[center][h1][color=darkgoldenrod]Khthon[/color][/h1] & [h3]Patrons[/h3][/center] “Where has he gone?” The Patron of Glory was the first to give voice to it, though Fire and Lord Hierarchy had both begun to wonder. In one moment they were traversing the burning forest together, Sarhush just ahead, but in the next things had become strange. Smoke had flowed sideways, the air had seemed bent, and the god had said something about odd noises and then vanished before them as if into nothingness. The Patron of Fire flared as if to shrug, a brief restless surge that vanished into the greater inferno of the jungle. No ash marked Sarhush’s passing; nothing had been consumed. “If I cannot see him, how am I to witness any great and terrible deeds that he is to commit?” Glory protested. Lord Hierarchy stepped in, “He called us. Until that summons is revoked, we are to attend this place awaiting his return.” So they waited for a time even as the first of the once-great trees nearby collapsed as a blackened husk, consumed by the raging flames. “You can remain then, but I won’t,” Fire eventually declared. For its parting words, it addressed the other two, “There will always be more to burn. If he should summon me again, I will answer, but he cannot expect me to wait starving atop a pile of ashes.” Glory didn’t need to be persuaded; as glorious and awesome as the sound and tumult of a fiery log crashing into the earth could be, there was no longer any novelty in watching a forest burn. It had seen such happenings many times already, so now Glory took its leave to find something worth witnessing. The Patron of Hierarchy remained in that place where Sarhush had vanished. More trees collapsed into ash, consumed down to blackened roots. Others smoldered, stubborn, their sap hissing and steaming as flame refused to take hold. Paths opened and closed as embers fell. The jungle was no longer a single inferno, but a field of decisions made by heat and chance. For the first time since manifesting upon Ashuru, Lord Hierarchy attempted to resolve the situation through rule and sequence rather than mere deference to authority. It yielded no answer to the present situation. This was not proper. There should have been a contingency, a hierarchy of absence, a clear succession plan, some articulation for what should follow. Without Sarhush, there was only a wretched void that permitted no ranking. At last, Lord Hierarchy withdrew its presence from that desolate place. The fires of that jungle continued to rage for some time, but they did so without order, guidance, or witness. Eventually the untended fires had nothing further to consume and faded to leave only an ashen landscape behind. [hr] The reach of Kur-Laka had spread far from its origin, like redness creeping outward from a wound. It now possessed settlements too numerous to easily count. Some were independent in all but name – tributaries who paid in fear and flesh to avoid open defiance – but others were true outposts, founded and settled by those drawn from Kur-Laka’s swelling mass. One such colony, perched at the very edge of Kur-Laka’s grasp (for now!) was called Telepylos. It was in the heart of a wild place. The surrounding hills were haunted by wraiths, prowled by beasts, and home to some scattered tribes and bands of savages that had yet to fall under the Kur-Lakan yoke. To survive, Telepylos wrapped itself in rock. Walls hewed from unmortared stone blocks rose thick and uneven around the settlement, and passage into Telepylos was granted by a single door: a massive gate fashioned from a dozen whole logs that had been stood upright and lashed together. Lifting the gate required pulleys of strong rope and many slaves with backs that were stronger still. Other strong-backed slaves labored beyond the walls to carve out blocks of stone from pits, the hills and cliffsides groaning under the work. Wraiths, accidents, and beasts claimed a few in the quarries from time to time, but replacements were always forthcoming. New meat was procured from cowed tribes, from the defeated enemies, or from those who had fallen out of favor in Kur-Laka. The work did not slow. It was above one of these quarries that Glory first appeared. At dawn, those preparing for the day’s toil noticed that the light was wrong. The sunlight was there, but there was something else too, a luminance that was brighter, pulsating, and impossible to look at directly. Shadows sharpened. Stone faces gleamed as though newly polished. Some fell to their knees in awe at the Patron. Others shielded their eyes and stared anyway, teeth clenched, tears streaming. Glory did not descend. It did not speak. It simply hovered, suspended above the hills like a great fire that exuded white-gold radiance absent heat. Glory descended down to one of the overseers. Nobody else heard what was said, but from that day afterward, that overseer began shouting orders of a different sort. He was not relaying commands that had been given to it by Glory, but ones that simply felt obvious and natural now. The highest point overlooking Telepylos was cleared at this one’s behest, even against the protestations of those who clamored to put the slaves to more pressing projects. Nothing could be more pressing than this. The cliffside itself was carefully examined, measured, and marked. Stone was carved out and hauled aside. The shape came before the reason. A foot planted upon the hill. A calf, a knee, a