The Scroll collided with the rock, and there the heat of it singed a hole into the Veil, its edges ragged and lined with sizzling embers. And no sooner was this hole torn than did brutish tusks and tendrils rip into it and tear it open, and in a black dust-cloud the outer horde surged forth, mercifully hidden by the very smoke they kicked up.

The vanishing wisps of black mist above the lake of warm gold were instantly replenished by the onslaught. Fins and wings unseen skidded across the surface of the lake, scattering droplets of hot gold into the roiling cloud of darkness. Horrible things swarmed unseen above the golden light, and another, like horrible thing spasmed below, deep in the liquid shining gold. 

It felt their passage and heard their howls, longing mindlessly to join them in their conquest of all things, driven by a hideous instinct to defile and [i]grow,[/i] a mouthless sightless skinless need to strain against the world, to scream… this thing that had no skin, no brain, no teeth, this embryo awash with warm liquid gold, that hadn't any blood to call its own. 

The black mist roiled around the lake, and incubated it.

But the Scroll was resilient, and pure, and [i]hot.[/i] It was aflame with its own clarity of purpose. Its light burned off the black mist, dissolving it once more into nothing, and the horde seethed away like a swarm of vermin into the deep folds of the Veil. Deep in the lake of gold, the seed that was planted felt that heat, the cleansing heat from which its soft womb could not protect it, the blast that would rip its tender body apart.

Then it felt the heat no more. For there was one last dark thing that remained in this place, and that thing caught the whole of the lake under Its palm and hid it all at once, though the Scroll charred Its flesh. For one last, crucial moment, the Hand of Mysteries sheltered the lake and what grew inside it with Its own body.

[i]Go,[/i] It seemed to say. [i]Become what you are.[/i]

Then the Hand was gone, leaving only Its ring and seal, and the lake began to stir. The embryo felt for the first time a current, a brutal whirling flow where there had only been eddies and ripples before. The lake of warm gold was draining- not outwards, for it had no shore, nor downwards, for it had no bed, but draining nonetheless, somewhere far away, away from this realm of dream…

[hider=Itzala is flushed]

The swarm of eldritch beings that emerge from the rip in the veil torn by the Khodex colliding with Galbar energises and incubates the growing Itzala in the lake of warm gold, as though he too were an outer demon. When the Khodex emits a shockwave to push away these beings, it nearly kills the embryonic Itzala, who is sheltered by the same Hand of Mysteries outer god that first planted him, at the cost of its own flesh. The Hand disappears or dies, leaving its ring in the lake, which drains into the new world.

10 MP for the new turn. None spent. This is just the beginning.

[/hider]