Avatar of Cyclone

Status

User has no status, yet

Bio

Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I got started with writing online on the Spore forums. Man, those were the days. We're talking like 12 years ago!

I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.

Discord: VMS#8777

Most Recent Posts



The Beginning of the End










Upon a throne there rested a withered husk, once mighty of body, but now with flesh yellowed, wrinkled, and sagging. His throne had become his sarcophagus, his palace a tomb and his house of eternity. The thunderous pounding of footsteps reverberated through the stale and dusty room, rousing the sleeper from his sepulchral reverie. But even now, the god did not seem alarmed. Never was he surprised, for he claimed to have already seen all things. So it was with something resembling expectancy in his eyes that he looked to the visitor and whispered through the tongue of the mind, ‘I foretold this day. Your efforts were admirable, A̴̢̡͠͠ḿ̡҉̵ṕ̡͝͠ḩ̵̀̕͟ì̶̶͞b̶̛̕̕҉ò̸̵̡͟l͏̕e̢̕s͏̶҉̵ , but your toil ultimately in vain.’

The visitor never stopped his advance, calmly walking past row after row of golden pillars down a great hallway leading to the dias and the throne atop it. Nothing remained of the once-magnificent rug beneath his feet save for a few fraying gilded threads.

‘Mortals are like the brazen wicks of so many candles; fickle, bound to fade away. On rare occasions one might be truly great and spread, and create a great inferno, but in the end there will be only ash all the same. They are flawed by nature, and can never grow to be greater than the sum of the might and labor that you put into the making of their wax, dousing of their wick, molding of their form...it, like all things, is bound to one day end, for not even gods have vigor enough to carry on for perpetuity.

‘And did I not warn you that when the toil became too great, as I see it now has, that you would release yourself of the burden and finally abandon your fruitless labor? I bid you look down now and witness for yourself: with the last of us departed, all heavenly and guiding voices have fallen silent; the fruits of the land rot, the soil turns barren, and the very air sickens in sullen stagnation. It is in this manner that old age befalls the world, as it already has done unto us. In this final age, darkness shall be preferred to light, and death thought more profitable than life; no one shall raise his eyes to heaven, the dead shall far outnumber the living, and finally there will remain nobody at all upon the mortal plane. Wind and weather shall persist, in a fashion and for a time, and aided by such forces ruin and disorder will claim the world. Only the remnants of temples and obelisks shall remain to tell of us and our acts, yet in due time even the stones are destined to become dust and then nothing remember. The world will return to Chaos, as if we had never existed, and none shall have been any better off for all the years that you had delayed what was inevitable.

‘That is why I counseled you to cease your rebellion; warring against Destiny is as foolish a task as one might expect to be conjured in the mind of a madman, and yet you did so and always insisted upon your sanity to the contrast of all your peers’ supposed madness. Do you accept now what I tried to teach you so long ago? By now even one so stubborn as you should have realized the truth of my words--the only purpose of life is to inward perfection, and to prepare yourself for death. Immortality is unattainable. Accept this wisdom and grow from it, and I suppose that your labors shall have then at least borne some small fruit, late as the harvest was.’


The visitor was mounting the steps to the dias, nearly upon the throned god now. He climbed, and stopped only when he loomed directly over the decrepit god. He narrowed his one eye, and asked, “And when the winds stop blowing, and we move and think no more, and the world slips back into its primordial state of Chaos, what is to come then?”

‘Perhaps there will be another tiny spark that spawns a great blaze, and for a time, there will be a new cosmos and a new world, and the wheel shall have turned once again until that fire burns out.’

Ả̶̢̬̻m̸̲͆̆p̷̰͕̠̔̚h̸̻̜̞͑̓͠ḯ̷̠̦̗̎b̷̯͓̐͐̾o̶̙͔̖̓̌l̶͍̉̎͜͠è̴̥̒ͅs̴͕̳̏̆͜ allowed the hint of a triumphant smile to etch its way onto his stoic face. “I think so, too. But you misinterpret my intentions, O Wise One; I would live through the long night to see this next dawn, for I have yet to abandon my greatest burden--that burning desire for eternity.”

