[center][color=662d91][b]Many Decades Ago.
[url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5572652]Svart’s Rest[/url][/b][/color]

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/Cx9Dt4zf/Chat-GPT-Image-Jun-10-2026-11-40-37-AM.png[/img][/center]

The hologram was jumbled, as if the connection to a lost world was fading along with the desperation it portrayed. Umbral violet vines wrapped around the legs and waist of the dwarf as the plant’s iridescent leaves began to climb and consume the room. A large, uncut emerald was just barely visible amongst the disheveled black hair of the lone dwarf. He was stoic, yet fear, anguish, desperation leaked through his strong browline. He was in a catacomb , though perhaps better defined as a morgue. Beside the dwarf was a large ceremonial tomb made for two, its ornate engraved ivory shaping the silhouette of a dwarven mother holding her child. The father, the husband, sat light years away watching the faded hologram. The pain-soaked brow of his friend mirrored back. The trapped dwarf in the hologram muttered something, just barely audible through the fragmented transmission: 

”From cunning comes power… from arrogance comes its loss.” 

The screen’s transmission began to fade. The widower should have found these words painful: too true, too sharp to speak over the grave of his family. But how can someone find allodynia in wisdom when the bearer was dying; no doubt–by the time this transmission arrived–was dead? Their world, dead.

The hologram faded to pink interference. Scrabbled words eked out.

“Do not lose your mind, Lumi. All power both breaks and builds.” 

Silence. 

[center]— -- - -- —[/center]

[center][color=662d91][b]Near Present[/b]
[b][url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5662127]The Bijol Verdancy[/url][/b]
[b]Grove World: Saprophage[/b][/color]

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/MZY7TRFG/Chat-GPT-Image-Jun-10-2026-11-51-31-AM.png[/img][/center]

Deliverance. That was the word they had used when the dwarves were inherited by the Bijol Verdency. Some sort of freedom, a secured destiny, the success of shipping and handling? Lumi did not quite know the definition. But he did not feel delivered. 

The middle-aged dwarf took another drag on his pungent cigarillo. The air around him was so thick and moist that it felt like the smoke only traveled downward about his figure. A nuisance though it was, this blanket of smoke was quite the point. A shroud against the maelstrom of midges, moths, mosquitos and mysteries of this swamp. He dangled precariously a few stories above a festering bog in a large woven portaledge. The giant arboreal wall was dotted with many such rickety structures; filled with tired families, hushed-laughing young couples, or broken old men. He took another drag of the cigarello, alone. 

He had once been a great man, or at least a household name. Governor of the greatest system of his dwarven kind, Svart’s Rest. He had been a young man in love when he rose to power. The vestigial wealth of the Yrrani industrial worlds whirred around him. He had been a young father when it was taken away. [i]The Desperation[/i]--a cursed, cancerous plant from the bowels of the Wellspring–had swallowed his world, his family, his future. He was a broken man when the cold tendrils of the Pelagor Abyss took them in as refugees, and that is perhaps how he survived. Soon came the Bijol hordes and everyone who had mattered, anyone who had valor, anyone who could think or threaten was tuned to [i]mulch[/i]. And so Lumi Slougk survived. 

Lumi itched incessantly at his arm. Everything itched. Splotches of sap-burns cratered amongst the many swells of insects bites made him look almost topographical. His life had become about mining a viscous, electromagnetic plasma coolant, strijk. Or at least that is what the sap became after it was consumed and excreted by the sentient trees who had [i]delivered[/i] him. It was waste, this was all about waste.

In the patches of intact skin were many tattoos, rather crudely done and in a strange, uncomfortable, iridescent ink. They had been gifted to him in one of his many “vision journeys” at the hands of the Bijol. Eat something, smoke something, drink something handed to you by one of those Bijol shamans and you were in for a trip. In some ways he envied the grotesque ursines, at least they seemed to enjoy such hallucinations. They often sang passionately around their fires, danced for days in the same rhythm, or massacred more fleshy bystanders in these journeys. The Svarts, and others, simply fell to the soil like heavy dew and were paralyzed as their minds evaporated into the cosmos. They would wake up often marred in new tattoos. Scribblings of the Bijol shaman who had [i]guided[/i] them. Apparently the markings were biofluorescent to the eyes of the Bijol’s sacred insects. Which would explain why they so frequently made meals of them. His arms had once held a tapestry of his deeds, symbols of his clan, the pillars of his duty: Production, Vision, Relevance. Now Lumi was a neon lunch sign. But to his eyes, the markings, the tapestry, just looked like waste. 

However, the faint glow of his cigarillo betrayed an outline in the dwarf’s hand. A small piece of tobacco paper with text so miniscule that it could not be read by the naked eye. It did not keep Lumi from trying. He desperately wanted to read it. He wanted to know what was next. The tree from which he hung was filled with hanging whispers. The strijk miners had been glancing at one another just a little bit longer through the festered plumes of exploding sap. Things in the galaxy were changing, conflict was brewing. Perhaps a true deliverance, a violent revolution like the Abyss Front had seen. Was it they who had written him this note? Maybe the Mother had enough place in her arms for his broken people. Lumi held the cryptic squiggles at arms distance and almost thought he could see the faint outline of a bird… or a woman? What was it that his long-dead friend had told him about the Prydwenite, the noble houses he had so adored? A Lord-Protector, wouldn’t one of those be nice now? Perhaps Lumi’s mind had truly left him. Perhaps equally it was all a trap. 

Lumi smelled something… organic. Like algae freshly sweetened with death. He froze. His fingers, once warm from the hygge of nicotine, felt frozen in carbonite. A large figure was climbing up from beneath. He could just barely remark its hulking arms crashing into bark through the loose roped hammock. Shit, the cigarillo. He dashed it out against his knee. Hands fumbled. The missive was gone. Shit. He swatted at the lingering smoke with fervent futility. The mercurial creature approaching would likely hurl him off the perch for offending the multitude of insects infesting this swamp air. Lumi knew the bog was deep and their temper shallow. 

A giant claw wrapped around the clew cords of the portaledge. The creature's weight yawed the flimsy structure. A Bijol shaman–clad in runed, hand-woven brigallia, smelling somehow more monstrous than his looming figure could appear–had climbed up the great tree and hung beside him. The creature stared at the diminutive dwarf, huddled cadaverously amongst the thick rope. The creature sniffed the air, with a displeased snarl that betrayed glimpses of long ivory teeth. The sharp smolder whirred about the Bijol snout. The back of the creature's eyes seemed to glow momentarily. Lumi wondered how long he would fall. How deep would he sink? How quickly would the mire take him and turn him into waste. 

The creature's eyes turned vantablack. Its movement became labored. Its breath became deep. “Eat,” the shaman said in a bass growl. It threw Lumi, a small bag of shriveled fungi. Much to Lumi’s surprise, the hands which had turned to fumbling clubs feverishly reached out to the offering like an addict to its vice. He scarfed the mycotic sacraments, not allowing the beast a second chance at killing him without his mind already being gone. And it was gone. 

[i]He whirred through time. His mind levitated out of his body, out of the hammock, up though the canopy and millions of swarming wings, into the sky, into the stars, distant and then forward, down, to a new world. His sight screamed into the atmosphere, giant scarring streaks of plasma, smells of sulfur and ferrous, wails of terror, roars of rage, thunder of metal and heat, into the canopy, burning, flesh, squeaking armor, whimpering huddled masses, rain, a flag caked in mud and rot. Augusta. Concordat. 

Silence. 

Hunger. [/i]