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 2010-ish!
I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.
The Searing Tunnels Somewhere beneath a volcanic island
Claws dug and ground into stone, carving a path forward, sloping upward. They worked quickly. The rising temperature in those infernal depths gave them urgency, for not even achtlaca could endure the mantle’s heat, and now its tide of fire was inexplicably and unseasonably rising, and quickly. As this unstable tunnel slowly flooded and heated as one great crucible, the rock walls ahead of them became softer and more easily broken – that was a welcome reprieve. They cast the excavated debris backward; the rising magma would dispose of it. It wasn’t far back; they tried to ignore its ominous bubbling as they toiled in the light of its incandescence.
“Didn’t plan for this, did you?” Yaquica, one of the hot-headed youths of the warband, spat out. That one dug his four frontmost claws to rend at the rock with fervor, fueled by frustration at what seemed like a doomed situation. This had not been their plan!
Achcauhtli, their leader and a giant of prodigious size, cast a baleful glance towards the smaller salamander. His aura projected enough reverence and calm to keep the group toiling with steely resolve; though the occasional complaint was inevitable. Still, were it not for his decisive orders a while back, they’d have probably only bickered and despaired until the rising tide of fire swallowed them all… or perhaps they’d have suicidally tried to dive into the chthonian magma and swim through the searing depths to get back to the deep passageways on the other side.
But then again, were it not for their chieftain here, the self-proclaimed master tactician and strategist, this foolhardy ploy would never have been attempted! Sure, it had sounded clever: they would take a smaller and more unstable branch of the lava tunnels, boring through any collapsed sections as needed, and take by surprise the volcano that housed their hated rival league. This war had stretched on for too many cycles, and a decisive victory was what they’d all longed for. So with a few smoothed words this stranger from another tribe, who’d sworn fealty to their lord only a cycle or two ago, had convinced their ruler to give him command over his finest warriors, for a surgical strike.
There was just something indescribable about Achcauhtli, this strange ‘tactician’. When he had offered battle plans in the war councils (which his size and age had quickly won him access to) they had always worked, almost as if by magic. The enemy did exactly as he predicted, and so he and his stratagems had won them many close battles in the great tunnels. When he spoke his designs, one could close their eyes and just envision everything as he spoke; Achcauhtli was blessed, the elders and sorcerers had said, but it didn’t take a sage or a prophet to see that.
The present was a lens that had a funny way of coloring the past, though. Perhaps they had all been wrong and this was just some lucky fool that they’d been made to follow, with schemes that’d worked only by miraculous chance; Achcauhtli was now seeming more and more like a fool, and one whose luck had run out at that. Whatever lingering respect they had for him was the only thing that kept the rest going, so Yaquica withheld the worst of his thoughts with bated breath.
‘A suicide mission, and one that looked like it might well end without glory or even combat, with us all being horrifically melted, none so much as knowing our fates, let alone remembering our legend…’ the warrior couldn’t help but muse to himself as he dug forward. What they faced was the worst sort of fate, far worse than perishing in honorable combat against the enemy.
Achcauhtli finally spoke after several long moments of tense silence, “How could I have accounted for it? Our plan has been sidetracked by this… unpredictable and unfortunate eruption from below. But we are not lost; our mission can be salvaged yet. We need only tunnel upward until the magma recedes, or we are met with another tunnel and can regain our bearings. Then I will reevaluate our position, and we will continue on to press the attack from another angle, or… return back empty-handed, if we must.”
Clever wordplay. Even young Yaquica had felt a flush of shame at the thought of returning from their mission as a failure, and so ended with that thought made it that much easier to keep going, to forget the rising tide, to just trust in their warband’s leader and press the attack even as their supplies grew perilously low.
The youth was still mulling over the manipulation of those words when his claws dug into the stone and made a strange sound. None of the others had heard it. He slapped and struck the rock wall with a strange motion, and the wall echoed louder this time, loud enough for the others to hear. They all rapidly began tapping upon it with their claws. “There’s a hollow cavity of some sort not much further this way,” one of them with much experience in such matters declared. Relief washed over Yaquica; perhaps he had been wrong to doubt Achcauhtli.
“Excellent,” their illustrious leader said, breathing in visible relief. He’d been more anxious that he’d let on. “Probe closer; we’re almost safe again.”
Eagerly and desperately they tunneled until there was a breach from whence bright light and frigid air spilled out. This deep? In fleeing the volcanism and rising magma they had come a long way up, but they should have still been far, far below the surface. Great Achcauhtli was too large to get into that narrowest part and peer through the hole, so while the others kept chipping away to widen and expand the tunnel, young Yaquica described what he saw. “There is a chamber here above us, and it does not seem at all natural, for the walls and ceilings are carved perfectly straight and smooth, and where the walls meet there is a harsh and sharp edge. This is not of achtlaca make, either… the proportions are all wrong.”
“It makes no matter; keep digging until the breach is wide enough for me to fit through,” Achcauhtli insisted. He left the obvious unsaid – that the magma was still rising, and they had no other choice but to press forward into this strange void, for good or ill.
With renewed enthusiasm, they quickly tore through the remaining span of stone and entered the artificial cavern. Their claws had a harder time than usual finding solid purchase on the smooth floor; it was tiled, and they found the tiny polished squares of stone to be utterly alien. Even in the harsh light of this room, which was inexplicably illuminated with some manner of strange lantern, they felt terribly exposed. Fortunately, it seemed that this place was devoid of any inhabitants…
That was, until they heard the light tapping of claws coming from up a stairway. Though spacious compared to the wormlike tunnels from whence they’d just emerged, this hall was still so small that they could only barely all stand abreast. All turned to face the oncomer, mighty Achcauhtli at the head of their defensive line formation.
A strange voice echoed from above with cadences and tones that were terrible and alien in their shrill chirps; they had no ear for whatever curses this incoming monstrosity had to lay upon them, so they merely readied themselves for the sight of whatever horror they would face. Moments later the demon at last descended to the bottom of the stairs and entered the room. It was slender and not terribly great of stature, much smaller than they’d expected from such a terrible foe, but it still looked as gruesome as they could have imagined. It had four limbs – two too few – and pointed ears; moreover, a ghastly and horrific chill seemed to enter the chamber at its heels.
Achcauhtli wasted not even a single breath. “A cecepaltictli! Slay the demon!”
Of course, Yaquica had already charged forward before the order had even been spat out. He was swift of foot, for his body still burned hot with youth, and so he closed half the gap between them and the demon in what felt like just one moment.
Startled and bewildered by their valor, the wretched demon stumbled backward and nearly tripped upon the stairs. He didn’t even attempt to fight back, it seemed to them, until something happened. None of them could tell what – in one moment the demon was scrambling up the stairs mewling and murmuring something that none of the brave warriors could hear or had ears to hear, and in the next it had looked over its shoulder and opened its mouth wide. Brave young Yaquica had nearly seized the fleeing demon by the tail and fallen upon it at that point, but instead horrific agony suddenly wracked him. Yaquica shrieked, and his body shuddered as clouds of strange fumes erupted from his stony hide. The demon had used some perfidious spell to strike at them, but even as Yaquica writhed, others scrambled over or around him in pursuit of the monster.
They came up to another chamber at the top of the stairs. This was an unbelievably vast void in the ground, and here and there near the walls were clusters of strange humanoids, small and four-limbed but reared up to stand on just their two hindmost legs. They were arrayed in perfectly regular formations, utterly motionless even as they seemed to hold all manner of weapons or tools in their hands. The sight of such an army of demons filled the warriors with cold terror for just a moment, and they froze. But then they realized with a start that this was some sort of graveyard, and all those demons mere icons.
So they continued giving chase to the still-living (and slightly warmer) demon. A few others like that one emerged from connected antechambers and hallways, and soon the warriors found themselves chasing not one cowardly demon but a small group of them. On all four legs the demons scrambled up yet another set of stairs, one of them calling out in their foul and oily-smooth cadence, “This is out of hand! We must summon the master!”
“He is busy, fool!” the first voice answered. Instead, that one, the cecepaltictli that they’d seen at the bottom of the last staircase, spun around suddenly and cried out, “Guardians! Attention!”
The achtlaca were met with the din of a thousand feet stomping the ground from just behind. They cast their eyes backward, away from the staircase and the foes they’d been pursuing, and beheld the sight of all those statues that they’d taken for icons moving.One, two, three strides forward they all took in perfect, freakish unison, before raising their weapons high in some strange salute. And their weapons were strange too, fashioned not from jagged and wicked obsidian, or from unyielding adamant or hefty granite, but some strange, shiny stone that gleamed in the lanterns’ light, a stone that they’d never seen.
“Guardians! Ready!”
Weapons that had been brandished in salute were suddenly leveled with deadly intent.
With a smugness to him, the demon demanded, “Now, cease this futile and most foolish aggression!”
They did no such thing, and met these attackers, these demonic ‘guardians’, with fiery spittle and tooth and claw. The guardians approached fearlessly and with immaculate discipline, quiet except for the pounding of their heavy footsteps, clearly unfazed by the much larger lava lizards. A hail of projectiles suddenly tore through the air and crashed into stony achtlaca hides, and though these were small things they had somehow been fired at great speed. A few of the warriors bellowed in pain when the strange metallic darts found gaps in their scales (or in the cases of the younger warriors with thinner and softer scales, pierced into those scales and the fiery flesh underneath) but the moans of pain were soon buried beneath a mighty battlecry as their warband’s leader rallied them and led the charge.
Great Achcauhtli whipped and thrashed his massive tail at one of the approaching platoons, utterly breaking their formation even as long weapons of the strangely gleaming rock shot out to spear and cut at him. Sparks flew out where the metallic weapons rang and scraped against rocky scales. It was in vain, of course; he rampaged through the rank of attackers and almost singlehandedly crushed a dozen guardians. The other warriors all around did their part too, and after a short but intense fight the guardians, some hundred or so in number, were all destroyed or disabled. They were remarkably resilient, with forms fashioned from some kind of strange stone, and so a few thrashed futilely and silently as they tried to keep battling even after their limbs had been shattered.
The first demon, that one that ran around so quickly yelping and taunting them, that one that had awakened all those some hundred guardians, looked very distraught at the outcome of that battle. Predictably, it turned tail and fled up another flight of stairs, so with a triumphant roar the demon-slaying achtlaca warband pursued.
Through hall after hall and many chambers they fought, hacking their way through what seemed like endless hordes of these ‘guardians’. Ornate and fanciful furniture and devices and decorations were everywhere; out of spite and hate for the demons, many a stray limb thrashed out to crush and destroy. They would sack this den of evil more thoroughly when all was done, but for now they focused upon catching the talking demon, and they gleefully relished in its repeated begging that they halt and listen. There was no talking with demons! Once or twice it spat out unsettling threats to summon its master, but if there truly was some great demon lord that could smite them all, why would it not have acted already? They saw through its vapid lies and manipulations for what they were: hollow deceit, a poor shield when raised against true might and courage.
But it was hard to fight on, ever upward, through the labyrinthine complex when every breath of air grew crisper. They emerged into one final massive chamber with a vaulted ceiling so high that it resembled the conic interior of a volcano reaching up to the cold surface, and like the harsh light filtering down from the top of a volcano’s crater, this chamber had some sort of light fixtures in the ceiling that filled the whole place with radiance. And as they shambled out into this massive room and beheld a garden of all sorts of frigid and unnatural plants and creatures, they were suddenly beset by a fog of poison.
Thick clouds of dense, white vapor spilled out from above and to the sides, and where it clung to the infernal skin of the achtlaca it caused horrible sizzling and crackling. Where their nostril inhaled it, their bodies were filled with horrible pain, and it sapped their life and energy. The toxic gas was just the tip of the spear, though: it was being dispensed from the walls where a whole river of the poison flowed freely!
…until an angry demon turned off the waterfall by pulling a lever. A floodgate closed, and the lovely waterfall that had been filling the air with its spray and ambience was suddenly just a trickle on the wall. Nervously, the achtlaca eyed this being that was surely the lord of the demons, for who else could wield such magic as to summon and dispel clouds of icy poison?
]
He was much smaller in stature than that first demon, even smaller than the guardians. Like them, he had only four limbs, and yet he stood on just two! The cold one’s visage was a mystery as those alien features were impossible to read, but his eyes, they gleamed with what looked like cruel malice.
“Susanoo,” the demon lord scolded that first one that they’d pursued so far, up from the very lowermost stairs and the fiery depths, “you were supposed to greet our guests with courtesy and respect!”
And the dragon bowed his head in shame to look down at the four clawed feet of his long and serpentine body, and his triangular ears (like those of the ox) flattened down in sadness. “Shu Zhi Da Shen, my deepest apologies,” the first-demon-called-Susanoo stammered to its master, “but they just attacked upon first sight! They’ve raged the lower levels and destroyed half your army in their rampage!”
“WHAT?!”
Now Shen was very angry, and the boom of the god’s voice shook the underground garden. He turned down to the horrific cauldron of broiling water that he’d been standing over the whole time, tapped his stirring stick such that it became a spoon, and used that to dredge up a single grain of rice from where it’d been cooking in the bottom. He grasped it between two fingers and tossed the day’s meal into his mouth and his scowl only deepened. “I couldn’t even cook dinner all the way through in the time it took for you to bungle the plan! Agh!”
Foolish perhaps to the point of stupidity, brave Yaquica listened to no more of the demons’ talk and charged forward. As Shen looked up incredulously at the gigantic brute of a lava lizard, he laughed and the spoon suddenly became a long staff. Yaquica lunged forward with a huge claw, but the agile Shen smacked the limb aside with one deft thwack. Where claw failed, the warrior tried tooth, and his head darted forward in a biting motion. Shen had of course foreseen that move and so he darted out of the way effortlessly before thwacking the salamander over the head for its impudence.
“Perhaps these ones are too rude and brash to be reasoned with,” Shen conceded to Susanoo, but by then the rest of the achtlaca had found their courage and began to press the attack, that they might at least die with honor if that was to be their lot.
Achcauhtli reared up to stand tall on just two hind legs, and then with a sharp twist of his neck, spat a huge glob of molten salt at the foremost demon. The offended Shen twirled his gun-staff around so fast that it whipped up a great wind, and the frigid blast of air hurled the spit right back into the of Achcauhtli. “Unbelievable!” was all he could declare.
Well, maybe not all. It quickly devolved into a rant about hygiene. “I’d imagined their breath might be odorous, but this stench of sulfur is vile. And from how they hissed in that water, you know that they never bathe or shower in their whole lives.”
The whole while, Shen kept twirling the staff to buffet them with a wind powerful enough to slow their advance. Hurricane-like winds whipped at the achtlaca, but through the gales they could behold Susanoo open his maw and do the thing again, spraying out water just like he’d done to paralyze Yaquica the first time he’d nearly been caught. As the dragon-summoned rain was swept up by the gales of Shen’s make, the icy cold droplets were hurled into the crowd of achtlaca in a rain of terrible pain.
Still, they fought through. One of them knocked down a potted plant in its raging warpath as it drew close enough to swipe at Shen, who called out in grief as his planting pot shattered. The gun-staff became an ornate and curved dao-saber, and in one motion Shen tore off his baggy robes to reveal a chiseled physique. He leaped high into the air and then descended back down into the warband of lava lizards as a whirling dervish or slicing blows. Every tail, claw, and tooth was effortlessly parried away – he didn’t even bother to try dodging – and Shen always returned the favor with a mighty thwack from the flat of his blade.
