, no larger than a few granules of sand, remained in the air besides Katharsos. [color=goldenrod]”Inspect the ash once more. I suspect that you will now find it utterly tasteless.”[/color] As the ash mixed back into the water, it entered Ashalla’s form and senses and was subject to her scrutiny. True to Katharsos’ word, the soul ash was now utterly bland, a flavourless base from which souls could be made. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”It is satisfactory,”[/b][/colour] Ashalla said in a voice like the swish of water. But her eyes looked around and saw more soul ash falling. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”We shall need to find a more sustainable way to cleanse the soul ash, though. Perhaps some form of life, like how there are lifeforms which convert carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen, or nitrogen gas into ammonia and nitrates, or dead flesh into useable nutrients.”[/b][/colour] [color=goldenrod]”Such a process requires powerful magic; what appeared effortless when done by my hand would prove quite difficult for mundane lifeforms. You must realize that this is a feat greater than any of those other mundane functions that you mention life fulfilling. Still, as you seem to possess an aptitude and an affinity for creating life, I believe we [b]can[/b] design a suitable creature to fulfill this role. I will offer what assistance I may.”[/color] [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Then let us design it,”[/b][/colour] Ashalla declared. A watery arm emerged and scooped up some of the soul ash which Katharsos hadn’t purified. The end of the arm spun rapidly so that the ash precipitated to the edges of that ‘hand’. Ashalla moved the soul ash and sculpted the appendage until a large droplet thick with soul ash hung in front of her for them to inspect. Ashalla also scooped up a mass of plankton in another arm and held it aloft in another globe of water for comparison. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”This lifeform will need to filter through large quantities of seawater to process as much soul ash as possible. It will need some of your magic for it to perform this processing. It will need to contain the impurities in some form which will not leak into the ocean, a form which will probably need some physical container. This lifeform should be plentiful enough to be distributed across this area and beyond. It should be resistant to predators so that its processing is not disrupted. It does not need to be mobile like the drifters because we know where the soul ash is most concentrated. And this lifeform would need to derive some benefit from performing this filtration.”[/b][/colour] He blinked to take all of that in. Ashalla took the silence for affirmation and continued creating a design. Ashalla raised up a third arm between the other two and sculpted the end of the pseudopod into designs as she thought of them. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”A tube to suck in water and soul ash, and a tube to expel it. Something in the middle to process it. It will need tendrils inside to capture food and soul ash, and also gills to get oxygen from the water. A few basic internal organs. Perhaps a hard shell to protect it from the environment. Make that two shells, which it can open and close. It can accumulate the impurities from the soul ash inside itself, then it can expel the purified soul ash. The higher concentration of soul ash near it would promote the growth of plankton and other life, which it can feed on. As for the impurities, we need some way to contain them without it being able to leak into the environment, even after the creature’s death.”[/b][/colour] [color=goldenrod]”Surely there is a way that these impurities can be altered and made to take a more inert form,”[/color] Katharsos mused as his eyes narrowed to hone in on the microscopic grains before him. He was at a loss, admittedly. His divine fires would do [i]nothing[/i] to help him here; in fact, his flames were what had created these pollutants to begin with. It would take some other power to remediate the ash’s impurities and transform them into something stable and benign. But what other power did he hold? What tools could he work with besides mere fire? He wracked his mind and stared at the defiant grains of sand. They might not have been large, but they remained the very incarnations of his failure. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”I’ll make a start on the creature while you think,”[/b][/colour] Ashalla said. She pulled together flesh and matter into the form of the template she had designed. It took her a while to grow the mollusc, but when she looked up from her work Katharsos had hardly moved. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Have you gotten anywhere yet?”