A frown might have appeared on the decrepit one’s face if his muscles still had the vigor to move. Instead, he conveyed his frustration and displeasure through telepathy. ‘Do you not listen? You remain blind, even now, to the impossibility and futility of your raging against fate? There is no way to sustain yourself long enough to see that day, no guarantee that it will even com-’

And with that the final brick crumbled, and everything collapsed with a sudden violence.

“I will MAKE a way! A new world will arise, for I shall be the Architect of its making, even if I must labor until the ages of ages and expend every last ounce of my strength...and of yours.”

He raised a massive fist and struck down the God of Gods with a single mighty blow to the head. From the corpse of his oldest friend he drained every last ounce of power and might, all that could sustain him, until withered flesh became as paper and then as dust, and bones no more than sand. And then he collapsed, somehow wearier for it. In the days to come, he would do the same to each and every one of his fellows, and to what remained of the dying world’s mortal life. That grim task brought to a close, he found himself truly alone, sitting upon his former master’s stone throne.

He felt weak even after all of that. But his willpower was stronger than it had ever been; it was stronger than the foundations of the earth, than words could describe, than the imagination could even grasp.

The true work hadn’t even begun.



The Architect wallowed in a fevered state, even if he masked it with smoke and projections of majesty and power. The great, bulbous, all-devouring eye about the center of his head was of course an illusion, for no eye could truly see all things and stare directly at a dozen gods at once. First it had been his skin; he had taken on a mummified look. His stone throne and palace, those that had been his former master’s, had been the only tangible relics of the past that he had brought to this new world before its foundation. He had done so out of practical reasons, in truth. The palace, buried deep within a moon, had been a suitable vessel for traversing the void of space, and time and energy had of course been of the essence. He hardly could have afforded to fashion his own vessel even if doing so might have freed him from carrying the burdens of the past.

And what burdens they had been! It was to his horror that his flesh had started to take on the dessicated and mummified look of his dead master; for a long time he had refused to so much as look upon the stone throne for fear that he would grow like the one who had sat on it previously. So he always toiled, confident that labor would spare him the fate of growing so decrepit, but instead the endless burdens of erecting the Seals around his chosen place and carving out an entire universe from nothingness had left him even more broken. Muscles tore, and his body and strength had begun failing.

Dismayed but not dissuaded, he had compensated for the sickly constitution by relying more and more upon the power of his mind and magical might. The atrophy continued, and eventually even the ligaments and tendons below fell off or else rotted away.

Now his bones were ancient, yellowed, and cracked; exposed to the world save for a thin layer of slime and the vaporous illusions that he wove around himself and wore like clothes. The slightest movement required a telekinetic heave, and that was the true reason why he had collapsed upon his throne and not moved since he’d sown the seeds for this world.

Fortunately, none of the seeds that were to become caretakers seemed to have perceived his weakness. He thought back to the one with a head of fire; her challenging of his might had been terrifying, for he knew all too well that even the greatest of gods could be slain, but it seemed that through stifling her first acts of rebellion, any thoughts of rebellion that the others harbored had been slain in their infancy.

So he had waited in a half-delirious state while they had set themselves upon the field he’d built. They furrowed it and helped the other seeds to grow for generation upon generation and his plan had come to fruition. It was slow but sure by the notions of mortals and gods, but to his warped sense of reality, it had been hardly an instant before he could sense that the time grew near.

Roused by the scent, he shook himself out of the trance that he’d lapsed into. Fully lucid once more, the Architect ordered his palace to move, and so it began to journey its way through the Celestial Spheres and descend ever closer and closer to Galbar.
I would really like to draw Vizier Ventus' arc to a conclusion though, and I think I have a good idea.

A surprise post or two might come from me in a little while, too.
The timing unfortunately isn't very good as we're looking to start wrapping up the IC (and I doubt you'd want to join just to partake in the ending), but I'll happily link you to the Discord! Check your PMs.
can they be wizards on the bridge
Ashes


Collaboratively written by BBeast and Cyclone


A shape flew through the sky with a silhouette of a pterodactyl yet far larger than even the beasts of Kirron’s Hooflands. A mild heat wave followed in its wake. Eyes which burned like embers scanned the razed ground below.

