[center][h2]Bohtrut[/h2][/center]

[hr]


Two met at the shore of an ocean of mud.  The First had swum here, the trail of his passage stretching into forever as a perturbation upon the sea of all that never was, and only half his being lay upon land.  The Second had appeared when the First wasn’t looking.  A long time passed, each one aware of the other, before the newcomer spoke, their voice deep and questioning, “You’d give up, after coming so far?”

The First groaned and shifted to regard the speaker, but whatever was on the tip of his tongue fell flat when he beheld himself.  He looked around the void of that which would be before him, and back to the muddy waters of all that never was, and whined with indignation, “I gave it what it wanted didn’t I, who am I to criticize myself?” 

“I pulled myself out of nothing and everything.” The Doppleganger’s voice grew annoyed and he lectured, “I have every right to demand I finish what I started.” 

“As if.  I owe me nothing, and not being at least a little bit is more comfortable than I’d admit to anyone but myself.”  The swimmer wriggled his toes in the nonexistence beyond even this void and smirked.

“Pathetic, even for Sloth.”  The newcomer knelt until he was face to face with the First, the very personification of inaction, and snarled, “I don’t need to exist if I don’t want to.  Pull yourself out.”

Sloth sneered up at his duplicate as he spread his arms with a yawn, reaching out as if to grab hold of reality and extricate himself from the nothing beyond.  Then he flopped back down onto the beach of what would be with a snort, “Maybe later.”

The newcomer’s grimace vanished and the not-Sloth sighed before standing amidst the world to be.  He shrugged and seemed to concede the point, “Have it your way.” 

At least, before reaching out to grab Sloth by the throat.  The Doppleganger stared into his own suddenly panicked eyes and endured terrified hands grasping and scraping at his outstretched arm as if the bloody gouges carved by divine fingers were nothing at all.  He began to crush the First's essence out of him and lamented, “[i]You[/i] think [i]you[/i] can betray [i]me[/i], after all [i]I[/i] did for [i]us[/i]?  [i]I[/i] didn’t want this, but if [i]we[/i] can’t work together then maybe [i]you shouldn’t [b]be[/b] anyway[/i].” 

His arm ran with ichor from wounds that would take long eons to heal, but the newcomer's grip only tightened. In spite of his struggle, and long before his strength would have failed him, Sloth gave up.  The duplicate let go and spat upon his writhing form in disgust the moment he noticed.  The Second seethed, “Too easy.  Too easy.  Bringing you here was too hard for sending you away to be easy.” 

While Sloth struggled to recover and even, at last, began to pull himself fully into the world that would be, his attacker cast his gaze in every which direction.  The newcomer surveyed all that would exist and in the form of Anat’aa found his answer.  With renewed focus he cast his gaze upon Sloth, now fully real, and summoned that which had only just entered a world yet to be: fire.  Sloth’s eyes widened in fear and he coughed, pleadingly, “You w- wouldn’t kill yourself?  We came together.  We’re th- the same!”

Burning hands grasped Sloth's shoulders and words gave way to shrieks.  The First, the one who had held all at bay until pushed, was burning and screeching in pain as the hands of his Doppleganger held him in an inferno that scorched his very essence.  A moment passed into an eternity before time and a god died before he was born. 

The one who remained, his hands still burning and cursed as surely as his savaged arms to heal poorly and slowly, stood over his own body and inhaled the acrid stench of [i]no one and nothing[/i].  He spoke to nobody and all that would ever be when he bellowed at the scorched corpse before him, “I am nothing like you! I am [b]Toil[/b], and nobody will ever know you existed.”

He turned, still aflame himself, and approached the Khodex.  He pulled the scroll open and wrote his power into it with stolen flame.  Toil enshrined forever what he had done and the fire which served as conduit for his power, one summoned with hatred and for murder, demanded yet another curse be added to the litany already teeming to be unleashed on an innocent reality yet unborn.  In his fury he indulged it, grinning as he wrote:

[center][i]Sloth is dead.  
A fire burns in all that exists and it withers when left untended.  
All that sits idle will crumble to ruin and no creation or blessing of men and Gods will have its fire endure without hands to uphold it.  
Age will claim the weak flames of the indolent and contented before their time; the industrious will see their fires and lives stretch with the scope of their works. 
Dead sloth will remain.[/i][/center]


[hider=might and summer trees]
-4mp writing a murder and a curse into the Khodex while empowering it

So what happened was sloth wasn’t one guy, he was two guys.  One of the two guys was the guy that swam hard to exist, the other guy was the one that was using the precipice between everything and nothing as a Chaise longue.  Same guy, though.  At least until they were out of everything and nothing and in this reality yet to be, mostly.  Then they split and the half that’s toil loses his shit at how lazy sloth is and kills himself.  Then he writes sloth out of existence and signs a great decree that means you work or you get sick and slowly die and also you need people maintaining everything forever.  This is because there’s a metaphysical fire in all things and if it’s not tended it goes weak and dies, maybe we’ll see Anat’aa like that so much she forgives Toilboy, AKA Bohtrut, for using fire as the first murder weapon.  Yeesh. 
[/hider]