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Mighty Sarhush eventually awakened from his long rest. There was still a terrible pain coursing through the arm that Saries had chewed, and this left him in a foul mood. The smell of sea spray irked him too; almost instinctively, he wanted to put distance between himself and the vile sea, for the memory of nearly drowning in it was still fresh.

It pleased his sensibilities to look around and observe some of the ur-humans shepherding the animals of this land; but the trees and wilderness all around were a blight to the eyes that he would suffer no longer. With purpose, he rose to his feet from the beach where he’d lain down, and made his way towards the nearest of the offending trees. 

The humans, inquisitive and natural followers that they were, saw him stomping towards the forest with purpose, and they followed to watch what their great patron would do next. Sarhush squatted, wrapped his arms around a mighty oak, dug his fingers into its bark, and heaved with all the might within his legs to rise. He uprooted the whole tree, wrenching it from the earth, and then threw it down on its side. Then he did the same to a poplar, and then a juniper… he spared no tree from his wrath. 

The humans tried to do as they saw, but they were far too weak to simply cast down whole trees. Then pushed and kicked and hanged from the branches, but it was all their could do to break off the low-hanging limbs and leave the trunks. That would not do.

Really, the exertion that it took to rip up the trees was quite taxing even for mighty Sarhush. There had to be a better way.

Where before the ground underfoot had been little more than loose grains of blackened sand, there were now stones aplenty, larger and sturdy rocks. Sarhush took note of that, and lifted one to inspect it. He bashed the blunt stone against the trunk of a nearby tree, just as he’d bashed the Egg of Potential upon the head of Saries, but this did little save splinter and dent the wood. So he cast that stone over one shoulder – there was a watching ur-human that barely managed to leap out of the flying rock’s way – and looked for a better rock. He soon found one with a jagged edge; with it, he could cut into the bark. Slowly, he hacked and sawed through a tree’s trunk. This was better, but it still did not feel quite right.

Sarhush sat down to rest, for by now he was covered in sweat. He lifted another stone, and began knocking them against one another. It demanded some thought and attention, but with careful enough strikes, he was able to chip off bits of the first jagged rock using the second one; in this way he knapped an even more wicked edge onto his stone. And then with the thing in hand, cutting through the tree bark became easier still, but he was still simply palming a rock and bashing it against something.

There had to be a better way. He sat beside a small thicket to ruminate on how to best destroy the forest. Some fibrous plants tickled at Sarhush’s skin as they waved in the breeze. Annoyed, he wrapped a brawny hand around the plants and ripped them out of the ground; this was much easier than wrenching up a whole tree. But as he held the small plant stems and felt how flexible they were, it occurred to him that these might be capable of lashing his cutting-stone onto the end of a stick. With that idea in his mind, fashioning the first stone axe was a quick and simple thing. 

He put that axe to the test, and found it viciously effective. The god’s booming laughter rang out across the land as this clever creation allowed him to fell the trees ten times as fast. The Mes of Flint Knapping, Tool Making, and Woodcutting manifested like treasures heaped before his feet; he kicked them to every mortal that approached him. 
There were many such mortals that had come to him, for curiosity prompted them to investigate the terrible, thunderous, nearly incessant sound of trees crashing to the earth. Sarhush called out to them all as they gathered and laid hands upon his sacred Mes, [color=#9E5020]”Do as you have seen! Spare not a single tree; that is my commandment. There is great power in numbers, and through our mutual efforts shall we cleanse this land.”[/color]

Soon, night began to fall. As the sky darkened and the air grew crisp, Sarhush stopped. There was a great hunger that overcame him, so he made his way to one of the cattle that he’d tamed and decapitated the animal with a single blow of his mighty stone axe. He bit into its flesh; the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth, and after many great bites he left perhaps half the bull on the ground for his hungry worshipers to finish.

Sarhush shivered in the night’s breeze, but he was a clever god, so it did not take long for him to discover that he could rub the fallen trees against one another with great vigor to heat them and set them aflame. Soon, the Me of Fire manifested in his palm. He and the humans crawled across the darkening landscape to gather up wet and green timber, for fallen trees now littered the earth everywhere, and pile them up into great bonfires.

The thought occurred to Sarhush that there were so many trees around that they could not easily be counted; and these were just the ones that he could see! How many other woodlands might have already sprung up across the world? Destroying the forests would be much easier if he were to skip this intermediate step of felling the trees and simply set the live trees aflame. He beckoned the ur-humans closer. The Me of Fire rested in his palm; it burned, for the thing took the form of a red-hot ember, but he pressed it upon the hand of each human in turn for a moment or two. A few saw the others wincing in pain and tried to flee, but the furious shouts and stomps of Sarhush frightened most of them into submission and obeisance. Soon he had bestowed knowledge of fire upon hundreds of the humans, and he set them loose into the flammable wilds like so many embers upon the wind.

[hider=Actions]
Sarhush creates the Mes of Flint Knapping, Tool Making, Woodcutting, and Fire (all 0 conviction in-domain lucid actions).

He quickly bestows these gifts upon some of the primitive humans around him, and then commands the humans to cut down forests. But then he decides that simply cutting down all the trees would take too long, so he sends out a second wave of hundreds of them to light the wilderness on fire.[/hider]