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[b][h3]Saries[/h3][/b]


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The Me of Fire bounced up and down in Sarhush’s blackened palm as he walked. When he finally arrived at the forest’s edge, he brought the hot coal of the Me so close to his mouth that the heat kissed his lips, and then he blew. The Me grew white-hot like a tiny sun, and tongues of fire shot out to lick and singe his fingertips. Then he pressed the Me against a mighty cedar.

The bark caught fire quickly enough. Sarhush paused to look around; there were so many trees! Would a single blaze leap from branch to branch and consume them all, or would it gorge itself and slumber after just a few?

He watched the flames crawl, slow and reluctant, along the cedar’s resinous skin. The wood hissed. Sap bubbled and popped. Wisps of smoke and steam escaped, but the lazy fire did not run. It lacked vigor.

[color=#9E5020]”Too wet,”[/color] Sarhush muttered to himself, cursing that he had suffered the Patron of Water to have even a drop. He should have [i]truly[/i] smited all water from existence. A thin film of volcanic ash covered the bark in places, and carpeted much of the forest floor and undergrowth. It was like grey snow, up to his ankles, and it was not helping the blaze to spread either. The powder stuck to everything, and it smothered nascent flames as surely as water.

He tore dead branches from the forest floor where they stuck out from the ashes and fed them to the flame on that cedar tree. It grew brighter and hotter, but remained uneven. The living trees resisted, sweating their lifeblood to smother the blaze. Nature was wasting his time just as it always did.

Sarhush snorted and crouched, raking his fingers through the ash, through the detritus of the forest floor, deep enough to almost touch soil. He felt dry grasses, fibrous reeds, strips of bark that had peeled off of the trees. He bundled these things in a heap.

[color=#9E5020]“Fire does not merely need fuel,”[/color] he realized aloud. [color=#9E5020]“It needs to be fed properly.”[/color]

He began to twist the fibers together. This was done not with care but with brute certainty. He bound strand to strand, crossing and tightening, forcing the weak to reinforce one another. Sarhush had an affinity for bending and twisting, binding and breaking. Kingship meant subjugating all things. The bundle grew thicker and denser until it held its shape even when he released it.

Sarhush regarded the crude wicker. It just might work.

[color=#9E5020]“That’s better.”[/color]

He ripped out more grassy fibers and he began to weave faster. Bundles piled at his feet; they were dry, tight, eager to burn. When he so much as held the Me of Fire towards them and blew, the sparks and embers that it cast out immolated the kindling instantly, and then the fires blazed hot and fierce. He hurled these burning knots into low branches of the forest, into the undergrowth that poked through the ash, and into the shadowed spaces between trunks where flame had struggled to reach.

The fire had been yoked and harnessed, spreading in deliberate arcs and lines, and now the trees screamed. The roaring of the inferno and the sweet, resinous scent of woodsmoke were music to Sarhush’s ears and incense to his nostrils. This was a fire fit to consume an entire woodland, and satisfied, Sarhush pressed deeper into the forest as it followed in his wake. The Me of Fire had fulfilled its purpose for now, so he choked it inside of a tightened first, then for lack of a better place to set down the warm coal, he placed it into his mouth. It smoldered obediently against his tongue, tasting of triumph.

He must have looked like a herald of destruction, caked in volcanic ash, filth, and the dried gore of the burst whale. Bathing was unthinkable, but he would not walk Ashuru as some naked beast. Order demanded form.


Deeper in the forest, the ash lay thinner under the canopy. The living roof of leaves had spared the undergrowth from the worst of the nearby volcano, and fibrous plants thrust up eagerly from the soil. Sarhush seized them as he walked, tearing free long strands and winding them about his fingers. He twisted and crossed them with practiced certainty, tightening weakness into strength, binding many into one.

The fibers became cord. Cord was then woven into structure. Sarhush wrapped and looped the clothing about himself without pause, cinching and fastening until it held fast against his stride. Now his appearance reflected his nature: not beast, and not merely man, but master and king.

As the last knot was drawn tight, a new Me manifested before him. This one took the shape of a length of cord, perfectly bound along one half, while the other unraveled into frayed ends. Its fibers were impossibly varied: green twigs braided with sheep’s wool, human hair twisted alongside dry grasses, and veins of pale, stringy stone that should not have bent at all.

This was binding made manifest, not adornment and not comfort. It was control. He beheld the ropelike Me of Weaving with pride, but then felt droplets of water fall upon his face. He cast his glowering eyes upward and through the gaps in the leaves, he picked out a bird soaring high overhead, conjuring rainclouds with great buffets of its wings. The insolence was astounding, but then, beasts had no intelligence of their own unless some greater force was there to break and drive them. Sarhush contemplated ensnaring and capturing that bird, that he could harness the power of the rain through it, but why bother? He had no need for water.

