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Sarhush followed the ash-strewn tracts of land. Lord Hierarchy hovered invisibly overhead; behind them followed only the Patrons of Fire and Glory, for Civilization had still not returned. As they traveled, they came upon signs that marked the path of those that Sarhush had sent out so long ago, when Ashuru had been young. His quarry was a scant few who had carried his commands to the ends of the world; seeing no end to the work, they’d then turned back only to continue it again.

Strewn across the wilderness were wide clearings dusted gray, fire-rings where the earth had been baked hard and then left to cool. These camps had vanished such that for one who did not know to look, only the smell lingered when the wind shifted. The forest pressed in around them again, tentative but persistent, green fingers already reclaiming what flame had taken.

“They have brought me here many times,” the Patron of Fire said, “but they never learned how to keep me fed for long.”

Glory’s radiance intensified. “Is there no pride in refusal to yield?”

[color=#9E5020]“No. Pride is for when something remains. These people burn and leave, and the world erases their works. Fire is not mastered if it is always abandoned.”[/color]

“You sound almost like Civilization!” the Patron of Glory responded. Sarhush only grunted. They walked on for many leagues.

At last, the god found his followers in a hollow where the trees had been driven back by repeated burnings. The ground was bare and pale, stripped down to dirt and cinder. Smoke rose from many small fires, all carefully tended, all eager, none meant to last beyond the night. Beside one, a few humans plucked the feathers of a Tormenta bird they’d somehow ensnared or shot down and made ready to skewer and roast the thing. Perhaps they’d lured it low to the ground with a small fire, enough smoke to warrant investigation but not a thunderstorm. Glory flashed brightly at the sight, delighted by the audacity of their hunting such a beast, if not the aftermath.

As for this camp’s shelters, they were quick and rudimentary things. Saplings had been bent and lashed, and hides thrown over frames and weighted with stones to make crude tents. Nothing here was expected to endure. Whatever couldn’t be taken on the move would be set ablaze on the morrow.

At the center of the camp crouched a man Sarhush recognized at once. Hammon had been his name, and he was among the first of the ur-humans that had flocked around Sarhush in the dawn of days.

Hammon was beside a bonfire far larger than the rest. He knelt close enough that heat shimmered the air around him. His hair was burnt short and uneven; some of the hairs of his beard grayed from age and others from the flakes of ash embedded within. Though flame already roared before him, his hands worked a familiar motion, fast and practiced: there was a spindle twirling in a socket, a sinew bowstring drawn back and forth with tireless precision. He was not tending the fire, but calling a new one into being.

Each twist of the spindle made a singing scrape upon the firewood. Each twist promised flame. The friction generated a small plume of smoke. A new fire came to answer the man, and a smile lit Hammon’s eyes and face.

Sarhush stopped; only then did the firemaker seem to notice him. Gingerly, Hammon placed the newly kindled torch into the roaring bonfire, but he held the bow-drill still. Then he rose, eyes wide not with fear but with fierce, exultant recognition. He pressed a blackened fist to his chest and bowed his head.

“Sarhush,” Hammon breathed at once. “Fire-Bearer, Beastbane, Man-God. You return at last!”

Around them, others fell still. A few echoed the bow, and a few others fell to their knees. A few whispered the name. Their eyes flickered between Sarhush and the Patrons just behind him; even as they tried to subdue their presence, Glory, Lord Hierarchy, and especially Fire were impossible to ignore.

[color=#9E5020]“You followed my first commandment,”[/color] Sarhush acknowledged.

Hammon beamed with pride. “And all the others, as word reached us. But for the first, we did more than follow,” he said, “I ran ahead of it.”

He lifted the fire-drill so Sarhush could see it clearly. The wood was darkened and polished by use, the sinew supple, the spindle true. It never slipped and never failed.

“Fire no longer waits for chance, nor takes long hours of toil, nor requires the still-warm corpse of a past fire,” the man said. “It comes quickly now. It comes when I call it.”

Sarhush’s gaze fixed on the fire-drill, then wandered to Hammon’s side. Fixed to his waist on one side was a stone with three grooves, useful for shaping spindles, scoring wood or bone, making tools of sorts. It was the Me of Toolmaking. Curious; with it, Hammon had devised tools of forms Sarhush himself had never even conceived.

The Me of Ashuru was there too, sitting on the ground by Hammon’s feet. With such tools, and with a handheld reminder of the world’s vastness, it was no wonder that Hammon and his followers had roamed for years without count. They understood that there was always more to burn. 