A spot of midnight blue stood out among the grey and brown. Swiftly the shape descended and the Phoenix landed beside the heap of blood-soaked blue feathers. “No, no, sweet Thunderbird, no. Why?” The Phoenix lowered his beak to the Thunderbird’s. Scalding tears welled up in his eyes and sizzled as they fell on the ground below. “I should have been there. I- I-” The Phoenix sobbed, his deep guttural cries echoing across the land.

The Thunderbird shuddered as if waking again, but it was just the mocking twitch of dead muscles. The ground was strewn with the dead and dying, and almost in unison the corpses seized. Those slowly succumbing to their wounds laid still save for ragged breathing or gurgling, in many ways looking more lifeless than even the dead about them.

A hazy grey figure emerged from over the horizon, flying and fast approaching the scene. It didn’t circle around like a vulture, for its senses were keen and it easily found the carnage that had attracted its attention. The ghostly figure landed besides the oldest carrion, the shredded and mangled remnants of the first beast that the Thunderbird had slain. And then it set to work. In its grasp was a long pale rod, and the merest tap of that staff upon the ground brought a reek of decay so potent that it could have been smelled from leagues away. The Phoenix, however, was much closer than that.

The Phoenix’s nostrils flared at the stench and he raised his head. His eyes locked onto the ghostly figure. He rose to his full height, towering far above the newcomer, and puffed out his chest. “Who are you?”

Zotz cast little more than a glance at the monstrous bird. “The one who is left to remedy the filth left behind by the living who are destined to slaughter one another.” His gaze returned down to the yellowing grass that withered beneath his feet and the now almost indistinguishable mounds of rancid flesh. He stepped carelessly over the bodies, raising his magical staff before the carnage and willing it all to become dirt once more. He did not know who or what the Phoenix was, but nor did he care enough to ask.

The Phoenix watched the circle of decomposing matter spread out from around Zotz. He looked around at the battlefield through eyes still clouded with tears and properly inspected it. A short distance away lay the body of Azadine, the burns of lightning clear. Around lay the dead bodies of both Azadine’s spawn and giant red crabs, slain in battle against each other. Any survivors had probably scattered and fled by now.

He looked back down at the body of the Thunderbird. Fresh tears welled in the Phoenix’s eyes as he bowed his head down to the bird. “My sweet, I shall not leave you to scavengers or decay. You deserve a proper funeral,” he said softly.

The Phoenix exhaled a breath of cinders and the body of the Thunderbird caught alight. The Phoenix stepped back and watched. As the fire took hold the feathers burst into dazzling flares of brilliant white light. As the Thunderbird was engulfed in an inferno some of the midnight blue feathers came free and billowed up with the smoke into the sky. Soon the feathers were gone and the light faded to just the flames, supernaturally hot though they were. The Phoenix released a mournful cry which carried far and wide as his beloved Thunderbird became ash.

The blaze caught the ghostly one’s attention. Zotz turned from his work and watched attentively. “Less work for me,” he concluded. When the Phoenix finished its infernal wailing, Zotz unraveled his humanoid form into a gust of billowing smoke and approached at a frightening speed, then insensitively loomed over the Thunderbird’s remnants and inspected the ashes. ”Purified!” he noted with some surprise.

“You have garnered my interest with that display. Might you burn the rest? You would make for a good assistant, better than my wretched fool of a brother--”

And then almost on queue, the ghostly silhouette of a giant monkey manifested at the edge of the battlegrounds, mouth cackling and a strange whip cracking. The corpses of the dead kicked, rolled, twitched, or seized with every snap of the whip, and even after all the years Ku couldn’t find anything more hilarious than their spasms.

The Phoenix regarded Zotz critically. “The Avatar of a God reduced to a servant of a lesser being? I think not.” His gaze cast over to Ku. “Who are you?” the Phoenix asked both of them.

“Servants of the god Katharsos,” Zotz explained, unconcerned with the Phoenix’s slight. “I am meant to decay corpses when great quantities of them are made, before their poison spreads and their carrion feeds scavengers and worse. And my brother is supposed to mark the dead that I do not disturb those that yet live; however, to him our sacred charge is nothing more than a game.”

