[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/CMRx7Rm2/imageedit-1-9127796553.png[/img][/center]
[quote]The first Oracle Healer who understood what was happening to her was a woman in her middle years who had served the amber temples since before Radanuh had walls. She noticed it on a winter morning when she was building a fire before the dawn prayers, and the poker slipped, and the heated metal pressed against the inside of her wrist for long enough that the skin should have blistered. She looked at the mark afterward, at the red crescent it left behind, and realized she had not cried out, had not flinched, had not, she thought slowly, felt it happen at all.

She said nothing to the other healers. She tested herself over the following days with the careful, methodical precision of someone who has spent years diagnosing others and does not know how to turn that attention on herself: a thumb held over a candle flame, a splinter left to work itself deeper rather than drawn out, a bruise pressed and pressed again. The pain that should have sharpened and spiked each time arrived instead as a distant report, something received from a great remove, accurate in its information but stripped entirely of its urgency. She could perceive injury the way she might perceive weather, as a condition of the world rather than an experience of the body.

It was useful, and she recognized that clearly. She could work through what would have once sent her to her knees, could hold a patient's wound without flinching, could tend the most difficult cases with a steadiness that the other healers remarked on with admiration. The god's grace, they said; the blessing of channeling restoration without being undone by it. She accepted their interpretation and said nothing to contradict it.

What she did not tell them was that she had sat beside her fire three nights running and tried to understand whether the warmth was pleasant or merely known, whether the smell of woodsmoke stirred anything in her beyond the recognition of smoke, whether somewhere in the machinery of her transformed body the capacity to simply feel rather than perceive was still present, or whether Orranoth's filter had reshaped something she could not name and therefore could not mourn precisely.

The patients continued to come: a child with a fever that had lasted six days, a laborer whose shoulder had been wrenched beyond the body's ability to quietly repair, an elderly farmer who had been slowly losing ground to an infection in his leg that the old remedies had not touched. She laid her hands on each of them and felt the current of the Ideal move through her, felt the god's attention pass along her nerves like light through water, and watched each of them improve. The fever broke, the shoulder knit, the infection retreated before the treatment as though it recognized something it could not oppose. Their gratitude was immense and genuine, and she received it with a warmth she was not certain she still fully felt.

She was not the only one changing. In the amber temples across the settlements, in the slowly expanding network of healers who had taken on the long discipline of communion and meditation that Orranoth required, the drift was happening at different speeds and in different registers. One young healer found that his eyes had begun to see injury before it was declared, some barely perceptible misalignment of color or posture that told him a shoulder was damaged before the patient had taken off their coat. An older man found that his skin, once prone to reddening and roughness in cold weather, now maintained a temperature so even and steady that children who reached up to hold his hand in the amber temple sometimes pulled away in surprise, saying he felt cool, like river water.

None of them spoke about it openly. They compared notes in the indirect language of people who are not yet sure they are describing something real, and who are uncertain what will happen once they confirm it; they watched each other's faces for signs that the change was visible from the outside as well as the inside, and they found what they were looking for but did not name it.

The mortals who came to them noticed, though not in a way that could be easily articulated or repeated as a complaint, but in the way that a room changes when a particular temperature or smell or sound is removed. The healers had always been set apart by their training and their calling, but now they were set apart by something subtler and harder to dismiss. A woman who had known her healer since childhood found herself, with some bewilderment, unable to remember the last time she had sat beside him at a meal rather than across from him. A family who had once pressed the community healer to attend the festival of first harvest quietly stopped asking, and could not have explained why except that the invitation felt somehow wrong in the framing, like asking the river to come and drink with them.