This little flea of a four-limbed demon made them all look like fools as they jumped and cried with every blur of the demon’s motion, and from the periphery of the room Susanoo and a cohort of other wormlike dragons were all laughing. Eventually, the pain and frustration started to get the better of Shen.
The long dao-saber suddenly straightened itself out into a jian-sword, and Shen held it up to bring its point awkwardly to his lips. With a few sharp thrusts, he finally dislodged that grain of undercooked rice that’d been lodged between his teeth like a rock, and then he hurled it at the leader of the achtlaca. Three sounds rang out across the hall: first the sonic boom of the rice grain as it tore through the air, then the horrific impact as it struck Achcauhtli, and then a big thud as the big lizard crashed into the wall behind. Then there was a fourth, much quieter sound of a pained moan.
Shen leaped forward to pont his jian at the biggest lizard’s dazed head. “Yield!” he cried out, and an affirmative nod finally put an end to the fight, all the other warriors bowing their heads in shame and defeat.
“Now, with that thing out of my teeth, I’m in a much better mood,” Shen began, “so I’ll forgive you if what Susanoo said is true and you’ve destroyed half of my forward outpost. I’ve got other bases all over the place anyways, and we can always build more terracotta soldiers.”
“Are you… a god? Not a demon?” Achcauhtli finally asked.
“Of course I am! I’m Shen, the God of Plans, the god with plans! Though it seems like today I can’t get a break!”
The salamander finally chuckled. “Well, neither can we. We weren’t looking to intrude upon your, erm, domain, truly. We were trying to find-”
“Yes, yes, I figured out what you were planning, what you were trying to do,” the god impatiently interrupted as he paced around, wagging the stick in his hands at the downed chief, “that’s why I intervened to bring the magma up and send you to me. Your war’s already over, guy. There’s peace between your tribe and that other one now; you and I have got bigger, worthier enemies to contend with.”
“Peace? In the last few days? How? And what, why did you force us in here? Why didn’t you just say anything?”
“Oh, it was easy. See, a certain Tletzintli princess of great beauty arrived at the city of your hated enemies, and promised her sister’s claw in marriage to their king, if only he would have peace,” Shen began, even as Susanoo snickered and his serpentine draconic form twisted into the shape of an achtotlaca that looked indeed to be every bit as regal and beautiful as a princess ought’ve! “And then of course that same princess went to your city and said much the same thing. I’m sure there’ll be some confusion about who these ‘sisters’ are, but that’ll be easy enough to sort out.”
He leaned in to continue. “Now, the important part: you’re here because I need you. You’re the greatest warriors of your tribe, and you’re all conscripted into my army! See, I’ve been planning an invasion for a while, and I have redoubts all over and plenty of golem soldiers, but you saw how easily you rampaged through this one. It’s not enough, and so that’s why your sort will have to help me. As for why I didn’t say anything, well, I was cooking dinner when you got here! But Susanoo says he tried, and you didn’t listen and just attacked him!”
Yolly week contribution!
Some lava lizards are digging a hole. Really hot magma from the mantle is rising inexplicably behind them, and to avoid being melted they’re just digging up and out to get away. The leader of this warband is supposedly a venerable giant and a strategic genius, named Achcauhtli, and he’s totally not Shen in disguise.
They were on a secret mission to fight some other enemy lava lizards and their plan was in motion, but the unexpected volcanism made it all go to shit. They encounter some secret underground base that is definitely not natural and definitely not built by other lava lizards.
There’s lots of hints that it’s Astus’ workshop, like how this is under a volcanic island, the first cold ‘demon’ they encounter has four limbs and triangular ears, there’s artificial lights underground, and they’re accosted by what seem like robots as they fight their way through.
But I hopefully SUBVERT YOUR EXPECTATIONS with the shocking reveal that they’ve instead broken into Shen’s secret underground base! Those were funny-eared dragons, not catgirls, and golems, not robots. Turns out Achcauhtli really wasn’t Shen in disguise. Yeah, and Shen recruits them all into his army despite the mayhem they caused, because he’s preparing for some sort of attack. Thus, these lava lizards find themselves drawn in to be part of the Plan™.
No, we don't quite have anyone dealing with war! There is a god of defiance and a goddess of honor, but that's perhaps as close as it gets.
Honestly I have my doubts about whether this is really workable at all if you're not going to be on the Discord, though. You'd be missing a lot of information about various things and would likely get a lot less reaction or interaction from everyone else, since the discord is always abuzz with plot or story ideas and you'd be left out of it all.
It's a big RP and the IC has been moving fast, so fast that it's been hard to keep up with at times. This is a big bite to chew, and it's even tougher meat if you're going to be stuck doing all communication over PM or OOC posts here.
I'll ask Frettzo and Lauder what their opinion on this is, but since it says you're online as of the moment I'm typing this out, I just figured I'd give you my two cents right away.
On high above the mists I came A distant flame before the sun A wonder ere the waking dawn Where grey the nordlands waters run In elder days and years of yore
Seven hovered over the island’s dead soil, their smoky cloaks tinging the grey stone with soot where they swept across it with their frayed edges. Though they all faced the middle of their semicircle, they kept their eyes averted from that point, looking at the ground, the sea, the sky, the buzzing flies, anything but the white light that washed over them from the center. They knew, without need to experience it, that if they met it, that illusion of eternity that was their greatest treasure would be shattered, and all that rested on it would follow.
”What did you see as you roamed the world, with no purpose but what you gave yourselves?”
"We saw the ocean and its colourful dances, and heard the songs of the great wanderers. There was neither harmony between them nor accord; had we such songs and dances, they would not be matched so crudely."
”And what did you see in the north?”
"We saw a people who cannot share a thing as plentiful as fire. Had we their fire, we could make it endless."
"We saw the beast-folk of the northern rivers and the sun-blooded of the plains alike maim and slay each other for what they fancied to be riches. Had we their blood to spill, we would not value it less than bark and grass."
”And what did you see in the east?”
"We saw the people of the monoliths, who had to be taught to hate death, for they could not understand the weight of it otherwise. Had we their strength and vigour, we would know better than to risk it until admonished like unruly children."
”And what did you see in the south?”
"We saw the many living shapes beyond the poison waste, who think with one same mind and still are slaves to their primal cravings. Had we their multitudes and unity, we would not be bound by such base chains."
”What did you find all around the world?”
"We saw those who call themselves gods, and all the power they wield is worthless as long as they are shackled by their follies. Had we their might, we would truly be all-powerful."
"We have seen that all that is good in the Galbar is in the hands of those who cannot use it, and none are as wise as us."
"Nor are you wise enough not to covet all these things, when I have given you something better than them all. But it will serve me well now. Go forth, and find that which the divine would desire above all. Let your envy flow freely and be your guide."
Through the murk of a night stretching overlong into the morn, One of Seven drifted over rocky wastes veined with rivers that shimmered in uneven pale streaks where a fading moon-ray reached them past the clouds that kept the darkness against the Galbar into the early hours. Already, grazing beasts of the arid shrublands were rising from where they had lain in black heaps, and under a lonely tree by a branching stream the lion stirred lazily, not to be left far behind by its prey. The One cared not for the beasts, thoughtless and ungainly bodies of breathing clay that they were. They had no eyes for beauty nor hearts for warmth, nor had they value for that which the Seven had been commanded to find, and so it left them be.
But there were other things than the beasts in these lands, things that thought and laughed and dreamed, and the One would stop in its search when it found them. That evening, it had spied a family of furry things with long teeth as they looked out over the darkening horizon, calling shrilly to each other, and when they had gone to curl up in their burrow, it had followed in silence. They had huddled together against the cold of the night. What right had these sorry things to do this when the Seven had no soft bodies to keep each other warm? So it had burned them until they were bones and dust, and it had been pleased in its hollow way.
Now, as the One wound its oily shadow over a quietly murmuring river, it saw a loose circle of bodies on its shore that breathed without the coarseness of beasts. Curious, it lowered itself to the water, and crept close to the sleepers on soundless wings of smoke. They were painfully familiar, with their four limbs and well-formed faces that had two eyes to see. Long ago, it had slept like them, perhaps side by side with these same weary travellers, before the Seven had been Seven. But now it was no more like them than the sand on the night breeze. It would never know, as they did, what it was to collapse in exhaustion after days of marching, what it was to know the relief of seeing the waters play and run ahead, where for days there had been only dry earth. There were many things that the pilgrims of the river knew that the One could not, and once more it felt spite twist and stir in its heart of cold grey fire. Like fog, it crawled over one of the sleepers, and silently it burned and gnawed what it had lost.
But the man roused at once, for his sleep had been but a ruse, and his third eye never closed! An arm the prophet Medes raised to shield him from the evil, and even as his flesh dried and cracked under some withering fire that hungered for life, and even as he gasped in pain, the prophet spake, “You, who steals life in the dead of night, are cursed! Not just once by your master, but thrice: by him, by me, and by the light of the moon!”
The Eschatli drew back into a swaying cloud, like a cobra raising itself on its coils. Where its flames had licked Medes' limbs, they were left dry and wrinkled, as if they belonged to a very old man.
"What can you or the moon take from me that I have not already lost?" asked the spirit, "Look at me: I was like you once, but now what you see is all I am."
Others were now waking to the commotion, but Medes squinted only at the phantom. “From you much was taken, and more still have you taken from others. You think that the way of curses -- the taking of things precious -- but beware! The moon’s vex upon you might be one that gives; a heavy stone, you would be made to bear. The emptiness that you have now might be preferable indeed to being laden with burden.”
“You speak so lightly of these things from within the firm walls of your skin, by the fire of your heart on the hill of your bones,” the Eschatli hissed, glaring at him with its one eye, “How different would your words be if you truly had nothing, if you knew that weariness itself can be a boon! But enough talk, I can teach you what it is to live so!” And it reached for the seer with arms of grey fire that burned no brighter than the moon above… until in that instant the moon’s phosphorescence rivaled the sun, and the dark pit of the pale jewel’s eye seemed to glower all the more menacing.
With a hand of fingers like a fire’s licking tongues, the One seized that droll speaker and immolated him utterly. But what happened next defied reason; where the flames seared, grime and sweat and sunspots were cleansed, the flesh renewed. Medes grew more youthful, and then collapsed, suddenly a dormant manikin once more, like he had been when he was just another body piled into the great colossi.
It made no sense!
The Eschatli’s head tore from left to right, but all the other awoken humans were gone; there was only a small copse of trees, none of which had been here before. There was no river, either; this land was as it had been when Phelenia’s touch had first embraced it, before the Ruination that had smote a goddess and sundered the hills.
There was a small puddle; it called to the One, and eagerly, the lifeless immortal raced to it, the strange and sudden feeling of a heartbeat spurring it to witness its own reflection. And lo, it had two eyes, a body!
Moreover, this reflection revealed that there was a black cloud looming over the sky. The darkness of a storm was approaching swiftly. There was a noise that it bore also; however, this din was not the boom of thunder.
The sound – an incessant, undulating drone – became deafening once the endless swarm of flies arrived. They carpeted every surface, swarming and biting at the One’s supple flesh. Something heavier landed behind, talons scraping the ground. The Eschatli spun around in terror to see its cyclopean master, ten palms facing upward in a thoughtful ponderance that threatened to turn into a cruel rage. Iqelis’ one eye met the Eschatli’s two, and Doom shook his head.
The One, who was of Seven no longer, looked about itself, frantically searching for something, anything to put between itself and that horrid eye. It did not stop to think that perhaps now it had less to lose, having been restored from its false deathlessness. The eye could do worse than merely disabuse it of a consoling lie. Away, away from its merciless light, from its cutting gaze!
But there was nothing to stem it. The flies refused to stand between their master and his quarry, and no matter how thick their clouds were, they always parted so as not to obscure his sight wherever the Eschatli moved. Away! It did not understand by what miracle it had regained all that had been taken from it once, but now that it felt the earth under its feet, the air in its throat, the pure burning fire in its chest, it could not bear to lose it again. It would not let those black claws reach into it again, would not let them tear out its soul, bloody and writhing. And so it ran, shaking away the noisome insects that harried every step, ran without sight, without feeling anything but the pounding of the warm soil under its heels and the pain of the dry wind tearing through it with every gasping breath.
Three moons hung over the sky above, two lighting the way forward: a white one, and a gray. The third, ink-black, cowered halfway obscured behind the other two, lurking in their shadows. The three moons each suddenly blinked, and revealed themselves as gargantuan, bulbous eyeballs. Past, present, and future all presented, side by side, and all bore down upon the wretch with their full weight and gravity. Their triple glares all came together in perfect unison upon a bleak obsidian mountain not far ahead, and Lord Doom coalesced from nothingness atop that peak. Looming over the world, the god threw a hundred arms to each side as though forcefully tearing away curtains, not merely drawing them aside.
The clouds of flies were swept aside by that gesture, and they tormented the Eschatli no more. But there was still that scrape of talons behind, drawing ever nearer… the wretch looked back, and sure enough, the cyclops was there too. But then that Iqelis fractured. White light in place of blood sprung out from the cracks in his glassy form, and then with a harrowing wail and an ear-piercing sound of scraping stone, the god burst apart into a million scintillating jewels.
The Eschatli sighed a breath of relief, but then puzzledly turned back to face the obsidian spire. Nothing crowned its top now; the One God was gone, swept away by the Flow of a river that not even he could dam.
But then he – or it, whatever this new one was that had killed the first – appeared mere inches from the Eschatli’s face. A score of cruel vices seized the One’s newly gifted, pasty flesh. The three moons were overhead no longer in their places, but they hadn’t truly vanished. Each of the three glowed from deep within the god’s oculus. There was one eye; yet from within it, three pupils peered and Saw all… Horror had a face.
“Ţ̱̑̈͑ͅh̢̝̥͙̽̃̈̀e̻̮̣̓͂̾̇͟ ḩ͚̪̉͐͑ṷ̧͇̼͍̟̃̈̐͂̎̿͟͝m̛͓̺̀͊͢ą͎̤͌̾̾̚ͅn̟̳͇̊̂͋ w̦̳̪̽́̂ā̜͓̞͑̍̌͢s̺̠͕̋̋͊ r̬͚͍̆̀͞ǐ̬̞̱̖̪͋̑̎̿͜͝ǵ̢͉̲͖̪̬̯̂̊͊̈̊͠h̡͇̘̋̍͂t͉̘̟̖̎̒̆̄͟͠,̘̜̟̮͊͗͒͘” a raspy voice croaked, the sound having emanated from somewhere within that All-Seeing Eye.
One of the twenty hands grasped that One by its cheek. Its tightness eased, and for a moment the glassy obsidian touch almost caressed the One’s soft, supple flesh. But then it drove a daggerlike thumb through the One’s forehead, drilling deep into the skull right above the bridge of its nose.