The god seized up a rock nearly the size of a man’s head. He toyed with it in the grip of one great hand, gauging the distance and imagining how he might cast it to smite the bird. This was a terribly long distance to hurl a stone. But he held the Me of Weaving in his other hand, and perhaps it could help…

He quickly tied together some of the loose strands at the end of the Me. They would come undone soon, he sensed, but what mattered was that for the moment he’d coaxed the wild frayed fibers into something resembling a loose net. He set the rock inside that makeshift pouch, then gripped the Me from its rope end. He began swinging it in great circular motions above his head, around and around him, until the rope was moving so fast that it was a blur. Then he slackened his grip upon this first sling, and that sent the rock flying like a bullet. It struck the bird and shattered its wing, before it had managed to summon more than a paltry drizzle.

Sarhush raked up more fibers from the forest floor to continue his weaving. He corded fibers and then folded them inward to bind space itself into enclosure. He was growing tired of the Me of Fire’s taste, so he spat the thing into his newly created sack, then stuffed the Me of Weaving in there too.

When the smote bird had tumbled out of the sky, it came to land somewhere not far. Sarhush trod in that direction with a mind to inspect his quarry and similarly toss it into his sack; perhaps he’d be able to fashion its remains into something useful, or cook it for a meal. He emerged into a small clearing in the woods to see a gory mess where the bird had crashed down atop some great boulder, with some band of ur-humans standing all around in shock.

They weren’t an impressive bunch – most of them lanky, underdressed, ribs showing – and yet even in their sorry states, some of them were rushing to the boulder to try and remove the gore from it. 

It was a couple seconds before one of the ur-humans – a young teenage boy who immediately gasped and fell backwards – noticed Sarhush emerging from the edge of the clearing they called home, garbed in clean and newly woven clothing but with a visage still covered in ash and gore. The commotion turned a few more heads, and this in turn turned more and more heads until every ur-human present had stopped worrying about the grisly remains smeared across their precious boulder.

Then they looked past Sarhush, and saw the growing plumes of smoke behind him and felt the heat radiating from the approaching fires. It finally dawned on them then – The Valley was finally burning, and the unrecognizable gore covering the boulder now looked very similar to the remains of one of the increasingly rare Tormentas responsible for putting out fires.

“The Man-God…” Came a whisper, from the very first teenager who had noticed Sarhush.

That whisper broke the crowd out of its reverie, and in a sudden flurry of movement, dozens of ur-humans ran into their crude huts and started to collect their belongings.

It was then that two figures ran out of a half-hidden path nested between two large bushes. One of them, the most remarkable, was nearly as tall as Sarhush and had a burning gaze that was completely unafraid of him. He held a club as large as a leg in his right hand and a crude obsidian knife in the other, fashioned from a naturally sharp piece of the jagged rough slotted into the end of a stick.

The other man, a hunched-over ur-human with a graying goatee pointed at Sarhush several times, his skittish gaze moving from the remarkable man to Sarhush and back until the tall man nodded, at which point the older man left in a rush to gather his belongings, like the rest.

“Man-God! You are not welcome here. Take your fires and killings with you and go from here! We thrived when you left, lived in balance with this Valley that you now threaten, and now you take our guardians and defile our lands.” the great man said with a booming voice, the impact enough to momentarily stun the lesser ur-humans around him. “I, Oxen the Strong, will do what it takes to protect my people. Even against the likes of you, Man-God!”

Sarhush snorted in bemused contempt. [color=#9E5020]“Has it been so long that you have forgotten my name already? Have you already forgotten my first commandment: that the forests must be burnt?”[/color]

“My people would not follow me if I told them to slaughter every rabbit and every chicken. They would not follow me if I told them to delve into the under-earth where it is dark and there is no air.” Sarhush raised an eyebrow. Oxen tightened his grip on his club. “So why should we listen to you when you tell us to burn our primeval home to the ground?”