The healers were welcome; the healers were necessary. They were no longer, quite, part of the ordinary texture of daily life, and the gratitude that surrounded them had taken on the particular quality of reverence, which is to say it had begun, slowly, to substitute for intimacy rather than coexist with it. The healers healed, the people were healed, and the distance between these two facts and the people on either side of them grew by increments too small to measure on any single day.[/quote][hider=The Drift Between Hands][b]SUMMARY:[/b] Orranoth establishes the Oracle Healer clergy, granting a select group of mortal priests the sustained ability to channel the Ideals of Restoration, Life, and Healing through himself as a divine filter, reducing the personal drift costs that would otherwise accumulate in the healers. The gift works as intended — the healers heal effectively — but sustained communion with the Ideals begins producing irreversible physical and perceptual changes in the healers themselves anyways. Communities receiving care register the drift instinctively, and the social texture between healer and healed begins to quietly transform.

[b]DIVINE ACTION:[/b] Orranoth — The Ordination of Oracle Healers
[b]ACTION TYPE:[/b] Divine Gift (Sustained) — Mortal Group
[b]TIER:[/b] SURREAL — Regional, affecting all settlements with established Orranoth worship
[b]DOMAIN ALIGNMENT:[/b] In-Domain (Magic, Sky)
[b]CONVICTION COST:[/b] 3 (2 base + 1 con modifier)

[b]RIPPLE:[/b] Minor — "The Drift Between Hands"[list]
[*]Oracle Healers who channel the Ideals over sustained periods begin losing the subjective experience of their own pain, retaining only its informational content
[*]Secondary perceptual changes manifest at varying rates: anomalous thermoregulation, proleptic injury-perception, subtle sensory flattening across non-clinical contexts
[*]Healers privately register the changes but do not openly discuss them, creating a culture of internal concealment within the clergy
[*]Communities receiving care begin instinctively socially distancing from healers without conscious awareness of doing so — invitations to meals, festivals, and ordinary social gatherings quietly cease
[*]Gratitude toward Oracle Healers remains intense but converts over time from intimacy to reverence, a category of relationship that substitutes for closeness rather than expressing it
[*]A sacred-but-separate social class is forming in embryonic form; no crisis yet, but the structural conditions for one are accumulating[/list][/hider]
[quote]In the cloud temple that mortal dreamers had imagined into existence for her, Sirna cast her attention downward and inward, through the permeable membrane they had thinned between the Dreamscape and the waking world, through the layers of sleep and vision and half-formed wanting that mortals carried without knowing they carried it, looking for the presence that had, until very recently, not been a presence at all.

Every dreamer leaves a signature in the Dreamscape. It is not a name or a face but a quality, a particular texture of longing or fear or attention that makes one dreamer distinguishable from another the way stones from different riverbeds feel different in the hand even when they are the same shape. Sirna had, over the long years of the world's young life, grown familiar with the signatures of mortals: the dense knots of anxiety that unraveled differently from person to person, the bright particular lights of children dreaming without context or consequence, the heavy saturated grief-dreams of the bereaved that tended to recur in patterns she had seen so often they had become something almost like weather.

What she found when she searched for the entity that had woken in the broken temple was not a signature in any of these senses. She found, instead, that the Dreamscape had a floor.

She had always known this in the way that one knows a thing by its effects without having looked at it directly. Mortals dreamed within the Dreamscape the way fish swam in water, moving through it without considering what supported it. But the support was there, and now, attending to it with the kind of focused curiosity that had always been her most essential characteristic, Sirna perceived that the floor of the Dreamscape, the dense, patient, unintentional substrate that had simply always been beneath every dream ever dreamed on Ashuru, had become aware of being a floor.

It had not entered the Dreamscape, for it could not, in any meaningful sense; it was what the Dreamscape was built against. But it was now there in a way it had not been before, present in the way that a listener is present in a room even when they are not speaking, altering the quality of every sound that fills the space by the fact of their attention. The entity was not dreaming. It was the surface that dreams touched when they fell, the weight that every night-image landed on, the boundary at the bottom of the well, and it had opened its eyes and it was looking up.

Sirna looked down, and for a long suspended moment, both simply regarded one another.