“I do what the god told me to do,” the eavesdropping monkey called out. He never ceased flailing his whip, cracking it between every other word and grinning as he made some mangled corpses twitch and spasm so violently that they appeared to rise once again and dance in some crude fashion. “But I find my own entertainment too, because if I took my job as seriously as Zotz takes his then I’d have gone mad long ago. Ha! Maybe I already have!”

The Phoenix watched Ku’s peculiar display. Some of the brothers’ words echoed around inside his mind. “I should probably return to Muspelheim. I have been away too long already,” he said.

“Why hurry? Loosen up, take your time, stay and watch the show. Hey, see if you can light these things on fire!” Between giggles, Ku used his whip to goad the throng of ‘dancing’ corpses towards the Phoenix at a clumsy gait.

A slight smile might have crept onto the Phoenix’s face if he had lips. “Burning things is in line with Sartr’s will.” The Phoenix took a deep breath in, then exhaled an incandescent beam of heat which vaporised the moving corpses. In the thick of it all, unperturbed by mundane flames, the ghostly monkey laughed and danced. His whip flew back and forth at a blurring speed, and Ku sent hordes more of the dead forward whilst guiding their every motion like a crazed composer. Some tried to use others as shields, some tried to stealthily approach the Phoenix from behind, and still others just bounded forward like rabid beasts. Yet all fell to the flames as the Phoenix swept the beam around.

When some of the corpses from behind reached the Phoenix, having escaped his notice, they burst into flame as soon as they reached for the Avatar of Heat. As he felt their claws and teeth clatter uselessly against his hide the Phoenix paused his fire breath. He swept a wing which caught the small horde and hurled them away, leaving a flaming heap.

The surge of animated dead suddenly came to a stop, though many lumps of flesh still remained on the periphery of the battlefield where the Phoenix hadn’t bathed the ground in sweltering flame. “Pah, the rest still cling to life, and Zotz would be fuming if I tried to move them around. But good show! Working with you is fun. Say, care to do this again next time the fleshbags leave behind a big mess?”

“I had already extended him the offer. It remains from my end, still,” the forgettable Zotz whispered. The bat-shaped ghost had watched with far less glee than Ku, but he’d seemed pleased enough all the same.

“Great! So we’d only have to run it by Balam! When are you, uh...available?” Ku asked the Phoenix.

The Phoenix looked around the scorched earth around him with some satisfaction. It had been a long time since he had properly incinerated anything. “I would be open to collaboration. Although I am only available when my master does not need me elsewhere.”

The monkey’s neverending smile widened a bit at that. “What is it that you’re supposed to do, anyways?”

The Phoenix hesitated for a few moments as he tried to remember his purpose. “I burn what Master Sartr tells me to, watch the world for him, and do anything else he requires of me,” he answered.

“Huh. To have such freedom! What’s ‘watching the world’ supposed to mean anyways? You could probably bend that one to do whatever you want! Well if you stick around us, you’ll get to have lots of fun and laugh at Zotz’ expense, and maybe we’ll put in a good word to the god of death for you, eh? We’ll be able to find you next time there’s something worth doing. You’ve got a particular scent to you, and we’re sharp enough to smell a bloated corpse halfway across the world!”

Zotz, lacking words, silently backed away and began to attend to the remaining monsters one by one as they drew their last breaths. Ku’s absentminded fidgeting of his whip and the dead’s resulting motion made it easy enough to spot them once they’d expired, and then a quick tap of Zotz’s staff left them rotted within seconds.

The Phoenix looked guiltily away. “Sartr will be asking where I’ve been…” he mumbled to himself. He shook his head and looked to Ku. “If we cross paths again then I would be happy to burn things with you. I cannot guarantee when that will be, though.”

Ku shrugged. “We have all the time in the world. It’s been fun, fiery bird! See you next time!” Then the monkey fled and left his brother to finish their macabre work.

“Yes, next time.” The Phoenix then stretched out his wings and with a wingbeat which stirred up dust across the battlefield took to the skies and left.