The pain was a matter of a moment, a sharp flash that numbed all other sensations. For a moment, it was as though it had lost its body again, and was drowning in an airy sea of shapeless, discorporate torment. But like the flowing water, it went and passed, and in its sore dripping trail the Eschatli could see, no, See –
It Saw what had been before awakening to its eternity of servitude, when it slept as an inert body that had never been nor would ever be truly alive or dead. It watched the waves sway from atop a titanic back of heaving metal, and looked on as its maker consigned it and its six brethren to jeering doom - for what?, it wondered, what good was her honour if it demanded such things?
It Saw what was now, as it lay trapped in its tortured flesh. It followed, with the eye that had been gouged into its forehead, the Six as they flew through the night, in search of that which all desire, and saw as they stopped, as it had, to exact their vengeance on the carefree and the unworthy. It peered cautiously at its Lord, who plotted and puzzled over something in the desolation he had wrought about himself.
It Saw what would be, where the course of the Flow became a glossy black thread in an intricate arras of cosmic magnitude. It Saw flies in countless myriads carpet a gulch, waiting for something it could not guess. It Saw bones blossoming on the slopes of a tall mountain like the descending snow. And it Saw the moon, that faceless haunt of the nightly sky whose glare had pierced it so viciously, raked and torn by hooked fingers of obsidian.
The One thrashed in the grip of the astral presence, the danger to its newfound body forgotten as it struggled to hold onto what little was now certain, what it knew to be itself.
Alas, it was futile trying to writhe away from the grip of that horrible scarred moon… its formless, ethereal clutch was all too real upon the psyche, and it gripped tightly. All around the One, there swirled a wind that bore some melange of pallid lunar regolith and tiny, scintillating diamonds. The cyclone of pain tightened its grasp, and the sharp gemstones flew closer until they gnawed and tore at flesh as though they were so many teeth. Then the white, powdery dust was stained and joined by a carmine mist. Just as it reshaped and maimed his corporeal form, a cosmic storm etched at the Eschatli’s very essence, imprinting it. Now it was Eschatli no longer.
The storm faded, but the pain endured. Anemic moonlight roused the One back into Reality’s grip; it looked so beautiful in the One’s two eyes, and so horrific in its third. Dazed, it looked around; those Medians that it had tormented had all flown away, and now it was more alone than it had ever been.
It remained One, and its immortality and deathlessness had only been affirmed stronger, and so a replacement could not erupt from the other Six. Never again would they truly be Seven; they would be Six and then this One, who had been cursed again to forever be the Outsider, the Twisted, the Slave of the Moon.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
High above, Yudaiel was pleased. Another being had been enthralled to her will, another eye had been opened, an interloper had been punished, and Iqelis... oh, the Fly would seethe at this!
She had observed his heptade of phantoms as they had haunted the land, scorching and razing whatever they pleased as they went about fulfilling his insipid will. But how would Doom feel to have one of its own agents twisted? This One was greater than any of the other Six, for it had been doubly cursed. Moreover, it could See. It would be able to play the game of the Eschatli still, but it would also be able to contend with the others and thwart them.
The Reverberation located the fiend, the one she might have named nemesis were he not so far beneath her. It had only taken her a moment to find him in meditation, no doubt brooding upon the divine punishment that had been decreed unto him by that one who called Himself the Monarch of All. Yes, she had borne witness to Iqelis’ confrontation with Him, for she was ever at the shoulder. She projected oppressive consciousness toward her rival, tormenting him in his lowest moment.
The roar of the Flow became deafening, the churning rush of stygian fluid sweeping aside all things; this was a river with no banks, after all, only an end where it emptied into a deathly still Final Sea. The power and grandeur of it all was intoxicating… glorious was this rush!
Of course, the moon claimed a lofty place in the heavens above, far out of the Flow’s reach in its pretension… In mockery of the Flow and of Doom, its rays of brilliance beamed a hundredfold more luminous, so much so that the moon rivaled even the sun. Cleansing moonlight pierced the inky waters of the river. It evaporated the Flow’s surface with a scorching heat, averting ruination here and there, perverting and averting the proper way of things. Iqelis longed to tear down the insult that had been hung above his head, to dispel her merciless light and usher back the soothing coolness of the night!
Yet as though that insolence was not enough, the moon defiled even more! There yonder, a vast riptide of the Flow had been corrupted; it was aglow with divine power in its throes, and all about it spawned chaotic whirlpools as it twisted and raged against the Six currents all about it, answering to the beck and call of another: Yudaiel.
The answer did not let itself be awaited for long. There was no returning wave in the tide of ideabstraction, but when her eye turned back to the world of the corporeal, the Lord of the Flies was no longer where she had observed him. Instead, she could see the thread of his motion rearing up into the sky, and there he was at its tip, riding the umbral Flow until he was high enough to vault over the rings of unbroken night and push off of their glittering swarm. Higher still. High enough to reach the moon. The going was easy; the moon itself seized him in its clutches and helped pull him nearer, at ever increasing speed.
This promised to amuse and excite. ’Come, little one. Let us see if you fare any better than your minion did.’
Upon Iqelis’ landing, taloned feet dug into the gleaming surface of the moon, which, though once scarred by shattering decay, now truly knew for the first time the touch of its destroyer. It could have been an illusion or a play of shadows, but as they stepped, the dust they unsettled seemed to collect into small black shapes that whirred in the soundless flight of spectral gnats. As if carried by a whirlwind, they spun around the black tree of grasping hands that smoothly wove through fluid patterns, now snapping by in a blur, now oscillating with the sluggish grace of drowned seaweed.
”How eagerly you all cast yourselves to your destruction,” Iqelis crackled as he advanced towards the core of the All-Seeing Eye, a thousand hands poised to strike, ”Your time could have been distant yet, but like a curious ape you dip your edges into the Flow until you are carried away. Now I shall tear out your pupil and set it into my eye, so that I may See the shortest path to the First One’s Doom.”
And with those words, he lunged, swift as the slightest of implacable instants. Time itself accelerated, aiding in the perpetration of his vindictive assault. Dripping with the Flow, ten thousand claws rent through the nebulous vastness and tore about the goddess’ insubstantial soul, blinding and ruining that arrogant eye to such a degree that its pupil might not even be worth the trouble of harvesting.
With a shudder, the sea of consciousness lost shape and came unbound; psychic energies charged everything all about, and in chaos that ensued, the moon was torn asunder. But through the concussive blast of unshackled telekinetic might, laughter boomed. It shook and rattled and threw Iqelis to and fro; now he was a breadcrumb dancing on the skin of a massive drum that was her laughter.
He shrieked, a scrape of toothed metal wheels that was enough to shatter the fragile glass of this illusion. He won a brief glimpse of Reality, and found himself suspended high over her pupil, having never even managed to touch the moon’s surface. Yudaiel claimed mastery over what could be, what had been, and also what was not. The immaterial and the false owed her their allegiance and so they bombarded Iqelis’ mind; a million illusions raced across his vision. In entering the storm of her mind, he’d consigned himself to her power, and now was shrouded in the madness of her weave. With just a single eye, it was nigh impossible for even the One God to peer through the veil and perceive truth, and yet he could sense that was exactly what he had to do. If he could not cast aside the phantasms and prove the flimsiness of hallucinations, then he would be lost.
And so he traced the course of dreaming, straining his arms as he held the swirling chaos from his sight while he followed the span of the unreal to its edge, and he saw where its end lay - for nothing, not even deception itself, can be endless. Dreams withered before the coming of dawn, their thousand nameless colours crumbling to grey strands of drowsiness as the eyes opened to the light of the rising day. Thus Iqelis grasped the rim of his own eye with twenty fingers, and he pried it open with a crack of shattering glass and a hiss of pain. From the gruesomely widened fissure, white radiance came pouring in blinding rays. Where they struck, the weave of apparitions shrivelled like paper in a fire, and though the god could scarcely see it from within his own glare, it wavered and crumbled to colourless dust.
The wild shapes and apparitions came alive even more in what was to be their final breaths, but they danced in defiance and fled from the devouring beam that left his eye, keeping to the periphery of his sight. As though conveyed by a million unseen strings, they flew just at the skirts of the destruction that he brought to bear, tauntingly close and yet never within reach. And the Eye, where it rested at the very edge of the unreal, was likewise shielded by some oddly distorted space. It Saw where he aimed, where he meant to look next, and it twisted and contorted everything around a million fulcrums so as to render aim and perception as meaningless as any of these illusions. A single dart of consciousness struck him in the widened, near sightless eye, and an icy lance of agony wracked his mind as new thoughts crystallized in frost:
A gadfly of grotesque proportions had its wing tangled in a spiderweb. It writhed, but could not free itself. When the vicious spider with its many beady eyes neared, the fly fought even harder and lashed out with bites and flailing limbs. It was all in vain. The spider foresaw the fly’s every motion, and it waited patiently, allowing the fly to tire before beginning to wrap it in a smothering, deathly cocoon.
The fly vanished in an instant, as did the spider and the web. Only the cocoon remained, but now it was more like half-woven silken tapestry, attended to by the deft hands and needle of some unseen seamstress. Upon the tapestry Iqelis witnessed an embroidering that bore the likeness of himself, the Flow pouring from a maw that had erupted from his head. Strings and shackles wrapped about his million limbs though, and they all led to Yudaiel – his Fate was bound to her, his neck collared and leashed.
No more.
Latching on to the more tangible facets of the pain and the phantom chill that echoed the vision being thrust upon him, the god tore himself from the dream-painted mockery and once more found his footing on solid moon-ground. The glow of his exposed eye had abated, though narrow white streams continued to flow from the cracks around its rim, searing away the tendrils of the surreal that sought to encroach on his vision.
His hands darted to all sides in a flurry of kaleidoscopic motion, constraining the currents of time in a hundred ways. His motions hastened again, and a step became a blink, even as the sweep of an arm grew no slower than the lightest twitch of a finger. Yet that was not the entirety of his manipulations, for the Flow pooled oddly behind a web of black claws turned towards Yudaiel's center, and as it swirled to a halt a heavy sluggishness caught hold of her. It was no mere fatigue, or what simulacrum of it could exist within the Eye's incorporealness, but a drought of the oil that smoothed the universe's grinding advance, and she was caught in its midst. Her thoughts crawled as if in a daze, and her sight, once unmatched in its pursuit of the singular moment, could barely rise fast enough to meet the thorned streak of night that lashed at the heart of her illusionary web.
Ah, but that Eye could See its peril, for it perceived the Flow as easily as any other thing. A Reverberation was not so easily trapped within clouds of decay or the oil of Time, and so she rippled through the tiniest and most invisible of threads to emerge somewhere else. Iqelis gave pursuit, but even as he hounded her, unseen tentacles of kinetic might sheared away limb after limb, groped and choked and twisted his neck, seized his legs, and harried his every step.
And though that vulnerable heart of Yudaiel’s form – the pupil of her Eye and the core of her mind – was ever fleeting and evasive, her insufferable voice and the thoughts that she projected were omnipresent and mocking.
A bizarre plant erupted into view, obscuring Reality for just a moment. This plant had a maw, and teeth, and though it could not leave its place it nonetheless feasted. Even now, it had lured a curious insect to its grave. The Fly buzzed too close to the maw. It touched a nigh invisible hair, and the plant’s trap-jaw snapped shut with such rapidity that the motion was imperceptible to the eye.
With ire and his wroth, with rage that flared and burnt so strong that it became palpable, Iqelis incinerated the wretched plant; from drifting ashes and smoke, the moon coalesced before him once again. He could sense her thoughts, just as she could doubtless sense his.
The charred debris of the ravenous plant struck the ground - for there was a ground now, a craggy stone plain that ran past the horizon in all directions - and splashed outwards like liquid pitch. Now fluid, it expanded at a frightful speed, flooding the wasteland like an inky wildfire rampaging over a dry field. Not satisfied with swelling in breadth, it grew in depth too, rising as if fed by a thousand roaring rivers, until the moon, now seeming ever so small, hung above a boundless tarry ocean. The fly that was Iqelis was no more to be seen.
A shadow suddenly loomed in the distance, and as it approached it solidified into a titanic wave of viscous blackness, rushing to swallow the diminutive moon. The orb glanced at it contemptuously with its eye-fissure, and a cord of silvery light crossed the sky, interposing itself between the sphere and the onrushing wave. More gleaming threads sprang into being, crisscrossing each other’s span to weave a thick web that blocked the tide from view altogether. The moon glared triumphantly behind its barrier, but great was its consternation when the wave crashed through it, ripping the silver cords like fragile gossamer, and sharp was its terror in the moment before it was engulfed by the black ocean.
And like the wave had torn through the illusory web, so did Iqelis carve his way through the bridge of thoughts, and both combatants were awakened to the material world as he lunged anew.
Far away…
Over the waters of another, much more tranquil stygian sea, nine eyes looked up at the night sky. They pried at the distant scarred moon, and though their sight was sharp, six of them could only guess at what was transpiring so high above.
“I see the cracks widen and close again, like the breathing of a leviathan, but not what moves them,” said One of Six.
“I see clouds of dust blossom with no wind to scatter them, but not the blows that seed them,” said another.
“I see none of those things, but only a swarm of black flies pass over the white sometimes,” said a third. It then turned to the one specter in the group that hung aside from the others, separated by something more than its two supernumerary eyes from those that had not long ago been its brethren. The Third did not say anything more, its words lost to it in the fracture that had been opened between it and the other, but the Outsider understood nevertheless.
Rivers of fire at dead of night On moonstone lying cold and white Upon the plain burst forth, and high The red is mirrored in the sky.
From Galbar’s plain I See the fire, The steam and smoke in spire on spire, Leap up, till in confusion vast The stars choke, and so it will pass.
The others did not answer, unnerved in their sinewless forms by the strange notes and cadences they had heard in those verses. Yet the Outsider still had more to say, more that it could not put into words, and so it spoke directly to their minds.
On the sands of a white desert, under a black sky, two giant drops of thick glassy ooze chased each other. One was as dark as the heavens above, and its surface was faceted like a cavern-grown crystal. The other was as pale as the ground below, and it moved with a dreamy slowness that did not seem to impede it in traversing as much space as the other did in the same span of time. The glossy mounds spun in a circle, each striving to seize the other’s tail, but the more ferociously they reached, the further they slipped from each other’s grasp. They ran and streamed and leaped, until the very force born of their spiralling trajectory began to distort them, stretching and flattening them against the walls of an invisible ring. And still they pushed ahead in pursuit, even as their frenzy shook the desert around them, pushing up concentric dunes of disturbed sand and tearing them apart again and again and again.
The Six were quiet, for now there was no more to be said.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Canyons were gouged into the lunar rock. Silent dunes of dust and regolith had been smattered away like so many piles of snow, and new pits and craters were strewn everywhere. Doom knew no discrimination, its ruinous power claiming everything within sight. Yudaiel embraced her violent tendencies, too; perhaps the Sight was wasted upon her of all people. For all the wisdom and knowledge that was hers to claim if she only looked and Saw, she’d always had a talent and appetite for violence… even if she often resorted to other means, her first instinct was almost always savagery and brute force, and here and now, that tool was as effective as any. Unshackled by any notions of restraint, for her jewel was already cracked and scarred, her telekinetic might wrought devastation on cataclysmic scales.
