There came a time when Ea Nebel, Maiden of All Tombs, set foot in the lands of the far north, so far almost that there was no longer any north left, only south. There was in those nights no aurora, for no god had given breath to such splendour. Long rays of evening sunlight sparkled on flurries of snowy glitter, and their dance upon the clean snow was beauty enough for the Maiden.

Yet there was something foul and hot on the wind. Something rotted here with a pestilent warmth, filling even the furthest north with the far-ranging stench of death. The gravedigger of deity folded her mittens into her coat with a grim squint as her boar followed the scent. She knew her duty. Her joyless task would be executed, come Hell itself.

A sound before her was so foreign to the land that Ea Nebel barely noticed it the first two times. Only when the snow grew thin and the air unnaturally warm did she notice what was flying towards her from the heart of the sulphurous miasmic anomaly. An insect- a fly. Not even a blowfly, born of carrion. This was a [i]common[/i] fly. This kind was only born of...

...

[color=gainsboro]"By the Heaven-"[/color]

Ea Nebel stood on the permafrost and stared at the ghastly abomination poisoning earth and air before her, covering her mouth and nose, eyes wide as a stack of [abbr=Not every young woman in the annals of divinity is lucky enough to have eyes like lapis-lazuli or amber or some other fashionable gemstone.]gunmetal ball-bearings[/abbr]. Word left her, thought cringed away. The staggeringly nauseating mass was the work of a demon, not a god. None numbered among her family could have the demented perversion of imagination to conjure into being something so unutterably vile. No monument stood before her. It was an [i]affront.[/i] 

Gripped with righteous disgust, Ea Nebel felt her internal furnace burn hot within her, and pulled from the ground a tall torch already roaring with cleansing fire. The frost around her gave way to bilious brown mud churned with the worst kind of filth. Choking on vomitous fumes belching from the hill, Ea Nebel advanced through a dense, buzzing hail of flies, deriving no comfort from this profane lesser breed of her father's sacred creature and offering them no mercy from her light. Her crusade bore her to within the closest possible reach of the thing, and there she hurled the torch like a spear into its glistening feculent surface.

It stuck there, falling wetly onto the vast and uncomfortably body-warm heap like a dropped matchstick, sputtered weakly, and went out.

...

[b][color=gainsboro]"IGNITE!"[/color][/b]

The hill erupted into a pillar of flame that pierced Heaven. All colour disappeared except that of fire. Ea Nebel staggered from the conflagration, choking on smoke too black and noxious to speak of. Meltwater steamed up all around her, rising to surround a long smear of toxic brown smoke that would billow from the roiling inferno for one thousand years.

She did not visit those parts again for some time, but was ever after grateful for the bright, crisp cleanness of fresh fallen snow.

[Center][b]MERRY CHRISTMAS DIVINUS 2021[/b][/center]

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Ea Nebel spends 1 vigour to light a merry little Christmas bonfire, bringing her down to like five or six.
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