[center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019ad9be-b7e5-7611-bde4-b08d49ad3ce9.webp[/img]

[i]&[/i]


[h1][color=darkgoldenrod]Khthon[/color][/h1][/center]

[hr]

[color=darkgoldenrod]"God-Brother. The seas are draining. I have fulfilled my end of the bargain. Now, it is your turn to do so. Cling to me once more. We shall travel to the bowels of the Earth.”[/color]

[color=#9E5020]“So it shall be,”[/color] a soaked Sarhush answered.

The Earth swallowed the two Gods once again, and brought them to the very deepest point of the earth, in a small air pocket that Khthon had created for this very purpose. The copper pickaxe laid on the floor, carried here by his power once he realized it had been lost to the flood. [color=darkgoldenrod]"Here is the very bottom of our world,”[/color] the God entoned. [color=darkgoldenrod]"Here we shall ignite the greatest of all fires, so that stone will forever hold its warmth, forever be transformed, forever change what it touches.”[/color]

[color=darkgoldenrod]"Tell me, Sarhush. You have fire. What needs to be done so that it spreads beneath?”[/color] Khthon asked. [color=darkgoldenrod]"I have seen ash and wood, but stone does not burn as they do, and they do not burn hot enough to melt the Earth.”[/color]

[color=#9E5020]“Fire hungers, but its palate is broad. All that once lived can be set aflame, but down here there is nothing. We will require fuel from the surface.”[/color]

Still soggy, Sarhush at least managed to resist shivering as he reclaimed the pickaxe. With a mighty few swings, he dug out a great hollow of stone. To him, the trough represented a mouth. Soon, that would be the searing maw of the greatest fire the world would ever know, but there was more work to be done first. He widened and deepened the mouth, swinging his pickaxe wildly and without care to neatness or symmetry. He hurled the loose stones aside and worked until the fractured stone floor itself seemed sore, seemed to recoil from his strikes. 

[color=#9E5020]“Soon, you will eat,”[/color] Sarhush dismissively spoke to the maw. [color=#9E5020]“But not yet, for you would only choke and suffocate. First, you must breathe.”[/color]

Sarhush rapped the copper pickaxe gently upon the walls around, ear pressed against stone, listening carefully to the echoes. He began to tunnel to where he heard signs of another large cavern. This would be the nose, the lungs. When the nostrils of that nose finally stretched from the back of the maw into the vast reaches of a second airy void, he turned back.

What was a maw and a nose without a head and skull? With the stone rubble from his digging, Sarhush began to stack stones and arrange them into mortarless walls. Where there were gaps, he crammed small pebbles and bits of dust. When stones would not fit together well or gaps persisted, he hammered and battered the wall, and in his rage he compressed and crushed the loose bits together. In the end, he’d hewed a head, the skull so tight that the insides might have been nearly choking. The maw could breathe in, but it lacked the power to exhale. Sarhush struck upward with his pickaxe to right that.

He excavated a tortuous tunnel that twisted and writhed through the foundations of the earth. Within, the heat and smoke would scour, burn, and seep into the stone. This would not be a chimney so much as an artery of scorching heat, a path of suffering carved into Ashuru’s bones.

Sarhush descended back down the way he’d come, climbing out from inside the maw. He looked back and beheld his creation. While the world had yet to know the words for his artifice, his work had wrought the first furnace.

Sarhush finally threw down the copper pickaxe, battered and ugly as his toil had rendered it. Then he looked to Khthon. [color=#9E5020]“Fire is a beast that hungers like any other. I have built its skeleton, but now it requires food. Go to the surface and bring down as much fuel as you can; nigh anything that lives or once lived will serve. Then, I shall make a blaze so hot that it will wake the stone.”[/color]

Khthon heeded the other God’s words, and rose back to the surface. He did not have to look far for fuel, for he emerged in a large swathe of burned forest. The ground was littered with ash and the burned husks of tree trunks. They would serve as fine fuel. From his body grew arms and hands, and he grasped handfuls after handfuls of ash and charcoal, pressing them down into a small, hard, brownish-black lump. Satisfied with his creation, he ordered the soil to swallow the ash and compress it into coal as he had done, and to then bring it back to Sarhush’s creation.

With this part of the land cleaned from debris, Khthon moved to the next, each time taking the ash and burnt plant debris, each time condensing it into coal, until most of the devastated lands were cleaned of any trace of fire, leaving only empty plains. The coal also evolved, each time getting darker and more dense, until it gained a luster, and Khthon knew it could not get any purer.

He wandered some more, eventually approaching a mortal campsite. He saw that the creatures living within had crafted their own fires. When all seemed occupied by one task or another, Khthon approached some more, looking into the fire pits. The mortals seemed to be burning almost living firewood; the God knew instinctively that his coal would burn much, much hotter than it ever could. And yet one fire burned brighter than the rest, and when he looked into it, he found a small speck shining a fiery gleam. He plucked it out of the fire and held it out in front of his face, admiring as it continued to burn alone. And then the vision came.

Deep, certain knowledge of fire. What it is, what it does, and how to make it. But also what it is [i]for[/i]. Warming, yes. Lighting up the darkness, too. But also destroying. Killing. Burning all to the ground. Melting all that can’t be burned. Bending the unbendable, shaping the unshapable, and if all else fails, destroying it. A weapon and a tool in one, the first step in taming all that is Wild.