Their battle raged on, endlessly. Neither were ever truly in flight, for every motion was either an aggressive lunge or a fighting retreat to evade the next blow. Here, Yudaiel brought down the full weight of her might in a fearsome battering blow. Alas, it was perilously difficult to strike a buzzing insect with a hammer. She could aim with supernatural precision and predict her foe’s motions with brief prescient glimpses into the future, but then he could accelerate or slow Time as he pleased and in different areas. Accounting for the relativity was challenging enough that it all but cost her the entirety of her advantage, and so they were left on near equal footing for the deadly dance. So her reckless swing had missed the dancing Fly, but it still struck the cadaverous surface of the moon. It chipped her precious jewel, it bored through rock and rent a horrific pit that extended all the way down to one of the wormwood tunnel-ravines wrought by that wave of Iqelis’ power.
Ah, how that had felt like an eternity ago! Yudaiel had relived those moments, over and over, again and again, until they were forever seared fresh into her memory. This was her vengeance for that slight, among other insults. She lashed out at the Fly again, this time seizing him directly, throwing him onto the ground in a battering motion and then dragging him over the edge of the cavity. But as he fell he drew the course of the currents with him, and she slipped down over them, following her adversary into the crevice.
In the depths of the fissure the struggle continued unabated. Leaping from wall to wall like a maddened locust, Iqelis pursued his foe, and she slipped around the unearthly maze of the lunar tunnels, now flanking, now ambushing from the twists and crannies she knew as thoroughly as the Tapestry’s knots. He brought down tonnes of crumbling moon-soil upon her, and Yudaiel snatched them in midair, hurling them back at his burning eye. The darkness of that hoary underbelly became choked with dust, crumbling passageways closed like decaying veins, yet neither was deterred, and the moon groaned as they tore deeper into its innards in their frenzy.
Far away…
This was an auspicious night. Weeks of careful toil within their research post were about to culminate and finally bear fruit; the ranger named Udish toyed with the telescope that rested in his hands.
They had spent a long time up here, crafting and inventing various new scientific instruments so that they could better understand the stars, the night sky, and even those lands splayed out below and all around their camp atop the mountain summit. Ludari had painstakingly pressed and refined plant matter into parchment and ink, and now by day he mapped the surrounding climes and geography, and by night he charted the stars diligently while Udish could only stare at them and the moon in wonder.
There was much knowledge to be found and shared within their outpost; they were all gorging upon it. Udish felt as though he was struggling to pull his own weight, though. He’d gone spelunking into some cavities in the cliffs and found twisting caverns, and within those he’d harvested some growing crystals of quartz. Iluratum, awed by how they bent light, had spent a long time chiseling, polishing, and shaping cuts of the strange stone. Eventually, Udish had been inspired while gazing unto the moon and contemplating that look in its eye, and he had spirited some of Iluratum’s lenses and fashioned this telescope in secret, a short ways from the others. No doubt they thought he’d spent the afternoon down in some new hole, but instead he’d built this marvel. How large everything looked when enhanced through this simple optical tube!
As the sky grew dark and the moon rose, Udish peered at it through his telescope… he knew that the stars were one thing, but the moon and the sun another entirely. This research of the moon strayed dangerously close to that which was forbidden – studying the divine – but he could not care, did not care… the moon called to him!
And as he marveled at it through his telescope, discerning the ridges and craters too small and hazy for unaided sight, he saw strange flashes of light. He peered at them more closely, and saw great explosions of color that came from no obvious source, but which tore asunder the surface of that distant, alien, and pale jewel. This was confusing, but so savory… The implication was that this must be a normal thing. Was the moon always in such a state of flux and violent change, only for them to have been entirely oblivious by virtue of their feeble sight?
Udish ruminated upon that thought in wonder, lowering his telescope as he considered that crude hypothesis. But he continued to look up at the moon, and the flashes were so bright that he saw them still, even without the assistance of his instrument. His conjecture was disproven in an instant, but this anomalous observation left the kynikos with only more confusion and questions…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Through the tunnels and depths had the gods battled, until they burst out to emerge from the caverns once more. Now the fray was on the far side of the moon, that which the Galbar never saw. At the moment this was also the dark side of the moon, lit only by the twinkling of impossibly distant stars. With the sun so far away and its view so obstructed, perhaps not even the so-called Monarch of All bore witness to this clash.
Iqelis broke and shattered Time itself; roots and tendrils of acceleration spiraled out from his own form, granting him alacrity and hastening the doom and decay of all around, but here and there remained bubbles of slow. The Tapestry of Reality fluttered, wrinkled, and nearly was torn all around the monstrous deviant, and Yudaiel Saw his profanity more clearly and fully than perhaps any other could. So she, the Prescient, at last realized the path to victory. Calling upon her divine power, she bled and radiated ghostly ichor, flaring like a flame that had been fanned. She, the Reverberation, rippled through the Tapestry’s fabric and righted it, hurling Time back into its place and defying that power which sustained Iqelis so far… that was what had granted him some analogue to her own unfathomable power, the only thing that had allowed him to rival her in this battle. Now, it was fading.
Thus the Fly was cast down from the confluence of temporal fractures that he had engendered, and from the middle of a leap that defied speed, insofar as it was grounded in the ordinary course of time, he fell skidding onto the shadowed ground, his feet carving gouges in the stone as momentum reasserted itself around his body, now bare of anomalous folds in the immaterial. He grasped at the void, seeking the currents he was wont to turn, but, defenseless before blows from arcane angles, he was hurled from where he stood by the resurgent Yudaiel.
He did not remain off his feet for long, however, and again he plunged his claws into the waters of the Flow in defiance of Time's equilibrium. Yet it was a ruse, for, reaching from below the surface, he caught the fraying edges of the weave where they dispersed into the end, and with a mighty pull he yanked them down. In a groaning vortex of chaotic moments, past and present became one with a dead future. Thoughts and intentions ended before they had fully formed, movements wound down before they had been realized, stones crumbled before being touched. A dire tangle rose to mar the All-Seeing Eye's view, and beyond it Iqelis sprang at her in a high arc through the empty sky, bearing down on her from above.
For the first time in all of her existence, Yudaiel was sightless. Fear filled her in that moment too, and it was an icy lange that gouged a fiery wound into her psyche. She could not See, so she lashed out, blindly and in all directions, in a paroxysm of mad violence.
It was good that the Galbar was shielded by an entire moon, as for a brief moment, that darkened half of the sphere was aglow with a light brighter than even the sun. The explosion rocked her moon again and chiseled yet another gaping hole. Such was the shockwave that it swept up Iqelis as though he were a mere fly in a hurricane, hurling him upwards and leaving him to spin off into space. So potent was the blast that it rippled through the lunar gem’s core and all the way to another side; the backfire thrust up a mountain in the heart of that great crater that was her usual seat – now the crater was an iris, and that mountain its pupil. So vehement was the detonation that chunks of the moon were sent hurtling at well past escape velocity; some became shooting stars that eventually fell down unto the Galbar, some more distant comets that would forever wander and in their circligns occasionally come close enough to emblazon trails across the night sky, and still other pieces were flung out into the depths of space to never be seen again.
Far away…
On a blue-green jewel of a sapphire, there was an ocean. Somewhere out in the seas, there sprouted an isle, and for roots it had caverns. The roots were deep and long and dark and twisting, but down there resided a mind. It looked like little more than corruption – mold, rot, and moss covering the damp stone, encasing wall and ceiling and floor alike, but the branching hyphae of the mycelium was all beautifully connected and intertwined like rope. Countless fungi were there, but only one beautiful and nascent mind.
It had never really been troubled by the simplicity of its existence, growing in the humid darkness and waiting. It didn’t really even feel trapped by its nature, free as it was to sing and dream. It liked to project itself into dreamscapes, to imagine what it would be like to be a mushroom under the sun, to feel the rain, or to be a spore that settled upon a cloud and grew from there, or to be a brave toadstool that took up arms and fought a mighty beast of a boar to protect all the other mushrooms in the forest. Its mind wandered and pondered all of that and more, and yet it remained content and safe at home.
On this day, it was a king. Its loyal subjects had all assembled around in circles, forming a hundred concentric fairy rings. Its first act, as king of the mushrooms, was to summon his guard and lead them to war against the lichen that dwelt on a large boulder nearby, and which had arrogantly crept onto the rimward trees of his glade. But the dastardly lichen had been of the same mind, and met them at arms in the middle of the road, where the grassy realm of the mushrooms met with the rim of its craggy grey boulder.
The battle was a fierce one; both armies fought without respite, time and again threatening to overthrow the other, for three hours and three minutes. Lo, and in the darkest moment of the battle, the sky itself blackened as raven clouds hung overhead and blocked the sun. This truly was a horrid day; perhaps the coming deluge of rain would wash them all away in its heavenly judgement, and spell a watery end to his short-lived reign! Yet to the shock of all, it was not raindrops that fell from that black cloud, but rather flaky white bits of stone.
Not even a hint of the sun was anywhere to be seen; it was suddenly night. All the lichen and fungi ceased their quarreling and looked skyward, and as they squinted, they beheld the horror of a swarm of flies so endless that they had mistaken the bulk for storm clouds. Here and there, pinpricks of moonlight poked out for just an instant through the onyx blanket that smothered the sky. To their horror, the fungi realized that those flies were ripping apart and devouring the moon… That was their creator!
The kingsguard and even the savage lichen all melted away into aetherial wisps as the lucid dream twisted into a nightmare. Everything spiraled out of control; in the black depths of a sea that knew no end, a corpse-looking whale shuddered, stirred into rage and hunger by the scent of even the most wretched of lifeforms – this prey was still seasoned with some of the most savory of flavors, after all – and it exploded into horrific thrashing motion. Its cry attracted other whales, and horrors even worse, and they began swimming through the black void devouring flies and moon-bits like krill.
Distraught and horrified, the psychic fungus began to wail and shriek in its cavern.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Since the time before life, the outer void beyond the Galbar’s skies had remained untouched by the troubles that stirred and wounded the world below. Darkness and silence had been a barrier insurmountable for even the most insistent echoes of strife, and covetous eyes would have found nothing to aspire to even if they had thought to glance up at the cold waste between the stars. Peace, though it be of a sterile sort, had ever reigned in those unbounded halls.
But on that day at last it was to be broken, and the blight of anger spilled out into the translunar spaces as war seemed to reach for the stars themselves with its iron clutch. Two antagonists stared each other down with single eyes, unmoored from the spheres below, their struggle the only constant in the fluctuating vacuum.
Struck by Yudaiel as she lashed out blindly, Iqelis had been cast into the moon's own heavens. There, he clung onto the pale fragments scattered by their tremendous clash, vaulting between them as he had when first he had departed the Palace of the Sun, and in the untouched emptiness he began once more to twist and gather the tides of the Flow into smothering tides, as the All-Seeing Eye gave pursuit. She reached him first, though.
Her faintest touch was enough to conduct currents of madness, but now she wrapped all around him in a smothering embrace. Hallucination and phantasm became his wreath.
There was sand, drifting in the breeze. It settled underfoot, and that scarlet-haired goddess thrust the tip of her spear into the grit, moving it, drawing the design of a little humanoid figure… Ea Nebel. The stick figure became a clay mannequin. Earth became life, and his daughter’s eyelids opened.
Turmoil had coursed through his every thought. There was the Flow, roaring, ever roaring, demanding that he right this accursed wrong. He hesitantly raised a claw over the nascent godling, poised to strike. Then his gaze fell on her features, and he saw, reflected in the black of her four eyes, the white light of his own. Sparks that had split from the flame he carried in himself, now returning his look - so trusting, so familiar, so his. His hand froze in place, for the first time uncertain in delivering a demise, then fell limply to his side, powerless.
The sands shifted, and there He was, that arrogant fool.
”Trials…”
…
”...it is time for yours!”
…
”...four separate trials to prove her worth so that she may not be ended by my hand.”
Those words echoed in his mind as they already had a hundred times over, each syllable an agonizing reminder of this horrid Fate that had been decreed unto him by that atrocious Pretender, how He would burn–
Ea Nebel clambered up the steep slope of a mountain of black stone, so vast that its peak was hidden far past the clouds above. Around her, the harsh flank was barren, no sign of life stirring over it as far as the eye could see besides some noxious corpse-flies. But what did abound there were the dead. Rigid and mouldering, or little more than skeletons sparsely clothed in tatters of parched skin, they lay scattered on the unmerciful rock, or sat, propped up against ancient boulders. Though stricken forever with silence, they seemed to implore the deva with outstretched arms and despairingly gaping mouths. Give us rest, please, give us rest; yet she could not, for the stone was hard, and harder still were the terms of her task. She dragged her feet wearily, slouched under the unfulfilled burden, stumbled as a bony grip suddenly closed around her leg…
…
The ground was even under her feet now, a smooth road of dry beaten dirt. To her sides, unassuming grassy plains rolled to the horizon, dim under a nondescript beginning of dusk; gone was the oppressive leaden cloak of the mountain-clouds. Ahead, the road stretched on, a lazy earthen snake, until it came to a bifurcation marked by the foot of a low rocky ridge that neatly separated the two branches. The blessed clarity of her sight let her pry far along both ways. One led into a bank of grey fog, blind and featureless, yet calming in the way of nebulous things. The other was lit by distant flashes of what must have been lightning, flashes that began to approach as she looked, like a beast emerging from its burrow, accompanied by a cacophony of clashes and thunderclaps…
…
Nothing behind her, nothing above her, nothing around her - only the angular shadow of Iqelis looming over her, and his hooked fingers closing around her throat. His body, chiseled from that glassy obsidian, reflected the moonlight, brighter and brighter… The vision twisted, and suddenly this was not some omniscient view from above, but rather one from Nebel’s own four eyes. The perspective was enough to stir the flames of envy, but all that vanished in an instant. The bitter, chilling touch of those obsidian fingers around the throat grew colder and tighter yet. The world began to collapse inward and distort as creeping darkness encroached upon the corners and light danced in strange ways, a side effect of the asphyxiation.
Silver and white streaks ran across the sleek black form of Doom incarnate, like grey whiskers accenting a beard. The luster grew larger, and brighter though, until nothing remained of that jet-color. What grasped her was reflecting so much light that it may as well have been aglow, was practically bone-white. Craters and scars marked it for the moon. Smaller, smaller, smaller. The field of view shrunk and darkened even as Yudaiel-Iqelis seemed to grow more brilliant and blinding with each passing instant.
The hundred arms of Iqelis became the bulging, oozing red arteries of a bloodshot eyeball, grotesque in its scarred cloudy white vastness, and also in all the ash that cascaded from it in place of tears. That which grasped at the throat was no longer anything like a hand so much as the choking, crushing force of a divine will. It was as inevitable as winter, and fighting it was as futile as shouting into the wind.
The lightheadedness grew even more extreme; death and unconsciousness were near. Something whispered cajoling words, soothing the passing, easing the journey and making the acceptance of death feel right, proper…sweet. But something else screamed and raged and wanted to fight! It began to win, and panicked adrenaline seared and wracked the mind, staving off unconsciousness.
