[hider=Máthair-Amaidí]Identity: Máthair-Amaidí; Aekashirillion, the Thousand Maws; That Which Sleeps Below; The Shacklewrithe. These and many more were the titles once possessed by great Máthair-Amaidí when they writhed upon the surface of the world, and before the Móreanach was cleansed and shattered as it is today. Type: Scion Myth: “In times of yore, the land of the Hundred Lakes was not always as it is now. Long before the White One began their crusade against the forces of darkness, when the Great Sire lived and breathed still, the Hundred Lakes were a single fetid pool of brackish and maddening waters. Legends still live today about the foulness of that land and its tainted waters that drove all not aligned with darkness to desiccation and delirium, the cause of rotten harvests of fish and kelp--but that is another story for another time. All that must needs be mentioned here is simply that the abominable place once existed, and housed within it one of the Great Sire’s foul brood. It was a disgusting and scale-ridden thing, with great tentacles and even greater mouths--and it hungered not for flesh, but for sickness! The White One’s crusade came for the Móreanach and its oozing, pustulent waters when the Great Sire fell, and the tendrils of miasma that seeped from its gaping maw led them to this place of kindred squalor and obscenity. Weakened still from their narrow victory over the Great Sire, the crusade deigned not to attempt to sacrifice more noble lives but instead to cleanse the taint from this place and dedicate it to the provenance and sustenance of men. Though rite and prayer, through contrivances mechanical and metaphysical, the Móreanach was purified into the Beatus Aquas, and upon it settled the stock of crusaders brave enough to eke out a living in this once noxious and inhospitable demesne--and the being that thrived within it was banished deep below the ground where its taint would be sealed away for an eternity--so long as the blessed waters of the great lake sat atop it like a seal of wax.” “Hold, messere--’like a seal of wax’? Is that the line you’re going for?” came the response from a filthy little scamp, shuffling about amidst the muck and brackish water that even now threatened to encroach upon their small campfire. “Well, lad, if you don’t like my story ye can scamper back off into the bloody fens and see what awaits ye!” Silence, except for the buzzing of gnats, settled over the ersatz camp. “But lo! A great calamity struck this world, and as if releasing a heaving sigh the earth shattered and twisted under its own force and the great lake was split into the Hundred Lakes that we know today. But now that the blessed lake is gone, and the waters have seeped into the soil all around the land, what is there to keep that foulness bound? What force exists that might stay what lurks below..?” The dishevelled man in sopping rags finished his story with great, sweeping motions of his arms, and as he leaned in towards the grim illuminations of the sputtering flames pustules of ooze and pus made themselves plain upon his face, and his breath hovered in the air like a reeking cloud of filth. With a single stroke of his hand upon the little scamp’s face an oily, black streak emerged and was soon absorbed into their skin. “She waits for us below. You see it now, yes?” They both wept black tears, and cried out in rapturous agony.[/hider]