What passed between them could not have been called communication. The entity had no language for what it was or what it wanted, and what Sirna received was not words but impression: something so vast and so recently conscious that the experience of being observed registered as nothing more than a small pressure, the way a single footstep registers to a mountain. It was not afraid. It was, as far as Sirna could determine, curious in the way that new things are curious, not because curiosity is a choice but because consciousness, when it is young enough, has no alternative. Everything arrives as the first of its kind; everything is wonder without a name for wonder yet.

Sirna withdrew slowly, the way one withdraws from a room where something sleeping has shifted without waking, with the particular care of someone who has seen something they will need to consider for a long time before they understand what they have seen. The floor of the Dreamscape settled back into its ordinary imperceptibility, but Sirna did not forget that it was there now, that something beneath the Dreamscape knew it was being dreamed upon, and that this knowledge was, at minimum, a new variable in a world that was already accumulating new variables faster than they could be assessed.[/quote][hider=The Bedrock of Dreams][b]SUMMARY:[/b] Sirna turns their attention to the awakened planetary consciousness perceived earlier, scrying through the Dreamscape in search of its identity and nature. Rather than finding a dreamer's signature, Sirna discovers that the entity is not within the Dreamscape at all — It is the substrate it is built upon, now self-aware. The two observe each other briefly across the boundary. No communication occurs in any conventional sense, but mutual acknowledgment passes between them. Sirna withdraws carefully, carrying a Fragment of significant cosmological weight.

[b]DIVINE ACTION:[/b] Sirna — Scrying the Floor of the Dreamscape
[b]ACTION TYPE:[/b] Investigation/Scrying
[b]TIER:[/b] HAZY — Personal, contained within the Dreamscape
[b]DOMAIN ALIGNMENT:[/b] Out-of-Domain (Dreams, Oblivion)
[b]CONVICTION COST:[/b] 1

[b]RIPPLE:[/b] None
[b]FRAGMENT GAINED:[/b][list]
[*]The world-entity is not a dreamer and cannot be found within the Dreamscape as a signature or presence
[*]It is the surface the Dreamscape is built against — the substrate every mortal dream lands upon — and It has become aware of this relationship
[*]It perceived Sirna's observation as a minor pressure, registering it without fear or communication but with the unfocused curiosity of newly-ignited consciousness
[*]The boundary between Dreamscape and world-entity remains structurally intact; It has not entered the Dreamscape and shows no indication of attempting to do so
[*]Sirna is now, to the best of any deity's knowledge, the only divine being aware that this consciousness exists, is self-aware, and is paying attention to what happens above It[/list][/hider]
[hider=Conviction Calculations 23/02/2026][b]Conviction Rewards:[/b]
+1 to all gods who posted at least 1 time(s) (Orranoth, Sirna)
+1 to all gods who advanced plot/created major content (Orranoth, Sirna)

[b]Conviction Expenditure:[/b]
None[h2][color=gray]23/02/2025 CONVICTION TABLE[/color][/h2][hr][table=bordered][row]
[cell][center][b]DEITY[/b][/center][/cell][cell][center][b]STARTING[/b][/center][/cell][cell][center][b]SPENT[/b][/center][/cell][cell][center][b]AWARDS[/b][/center][/cell][cell][center][b]TURBULENCE[/b][/center][/cell][cell][center][b]FINAL[/b][/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]ADRIA[/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]ALECHIOR[/cell][cell][center]4[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]4[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]EXCELSIS[/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]KHTHON[/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]LIUTE[/cell][cell][center]8[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]8[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]MOREN[/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]ORRANOTH[/cell][cell][center]5[/center][/cell][cell][center]2[/center][/cell][cell][center]3[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]5[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]SARHUSH[/cell][cell][center]9[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]9[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]SARIES[/cell][cell][center]8[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]8[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]SIRNA[/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell][cell][center]1[/center][/cell][cell][center]2[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]SQUID/AMUT[/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]7[/center][/cell]
[/row][row]
[cell]YZECHR[/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]0[/center][/cell][cell][center]10[/center][/cell]
[/row][/table][/hider]