Then Yudaiel’s grip pulled in all directions; there emerged three spinning moons that orbited in wild and chaotic patterns, tugging viciously all the while with far greater fervor than the Galbar’s gravity; indeed, the Galbar was gone, as was the safety of its tether. Flesh ripped and tore while bone and neck snapped. The bits shorn off were drawn into stringy wisps and cast and flung everywhere through the void of space. The sickening sounds were only made worse by one last sight – that of the eye blinked and pulsating, flashing back and forth as its appearance oscillated. Doom, Moon, Black, White, Iqelis, Yudaiel…Iqelis. It remained his eye in the end. It had been him all along, strangling and breaking her.
An abominable, anamorphic monstrosity of a voice pierced the darkness that followed:
“Ń̡̮̫͇̎̓̅o͙̰̘̩̣̿̀̎̌͛t̝̱̖̺̀̊̄̊ w̮̘͓̿̇̿h̬̄̕͢a͉̩̳̜̽͂͗̕t̹͈̮͗̀͌ c̘͖̅̄ou̞̕l̬͓̱̒̌̔d̛̻̻̟̖̔̔̌ h̫̣̱̱̓̒͞͞a͎̗̮͂̇̉p͙͘p̯̱͚͖̔̐͊̕͢͝e̩̼̩̜̊̍̒̎͆͟n̝͇͍̻͗͗̐͐,̛͈͚̥̻̀̕͠” it insisted, “W̛̛̺̜̫̺̯̦̗͔̍̂̃̒̕͝H̥̱̦̪͈̿́̀͐̐̒͊͑͟͜͟A̡̻̝̖̬̅͂̔͒̀T̜͍͔̅̈́̚ ͇̫̙͈̫̗̖̑̾̈͐̀̕͞S̨̬͔͓̞̪̤̔̈́͑̋̈͊͐H̭̳̝͎̤͋̄̀̒̕͘ͅȦ̢̟͉̰͇̗̃́͑́͞L̟̭̹̮͚̙̍̋̐̎̚͝L̪̝̹̮̀͋͊̍!̗̓̿̔͢ͅ.̨̨̛̥̺͓̮͂̈́͛̈́͗”
That was her voice, and that was her threat. She punctuated it all with one final vision, that of Ea Nebel meandering the Galbar in that very instant.
Pain of the heart, bleak as Iqelis’ own was, unfortunately stood as only the tip of the spear. The agony of a million tortures she thrust upon him; a second passed, and yet it felt like an eternity. The Flow could not abate the pain, only stoke the burning agony that came while the flames flared and burnt even hotter and faster, or else it could slow and draw out the suffering so that the coals nibbled at him and writhed through his gut like worms. And still, these courses were the only recourse that his mind, severed from control and maddened with rage and excruciating torment, could conceive. The deeper Yudaiel drove her barbs into it, the more it rolled and wallowed in the black waters, sinking in them, melting in them.
Melting into them.
A droning sound rose in the distance as Iqelis’ crystalline hypostasis finally yielded under her grip. But it did not shatter as it ought to have, dissolving instead into a noxious black sludge that dripped between her intruding thought-strands, as if it had too little substance to be retained. For indeed, the looser the oily fluid became, the more she could see that its attributes were being reduced to a single constant. A moment, and it was no longer a god, a thinking being, a feeling one; only Doom remained, a blind and unshakable axiom lodged in the universe like a venomous thorn.
The droning grew louder, and now it was the grim chant of a thousand clouds of gigantic flies. The blackness flowed out from the maze of illusion and onto the moon-soil. Or perhaps it was Iqelis’ body falling down in an ichorous pillar as it liquefied in the void-sky and poured into a lake that corroded the ground about it with the crumbling of ages. Yet the One God was not so large for the lake to become a sea, no, an ocean that covered the best part of the moon’s hidden face before rising into an amorphous, undulant body as tall as ten mountains. He and his shadow were one then, a stain that did not merely sully the moon but defiled the material dimensions of which it was a facet. Darkness so absolute swallowed it that it had no name in a living cosmos, and even the star-studded emptiness above shone like a cascade of diamonds against that abyss.
A burning white light burst out in the god-shadow’s midst, not so much an eye as a maw of a titanic furnace that breathed with the bellowing of a cataract. Arms that were rivers, ending in deltas of many-pronged talons, raked the white surface, decaying – nay, unmaking solid stone and throwing up pillars of dust, as more of them rose to reach for the god-spark and extinguish it in their clutches. Pallid moon was devoured by creeping doom and converted into more of that ever-growing ocean of stygian sludge.
And yet Yudaiel’s smoldering gaze set fire to the thirsty seas, broiling the doom beneath the incinerating ray of her stare. The inky blackness evaporated, surged up in vast clouds, and rained back down as diamonds. The ravenous darkness swallowed and digested those precious stones just as readily as they ate into the jewel of her moon, and the cycle raged in a vicious and neverending circle as Yudaiel’s eye darted here and there, searching for the Fly, wherever he was in the depths of that horrid sea. If she could only find him, seize him, burn him, strip away his power and control, then all that sludge would become lifeless and inert. It could be righted and cleaned away in one great conflagration, but she had to find him.
A splitting pain pierced Yudaiel’s mind. It waned and ebbed, throbbing as if to a heartbeat even within the depths of her empty vastness. It made Seeing difficult; how could she not find the Fly within those depths when normally she Saw all, when nothing could hide from her? Pain. Somewhere within her disoriented and enraged mind, there was a whisper that she didn’t see the Fly, that she wouldn’t and couldn’t, for the Fly had dissolved and become one with that whole ocean of corrosive rot. Anguish. She heard a chorus of otherworldly shrieking. The Sentry, that Psychic Fungi that she’d left in Arvum’s service, had been wailing this whole time and she’d hardly noticed, but now its cry stood out. It was the only voice within the discordant tumult that she could discern, that she could recognize, that she could understand.
Agony! The other voices were vast, and distant, and close… their psychic voices carried well through the void-medium. There was a pattern, and a song, but it was horrifying chaos, nothing at all like what Yudaiel could grasp or understand, let alone lesser minds that had not been tempered by peering into the abyss before and hardening their sanity.
She Saw barbs, spikes, claws – claws that were made to rend the mind, not flesh. She Saw spikes, teeth, maws – gaping maws that hungered for the taste of misery and the sustenance of souls. Arrayed before her were maws within maws, maws within the pupils of sightless eyes, gaping and horrific throats and jaws that covered every part of their abominable and twisted forms.
A seeking arrow cut through the void towards her pupil. With a furious thought, she caught and gripped it. It was real, to her horror, and yet only half-real. It was not of her conjuration, not of the Monarch’s, and certainly not of the Fly’s; it was no illusion at all, and yet it was half-ethereal and utterly alien. She squeezed the arrow even harder, so that its tenuous being could not slip from her grasp, and then she twisted and turned. That thing had not been an arrow as she’d first surmised, but a horrific proboscis, like that of a bloodsucking mosquito, only this monstrosity had been intent upon draining the juice of her eye, the soul of her mind. The rest of the beast’s hulking form had somehow collapsed out of her sight as it had approached, hiding behind the tiny silhouette of that needlelike proboscis. When she'd twisted and broken its sucker, the thing hadn’t died, but it had shrieked, and her entire essence recoiled and shuddered. Searing pain juxtaposed itself with frigid fear.
Others had come, too. Like a vast whale, one breached the surface of that darkened ocean that covered her jewel, swallowing more of the sludge that any maelstrom ever could and yet surviving, thriving… feasting, even in the heart of a god’s ruinous power. The living shadow writhed and thundered as it struck at the abhorrent leviathan, its arms folding into itself in coursing loops, but where one interloper was pushed down, ten more arose, like sharks that had smelled blood. Its tremendous size turned against it, as every span of pitch waves had become a new breeding-ground for the nightmare flocks.
Its erstwhile enemy forgotten, the sea that had been Iqelis raged against the grotesque congeries of skinless and eyeless morays, lurking crabs that crept on fractal fleshy roots instead of limbs, and fin-ringed disks that split open into gnashing jaws like sunfish teratomas, battering them aside and vomiting searing beams of light from its eye-maw. Fury steadily became surprise, then alarm as the consuming tides and withering glares left the dire invaders unscathed. Whatever their nature might have been, Time held no more an absolute dominion over them than did the principles of life, trampled underfoot by the sheer incoherence of their bodies. Their hunger, however, was undisputable, and every bite and mouthless draught left the madly thrashing ocean diminished.
Far away…
The trickling of water made for a soothing ambience for meditation. Its ever-present sound near the Blackmoss Dam calmed Ruslan’s mind. The young bjork sat in the same darkened lodge-chamber as half the rest of his clan. In the center of their circle was his father, Tanas the Undying, Tanas the Seer, Tanas the Moon-blessed. They looked to him as their foremost guide now, not the matriarch: this was only right as it was he that had first discovered the potency of the sacred fungus, he who had guided them all in their first experiences with the magical substance, and he who had ingested more of the holy mushroom than any other.
The bjorks, kit and adult and elder alike as they were, sat in a circle about Tanas. Tanas did not seem to sit, preferring instead to levitate. Or perhaps that was more akin to hanging? The bjork might have flown (might have ascended all the way to the moon, even!) the mushrooms whispered to Ruslan, but for the thin, ethereal threads and branches of fungal hyphae that tethered him to this world.
Tanas had his two birth-eyes closed in meditation, and yet his third gaped wide open, all three of its pupils staring into the void. Two were glazed in that moment, but the third, that which saw the future, was focused.
’What do you See?’ Ruslan wordlessly asked. A telepathic chorus of other voices echoed the question.
In answer the manbjork, once a mighty warrior but now thin and nigh-skeletal from a long diet consisting of little more than the mushrooms, trembled. He trembled, he shook, and he shut his third eye, embracing sightlessness. Wordlessly, Tanas spoke to their minds,
’Calamity.
Doom.
Armageddon.’
The rushing sound of water was unbearable to him in that moment, its sound more horrifying than the bone-chilling roar of a giant snow leopard, than the bloodcurdling howl of wolves, than the howling winds that heralded wintry cold and frigid blizzards. The gloom and shadowy recesses of their lodge grew larger, more umbral. Darkness evaporated into wisps of smoke, and from those foul fumes there amalgamated the shapes of monsters and beasts and demons. Eyes were everywhere, staring, staring. He Saw it all, and yet his eyes were shut. There was no escape from the horror.
“The moon is under attack,” he gasped aloud, “I See it.”
The others looked all around, and they too Saw the shadowy people and beasts, and were afraid. It was a nightmare they couldn’t wake from. The sound of the river sounded eerily like distant, muffled screaming.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The relentless souldrinkers surged forward. Yudaiel perceived them in strange ways; she Saw a thousand brass claws, but only two-thirds as many limbs from which those graspers extended. These horrors were anathema to Reality and creation, slaves to unreason, impossible to truly comprehend. The grotesque forms that she Saw, even these brass claws that she felt ripping into the cohesion of her sea of consciousness, were all just her mind’s vain attempts at projecting that which was impossible to depict, grasp, see, or even understand. They were vast creatures, and she suspected that they existed in more dimensions, and higher ones, such that she saw only their outward facets, tiny shadows of their true terror. Still, she witnessed more than enough.
The one with the proboscis had shattered before her might, but from its sundered mass had erupted a half dozen more demons, each greater in immensity than the one that had contained them. She focused upon the most enormous of them all. It bit into her vastness, but as it gorged upon her essence, it was as though she’d thrust an arm down the beast’s gullet and not gripped it by the tongue – no, by the entrails. She had the fool now, as she reached deep into its depths. Recalling her essence, withdrawing that filament of her being back from the demon’s insides, she caught hold of its innards and jerked them as she ripped that extension of herself free. Its entrails were drawn outside of its body in one sickening and incredibly forceful movement. Eviscerated, everything was pouring out of its maw, and the demon was inside out for an instant. In that ungodly shape it resembled some sort of nightmarish blob of otherworldly flesh, of fiery malevolence, and of black bone… but then its flesh rippled over those bones and shifted in strange ways, even as those bones snapped and spun and rotated through the roiling cloud of gore. The demon collapsed back inwards on itself before splitting apart, and what should have been its corpse somehow became three thrashing horrors.
What was this madness? The absurdity of their profane shapes, the lunacy that such aberrations had emerged as if from nothingness, was such that Yudaiel could scarcely believe what she saw, let alone what she tried in vain to See. A single thought echoed in the back of her mind with crystallized clarity – had she lost? Had Iqelis wrested control over the unreal, and now banished her mind into the nightmare of madness?
No.
He couldn’t have.
He is only a fly!
With a roar, Yudaiel threw herself – or at least, the majority of her enormous vastness – into the maw of one of the lesser of these many beasts. It gorged at first, and as it unmade her essence and fed upon her soul Yudaiel writhed and felt diminished, but then she had forced her way in. The horror grew bloated as even its impossibly expansive void of a belly was utterly filled. Its teeth bent backwards in its maw as she swept her way down its gullet; its nineteen eyes bulged almost to the point of bursting as more and more pupils erupted from within, forcing their way into each one, crowding the red orbs.
Lesser minds would have been utterly consumed when trying at such a desperate and maddened ploy as entering and forcibly possessing one of these demons. Minds greater still would have been overwhelmed and consigned to lunacy forevermore, their sanity shattered so easily as glass. Yudaiel was nearly met with that fate, but the glassy sea of her consciousness was only cracked, not broken.
She Saw deep into this thing’s horrific thoughts, and for just a fleeting moment, she felt as though she actually understood it. It and its kind were infinite, timeless, and more terrible than words or thoughts could capture. They feasted upon misery and strife and souls and life, and they lurked somewhere out there in the cold, vast, black voids that lay between the stars. There, everything was so empty that it was like a bottomless pit that led down, down, down into lower and worse and more twisted realms. They only emerged when something drew their attention, when they felt the urge to hunt… in their hubris and displays of power, so near to the void and away from the protection of the Monarch’s terrible light, she and Iqelis had attracted these monstrosities.
But how could they ever be defeated, banished back to the nothingness from whence they came? She couldn’t find the answer to that; there was no time, for with each moment spent within the corpulent monstrosity’s caustic innards, she dissociated more and more, drawing that much closer to oblivion. She tried to fight her way free, to force her way out through the lenses of its eyes, but it held her tightly, too tightly to wriggle or break out. It would rather burst and die than surrender its meal. Its greed was its undoing; she seized control of the beast for just a moment, just long enough to send it careening too close to the maw of an even greater horror. Without discrimination, that leviathan’s jaws eagerly crashed down upon this mere worm, rending and ripping and shredding it into chunks and clouds of gore. Even then, even as it was swallowed by an even greater maw, the nebulae and rivers of gore – all that remained of the demon – tried in vain to wrestle with Yudaiel and drag her to the same fate, but she was strong enough to break free and soar out from the gaping mouth.
She beheld the carnage, and through the tumultuous battle beheld an even greater swarm of these demons… she was weak now, too. And her hard-won knowledge, claimed from the eldritch mind of one of these demons, was slipping through her fingers and out of her mind more and more with each passing moment. Some knowledge was just not meant to be known, not possible to retain.
Below her, the transfigured Fly was locked in his own struggle against the hideous void-spawn. His shadowy immensity had been greatly diminished, now filling but a minuscule fraction of the vast moon-sea that it had corroded, and it continued to shrink as putrid behemoths drained more of it. Nor was he as fluid any longer, for his bulk stiffened and hardened as more of it was sheared away. By now it had almost returned to its primordial state, a monolith of icy crystal hewed into a tripodal spire surmounted by a wheel of many-segmented arms.