[/b][/colour] she asked, impatience creeping in to her tone. Flames bent such that one of his brazen eyes looked downward to meet hers. [color=goldenrod]”My progress is not easily measured,”[/color] he replied vaguely. In actuality it’d have been easy enough to quantify nothingness. The entire time, he’d wracked his mind and found little in the way of threads to follow. The Architect had imbued in him no answers to this question, and so he was left with his instincts--that were just as silent, of course--and his memories, useless and obscured and scattered as they were. Warmth, heat, and fire. He remembered those aspects well; he had embodied them once. But this soul ash was not raw iron; exposing it to a fiery crucible could not purify it. [sub][i]purify…[b]purity[/b][/i][/sub] Ah, that seemed a promising line of thought. But what was [i]purity[/i] as he’d once known it? He obviously understood the vague concept now, but once he’d had a much deeper knowledge. If only he could remember. As Katharsos had been pondering, Ashalla had begun toying with the life growing in the waters about her, exploring new designs which could accompany the molluscs. Designs like some of the drifters, but instead static and unmoving. Perhaps creatures which would secrete underwater terrain for other life to live on. Maybe creatures imbued with colourful algae, the two species providing nutrition to each other. Perhaps a few more elaborate lifeforms, to take advantage of the richness of soul ash in this place, of similar complexity to the creatures in Phystene’s jungle. Ashalla paused from her work for a moment to look up at Katharsos, who still had not moved. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Have you thought of anything yet?”[/b][/colour] she inquired. His patience was as a pool that often seemed as vast as this ocean below him, but now it had all but evaporated. The hint of a growl left him. [color=goldenrod]”Heat and fire will not work. I need some other means to alter it. Another tool to see it purified.” [i]I do not need tools,[/i][/color] he suddenly realized. The revelation manifested as if from nowhere. [color=goldenrod][i]I am not some mere fire spirit, I am a [b]GOD.[/b][/i][/color] The tiny granules vibrated as if shook by some violent wind, and by force of will he remade the tainted impurities into something new. It was an utterly black substance that was smooth and cold, hard and lustrous, utterly inert and insoluble. Perfection. He relaxed, having not even realized how his fiery head had just violently swollen in a bright flash of roaring flame. Then he let the tiny grains-turned-pearls fall into the water below. He breathed, then finally declared, [color=goldenrod]”It is done.”[/color] Ashalla swept the black pearls into her form, tasting and testing them. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Totally insoluble and unable to flavour the water. Excellent,”[/b][/colour] her voice rippled. She lifted the prototype mollusc up to Katharsos in a globule of water. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Now teach this to do it.”[/b][/colour] He moved so close to the oyster that the globule of water might have broiled and shrank back were his head made of more mundane fire, but as it was he didn’t radiate quite enough heat to boil it away and kill the clam. [color=goldenrod]”Teach?”[/color] he echoed back. The prospect of ‘teaching’ anything to such a basic creature seemed absurd, for it had very little in the way of mental faculties or communicative abilities. Still, it had the potential to propagate and survive. It was easy to imagine colonies of this creature forming to sift through great amounts of water and the soul ash within. Raw iron didn’t learn, but it had a way of taking to the shape forced upon it. Likewise, this creature was simple enough to be [i]malleable[/i]. Though Katharsos had no aptitude for the subtle changes that other gods might use to manipulate such creatures, this one could be altered rather drastically without suffering from any noticeable ill effect. Its lack of intelligence also allowed Katharsos to set aside any qualms he might have had about forcing such a change, power, and ultimately burden upon some lifeform and all of its descendents into perpetuity. With a small black flames, he burned into the oyster an affinity for soul ash such that it would be almost magnetic to the stuff, drawing it in from the waters around. Then he provided it with the capacity to sift out the impurities and transmute it just as he had done. Though his technique seemed crude, it had worked. In time, these creatures would create pearls larger and more pristine than the little flakes he’d first conjured. Then he let the mollusc fall back down to Ashalla. He had come here primarily to appease her and to witness Galbar for himself given the opportunity, but upon becoming aware of the impurities present in the ash, he’d grown rather consumed by the goal. More time had passed than he would have liked, and the Sky of Pyres had been operating unattended all the while. It felt...wrong to leave it. To condemn all the broken souls that remained (though by now there were not so many, and the tides were slowing) to being recycled in flames without any to watch them in their last moments seemed cruel to him, even if such a thought was illogical. He didn’t need to justify it with logic, though. His intuition told him that it was time to return to his Sphere, and he meant to follow it now that his purpose here was done. Ashalla was inspecting the mollusc and already prompting it to reproduce. A watery face turned up to Katharsos’ fiery visage. [colour=lightseagreen][b]”Thank you for your help, Katharsos. This should help cleanse the water.”