The clearing awaited the god’s reaction with a heavy silence, but Sarhush regarded Oxen for a long moment in silence. His eyes swept from the man’s powerful frame, to his club in one hand, the crude knife in the other. He advanced, one step closer. A wave of heat came with him, accompanying the growing roar of the encroaching fire behind. [color=#9E5020]“This forest, primeval as you called it, was no ‘home’ for man. It was a den for wild beasts. Man must build his dwelling, not squat in Nature’s hovel.”[/color]

He did not pause for even a breath.  [color=#9E5020]”You should have felled and burned it yourself to make way for pasture. What animals you could not tame should have been slain or driven away, lest they prey upon your livestock and children.”[/color]

Sarhush came closer, every word set to a footstep, every footstep drawing a twitch from Oxen. The ground crunched beneath Sarhush’s weight. [color=#9E5020]“It matters little now. I am a generous god. I have started the fires myself. They come. Soon I will have cleared away this forest for you and your kin. Now let us speak of [b][i]rulership[/i][/b].”[/color]

He stopped at last, standing close enough that Oxen could see the black flecks of soot staining his yellowed teeth, the gray ash crusted across his tongue from when the Me of Fire had rested there.

[color=#9E5020]“You ask why they should listen, but they already do. They gather when you speak and scatter when you command. They fear you, Oxen the Strong. You stand tall, and you still draw breath.”[/color]

Each word grew louder, until Sarhush was nearly shouting in Oxen’s face, [color=#9E5020]“They know what follows defiance. When you raise your voice, NONE DARE ANSWER!”[/color] 

Oxen fell to one knee at the pressure of the shout. His point made, the god quietened again to finish. [color=#9E5020]“That is rulership. Fear is its spine; violence its breath. You will obey me.”[/color]

Sarhush at last set down the sack he’d been carrying in one hand and reached into it to produce the Me of Weaving.

[color=#9E5020]“And they will obey you.”[/color]

Oxen, already on one knee, trembling before Sarhush, let his obsidian blade drop to the floor and reached around to pry his grip around the handle of his club open. Once that was done, the great club fell to the ground with a thud, kicking up bits of dirt and grass as it did so.

“I do not intend to fight you, Man-God. I also do not intend to run from you, or grovel and ask for mercy, for there is no future for my people if I were to walk either of those paths. So give your orders if you must, but know that my people are proud, and will not burn their lives down for a God who only offers magical trinkets.”

Finally, Oxen hung his head and fell into a short silence, punctuated by the hushed whispers of the ur-humans around.

[i]”Oxen knelt…”

“No way, is he really…”

“I’m never letting a monster tell us what to do, I’ll…”

“Quick, someone tell the…”[/i]

Sarhush’s  gaze remained fixed only upon Oxen, still kneeling, trembling, breathing. 

[color=#9E5020]“Good,”[/color] he answered, voice steadied and quieter now, but heavy with finality. [color=#9E5020]“For there is no fighting or running or groveling from me. There is only listening.”[/color] 

[color=#9E5020]“You spoke of your peoples' pride,”[/color] he continued. [color=#9E5020]“I see it! It has kept you alive. It made them clot around you, instead of scattering like prey.”[/color]

His eyes flicked, briefly, to the gathered humans.

[color=#9E5020]“That alone sets you above them, but pride without vision is nothing. The beasts of the forest have pride. The wild bull lowers its horns, the boar raises its tusks and charges. They die or are broken all the same. They leave no mark and eventually sink back into the dirt that birthed them.

“I do not offer charms, trinkets, or comforts,”[/color] Sarhush said. [color=#9E5020]“I wrench you higher. I would raise you above animated dirt, so that your lives sear meaning into the world and are remembered. I will show you how to bind plant fibers, each weak alone, into cord strong enough to drag stone from the earth, just as you bind these people. I will teach you to hew shapes where Nature only sprawls.”[/color]

No one spoke. Behind him, the forest crackled and groaned, a long animal death-rattle. The Me of Weaving swayed in Sarhush’s hand; he lowered it so that its frayed ends nearly brushed Oxen's head. The loose threads of the rope’s unbound end writhed freely now, knotting and then coming apart like so many living snakes that did not wish to be bound.

[color=#9E5020]“Look at them,”[/color] Sarhush eventually continued, [color=#9E5020]“Separate, these threads fray; they snap, they rot, they are weak.”[/color]

But then he began to twist and torture the loose fibers together with a slow, deliberate motion of his fingers, extending the corded rope. [color=#9E5020]“Bound, they can lead beasts, or yoke them to pull your burdens. Bound, they can drag stone from the earth. Bound, they can choke the wilderness into submission.”[/color]

Sarhush kept twisting the fibers tighter until the cord creaked. Then he leaned down, close enough that Oxen could smell the ash on his breath. [color=#9E5020]“Your lives spent in some ‘balance’ with Nature were no lives at all, for the purpose of man is to overcome and surpass all aspects of Nature. You must twist and bind it to your will, as I have.”[/color]

He let the Me fall onto the ground at kneeling Oxen’s feet. As if to punctuate the god’s terrible coming and proclamation, a not-so-distant tree succumbed to the wildfire; the once-towering thing crashed down with a sound like that of a breaking spine.