In Hivemind 4 yrs ago Forum: Free Roleplay
The distant beehive finished the last of their evacuation procedures as we dispatched the first raider squads into the deep forest. Some of the hostile beetles that remained entrenched in the woods were eliminated while others (mainly those in larger groups) were simply harassed and driven out of the forest, to the northwest away from our territories and into the desert wilderness. Careful watch was kept over the captive and domesticated beetles during this effort, and no signs of contact between them and the foreign beetles was observed. Information quarantines also ensured that they remained blissfully unaware of our systemic efforts to rid the forest of their (now distant) kindred.

With that matter dealt with, the forest was scoured and after many days of searching we were finally able to rest satisfied that there were no wasp nests anywhere in the woods. But a few days later, a team of workers reported having witnessed what they thought to have been a wasp scout flying in a westward direction. A new caste of our own winged scouts was quickly dispatched to search in the direction that the wasp had purportedly came from, and after following the southern river for a long enough time, they surely enough came across a gnarled, twisted, and long dead tree. It must have been grand in its prime, for even as a withered husk the thing is massive and it serves as a landmark for a long ways around. At the top of that weathered and venerable tree is a blight, though; a massive wasp nest is up there.

Work continues on the newest hive that we built. A small tunnel now connects it to its sister hives, despite some concern about the potential for flooding. The channel between our great pit and the river was finally carved out, so we now have a shallow pond (though the bottom is a goopey mesh of organic matter mixed with sand, dirt, and gravel). Some of the newest berry bushes have also started to bear their fruits, leading to record harvests.

I think it's somewhat misleading to put this in the NRP section when close inspection makes it look as though this will be a character-driven RP where we're all in just one colonial nation that's presumably detached to some extent (whether by their backward status as in point 2 or their own will and isolationism if in point 1) from the old world and most other nations in this world.

Your idea for magic seems unique, I'm not sure whether I like it or not; maybe some examples of what you might do would help me to decide.

I'm mildly interested in this and might join, but no guarantees from me yet. For the record I do prefer option 2.
In Hivemind 4 yrs ago Forum: Free Roleplay
The bees, it turns out, really don't know much about own old enemy. They do know wasps are hiveminded and live in nests, sometimes building said nests up in trees or high places but sometimes even in the ground. The wasps tend to attack suddenly and in great swarms; they work together to take down larger prey, and only rarely go hunting for smaller things alone. So if a lone wasp is ever spotted, it's probably just trying to scout, but that's perhaps even more dangerous, for the wasps adore honey and will apparently massacre an entire hive just to steal its honey and sometimes even eat the larvae.

Beyond that, the bees claim that they wouldn't know anything about the loathsome wasps. They've never made any efforts to launch an offensive against the wasps, viewing it as utterly futile given that the giant wasps are easily capable of killing a dozen bees each. The wasps hunt other insects and will gladly wage war to feast upon the fallen, but for the bees, fighting the wasps can offer no benefit and risk only utter ruin. Whenever they see a lone wasp scout, they do everything in their power to kill and silence it lest its nest learn of their presence and launch a raid.

But if the bees should ever fail to spot and kill a wasp scout, and sometimes if they even so much as suspect that there might be wasps nearby, they take the precaution of abandoning their hive and fleeing elsewhere. They note that sometimes certain birds prey upon the wasps and help to cull their numbers, but at the same time those birds will readily eat bees, so they have never been able to successfully pursue any sort of alliance with the wasps' enemies. But if we would be able and willing to kill off the wasps, the bee queen nearest to us ensures that it would gain us the gratitude of just about every bee colony in the land.

Regarding our search efforts in the far end of the forest, we began to redouble our efforts by sending groups of scouts, some of which developed more advanced tracking pheromones. We sent a few larger groups into the areas where we seemed to have had the most scouts go missing, and we quickly discovered the culprit--more beetles! We accidentally discovered a small group of them trying to head west and leave the forest, and they attacked upon sight. Fortunately a few scouts from that group managed to successfully flee and live to tell the tale.

