[center][h2][b][color=f5f4d7]SALA[/color][/b][/h2][/center]

Violence shook the world.  Great and terrible forces played out across the land, rending and tearing at Galbar, opening wounds on its surface as great as those sustained by the Lord of Reality himself.  In any direction she could sense the spawn of that great being fighting and dying.  Creating and destroying.  It was as it had been from the very moment Sala was born. 

She paid it little mind.  The reverberations of powers bound and unleashed pushed and pulled at her, but not as more than waves upon the surface of the sea. Sala had returned to the world, released by her fallen brother and her creator, but her thoughts remained in the palace where she had seen the consequences of her own reckless creation. 

Of her existence.  It bothered her.  She and Ao-Yurin were as close to siblings as any of the Monarch’s court.  Their aspects combined so readily that she struggled to feel the wrongness of the pairing.  When she had first touched water it had been bliss.  To allow herself to dissolve and be carried across the world in the tides and currents was a joy she’d hoped to share with her sibling.  Now?  She alone experienced it, and it felt hollow.  Ao-Yurin had died for her to feel what had been only natural to them.  

Sala felt the ocean as she spread through it.  She’d allowed herself to be washed away after returning to Galbar, meaning to fulfill her promise.  Intending to assume her stewardship.  Instead she’d sat, languid, listening to the world in the language of waves.  Unable to move forward so readily.  Unwilling to ignore the truth of what she heard happening all around her dispersed being.  That the world her Lord had created was dangerous, unfair, even cruel.  Sala stewed, the irrefutable evidence of her realization spelled out in the distant chaos that moved even the sea, even her.  In the death of Water's first master. She had been created in a way that doomed Ao-Yurin, and she felt conflicts of the same nature playing out everywhere.  Their consequences dooming more besides.

She watched as seeds of intelligence were cast aside and left to drown, victims of an aggression far beyond them.  One that never considered their presence.  It was terrible and inevitable, Sala felt.  Aspects that clashed and the full powers of divinity unleashed in the struggle, what could hope survive that?  She hated it.  She hated the kindness the Monarch had shown her after she had contributed to it.  The way things were could not stand, or everything would find itself a victim of circumstance.  Everyone. 


She wouldn’t accept it.  She was not born integral to the world, nor had Ao-Yurin been.  If they both could change that, damn the consequences, then why not this?  Why secure only the seas?  Sala, a mind spreading through the water of the world, hatched upon an idea.  Her promise could serve to do more than secure the seas.  Thinking beings desired their careless annihilation no more than she did, they only required the tools. 

Sala began to reform, at last, with the solution to her troubles growing clearer in her imagination.  She directed herself to grow into a unified being once more at the precipice of Ruina’s ignorant ‘test’ of the ocean.  One of a number of vast expanses of the ocean floor left exposed, the water that should have obscured the desolate land held back by an unseen divine power.  It would be the first to fall. 

If destruction was too easy, too appealing, then she only had to make it harder.  The Goddess of Salt sat, whole, beneath a mile of water.  Before her, the edge.  She poked and prodded at it, and she knew its mere existence had doomed countless creatures already.  Beyond the wall of water sat a pile of corpses, mummified by salt that rained down from the turbulent ocean as it raged against its confinement. 

Sala took shape as a woman with countless arms, grasped a passing fish, and reached into its being as she started to weave.  She’d come to know flesh, and she knew it to be too weak for what she needed.  So she extracted every muscle, every fiber, every minuscule strand of matter that made the fish what it was, and imbued them all with the tiniest shred of divinity.  The fish could not thrash as she remade it, but she felt its desire to.  

A price.  It would emerge greater.  Scales became milky white crystals, bones turned to shimmering iridescent metal, and the animal's flesh began to glow with bound power.  When she was done a brilliant shining creature sat before Sala, an immortal being that carried her power, her intent.  So long as there was power for the creature to eat, it would endure. 

When one was done she simply allowed it to swim away, and when it swam towards the barrier Ruina had erected?  The edifice of divinity began to leak as the humble fish nibbled at it.  Soon the fish was left flopping on the dry land beyond, but where it had breached the vast unseen wall?  A torrent of water erupted out.  It's circumstances wouldn't harm the animal too badly, but if they did?  Sala did not need that one. 

Moving walls of precipitating salt herded millions of fish towards her, and one by one she worked upon them.  Mortal blood dyed the water around her dark red as she disposed of it.  All that the fish were had to be changed, and much needed to be discarded.  And every time Sala finished one of her creations?  Another hole was torn in Ruina’s barrier.

When it finally shattered and the ocean rushed back in, Sala hardly even noticed.  Ruina’s influence would extend for countless years to come, the fish had only broken the barrier, not undone the divine working.  Smaller holes would open at random all across the ocean in the future, but they too would be found and destroyed.  Her creations made certain of that.

Of course, fulfilling her promise had only been half the effort.  Oh yes, the fish blessed with a shred of her divinity would seek out and consume the energy of that which threatened the seas, but that was only the beginning.  Their flesh was what Sala had poured her energy and thought into, and that was not without reason. 

Those mortals who consumed the fish would grow stronger, less vulnerable.  They would not sicken from poisons, nor would they choke on water.  Their muscles would grow stronger in a way only the influence of divinity could explain, and their skin would resist all but mortal blows.  It was a litany of blessings, but in a way Sala’s gift was her absolution. A way to atone for a crime she'd never intended. But it was not a gift without cost.  Agelessness like the fish had could be obtained by feasting on nothing but their bodies, but only if one was willing to withdraw from the chaos and danger of land.  The ocean was to be Sala’s, and those who wanted her protection would have it so long as they remained within her power. 

The world was a cruel place, and she would ensure the willing survived it.  A promise as great as the one she’d made to Ao.

[hider=Summary + Expenses]
Sos sala is being a sad sack.  The world is going to shit, well its always been going to shit, and she kinda just is floating around dissolved in the ocean being morose.  Then she’s like, fuck this is ridiculous and cruel, I gotta make sure at least something and someone survives this.  So she decides to fulfill her promise to Ao at the same time as she makes things easier for mortals by making a species of semi-divine fish.  These magical fish are attracted to any significant disturbances in the ocean and they use their power to consume and break down magic, divine or mortal.  They break up one of Ruina’s holes in the ocean.  Bonus: Sala wants the mortals to have an easier time surviving too so she makes eating the fish a way to gain its power in a limited way.  Eating the fish grants immunity from mundane poisons, waterbreathing, enhanced strength, and armor like skin.  If you ate NOTHING but the fish, you might gain immortality like they do.  Side effects include growing scales and losing the ability to live on land. 

Semi-Divine Fish: -10 Vigour (8 to counteract the barriers, 2 to cover my ass for pulling a stunt like this)[/hider]