There was no hesitation, and yet the movement was not reckless. Oxen grabbed the Me with his hand, reacting as if it was the most natural thing in the world when the many threads wriggled and wrapped themselves around his fingers and palm and wrist. What Sarhush had been shouting about suddenly made perfect sense. It was sickening – Every single thread wanted to be itself, they wanted to break apart from the bunch, but by pushing and pulling against the others, all they achieved was to strengthen the cord even more. There was no escape for any of these threads, they would never be separate from the cord again, not without it completely breaking. 

Oxen the Strong closed his eyes and held the Me of Weaving with a tight grip, close to his chest. Knowledge beyond humanity flowed into his core, giving him the hows and whys behind every single technique one could use to make a cord, or a cloth, or a tarp. 

But Oxen was not a crafter – the technical treasures flowed into him and twisted and distorted into something different. The realization that he was no longer free, that he was now bound to follow Sarhush’s commands, came suddenly. He was a thread, and he’d been added to the cord. 

Oxen had people to protect and traditions to uphold. No cord should ever be allowed to snap. So, there was now only one path that a man such as he could take.

The Me of Weaving slowly unraveled and dropped to the ground after Oxen loosened his grip. Then, the man stood and looked at his gawking tribesmen.

“We shall honor Sarhush for his gifts!” Oxen announced. “Women, you will forage for dry grasses and vines. Men, you will hunt a bear, a wolf, and a [abbr=a subspecies of wild humans without speech or any of the Mes and with lesser mental faculties; think of Australopithecus or something]suth-human[/abbr]. With their hides and furs we shall decorate the rope that our women will weave to commemorate this day, the day in which we were chosen by the Man-God Sarhush to be the first thread in His cord. From today onwards, every single thing we do must be for the sake of strengthening that cord, lest we snap and be swallowed by time like so many tribes before us.”

After that was said, many of the men and women of the tribe came to grab the Me of Weaving off the ground and then ran off to make their preparations, at which point Oxen picked up his weapons and half-turned to Sarhush. 

“I have done as you asked, Man-God Sarhush. The knowledge you have granted us is valuable, and I have declared you as our patron. But the fires are here!” A wave of heat washed over the clearing as the walls of fire finally reached its edge. “We cannot stay here, or we will burn as well. Where should we go or what should we do?”

Oxen had hoped–perhaps even expected–to have been granted some reprieve or salvation in exchange for submission. But that was not Sarhush’s way. The weaving of the first rope would come, but not on that day. First they had to survive.


[color=#9E5020]”You already know what must be done,”[/color] the god stated simply. [color=#9E5020]”Let this fire be a test. Those who flee with nothing will starve. Those who cling to too much will stumble and be dragged down. Those who hesitate will burn.”[/color]

Smoke billowed freely into the gathering place then, sparks and embers dancing through the glade like so many swarming insects. The dryer patches of grass were immolating already, and the wall of burning trees began to creep around the clearing’s edge to encircle them. 

Sarhush watched as the ur-humans ran into their huts to claim what tools, supplies, and precious things they could not bear to lose. The god did not follow them. He stood alone in the center of the clearing as the first huts and crude dwelling by the edge caught flame, as the grass itself caught fire and burned even up the edge of the great boulder. Licking flames blackened the stone and the still-wet gore of the fallen Tormenta bird sizzled and boiled. Sarhush was unbothered by the heat. Through the walls of smoke all around, his sharp eyes could make out the lines of retreating ur-humans.

Eventually the voracious fires began to subside, and the heat died down. Sarhush turned and walked away into the smoldering wastes that remained. For now, he was content to know that the first cords were being pulled taut somewhere out there.

[hider=Actions/Summary]
Conviction Expenditures:
Sarhush creates Me of Weaving (0 conviction in-domain lucid action)

Sarhush invents weaving so that he can make wicker bundles to start fires and more efficiently burn down a forest.

While he’s burning down the forest, he figures out how to create a sling to lob burning stuff, and he makes some nice clothes to replace his old hides that got burnt to a crisp in that one post where he was down underground with Khthon making magma. He also uses his sling to lob a stone into the air and kill a thunderbird that was trying to summon rain to put out the blaze.

Then he finds the Accord of the Boulder (family/tribe of Saries’ twin prophets, though those two weren’t home!) and gives them the Me of Weaving and a free lecture to boot.[/hider]