The corners of Sarhush’s lips bent upward, but his grin refused to widen. His pride and joy in these people was muddied by disappointment in nearly equal part.

[color=#9E5020]”But you have not settled in one place. You leave marks in your wake, but you do not cut deep enough, so they heal or are eroded away.”[/color]

Hammon’s smile strained without breaking. “Fire moves,” he said. “To stay is to let it die. We keep it alive by carrying it forward.”

[color=#9E5020]“You mistake motion for mastery,”[/color] Sarhush replied.

He stepped closer and reached into his sack to produce something. When he set the wedgestone down beside the fire, it did not crack or darken. It simply waited, heavy with promise.

[color=#9E5020]“This is the Me of Masonry,”[/color] Sarhush said. [color=#9E5020]“It teaches permanence. It enables man to command weight to remain where it is placed.”[/color]

The man stared at it, breath quickening not with doubt, but with hunger. His mien mirrored the Patron of Fire.

“You would have me bind fire,” he said slowly. “Fix it, root it, and feed it in place?”

This one learned quickly. [color=#9E5020]“I would see,”[/color] Sarhush answered, [color=#9E5020]“whether you command flame, or only chase it across the world.”[/color]

Hammon did not answer hastily. His gaze lingered on the Me of Masonry, then flicked to the bonfire, then to the smaller fires scattered through the hollow. His followers watched him now more than Sarhush; he had earned a feverish loyalty from them long ago.

Eventually, the firemaker laughed. The sound was low, hoarse, and unafraid.

“Fire has never stayed,” Hammon said. “Not for me, not for them.” He gestured with his chin toward the others in his camp. “We learned that early. Feed it too long in one place and it devours you; but if you carry it onward, it lives.”

The Patron of Fire stirred at that, a column of flame that stretched just a bit higher in that moment. “He speaks truly,” it decreed. “I am movement. I am hunger. It is not enough to consume all that a single place has.”

Sarhush nodded in contemplation. [color=#9E5020]“And yet,”[/color] he began, [color=#9E5020]“movement alone leaves nothing behind. You burn the world, Hammon, but you do not change it. Nature haunts your trail and returns to undo your works. I would challenge you, the most worthy of my own, to strive for more.”[/color]

The god knelt down without grace, for this was a movement he’d hardly ever done. Sarhush reached into the heart of the bonfire. The flames wrapped around his hand like a snug glove, but when he pulled it back, his skin was caked in soot and yet unburnt. He turned his hand over, and upon an open, blackened palm he presented a coal unlike any Hammon had ever seen.

It was white-hot and steady, giving off no smoke. Its light did not flicker. It did not consume the wood beneath it, though the wood glowed as if eager to be eaten. In many ways, it resembled the Me of Fire, until Sarhush blew upon it and coaxed it into a blaze upon his palm.

“This is not a fire you found,” the Patron of Fire said softly. “Nor one you called.”

[color=#9E5020]“It is a fire that I would see endure,”[/color] Sarhush explained. [color=#9E5020]“This is no ordinary flame; it is sacred, a test of things.”[/color]

He smeared his burning hand upon the ground beside the wedgestone; the coal rolled off and embedded into the earth, its fire diminishing as it spread from divine flesh onto mere twigs and leaves and grass. But it remained, its flame brighter and its heat greater than such a small fire ought to have had. The Me of Masonry warmed, but did not crack.

[color=#9E5020]”I came to ask for my Mes back,”[/color] Sarhush started. A quieted hush fell over the excited humans, for they took it for a rebuke. [color=#9E5020]”But I am a generous god, and will give you two gifts in turn. First, I present more Mes.”[/color] He turned his sack over and shook it to let the contents spill forth. Clattering beside the Me of Masonry were the familiar Mes of Fire and Cooking that some among this tribe had seen before, but also two newer ones: Pottery and Slavery.

The crowd came forward to remisce over the old, and to rub their hands over each of the new in turn. Their hands could not linger long, so the lessons imparted were brief. Hammon’s gaze remained fixed upon Sarhush and the sacred fire; he might not have touched the Mes at all if someone hadn't thought to pick them up and brush them against his enraptured body.

