[center][img]https://txt.1001fonts.net/img/txt/dHRmLjgwLjgwMTU5ZC5RV2gwZW1seWFRLjI/beyond-wonderland.regular.png[/img][/center][hr]


A shrill sound, something between a howl and a hiss, drew Ahtziri's attention away from her reverie. She turned her head to look towards the source of the sound, only to be bowled over by Pazuzu leaping into her and giving her face a long, sloppy lick--and she laughed, bringing her clawed hands up to rub his muzzle. The two rolled over one another in the dusty crags of the cave they were in, occasionally bumping into creatures that looked like Pazuzu had before he had received his Mother's blessings, and after only a few moments of raucous play the entire litter seemed to be awake and joining in on the dogpile. For the first time in her short existence, Ahtziri knew what it was to be content--she knew the feeling of love given and love received, she knew the feeling of belonging, and she knew that a mother's love was boundless. She let the scene play out just a little longer before beating her wings to gently manoeuvre the creatures away from her, and most of them simply skidded along the floor towards the edges of the spacious cavern that was their nest. One was caught by her wingtip directly, and the force knocked it up into the air with a terrible yowl--but before it could get too far, her tail whipped up to catch it and cradled it softly as its serpentine tongue licked the thing's face and all was forgiven and forgotten.

Pazuzu himself let out a quick bark, nosing towards the entrance of the cavern, and Ahtziri turned herself to look towards it. Though nothing was approaching their ersatz warren, she could intuit precisely what her firstborn meant: they would need a bigger space, now that they were able to thrive with impunity under her protection. She stood  up, then hovered slightly off of the ground in order to shake the dust and dirt from herself, and whistled a piercing tone to beckon her children to her. They each made their way over to her simultaneously, bumping into one another with no heed for the limitations of the physical space or their own wellbeing, and only when Ahtziri's taloned feet touched the ground did they sit on their haunches and shuffle into a relatively even layer. She counted thirty-four of the creatures, not counting Pazuzu, and pressed her clawtips together in a brief moment of thought. If they were to make it in the world, to survive and to [i]thrive[/i] (she knew not why this was important, only that it was), they would need to be augmented in a similar fashion to that of Pazuzu--and they would also need something or someone to watch over them when she was not present. Though the rage she felt when the humans had first cornered Pazuzu had left her and she could not even remember its white-hot sting, she remembered all too clearly the consequences of the confrontation: these mortals, wherever they were, were a threat to her children if left unanswered. 

She pressed a single clawtip to her right palm, slicing across it with a deftness and conviction hitherto undisplayed. She coaxed forth a single droplet of the divine ichor that flowed within her veins, a drop of distilled deifaction, and beckoned Pazuzu forth to kneel before her. He did so quickly and obediently, twin tongues hanging from his twin muzzles, and she beckoned him to drink of her essence with a single look. His raspy tongue raked itself across her open wound, lapping up the single droplet, before Ahtziri knitted her flesh together with a thought. A deep, purple glow began within Pazuzu's maw and trickled down his throat like spreading flames, clearly visible even beneath his sinew and flesh and fur--and he let out an almighty whine as it changed something within him forever. Though his features did not explicitly change he grew to be several times larger than he previously was, now standing face-to-face with the Mother of Monsters (who herself was around ten feet tall in her humanoid form), and the sinew of his wings became wreathed in a shell of gently dancing purple flames. He opened his muzzle to bark, but instead of the guttural sound of a monster emerging came a sound he had not expected:

[center][color=#B5D295]"Thank you!"[/color][/center]

Two of Pazuzu's eyes looked towards his lower muzzle, and two towards his upper. He blinked once, then twice, before his eyes opened themselves incredulously wide, and he spoke again:

[color=#B5D295]"I can... speak? I can... I can think! Oh, Mother, I love you so!"[/color]

Ahtziri's smile had grown equally incredulously wide at that moment, and tears of joy spilled from her eyes with no regard to what she wanted. She drew in a quick, shaky breath and pressed herself into Pazuzu's now-massive frame, openly weeping into his fur as the love she felt for her firstborn child poured from her very being. It took her a good few moments to compose herself, and as she did so the other creatures sat open-jawed, tongues lolling out of their mouths and tails wagging furiously. They growled out their unanimous approval, four yellowed eyes and four dark pupils dilating with their rapturous attention, and suddenly it was all too much for them to bear and they piled onto Pazuzu (though he now utterly dwarfed them in size) with gentle and loving nips. Blood was drawn fairly quickly, owing to Pazuzu's lack of divine [i]resilience[/i], and the creatures each lapped it up hungrily.

[color=#B5D295]"Okay, okay! Stop!"[/color]

The last word was spoken with such intensity that the force of the noise buffeted the things, sending them further back into the walls than Ahtziri had, and though many of them let out raspy mewls of pain their tails did not stop wagging and they remained utterly enraptured by their newly empowered brother.