[/b][/colour] He offered a small nod back. [color=goldenrod]”You are welcome. It was good to see you, and this world itself, with my own eyes. But now we must part,”[/color] he answered her as he began to ascend back to the Vortex of Souls. [color=goldenrod]“One way or another, we shall meet again.”[/color] As Katharsos left, Ashalla turned her attention to filling this part of the ocean with life. With such an abundance of soul ash to turn into living things, Ashalla could stretch her creative abilities. This ecosystem would require light, so she raised the sea floor up so that the water was about a hundred metres deep. To provide a foundation for this place she laid down coral. These static creatures left behind their shells and skeletons to build up terrain. She discovered that the deposition of soul ash was not homogeneous under the Vortex of Souls but rather was patterned in a spiral, which caused the coral to grow in a matching spiral pattern. They were also embedded with algae which allowed them to take a rich array of colours. Within each colony of coral were many of the soul ash processing molluscs, enhancing the virility of the coral and giving the molluscs plenty of food to consume. While these static creatures were very pretty, Ashalla decided that there needed to be more motion. So Ashalla made creatures with vague similarities to the lizards on the Eye of Desolation. Scales, internal skeletons, complex organs, a modicum of intelligence. Those were the only similarities, for Ashalla also had to give them a hydrodynamic form, grant them limbs for swimming, make them breathe water instead of air and innumerable other adjustments. Her end result was a fish. Ashalla continued to make more fish, of every colour and shape she could imagine. She also made many more molluscs, some soft-bodied, some with shells, as well as more species of plankton. For a long time Ashalla’s laughter rippled about the ocean as she created one beautiful species after another in this great reef, its life enriched by Katharsos’ blessing. [hider=The world is your oyster] Ashalla notices that one particular region of the ocean is blooming with life, and chooses to investigate. She discovers that the cause of this phenomena is the Vortex of Souls, which is directly overhead and has been depositing an especially large amount of soul ash in the area. Though the overabundant soul ash helps life to thrive, she finds that it carries a faint taste of death and agony. The flavor doesn’t appeal to her sensitive palate, so she looks up and decides to yell at Katharsos. Katharsos, who was just brooding as usual, leaves his Sphere for some fresh air thinking that it’ll be a short trip. He’s sympathetic to her complaints and tries to help rectify the issue. Turns out that the soul ash has some impurities; these are ‘charcoals’, which are remnants of memories that weren’t fully destroyed when the former soul was burnt in the Sky of Pyres. These might come up again and have interesting effects later. Still, the two agree to create an organism to purify the soul ash before it can diffuse elsewhere and remove most of these impurities. They end up with a species of bivalve mollusc that forms colonies and attracts soul ash so as to enrich their surroundings with lots of plankton and other life to eat. As they do this, they also sift out the ash’s impurities and stabilize it into the form of magical black pearls. Black pearls will get a wiki article sometime soon. Ashalla builds a great big coral reef under the Vortex of Souls, using the soul oysters to boost the life there. It’s spiral-shaped and about 1800 km in diameter. [b]Might Summary[/b] 3 FP used to make Soul Oysters, all from Katharsos. [b]3/10 FP towards Purity Portfolio.[/b] 12 FP was used to create the Great Soul Reef (8 FP for large landform and 4 FP for the ecosystem), half-half between Katharsos and Ashalla. Ecosystem is enhanced by the Ocean Portfolio to have an incredibly diverse and colourful abundance of life. [b]2/10 FP towards Colour Portfolio for Ashalla.[/b] [u]Ashalla[/u] [i]Start:[/i] 6 MP & 21 FP [i]Spent:[/i] 6 FP [i]End:[/i] 6 MP & 15 FP [i]Portfolios:[/i] 2 FP towards Colour. [u]Katharsos[/u] [i]Start:[/i] 10 MP & 25 FP [i]Spent:[/i] 9 FP [i]End:[/i] 10 MP & 16 FP [i]Portfolios:[/i] 3 FP towards Purity. [/hider]