[color=#9E5020]“I permit you to hold these Mes now, but not to possess them. They must return to me, for the first gift is merely their knowledge. My second one is this sacred fire, and this one you may keep. Nourish the flame, and do not let it perish.”[/color] 

Sarhush rose back to his feet. He thought for a moment, then continued, [color=#9E5020]“Keep it alive not through carrying it endlessly, but by binding it to the world. Shape stone around it. Build a ring to house it, then erect a palace or a temple around that hearth. Then build your civilization around that center. Feed it without letting it roam. Let it burn long enough that the land remembers it. For so long as you do this, you retain my blessing.”[/color]

Hammon’s breath had quickened. His eyes shone, reflecting the pale fire until they seemed alight themselves. “And if it dies?” he asked.

Civilization would have demanded walls before flame, but Sarhush knew that to be backwards. His answer was, [color=#9E5020]“Then you will be proven impotent, and a failure. If you cannot keep a single flame alight, what work by your hand could ever endure?”[/color]

Hammon’s jaw tightened as the words landed cleanly. He straightened, shoulders squaring, pride flaring brighter than any blaze.

“It will not die,” he said. “I will feed it forever. But I will do more than that!”

Glory suddenly came closer as if drawn to Hammon’s thoughts like a moth to flame.

Hammon squinted in the light of Glory to look past Sarhush and the Patrons then, beyond the hollow, beyond the forested lands they had already reduced to memory. “There are cliffs where the earth still smokes, where the air smells of brimstone and salt, and baths in the ground are always hot. We have passed that place before and moved on, but that will be where we return. That will be where we dwell.”

He bowed his head again, but this time it was not in submission, but to swear a vow to Ashuru itself.

“I will make a fire more potent even than that one,” Hammon murmured, but even over the bonfire’s roar, the straining ears of all those assembled heard him. “I will make a fire that does not flee, that outlasts forests and man and stone. Perhaps a fire that outlasts even gods.”

Glory swelled to a crescendo, blindingly radiant and terrible. Fire flared in cautious silence, trying to make sense of mortal hubris and madness. Lord Hierarchy observed dispassionately, more preoccupied with the notion that this sacred flame was somehow ranked above all others.

Sarhush studied Hammon for a long moment. Then, without another word, he nodded. He placed a hand upon the man’s shoulder, and offered the other to lift him to his feet. Then the god found his sack, dropped upon the ground, and proceeded to refill it with all the Mes all too soon. Hammon willingly offered up those of Toolmaking and Ashuru; it seemed a worthy trade to him at that moment, for some spark had ignited within him and now he thought only of fire.

As for the god, he hefted his sack of Mes in one hand, then turned to resume his journey across Ashuru. He did not look back to see who followed; he already knew that the humans were preparing to break camp and make for the land that would come to be called Hammonar, while the three Patrons followed him to seek out the next Me.

“A fixed flame will require fixed hands,” Lord Hierarchy commented to Sarhush. “They will learn quickly.”

[hider=Actions]
Sarhush tracks down a man called Hammon, perhaps the most zealous of all his worshipers on Ashuru. Hammon’s band has carried the Mes of Toolmaking and Ashuru. Hammon is also a pyromaniac that has dedicated his long life to leading a nomadic band that burns everything they come across, in line with Sarhush’s first commandment that all forests must be razed.

Sarhush is impressed and disappointed at the same time. Hammon’s pride and dedication are to be admired, but his band go around in circles burning new land only for the forests to regrow behind them. Civilizations must settle in place so as to alter their surroundings permanently, Sarhush realizes.

So he bids Hammon to cease his endless wandering and create a settled people. Sarhush, alongside the Patron of Fire, gifts Hammon with a special flame and challenges him to keep it alive for as long as he can in order to prove that he can leave an enduring mark upon the world. As long as the sacred flame burns, he has the blessing of Sarhush and the favor of Fire. 

Hammon more than accepts the charge; he proclaims that he will (somehow) create a fire that will burn forever and outlast even the gods.

The civilization of [b]Hammonar[/b] is founded away from that fateful meeting spot. It's built in a volcanic area that was once underwater, but atop a rocky cliffside by one of the remaining seas. There's apparently sulfur baths and stuff. Think of Sicily or something.

[b]CONVICTION EXPENDITURES:[/b]
3 conviction to consecrate a sacred fire (out of domain surreal action)

This fire appears almost mundane, save for its potency being just a bit greater. It burns hot and bright, and if starved, will revert back to the form of a white-hot coal until it eventually dies. Whoever bears this fire and tends to it has Sarhush’s blessing, as does the place where it burns.
[/hider]