We don't know whether this means that there's an entire second nest of them that's been hiding out here, or if these are just the exiled remnants of the nest we conquered. Either way, in a fashion similar to how the bees did everything they could to ensure that one wasp scout never returned to its hive, these beetles seem to have been trying very hard to hide from our scouts and kill any that witnessed them or discovered signs of their presence. Unfortunately, that very strategy is what drew our attention to them. The governor in charge of the fallen log and its fungi farms (who has continued working on the beetle breeding program, to some limited success) is naturally an eager proponent of subduing this group of beetles as well, but if that is the path that we choose, we'd best hurry because it seems that at least some of the beetles are fleeing the deep parts of the forest to get even farther away from us.

Coating the entire bottom of the sandpit in a woody mesh is going to take a fairly large investment in time and resources. Several hundred worker drones have been devoted to the task, but because we're confident that the new floor will be able to retain water, we've started simultaneously digging a small channel to the nearby riverbank. Rather than relying on infrequent rains to keep the pond full, the hope is to have a small waterway with a removable floodgate (though rather than one solid, cohesive gate it's probably going to end up being more like a pile of rubble that acts as a dam; but that's no matter, we have the manpower to dismantle and replace the dam as necessary) so that we can empty or fill the pond whenever needed. Assuming no delays, the construction will hopefully be done in the near future.
In Hivemind 4 yrs ago Forum: Free Roleplay
A few worker drones maintained a cautious presence near the bee colony that had encountered the wasp. They started planting flower and berry seedlings in as nonthreatening a manner as possible, but the bees there seemed to pay them very little attention. In fact, they've started evacuating their hive and seem to be in the process of trying to find a new place to move. We spoke to our bee allies, and while they too expressed horror and apprehension at he prospects of a nearby wasp nest (it seems that the bees and wasps are ancient enemies) they're almost as concerned that they'll now be facing even more competition for the resources in their territory if these other bees move closer.

Meanwhile, a small council of princes were placed in charge of overseeing further expansion. They ordered the establishment of a small hive close to the river's edge. To protect against flooding they built it on a small rise and kept most of the space above-ground, with minimal tunnels underneath and (as of now) no underground connection to the other two hives. In order to get the materials to build this great hollow mound of a nest, they had to excavate a sizable sandy pit nearby. The hope was to just leave it there in order to create a pool, but that's been met with some obstacles. Small puddles have been forming in it after the rain, but the sand underneath is porous and most of the water sinks down before long. Building an artificial pond might take some more work and cleverness!

Numerous scouts have been sent out to the southwest to search deeper into the forest for the wasp nest; however, several have gone missing, and the others kept trekking through forest until they came across a great body of water where the trees finally come to an end. It's obviously natural to suspect that the wasps were the culprits behind our scouts' disappearance, but in fairness, we never saw that happen and to date neither we nor the bees have even so much as seen a second wasp scout. In any case, we could continue sending these small scouting forces and perhaps suffer even more attrition, or we could consider blindly sending in an entire army with orders to seek and destroy. They'd probably stop being picked off one by one if we sent an army, but having a couple hundreds bugs rummaging around in the forest will probably destroy any element of surprise that we might have been able to gain if we could find the wasps before launching our attack.

In Hivemind 4 yrs ago Forum: Free Roleplay
The initiative to create a strain more adapted to the water found success in an unusual pairing with the beetle breeding program. Our efforts to create a hybrid between the beetles and our own species have finally borne fruit, and we now have a small number of these hybrids. As our species has evolved it has gradually become larger and larger, but these hybrids surprisingly resist that trend in that they are smaller and lighter than both the beetles and many of our current phenotypes. Initial experiments have shown that they are capable of floating in water where most of our heavier insects eventually sink, and they can swim (albeit somewhat awkwardly, and not easily through moving water as in the river).

As a sign of goodwill, we planted a number of flowers and other plants near the beetle nest. The local beehive there has begun to pollinate those plants and seems quite appreciative. We attempted to similarly reach out to the third and most distant colony of bees, but when our worker drones arrived bearing seeds, they were witnesses to a brutal skirmish between a giant wasp and a dozen bees. Though the wasp was a giant when compared to the bees and it easily bit one or two of them in half, it was soon overwhelmed. The bees almost suicidally threw themselves onto it in a great heap, covering it so completely that it fell from the air before suffocating and overheating. That particular beehive seems highly distressed and they have been in a frenzy ever since that hostile encounter with the wasp.
© 2007-2024
BBCode Cheatsheet