[center][colour=gainsboro][h2]Ea Nebel[/h2][/colour][/center]

[colour=gainsboro]"Well, well..."[/colour] The deva wiped a little dirt off the lower side of the otherwise gleaming white skull. [colour=gainsboro]"You certainly [i]weren't[/i] a lucky one, now, were you?"[/colour]

The Iron Boar- well, warthog, really- lowered its snout, and Ea Nebel raised the skull that it might have an interested sniff. Here between some rocks on a sunny hill in an unmapped corner of the many forests of Orsus, an animal much like a lanky hairless pig had come to a pitiful end. Ea Nebel watched its memories dance before her eyes as she stroked the bone with her thumb. 

Strong, bold, a devoted mother, it had gathered many years of bush-lore, only for its twin upper tusks- fine, shining ivory- to grow so long that their gentle curve had curled them backwards. Their sharp point had first scraped away the skin, then burrowed through the skull, growing further and further into the brain until it collapsed in its last and longest fit of animal epilepsy. O beast, thought the shroud maiden, you have overcome everything, save your own longevity!

She fixed her four eyes on the sockets of the skull, whispering out a divine lullaby from black lips, a sweet little nothing. It came naturally to her. As gently as she sang, the skull cracked and crumbled, falling apart in her hands, leaving only the eyes, and then only the tusks.

From the pile of shards, a young pig squealed at her, grey-skinned and long-legged. Its lower tusks just about poked from its lips. Its uppers were nowhere to be seen. Ea Nebel laughed and pet the thing roughly.

[colour=gainsboro]"I like you. Keep an eye on the woods for me, won't you? Your name is babiruš."[/colour] With that she slapped the pig on its hindquarters and sent it scurrying into the undergrowth. The Iron Boar watched the bracken into which it had disappeared.

Ea Nebel let the tusk roll back and forth in her hand. It was so sun-warmed, so smooth and perfect. Its length was fated- it had grown only until it terminated itself.

[color=gainsboro]"Just like you, Father,"[/color] she murmured, comparing the length of the tusk to the stone at the hilt of her blade.

[hr]

A pale hand swished left and right over the silty gravel of the kelp forest, sending little puffs of sand into the water.

[colour=gainsboro]"Ah. There you are."[/colour]

Her voice carried cleanly through the blue murk, and she decided that she rather liked this body, which was much like her natural one, long black tail notwithstanding. She wrenched from the mud a skull, also like hers, only fitted with exactly two eye-sockets, no more than that. [colour=gainsboro]"...Until you, they did not know they could die. No wonder they just left you h- hoy- hoy!"[/colour]

The thick, slick mass of gunk now coating her hand, it seemed, had been deliberately cast off by some kind of queer tentacled eel hiding in the cranium. Unable to shake the noisome slime, and too dignified to properly chase the pink-grey devil, Ea Nebel clenched her fist and seized the eyeless worm in a ball of blue mana, flickering with glyphs of willpower. It seemed to have a simple little round hole for a mouth, in between its four stubby front barbels, until its relentless snakelike wriggles showed her the nasty jawless flesh-scraper invaginated below that orifice.

Ea Nebel tilted her head, shrugged, nodded, looked away, shrugged, nodded again. The sea-hag wriggled.

It would do.

[hr]
[hider=nautical nonsense]
Ea Nebel marks two grey scavenging animals as sacred to her: the babirusa, because it reminds her of her boar steed and also of inevitable doom, and the hagfish, because she's just a nutty little corpse gremlin she is. She demonstrates knowledge of the Mer.

For now this doesn't mean much, but she'll have an affinity for these animals in the future and might use them as minions. They might start showing up in biomes they don't strictly belong.

8 Vigour start.
2 Vigour spent bonding with two sacred animals. Regular price because they're obviously corpse-eaters.
6 Vigour remains.
[/hider]