towering thigh. Proportions were argued over fiercely, as though something precise were at stake. Slowly, the cliffside itself began to resemble the likeness of one whose name they all knew: [b]Sarhush[/b]. The sound of the god’s name carried strangely in the light, heavy and satisfying. The workers repeated it to one another as they hauled blocks into place. The name made the labor feel lighter. It made the cuts and crushed fingers feel seen. Glory watched for a time, unblinking. Every utterance of Sarhush was pacifying for it too, as though this act might bring back the god from wherever he had vanished. But that was besides the point; Glory urged this great monument not to summon or beg attention from the god, but for the mere act of inspiring a feeling of exaltation. Of [i]Glory[/i]. That was what the Patron embodied and desired and fed upon. There was endless glory to be had through the creation of a figure immortalized in stone, too vast to ignore, and too radiant to question. At the same time, deep in the stone, fissures and stress fractures discretely made their way through the hill and the statue. For the God of the Earth, though occupied with other matters, felt the transgression of the quarries like an ache in granite bones, felt the insult of another God’s effigy carved in his hills as if carved in his own flesh. The Earth is jealous. It does not forget, and very seldom forgives. The hills had been stripped bare to build this city, and nothing had been given in return. It would have to take back what had been taken from it, with [i]interest[/i]. Soon, the Earth would rupture and swallow all that had been built, all that was Telepylos. It simply needed one last little push… That push did not come for a long time. The work continued, and the slave-sculptors’ errors were punished. The carving grew more careful, more deliberate. Bit by bit, hands pared away the cliff’s face to chisel detail into the colossal form, to smooth, polish, and then glaze its surface. Never before had something of this scale been attempted. For all they could tell, the hill endured it all in silence and capitulation. During a quarrying operation elsewhere (for construction continued still on the walls and many other projects besides!) some veins of redness were discovered: hematite ore winding through the rock like arteries laid bare. The Kur-Lakans had no concept of ores, let alone knowledge of iron, but when they saw the red material they thought of Sarhush’s gaze and knew at once that it was from this stone that they would set the statue’s eyes. So they wrenched great chunks of blood hematite from that pit, and they hauled the heavy stones uphill to the site of the colossal statue. The ground itself seemed to crumble beneath the slaves’ trembling steps, but the overseers mercilessly drove them forward. It took an entire week to raise the stones from the ground up to the statue’s sockets, and another day to set them. A dozen bodies fell from the scaffolds and were broken on the rocks below, blood mixing with the stone dust scattered across the ground and darkening it. The glory-touched overseer looked up in pride to behold his work in the moment that it was completed, when the eyes were fixed into place. The statue towered over Telepylos, ten times the height of a man, its gaze fixed and terrible, its eyes red and unblinking. But then the hill shifted. The sound that followed was not like thunder, but like something immense being forced to move against its will. Stone groaned and then cracked. Seams that had held for ages gave way at once. The statue lurched forward, not in a bow of admiration, but because the ground beneath it no longer suffered it to stand. The overseer and architect of the great work died without understanding why, a stupified look upon his face in the moments before he was crushed beneath the falling statue. The great mass of rolling stones did not stop with him. The hill came down in a roaring slide of stone and dust, striking the ramparts of Telepylos and toppling them as easily as a careless hand scatters sand, rolling over and through the once-mighty walls to bury the settlement behind. When the noise faded, the land was quiet again and Telepylos was a ruin. [hider=Summary] When Sarhush went missing (accidentally entering the Carnival and getting drunk in the last post) his Patrons travelling buddies were at a loss. Eventually they wandered off. This post follows what the Patron of Glory does. Kur-Laka has expanded since it was depicted last, and now has many colonies, tributaries, outposts, etc. Glory manifests in one of its outermost settlements called Telepylos and inspires a ruling slave overseer to create something great. Something terrible. Something glorious! Countless slaves are set at a cliffside overlooking the settlement to carve a massive statue of Sarhush. Khthon takes offense to how the people of Telepylos quarried the earth all around to build massive walls and did this; especially when they dug up iron ores to use for the statue’s eyes. So he curses the stone to be weak, and as the statue is completed, the whole hill collapses in a massive rockslide that kills the overseer and destroys Telepylos. What were Civilization and Lord Hierarchy and Fire doing meanwhile? Find out in Future Post™! [hider=Conviction Expenditures] Khthon: (lucid alteration of existing terrain, in-domain, making the hill prone for a landslide) [/hider] [/hider]