A quake shook through the moonscape as most of the limbs slammed down, wreaking obscene carnage on the throngs that harried the black tower's foundation. To little avail, for the mangled carcasses had soon recombined, like the fanciful lens-figures of a kaleidoscope, into a tangle just as horrid and ravenous, and scattered entrails had sprouted like seeds into cyclopic coral trees with fanged mouths across their trunks. Iqelis raised a hand, parting a current of the Flow and raining the ravages of doom onto the encroaching horde; yet once more, the ineluctable was brazenly defied by the otherworldly monstrosities, for whom it seemed there were neither past nor future.
The god's eye, colder now and a measure more lucid than the roaring furnace it had been at the apex of the forsaken duel, jumped feverishly across the tainted field and the churning skies, and at length it met by chance with Yudaiel's own pupil. She did not need to peer into its temporal shadow to perceive the emotions behind it. There were still remnant clouds of rage, though they wandered confusedly, uncertain which foe to cast themselves against, and a shadow of spite at being so beset when he believed his triumph was nigh. But above all, it was lost. Consternation and disbelief reigned in the fading light of the great eye. His look seemed to be asking her whether she was seeing the same as him, whether this abominable breach of Time's law was real and not a deception more insidious than even she would dare to weave. Hostility was eclipsed by the desperate will to find something familiar in this nightmare. For the first time since the universe's wheel had begun to turn, Iqelis was shaken. Another moment, perhaps, and despondent apathy would overtake him, the uncountable arms collapsing limply as forests of teeth tore him to shreds.
She understood, of course, and she dove back down towards him. A hundred soaring demons stood in their path, but she wove all of her vastness and her nothingness between their seeking limbs and horrible claws of brass, away from all their horrific maws and teeth of crystallized nightmare and misery. She made her way through the swarm, finally drawing close enough to reach out and touch her rival.
A great beast thundered across a plain, savaged and harried at every step by the lions and hyenas, the flies and the mosquitos. With roars and mighty thrashes of its limbs and tail, it crushed and mutilated those lesser creatures by the dozen, but its assailants were endless, and they knew no fear. They were no mere beasts, after all; these were demons in another shape.
The great beast’s life drained from a thousand wounds; the buzzards smelled blood, if not rot, and already circled high overhead in anticipation. But then a sweet wind came, and it breathed it in deeply and gladly, even as the vapors carried by that gale forced their way into its flesh and changed it. The beast’s hide was crystallized into impenetrable adamant, and from all those wounds where it had been raked and bitten there erupted new eyeballs, such that it now saw everything all around with perfect clarity. It trampled and massacred its powerless attackers with ease.
And as a new expanse of vision had been opened before that oneiric beast, so too did a new light surge up behind Iqelis’ faltering eye. It tore itself from Yudaiel’s gaze and the sights it exuded, snapping back upon the gnashing, clawing tide. No more did it leap and run wildly about, however, harried by the dire spectacle, but it cut precise lines from one foe to another, as if measuring their multitudes and distorted distances. Then he stabbed a finger into the ground, and with the smoothness of a knife running through water carved a trench near his foundation. An empty gesture, it seemed, for none of the horrors had been there to suffer the blow; until a hydra-like tangle of boneless spinal cords, surmounted by toothed but otherwise amorphous lumps of bloodied flesh, twisted at an angle that ought to have been impossible, and instead of breaching his crystalline wall tumbled howling into the fissure that appeared to await it where in would emerge from its contortion through space. A colossal black fist followed it, and liquefied matter sprayed out from the edges of the rift.
The intruders, alien to Galbarian life and matter, were not bound to the temporal laws of the world. But as long as they remained in its confines, they had to abide by some few principles that permitted the existence of things, which kept them anchored to reality yet also subjected them to certain of its laws, however scant. One such imposition was their collocation in space, and though they blurred even that fundamental, for many of them were intertwined in eye-strainingly implausible ways or occupied extensions that should have been too small for them, of each void-predator it could be said that it was at certain moments in a particular place. This was what Iqelis’ revitalized eye tracked in the renewed clash, for though the ghastly adversaries were elusive to Time-attuned Sight, the sequence of the terrain they afflicted could be traced, and though that gift was barred to him, the momentary favour of the All-Seeing Eye permitted him to glimpse the reflections of the Tapestry on his black waters, and thereby forestall the hideous assaults.
Thus his arms multiplied again, and struck out with renewed force and focus. It was no immediate turning point, and many were snapped off and devoured by the forest of teeth where a wily terror twisted in a way that none could have predicted, or where a sacrifice was demanded, but the battle became more even. The seething ranks were now cut off when they tried to advance, halted by suddenly awning pits and rising shield-mountains. The One God’s towering body stirred with fluidity again, and his movements gained haste to match their decisiveness. Barriers rose and crumbled, and at the bidding of orchestrating claws the Flood spilled forth to reinforce them. Its waves did not seek to uselessly lap at gnarly hides and pulsing membranes, but washed smoothly around them, swallowing the ground they stood on into crumbling gaps. Undulant bodies toppled back as their material footholds failed them. In places, they became tangled with each other as they retreated, flesh commingling in a charnel metamorphosis until where two had been forced back, one was left standing.
At some point Iqelis had lost track of the Reverberation amidst all the thrashing, the carnage, the ambushes and feints. She had cast wide his gaze and granted him Sight beyond sight, but now he could not even See where she had gone.
Far away…
It was alone again, slowly hovering upriver. The Six had withdrawn into the mists of the Tlacan, restless and uneasy after it had told them of the battle that rent the moon, but not daring to go out across the world and hunt again, in case their master returned suddenly and demanded account in a foul mood. But the One that was no longer Seventh did not fear the chastising hand of its god. Death was illusory and ephemeral for one trapped in a cyclical existence, less forgiving even than the one it had led before, but for those few moments until it resurfaced from the black Flow, perhaps it would have respite. Respite from its dual servitude, labyrinthine as it lay ahead in the paths of the future, and respite from the Sight which even now needled its three-lobed burning eye.
The visions had not abated since the first brush with the vastness. If anything, they had grown more frantic as the night wore on. Dim figures barely had the time to form before being swept away by the next expanding thread, yet this came as a relief, for of late some sinister presences had been intruding into the dreamlike vistas which it did not wish to see more clearly. The two feuding gods were no longer alone in their battle at the edge of the world. A third force had intruded upon their contest, and it was not one that the Outsider could match to any strand of fate, nor to any reflection on the Flow’s surface. There was something unsettling about these aggressors, a whiff of red skies and shattering divinity, a stench of astral blood that made them sickening to even glance at.
But the third eye was a curse, not a gift, and as the Outsider passed near where it had fatefully set upon those sleeping humans, the visions grew sharper. And it Saw them.
Pain and fear struggled within it as it reeled from the revelation. It was not as though the entities could harm it, far as they were, though had they descended upon the Galbar it suspected that their distorted claws might have cut short even its recursive life. The horror they radiated was an instinctive feeling, the sort of fright that made one recoil from large spiders and tentacled octopi, though orders of magnitude more intense and protracted. A fundamental revulsion for the other, the different stirred its core, and beset by the dread of something more alien yet than itself, the Outsider sought to exorcise the noisome sights by giving them voice:
"No other eyes have vented there Since eyes were lent for human sight— But here, with gaze untamed by night, I see the Elder Secret bare.
Inhuman shapes, half-seen, half-guessed, Half solid and half ether-born, Seethe down from starless voids that yawn In heaven, to tides of stygian pest.
And voidward from that pest-mad zone Amorphous hordes seethe darkly back, Their dim claws laden with the wrack Of things that gods have dreamed and known.
The loathsome Fishers from Outside— Are there no tales in warning told, Of how they found the worlds of old, And took what pelf their fancy spied?
None sees me watch, long fore the dawn, Nor does my flame bear any mark Of what I glimpse in that curst dark— Yet from my soul all peace has gone!"
“Such a vivid poem,” a ragged voice commented from the darkness of a riverside shrub, not so far away at all. “Your words paint, and the moving pictures makes this nightmare that I See all the more real.”
It was Medes, that prophet, the one that had cursed that Eschatli, back when it had numbered among the Eschatli, when it had been One of Seven. Now, it carried a burden, and was somehow even less. And Medes Saw that too. The Outsider saw that Medes was alone; the others had gone on ahead downstream in their flight from him after that chance encounter, but the prophet, aged by the decay of an Eschatli’s touch, had soon run out of breath and had to stop.
“You… you understand my warning, now,” the human stated as fact.
”Aye, great was the loss of my spirit, And great is the reach of its doom; Not the pity of nightfall can cheer it, Nor can respite be found in the tomb: Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.”
the spirit answered mournfully as it stopped in its drifting, hovering over the river like a lost storm cloud.
Above, a more tangible cloud began to let loose its burden, sloughing off heavy raindrops that plopped as they seeped into the ground. Water mixed with sand and clay. A mirthful chuckle mixed with a hacking cough and a sorrowful sob. “These horrors in my Sight are too much for a mortal heart to bear. I implore you now, finish what you have begun, and grant me reprieve.”
As a wisp of mist borne on a sepulchral breeze, the spectre approached the dying seer. It did not set upon him like a hungry psychopomp as it had the first time, but gathered over him in a grim pillar, looking down upon him with three solemn eyes. It descended then, slowly, as it intoned a susurrant dirge.
”Then may for you death be A soothing well in an oasis dim— Cool-gleaming, hushed, and hidden gratefully Among the palms asleep At silver evening on the desert's rim.”
And Medes was engulfed in its black smoke as in a silent shroud; and when it rose again, nothing was left but dust and tranquil bones.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
After Yudaiel had dove down to Iqelis’ aid, she had found herself precariously amidst the densest swarm of horrors. Unseen shockwaves of force and all-too visible crackling bolts of lightning shot forth omnidirectionally to stave off the attackers, but she didn’t last long, not when her every attack against these strange beings seemed nigh futile. Eventually she found herself weary and surrounded on all sides with nowhere to flee, and then was caught by one of the greatest of the horrors. It had seized her with both tentacles real and fetters unreal, tethering its mind and will to hers such that there was no escape. When its many jaws came unhinged, she careened to the side and instead clung to its sickly flesh and what passed for its lips, like a veneer of intangible sweat. But pores and fissures had erupted from the amorphous demon’s form, and she had been siphoned and drank and absorbed – her consciousness, her mind, and her warmth swallowed and pulled in through some perverse method of inverted perspiration.
This beast, distorted as its manifestation in this world was, had far too much substance to it for her to puppeteer its bulk as she’d done for that last, smaller one. In truth, she now felt her vigor waning. She had already been pushed to the brink and beyond; her entire mind felt laden with fatigue and tiredness and the hints of surrender. The fighting spirit – that part of her that still screamed and raged and wanted to fight – now seemed a quiet and distant voice, one whose cry was stifled by a smothering pillow, or distorted by the weight of water as it called out from up above the clouds while she drowned in a deep lake. Even as it was digested and subsumed into nothingness, the will to struggle started to pass away like a fleeting dream…
In what might have been a final flash of clarity before oblivion or a gesture extended in air from outside, or perhaps both at once, a beautiful tapestry pinned to a wall swept before her in an unbounded wealth of colours and woven patterns. Spun across its face in vibrant threads were likenesses of the celestial spheres, the golden sun, the multifarious Galbar and the silvery moon, framed by the distant chorus of the pale stars. Of those, the earthly globe filled the center, with the sun and moon alike below it in different corners.
Her sight fell upon the lunar orb, and she saw that the edge of the tapestry where it lay was frayed, leaving argent threads to dangle down to the floor. There, they were lost in a mass of blackness: a swarm of huge, lazy flies carpeted the soil, unmoving but so thick that it could not be seen what they sat upon. One of the loose threads twitched, perhaps moved by a breeze, and slipped slightly out from its place in the pattern. A portion of the flies strewn out below it, stirred by the motion, sleepily rose from the bare stone floor and buzzed all together to another place further away. The loose thread seemed to have engendered a cascade, however, for another slipped out after it, and another. Every time some length of the silver weave fell, the flies below it moved away. There was a curious order to their flight, and every time it was only those whom the the threads brushed by that woke, as if there were a correspondence between the loose lengths as they fell further out and which of the insects were shaken from sleep.
Then her sight descended on one of the threads, and it was a thread no more, but a silvery river, with banks of grey and black stone. A wooden chest lay by its course, and into it unseen hands laid a still body with indistinct features, yet clearly untouched by decay. The cover snapped closed above it, and the chest was pushed into the shimmering waves, where it drifted downstream. As it floated, Yudaiel could see the corpse within mouldering in the darkness, with no respite from the faintest breath of air; until the fumes of putrescence became too much for the wood to bear, and it burst in a sickening rain of rot and splinters that stirred her awake to her similarly malodorous fleshy prison.
She lapsed in and out of lucidity; the light of the path out of this tortuous confinement flashed here, and then there, and then disappeared before returning to the first place, always ever so slightly out of reach. In this state and place the otherworldly and unknowable knowledge that she’d extracted from the mind of the first horror returned momentarily, slipping back into her fingers. The pieces came together… she almost knew what she had to do and how to achieve it, yet she felt so weak. Her own despair and hopelessness was only amplified by the appalling clime about her; half-digested and alien memories of the multitudes of all this abomination’s past victims flitted about like ash, and the curse of her Sight forced upon her the weight of experiencing some of their suffering vicariously as she Saw shattered fragments of their final thoughts.
A voice pierced the din with clarity so crisp and pure that it harkened back to a time that felt so distant, so very long ago, before she had been swallowed.
”You do not perish today, Yudaiel,” it proclaimed. She thought that she heard a droning sound, the distorted buzzing of flies, or perhaps the faintest roar of a distant river. ’Iqelis?’ she wondered in disbelief. She sensed the weight of a thousand shoulders shift, but it didn’t answer her, not directly.
Behind the words were the weight of an image; she Saw smoky roiling clouds, or perhaps currents in a river, and behind that just endless darkness. But in the center was a great looming hulk with innumerable hands and arms, far too many to count, so many that the elbows bumped and jumbled all together and she wondered how such a great mass of limbs could ever be coordinated. There was no background with which to compare, but she knew that this silhouette was tall and vast and inevitable; it consumed and seemed to fill the entire endless void. Just as that wound in the chest of the Monarch of All was so deep that it stretched into what may as well have been eternity, this familiar giant seemed infinitely tall.
The darkened lord – her unexpected savior – leaned closer, His body like a towering sculpture of frozen, glassy darkness. ”You have yet to fulfill your purpose; I have need of you yet. These monsters can be bested, so FIGHT!”
That final order echoed like thunder, shaking the void of her waking nightmare of a vision with such might that it roused her back to the horrific reality of her torment.
’FIGHT!’
…
’FIGHT!’
…
’FIGHT!’