[color=#644194]"Oh, Pazuzu... My beautiful, beautiful child."[/color] Ahtziri took a moment to regain her composure, swallowing and inhaling deeply, before continuing.

[color=#644194]"I cannot be everywhere, and I cannot look after your pack to the exclusion of my children strewn across these lands. While I am gone, you must look after your brethren, the... do you have a name for yourselves, my child?"[/color]

Pazuzu's features contorted in obvious concentration, the tongue from his lower muzzle hanging out towards the left and the tongue from his upper muzzle towards the right, as he took a second to think it over.

[color=#B5D295]"... hm. No, Mother, we do not. What would you call us?"[/color]

[color=#644194]"I shall call you the Abiktu, then. You must protect them, Pazuzu, and change them as I have changed you."[/color] 

Ahtziri took a step back, pressing her forehead against Pazuzu's snout for a brief moment, and turned away towards the mouth of the cave. The Abiktu all looked towards her, their forlorn gazes prickling against her skin, and she turned around for a final time.

[color=#644194]"I will return, fret not. There is no force in this world that can kill a goddess."[/color]

Pazuzu nodded, his lower maw snapping and howling to get the attention of the others, as Ahtziri flew off into the night.

[hr]

The winged figure of Ahtziri flew atop a great swath of barren rock, even the ruins that had littered it having been pulverised to dust. The only wind that blew was the result of her great wings flapping steadily, and her gaze was steeled as she looked down into the earth below. [i][color=#644194]Thrive.[/color][/i] The word thrummed in her skull, an invisible urging that gently tickled her consciousness with tantalising whispers of lives yet unborn and flesh yet unshaped. Ahtziri wondered in the privacy of her thoughts about the nature of her role in the world--it was simply a fundamental fact that all of the monsters of the world were her children, born or not. But if they were to truly thrive, she would have to create more: she would have to birth new horrors into the world to quell the onslaught of mortalkind's cruelty beneath an endless tide of flesh. She would have to act as steward and creator both, taking the mantle of Mother upon herself in every possible sense. The second that the thoughts crossed her mind she knew them to be inviolably true, a fundamental aspect of her being in the same way that she was divine, that she was the Mother of Monsters, that she was [i]Ahtziri[/i]. She steeled her resolve before plummeting to the earth in a graceful (insofar as she was capable of grace) swoop, landing upon it with a thud that shook through the earth for many miles.

Ahtziri placed her hands on her belly, closed her eyes, and let the world fall away. Though she was happy to simply birth monsters into the world, the creature she had in mind was simply too large for such a feat without her shedding the constraints of the form she was in--and though there was nothing around that she could sense, some hint of restraint refused to fall away from her on that particular topic. The truth was too glorious to reveal to the world in its current state, too much for it to bear--so she focused the powers of creation coursing within her, coaxing a mote of life from her womb, and suspending it in the air. It was a tiny, fragile thing--but as Ahtziri focused and gave of herself it grew rapidly, expanding and pulsating, soft flesh emerging from it at a staggering rate and folding upon itself. The formless mass quickly took shape, stretching and elongating exponentially, until soon it was so large that it was forced to coil around upon itself to even stay within Ahtziri's field of vision. Segments of black chitinous plating grew from the soft flesh, surrounding it like ringlets of armour, and a cavernous maw filled with teeth emerged at one end while a tail tipped with an enormous stinger emerged from the other. Ahtziri screamed out with the exertion of the effort before withdrawing her magic, and the great wurm crashed towards the ground mouth-first. Its teeth began to furiously gnaw at the earth, burrowing deep into it and swallowing it, and still it took five minutes for the thing to disappear beneath the surface due to its immensity.

[center][hider=The Bizai'i][img]https://media.mtgsalvation.com/attachments/85/60/635032493513828679.jpg[/img][/hider][/center]

Ahtziri looked down at the hole that marked its ingress, momentarily staggered by the sheer size of it. She smiled to herself, proud of her monstrous creation, before flying off into the night once more.

[hider=Summary]Ahtziri plays with her Abiktu children, many-legged wolfish creatures with four eyes, two maws, and sinewy batlike wings that hunt in packs. She chooses to endow Pazuzu with a spark of her divine ichor, granting him considerable intellect and increasing his size massively, and tasks him with protecting the pack while she tends to the rest of the world that requires her intervention. She flies off a considerable distance away to somewhere truly barren, spurred on by a strange desire to bring forth life, and creates the Bizai'i, a tremendous wurm that burrows beneath the earth and consumes ores to grow a tremendous rocky carapace. Satisfied with her creation, she leaves to wander the wastes in search of new opportunities to adopt or create monsters, and to ensure that no mortals hunt her children.[/hider]

[hider=MA]1 (0) - Create the Abiktu as a widespread race of monsters
1 (0) - Create the Bizai'i[/hider]