Khthon almost dropped the burning speck with how hard he flinched at those thoughts. How harsh and unpleasant a view of the world, for all that you can think of is how to abuse it! It must be one of Sarhush’s creations. Perhaps he could make use of it when igniting the Earth into magma.

He sank back into the soil, still unseen by the ur-humans nearby, and returned to his God-Brother’s side. [color=darkgoldenrod]”I have acquired fuel aplenty for the blaze. It lies within the surrounding Earth; call to me and I will bring it out.”[/color] Khthon handed over the Me of Fire still gently smoldering in his hand. [color=darkgoldenrod]”I believe this… thing belongs to you. Perhaps you can make use of it?”[/color]

Sarhush was beside the mouth of the still-cold furnace, casting chunks of coal and lignite into its maw. The strange new stones were heaped up beside the furnace in massive piles, but the furnace would hardly fit anything more. It was nearly time for the fire to begin its feast. 

When Khthon returned, Sarhush looked up. The sight of the smoldering object in hand was a pleasant surprise; he didn’t even notice the shift in the other god’s tone. [color=#9E5020]“Ah, you’ve found the Me of Fire!”[/color] He took it from Khthon and lifted it to inspect anew. [color=#9E5020]“This was one of many gifts that I bestowed unto the mortals above, that they could learn to mimic my own power and mastery over the world. Yes, it will aid us in this work.”[/color]

Sarhush blew gently on the ember that was the Me, and the thing flared to life. Where it had glowed a dull orange, it now was white-hot. Unceremoniously–almost lazily–Sarhush tossed the thing into the maw of the furnace, and in an instant it ignited the great piles of coal. A massive inferno soon filled the furnace’s stone head. A blast of warmth filled the whole room. Sarhush’s hide clothes, still soaked from the floodwater, helped him weather the already uncomfortable heat.

But this was not enough. Sarhush began throwing more and more coal into the furnace, for its maw was so vast that the flame within was able to consume the fuel as fast as it could be flung inside. Meanwhile, Khthon sank back into the stone and began to guide the heated stone and let it permeate through the Earth. When one part grew hot, it would be swapped with another that was still cold. Slowly but surely, the heat spread more or less evenly from the furnace, growing ever hotter every second. The stone around the furnace began to glow red hot, and softened, until their texture turned slightly gooey.

The fire burned hot, and fast, but not fast enough. Soon, Khthon realized that past a certain radius around the furnace and its winding chimney, the heat could go no further. The hot stones would cool off before more could join it. The fire was simply not big or hot enough.

What must one do when they want a bigger, better fire? Better fuel is one answer, but they already were using the best fuel available. The logical next step is then more fuel. Sarhush was shoveling it in as fast as he could, but Khthon knew he could be faster.

[color=darkgoldenrod]”Move aside, brother.”[/color] This was the only warning Sarhush had before a veritable torrent of coal emerged from the walls and rushed into the blazing maw of the furnace. The flames grew bigger and hotter than ever, until they became a blinding white. The heat had grown so violently fast that it embrittled and cracked the stone walls of the furnace; then the whole thing began to sag and glow as it too started to melt. The walls that had contained the inferno now caged it no longer. It roared and spread, guzzling an avalanche of coal as it blasted heat and soot upward through the chimney-artery.

Khthon could feel that the surrounding caverns were not spared from the same fate; slowly, and without much intervention by the God, stone, metals, and even a few gems began to melt into magma, which flowed into the hollows of the deep earth, until all was united into one great lake of liquid fire. The stone groaned. Pressure grew, as more magma accumulated in too small pockets, and in a few places the stone cracked and let it seep upwards. Whether it would breach the surface, or cool and settle in the depths, would remain to be seen. Finally, the Earth was given the spark of warmth that it lacked, and Khthon, too, smiled, for he knew that the heat would sustain his world for as long as he desired it to.

As stone itself had been made to bend and yield, the formerly cold and lifeless bones of Ashuru could now shudder. The world had been given warmth through the fire they’d forced into its bowels.

The cavern around the molten furnace was a hell of soot and glare. Sarhush stood bare-skinned amid it, soot-streaked and steaming from sweat, the charred remnants of his clothes discarded like shed skin. He would have given the pickaxe back to Khthon, but the handle was reduced to ashes and the copper head a puddle on the floor. Still, Sarhush remained unharmed. Firelight crawled over him and lit in his eyes.

[color=#9E5020]“There,”[/color] Sarhush said, not loudly, but with certainty. [color=#9E5020]“Stone awakens because it has been made to suffer.”[/color]





[hider=Actions]
Khthon wants to make magma and has Sarhush to help him. Sarhush knows a thing or two about making fires, so his plan is to build a massive furnace in the bottom of the world, with a chimney to carry the heat through the depths of the world. He builds this monstrosity, but they have no fuel, so Khthon creates coal and lignite by dragging down and compressing the ash and charred remnants of the forests that Sarhush and his mortals burnt.

They stoke a massive fire and make lava.

[b]CONVICTION EXPENDITURES:[/b]

Magma and volcanism are created.
4 conviction collaborative nightmare terraforming action
[Sarhush spends 3 conviction, Khthon spends 1 conviction (in-domain action)]

Coal and lignite were also created.
0 conviction in-domain lucid action (for Khthon)
[/hider]