Each booming roar of the word lent her strength: it endowed her with steely resolve, and also vigor that she didn’t know she possessed somewhere, perhaps that truly wasn’t even her own. She remembered what she had seen of these creatures’ disquieting and aberrant physiology, and the patterned fraying of Reality’s threads… she focused, and her mind reached out beyond her prison to find the Flow. Then she pulled it unto herself, and the monstrosity could not resist its decaying touch, not this time, not when the unseen stygian waters seeped through the tiny pores that she opened to allow grant access into its otherwise impervious skin. The Flow, guided by her mind, sundered the valves of its vile heart and poisoned whatever horrific substance flowed through it as a mocking, twisted analogue to warm blood. Using the Flow’s pressure, she then forced open a maw, breaching a way out, and escaped.
The horror came unbound and exploded, imploded, dissolved, and sublimated all at once. She’d actually called upon Iqelis’ deleterious aspect and guided it with such precision that not even that anomalous demon could withstand it! Her captor was utterly destroyed, its remnants smitten with enough power that nothing had endured in part or whole, that no other beasts spilled forth from its entrails as though their bodies had been stacked together in this plane of existence. Yudaiel was freed, unshackled, but so, so tired. The swarms still remained, but at least they now feared her after having witnessed that display.
They had shrunken now, too, for it seemed that the One-Eye had not been idle. His own bulk had collapsed again, and instead of a crowned tower embedded in the lunar surface, it was reduced to a less imposing though still gigantic simulacrum of his body’s torso. Below it there was nothing but a colossal tapering spike which, lodged into the stone, held him upright as he warred with the shapeless throng. He glanced up at the Reverberation, and his eye seemed to wander as if he were expecting to see someone else who had burst free along with her. Finding no other presence, it flashed with surprise, but soon turned its attention back to the battle the scores of his hands were waging.
Arrayed against them was a host much changed since when Yudaiel had last seen it. Driven back by incessant lunges from the black claws, many of the creatures had folded into each other in that blasphemous amalgamation that overtook them when collapsing spaces forced them together. Webs of bone and membrane had swallowed worm-eels into tubular canvases of mutilation, spine-limbed scarabs and serpents of intestinal flesh dripping with bile were knotted into twitching, seeping branches with insectile shells instead of bark. These comminglings had not paradoxically increased the size of the beasts; if anything, some of them had shrunken, as though the binding force had crushed some of the claim they had cast upon dimensions.
Iqelis looked at her again, and pointed a finger at one of the amalgam-trees: there, perhaps, lay the way to stemming the tide at last. He stretched out his arms further than they ought to have reached, and again the flurry of crust-shattering blows and corroding splashes from Time’s river began. Yudaiel’s ethereal bulk shuddered, exhausted, but then she threw her weight into the fray too, bending the Tapestry and distorting space; that was the means through which she was able to hurl about and cast down the horrors where even her telekinesis was not alone enough to overcome their own formidable mastery. It was still a battle, and no mere hunting of a harried foe. More black hands and wrists were snapped away from the mass that was Iqelis – the horrors possessed teeth and claws whose bite far exceeded their apparent length, and used them to vicious effect – and as the god’s severed appendages fell and shattered upon the ground, it became evident that these wounds were taxing upon his magnified frame. With every few new arms that sprouted like a hydra’s head to replace those lost, slivers of bulk vanished from around the god’s disembodied torso, until he had grown thin and emaciated.
Yet still, slowly and painfully, the terrors were driven back. Here two fell into a globe of limbs and staring eyes. There more were crushed by each other’s weight, in spite of the moon’s airless light-footedness, into a churning wave of steely grey sludge. There again, a viridian growth with empty yellow eyes and root-arms sprouting out from its head crashed into another amalgam, a mound of purple flesh ringed with red irises and creeping upon millipede legs, and the tumorous living hill that ensued was hideous to behold. Little by little, they dwindled, ceding ground as it crumbled around them and withdrawing into each other for lack of any other route of retreat.
In the end, only two corpulent, writhing masses of disconcerting demon-flesh remained. Yudaiel grasped one, and Iqelis the other, and without speaking the two understood what had to be done and crushed their final two foes together. They squeezed, and squeezed, against the struggling and screaming horrors until two congealed together into one, and until that one was compressed into an unholy singularity, a ravenous gap in space that began to clothe itself with a skin of angular grey plates. And then they manipulated Time and the Tapestry and the Flow in a hundred arcane ways, and together tore a rift in creation just wide enough to cast out the abomination before it had coalesced, and then receded their touch and sewed the wound closed before it offered passage to anything else from beyond.
On the moon, tranquil quiet was restored at last.
An Eschatli phantom wanders Nalusa by night. Driven by envy as much as by its ruinous directive, it visits a burrow full of maramoda and kills them all. Then it chances upon some sleeping humans led by a particular prophet, and tries to do the same again. It is halted by Yudaiel, who takes note of it, seizes it, bestows upon it the gift and curse of prescience, and effectively enslaves it. That One is no longer just an Eschatli – it is now the Outsider, a champion of Yudaiel.
Yudaiel seeks to do much the same to Iqelis himself, but it’s made difficult by her confinement to the moon. So, seeing his vulnerable mental state after the Monarch’s visit, she taunts him by saying exactly what she’s done to his minion, and successfully lures him up to the moon.
They fight. It’s a very long and destructive fight as desperation and furies escalate. During the fight, we cut for many commercial breaks that switch to other perspectives so as to give reactions and foreshadowing, and further other plots. The Eschatli, the Medians, the Blackmoss Clan, the Psychic Fungus under the Serene Island, and a research post of kynikos are all featured in their own interludes.
The battle between Iqelis and Yudaiel goes all over the moon and even into outer space above its dark side, on the very periphery of our setting. Out there the fighting draws some kind of horrific space demons that emerge from deep space to attack both parties indiscriminately, and they make Pariah look like a wimp. Their arrival forces the reluctant rivals to team up and defeat the horrors together (barely). Hooray!
Iqelis begins with 9 vigor, factoring in god week bonuses (Yoli Week post coming soon).
4 vigor (enhanced by Doom) is spent on his exertions throughout the fight, which further damaged the moon and knocked some bits of it into orbit as debris. Some comets and asteroids and meteoroids are out in space now.
Iqelis ends with 5 vigor.
Yudaiel begins with 5 vigor; 4 from the end of last post plus one for Yolly week.
1 vigor is spent on making the Outsider, one of the Eschatli, into a champion. It is also blessed with prescience; consider that a 1 vigor (discounted to 0) action if you want. 1 vigor (enhanced by prescience) spent on suppressing Iqelis’ manipulations of time for a portion of the fight. 1 vigor spent on telekinetic blasts and strikes that, along with Iqelis destructive efforts, flung up debris into space. 2 vigor spent on surviving being eaten by the two horrors, and killing her way out of them.
Yudaiel ends with 0 vigor.
The Outsider is created with 0 spirit.
+1 for being in this post +1 for it being a post of decidedly more than medium length +1 for it being an exceptionally long post that the champion appears throughout +1 for participating in a collab
It ends with 4 spirit.
The Eschatli are retroactively made into a holy order as per their original cost of 3 vigor, with 0 prestige.
+1 for playing a role in the post +1 for making appearances throughout an exceptionally long post
I'd first like to begin by complimenting the aesthetic and formatting of your sheet. It has a lot of visual appeal, and that helps with readability too.
Jumping right into the substance, I'm not worried about the potential toe-stepping since I believe both Kho and 404 said they're fine with some overlap over what Rosa and Ruina cover here. Now, I seem to recall you mentioning the duality of tempering and how you mean to take its literal meaning (strengthening objects) as well as its more metaphorical, as it applies to people and the mind. I do like that because it gives you a lot more flexibility and is interesting; however, your aspect section does not seem to allude to that at all. I would like to see some concrete examples and/or boundaries set out in order to help define what the aspect is actually meant to entail for your character.
I like the personality too, assuming that the descriptions from the latter two texts are meant to be mostly accurate. Interesting choice to explain through narrative rather than just walls of omniscient text, too. I presume that this Cathyrian Church will be something that you establish somewhat quickly IC, and I look forward to seeing it. It's good from a GM perspective to be able to note that you seem to already have some interesting plans and creations in mind.
The true form is very good as well. I note that "...become naught but elementals forged in Melainea's essence" feels out of place and perhaps anachronistic given I don't believe we currently have those fantasy sorts of 'elementals' in this RP's setting, but that's a very minor detail to nitpick and I still understood the essence of what you were trying to convey.
Your sheet, once again, is nice and it's accepted -- just please remember my request about you more explicitly spelling out the aspect, and add a bit to that section before putting the final version of the sheet onto the character tab. Minor changes there are the only real request that I have. I'm pretty sure that you intend for this to be a god and not a demigod character, seeing as how she's repeatedly referred to as a goddess, but then again that comes from the Church and her worshipers that have yet to exist so confirmation that's your intent would also be nice. It doesn't directly matter for the sheet whether you're beginning as a demigod or a god, it would just determine what sorts of entrances to the IC would be possible and whether you'd presumably be undertaking an arc in which the Monarch's approval must be earned for an apotheosis and promotion to full god status.
A sage old manbjork trekked through the woods alone with a trusty walking stick in hand, humming nonchalantly to himself. This was a beautiful clime, and it was good to stretch his legs every once in a while; he holed himself up in his burrow more than was healthy. It’d be good to set aside time for excursions like this one more often.
It was just about dusk now; that was mayhaps for the better, as there’d be less of the locals bumbling about to get in his way, or try to see if he smelt right. Still, it was remarkable what they’d done here! The elderly bjork found himself astride a great river now, and upstream he saw the magnificent Dam Voga. Clay, timber, and even stone all brilliantly brought together into one cohesive whole… what a marvel! That Yaroslaw Boulderbite was a blessed fellow, indeed. To toil that diligently was admirable, but to dream so large, to conjure up such grand plans, that was even more impressive!
The shuffling of footsteps announced that his oldest friend had met him there at their arranged place. Taking care to be quiet and stealthy, his favorite compatriot whispered, “They’re out there, alright.”
The former bjork could only chuckle at that; it was almost like Susanoo had expected something to go awry. “Well then, my dear friend, now our day’s labors are about to finally bear fruit. You’ll see that chewing down all those trees in that wood and bringing out here was worth it, aha-ha-ho! Now Susanoo, take up your place!”
The other bjork quickly swam across the river and then scurried off to a high hill that had been stripped bare the industriousness of the local Voganid Clan; that dam had seen nigh every good tree in a long ways chewed down. Still, it hadn’t proven too much of a nuisance to bring the materials here; he’d mostly just needed some sticks and plant fiber, anyhow. Some tallow rendered from the leavings of the shamans helped too, of course.
Night had totally fallen now, and this was a most umbral one. A great eagle soared overhead in the distance, searching for prey, but that was not the most dangerous predator out here in the cold dark. In the moonlight, spearbjorks patrolled the distant dam’s heights with torches in hand, to ward off vertans, corpse-demons, and beasts just as much as to ward off the air’s chilly bite and the moonless night’s gloom.
Drawn to Susanoo’s warmth, darkened silhouettes began making their way toward that hill. Susanoo’s vision was not quite as good, but even he would no doubt hear them; the beasts were overconfident, as they were wont to be after having had such easy picking for so long, living on the periphery of civilization’s stink and picking off the slow, the fat, the foolish who strayed too far or otherwise made themselves vulnerable.
Unfortunately for the bloodsuckers, they were the fools that night. The old manbjork giggled with glee as his discerning eyes witnessed two revolting vertans – one of the mosquito and one of the tick variety – make their way up the most obvious approach to the hilltop. Right where they were supposed to be! They didn’t even have time to so much as cry out before they stepped on the trap, falling through a few flimsy sticks covered in a thin layer of dirt and leaves, right into a pit full of sharpened sticks that had been coated in all sorts of nasty things. Oh, but there were more than two beasts in the night!
Another one, a stealthy leech-sort, had been creeping towards the bait (and it turned out that Susanoo was getting good at being bait – why, he wasn’t even crying out for help or trying to run away!) with a small line of saplings as its cover. That was a cautious one, hiding by the trees even when it was this dark outside. Unfortunately, the oversized worm was too dumb or too blind in that monster form to see the tripwire, so it crawled right over it and got skewered by a giant sharpened log that swung down from above, attached to a practical spiderweb of ropes that had run through all the trees.
The bjork was cackling louder now. “Ahoo-aha, ha-ha-ho!” his maddened voice echoed through the night. The soft sound of beating wings heralded a bat as it swooped down toward him, claws outstretched. But he was even better at being bait than Susanoo was. He didn’t even flinch as he used his trusty stick to thwack a switch at the last second, triggering a net to fly out from where he’d hidden it and entangle the bat. The thing fell into a disgraced heap and broke a wing. Its mewling stopped only after he thacked its head with his stick a dozen times. Mumbling something incoherently, he washed the blood off his stick in the river, then held it up to his eye. The thing became a spyglass, but damn! He’d missed the chance to witness the next trap go off on the far side of the river.
By now this clan of vertans had finally realized something horrible was amiss, and grown wise to these traps. Eh, he figured they’d start running and regroup over in that one clearing over there, which was why he and Susanoo had drenched it all in that animal fat from the shaman, with a bit of oil mixed in for good measure. This was all just too easy! Mortals were so predictable. His spyglass suddenly was a bow, and the god likewise procured an arrow from where he’d set it down. This arrow was tipped with a greasy rag, and with a few curses and murmurs, he used magic to set it alight. Then he fired the burning arrow clean across the river, into that clearing, and laughed as the whole thing was almost immediately transformed into an inferno. No less than a half dozen vertans were caught in the blaze; that was probably another whole clan of the pests wiped out.
Maybe those goofy bjorks would even see the show from atop their dam! The thought made Shen laugh so hard that he almost dropped his lunchbag, but that’d be no good! He reached into it and claimed a meal, his reward for this day’s hard work: a single grain of rice. He didn’t work well on a full stomach, so he was on a diet. A bit of hunger kept his ideas fresher anyhow!
Susanoo shifted back into his draconic shape and flew from that hill over the river and back to his master. “All according to plan!” the two guffawed together in unison.
This is my Yesaris week contribution.
In Voganid territory, a strange old bjork and his pal are wandering around at night; they’re not locals, and they’re also not worried about getting grabbed by any beasts or anything. They’re quite impressed by the giant dam!
After dusk, a clan of vertans emerges to hunt; it seems they’ve been stalking the edges of bjork civilization, ekeing out a living by preying upon any that stray too far from their dams or their clanmembers. Unfortunately, this clan of vampires get absolutely VIET-CONG’D by a pit trap with punji sticks, a field soaked in oil that gets set on fire, and a few other traps that are even more absurd. Yeah, the two bjorks were Shen and his faithful dragon companion Susanoo, and everything that night went according to The Plan™!
Chicomoztoc remained the grandest of all the Achtotlaca realms even on the day of mine own ascension to power, for this civilization is one of the oldest, having been founded early during the reign of Tlanextic by he and the seven great clans that followed him. And even as Tlatotoque after Tlatotoque took power after the Divine One’s rule, the pattern being that each oversaw a more troubled and volatile realm, the borders were expanded at times. Even through its many wars and conflicts, Chicomoztoc grew in power over time.
--Tlatotoque Teotl, the first and Last of His Name
. . . . .
Understand that Tlanextic, for all his deification, remained still as mortal as any other Achtotlaca. So his brazen and molten form were not calescent; when the gods created mortals, they decreed death for us and allotted life unto themselves. Tlanextic’s fragment of divinity granted him long life, but far from immortality. As the years passed they exacted a toll upon him, and what was once entirely molten began to harden into a stony skin, and then he and any other Achtotlaca looked something alike. His innards cooled likewise, as those of our kind are wont to do with age, and afflicted him with a slowness of body in his later years -- the doom that all curse, but which so few ever seem to question, to rage against, to defeat as any other enemy.
Yet we must return to the tale. The legends continue: Tlanextic was an Iyotlaca and so all those that he had saved from that Demon of the Darkened Flame -- all those that had sworn obeisance before him as they god and savior -- followed him as he walked the endless tunnels. Like the Iyotlaca of all the other places of the world, they charted the chthonic depths, they expanded and stabilized the tunnels too small and too dangerous, they tasted from the wells of molten salt untasted and named the great caverns that ‘til then had been unknown and unseen and unnamed. So they lived, in peace, for a long time.
Eventually their wanderings ceased when they discovered the surface, a frigid waste with great stony spires and treacherous ravines and gullies, and rivers of water. Understand that such a thing as water was entirely alien to the Iyotlaca. To encounter rivers -- not of warm, red flowing-fire but of cold and loud white-clear fluid that was poison to the touch -- that rushed and churned was terrifying to them indeed. The only relief that they saw was the heavenly lights, the great sun, a fire so massive and so effulgent that it illuminated the entire surface with blinding light. Not even the sun’s incandescence could make the frigid surface bearable for long, so in those earliest of days they could only venture outside of the depths for short times.
Still, when they found a great cavern within the depths of a volcano, with a caldera that offered many easy paths to the surface, Tlanextic saw a holy sign: there was a grand circular magma chamber with a maze of labyrinthine tunnels winding all about it, and surrounding that central place were seven smaller lava tubes -- that was one chamber for each of the seven tribes that followed him -- and so he proclaimed that they would settle there. He named that city Chicomoztoc, the Cavern of Seven Chambers, and consecrated it as sacred. Grand farms were erected in the depths, and dikes and floodgates to control the coming and going of magma and regulate it even as the volcano slept soundly and as it stirred. Palaces for Tlanextic and the greatest leaders of the clans were chiseled into the stone, and temples were built too, with shrines to sacred Yoliyachicoztl, the mighty and indomitable sun, and to Tlanextic who was God-within-Galbar.
But they could not banish from their minds the memory of that Demon of Fire which did not Glow, just as Tlanextic did not truly slay that Smoke-made-Phlogiston. The beast had been defeated and banished, but not slain, never slain. Tlanextic was the first to remind them of that, for he Saw that it stirred yet somewhere in the hellish depths, and that it had to be kept at bay. Upon every so many passings of the sun over the world above, Tlanextic would remind them. In a sermon he would warn, “That which is ember may become blaze once more, if it is not quenched.”
And then with basalt chisel would he pry a wound into his own rocky carapace, and offer a trickle of his burning blood to fall into the Galbar’s own molten blood. “With this sacrifice of blood, I fortify us against the smoke, I strengthen the seal of light that binds the darkness,” he would say. And his blood was divine, and anathema to the demon, and so mayhaps his offerings of blood carried power that truly did trickle its way down to the depths and keep the demon weakened. Yet he did not explain that technicality, and so in the coming ages there would be much sacrifice.
The descendants of Tlanextic claimed to share in his divine power, and offered their blood in imitation of his fabled sacrifices that they could elevate themselves to something resembling the same lofty glory. Perhaps they did have some tiny bit of divine power to them, even. But the blood of captive Cecepaltictli, taken from lands near and far, eventually became a staple of many great ceremonies. The ever thirsty volcanoes were offered rivers of blood, and the empire was insatiable, and yet the blood of mortals did not weaken the Demon of Ebon Smog, or lull it to sleep; such blood was powerless, yet palatable, and only served to rouse it once again.
And no Tlatotoque sacrificed so many during his reign as did I!
Our pal Teotl continues his recounting of the tale. The city of Chicomoztoc is founded and briefly described -- it’s in a volcano with some openings that grant relatively easy access to the surface, it has vast subterranean farms, and some quite sophisticated system of floodgates and dams was built to keep the lava levels in check.
Teotl also talks about blood sacrifice, and how it began under Tlanextic. Legendary Tlanextic, for all his being semi-divine, was also shown to have apparently aged just like anybody else.
In the deep desert, even the water seemed coarse and dry. Squint through the sun’s glare, and one could behold the sandy sea, each dune was the crest of a wave, slowly shifting and traveling as the endless winds bore it forth. There were rivers and brooks, also; when the wind was especially sharp, it cut gullies and filled them with streams of sand that flowed in the wind and that could scrape and tear at flesh. The sun was hot, and so it was wise to journey by night. The land was also treacherous, and so it was wise to walk by day lest one lose his way, or fall into a hidden gully or pit. It posed a dilemma that for most there was no winning, but fortunately, the weary band of humans trekking through the waste were guided by one who needed no light to See the way.
By night the air was actually quite crisp in the breeze, and the sharp sand was cool and not so rough upon the cracked and leathery soles of their feet. In such conditions the band wandered from one cave or oasis to the next, stopping rarely for fear of being stranded in the open desert when day broke again. The prophet Medes, their shepherd and guide, promised that the wet river was not far and that even now, he could See it lazily crawling across the land, carrying water that was cooler than nice, sweeter than cactus apples, and pure and unadulterated by sand. In the meantime, they satiated their thirst only with tiny springs where dirty and coarse water welled up from the sandstone.
They were arriving at one such respite now; the herds of wild beasts had found it first, and grateful for the water, the beasts who arrived had begun drinking from it. Before the rare watering holes, all of the wild were equal, and the beasts set aside their petty feuds and were at peace with one another. But a lion was also with them, and even as the approaching noise of Medes’ large band of humans -- who were not of the wild -- made the camels, gazelles, and jackrabbits scatter away, the proud lion bared its teeth and showed no fear. This was what the humans had named Nalusa, after all: the Land of Lions.
A great blast sounded overhead, and through the uniform desert sky, a distant object whistled. The dark form was only there for a blink before slamming into the distant horizon. Another bang came from the impact, deafening the scene with its power and launching a plume of sand into the air.
Before anyone could put together the alien scene, another explosion sounded and yet another figure came cutting through the sky. It crashed into the same spot, shaking the ground and summoning a mushroom of sand. Even at the distance Medes and his people stood at, they could see the glittering of glass falling from the sky overhead, the shockwave nearly toppling them.
To flee was the natural instinct, but this watering hole was the oasis of life, so they held their ground. Medes had Seen that there were no other such havens from thirst for a great distance in any direction. Even as the departing beasts hastened their flight all the more, the lion remained by the wellspring, for it too needed to gorge itself further upon the water and rest in its reinvigorating cool. All eyes turned towards the din and the darkness that had fallen from the sky; lit by the moon, there seemed to be some sort of black smoke rising from the shimmering sands at the center of the blast.
As they watched, a lone figure walked out of the crater and perched a leg up on the lip of the desolation. At this distance, Medes could make out the shape of a human man, posed heroically with a snapping cape and hefting a great weapon over shoulder. An inhuman voice boomed from the otherwise normal-looking man, sounding closer than it should.
"Another victory!"
The prophet Medes squinted, and beheld a god through the darkness and across the sandy dunes. He nodded a head in respect, and yet suddenly felt weary. If this was at all like that last river-god, then this might not be so chance or blessed an encounter… last time, when that brute Darius had seized the chance to take power with demagoguery and bullish fervor, the result had been disastrous. The flock had been split, and woe unto gods and humans alike for that; had they all stayed as one, under his guidance, Medes knew that their destiny would have been that much grander. But perhaps this was a benevolent deity.
“I congratulate you for your triumph,” the naked prophet offered in greeting as he strode forth. His head was tilted, to avert his gaze from the god and to also keep one eye fixed upon the lion by the water; prophet or no, only fools turned their backs to those beasts that were kings of beasts, of desert and of veldt.
"Thank you," Apostate boomed, clearly in a good mood. He let out a single monotone chuckle before continuing. "Who are you, whose sword hangs in the breeze?"
“I am called Medes,” the prophet answered, though his face was quizzical. In those early days, the Nalusites knew nothing of clothes or swords, so the god’s japes escaped them.
"I am Apostate!" The god all but yelled in reply, slamming his blade between the two before leaning on it. He peered over Medes with his human eyes and grinned. "How is your life?"
“We walk, and we are weary and have thirst, but still we walk on, grateful for the night’s cool and the moon’s light.”
Apostate shot a fist between him and Medes, keeping it lingering between the two. He shook it violently. “Defying the elements!”
The prophet contemplated that. “If living and surviving can be called defying the elements, then perhaps,” he conceded, but there was some consternation upon the man’s face. From behind his beard, his lips curled, and he cut to the heart of the matter. “I look into your essence, and see a great storm. What is your purpose, Great Apostate?”
“Let’s find out!” Apostate grinned back, his skin bubbling for just a moment. “What!” The God paused for dramatic effect. “Do you want?”
The prophet peered into the future, unsure if this was some trap, or if he was being offered whatever he could wish for, or if this was some philosophical quandary, or something else, but black smoke defiantly obscured all from his prescience. “We have a dream,” he told the god, “and we know the path to it, too.” Then his head turned to the lion, who still zealously guarded the small watering-hole. “But our throats are parched, and without water this path becomes a perilous one.”
“Then take the water,” Apostate answered simply. He pushed off his blade to stand up straight and in doing so, the handle to the mighty weapon tilted towards Medes. “Do you know how?”
“What is this instrument?” the wisest of them could only ask, not immediately taking up the blade but rather feeling the strangely smooth, cool texture of its blade. Soft and cool, not like the sand or clay underfoot, not like the grass in greener parts they’d seen away from this deep desert, not like the rough bark of the acacia trees, but like the softness of a riverstone weathered smooth by water… or like water itself. The prophet was awestruck, and slowly, some of those behind him advanced forward to similarly gawk at the weapon, Apostate’s question forgotten.
“It’s a sword,” Apostate proudly responded, “it is one of the many ways a person can seize their means from things that otherwise oppress them.” He paused for a moment. “There are many ways to seize your water, I can see them in the air, to defy what stands in your way… but I notice that this way seems to have taken your interest.”
The hand of Medes ran further upon the black metal’s glossy sheen, revelling in the silky smoothness… until it brushed against the razor-sharp edge, and found a new sensation. A small gasp escaped the prophet’s lipsas he beheld the place where flesh had been broken and blood now gushed.
“I understand it now,” he said, intuitively grasping it by the hilt. He tested a sawing motion in the air, stabbing and pulling it back, but found that unnatural — the immense weight of the weapon tossing him along with it. Next he tried a slashing arc, and found that more suitable, even if the weight was still rather unwieldy, forcing him to use both hands and all his strength. The lion only watched and growled in response to this endless din, its eye glued to the throngs of men crowded around Medes and Apostate even as it slowly lapped at the water.
“Is that your water?” Apostate suddenly asked as he split from the group, casually strolling towards the murky oasis.
“No,” Medes admitted after some thought, “but still, we must take it.”
Scuffing his feet in the sand, Aspostate stopped at the bank of the small pond — if it could be called that. He knelt down and dipped a hand in the water, finding it as warm as expected of such a shallow body. This callous disregard to the nearby lion as it growled and bared its fangs seemed to set the beast off guard, but not understanding the nature of the being before it, the king of that desert finally leapt forward with claws extended.
Apostate spun to meet the beast, and as it lingered mid-jump, the god let out a beastly roar that turned the lion’s into a squeak. The immense force of the rage forced the lion to land early in fright, and it backed slowly, eyes never parting from the strange beast that was Apostate. But like the lion before it had been cowed, Medes had also mustered up his courage, and so he had strode forward and was now almost upon the distracted animal. The shuffling of sand about the prophet’s feet suddenly caught the lion’s ear, and it turned its head just in time to witness the savage strike that cleaved into its back and nearly parted it in two.
It let out a different howl then, one of anguish, but began to spasm and go into shock. Medes and the humans could hardly comprehend what was happening; never had they hunted before, instead having lived off the fruits of the land throughout their long journey.
After some moments, Medes began to realize the burden of empathy: he looked into the dying beast’s black eyes, and realized that he should not prolong its suffering anymore. So he wrenched the blade out of the creature’s body, the silky black metal freeing itself with more ease than any mundane blade ought to have had, and without finesse the prophet brought down another savage hacking blow, and then another, and then the lion was in twain.
With a rough tug, Apostate ripped his blade from Medes and swung it over his own shoulder, letting it rest. The expert flourish swiped all the blood free from it before it even touched the god. Apostate idly commented, “It seems you learned a few lessons today.”
Their thirst must have been greater than they had even realized, for the great band of humans surged forward, coming forward in throngs around Apostate and their leader, over and beside the mangled carcass of the lion, to drink deeply from that humble hole filled with sand and mud and water. Medes could not take his eyes away from the lion; though its body was a ruin, the beast’s head still looked majestic, even if its mane would soon be caked with dried blood. It did not seem right, and yet, “Sometimes one’s fortune must come at the expense of another,” he realized aloud.
“Maybe,” Apostate answered, “that’s not what I had in mind, but everyone deciphers the guts of a dead lion differently.”
The god then held out his hand, a large orb of smoky glass present in his palm. “Take this.”
Medes readily accepted it with an air of curiosity. “I plead for your candor, Great Apostate,” he began. “These people look to me for guidance because I am supposedly wise, and yet here I realize that I know so little: what is it that we must do to honor you? What is your lesson and your dogma, and what is the purpose of this stone?”
Apostate let his blade fall into the sand. With both his hands now free he grabbed Medes on each shoulder and lifted him so the tall human form god and the naked prophet were eye to eye — even if that meant Mede’s swollen feet were now dangling in the air, the strange stone-orb having fallen out of his hand. Holding the prophet at arms length but staring deeply into his mortal eyes, Apostate bellowed.
“My lesson? My Dogma? Hear me as I tell you that you are in the most dangerous position a man can be in. You are a leader, and one of the things I do best is kill leaders who forget how to lead,” Apostate started, “so I will tell you the secret of leading without earning my ire, and if you actually remember this, then you’ll have my thanks.”
“Firstly.” Apostate shook Medes to make extra sure he had his attention. “A leader actually follows, and lives among their peers as a friend — ever seeking the best for whoever puts their trust in them. A leader wears the burden of the group, even unto death so long as the others had trusted them. A leader lives by example, showcase your virtues through your actions and your words for the good of those who are looking at you and hearing you. A leader never seeks themself first, but eats last and sleeps last, awaiting the wellbeing of those who trust them. Lastly, a leader only leads those who wish to be led, and encourages the expression of their peers.”
Apostate gave the prophet another vigorous shake. “Understood!?”
Medes nodded vigorously while all the others watched the display gawking. Apostate grinned and set the prophet down.
“Good,” he said, “and if you forget, I’ll cut your balls off.”
Panting, and rather meekly, Medes reclaimed the orb from it had fallen into the sandy ground. “All that, I take to heart. But what of this stone?”
“Oh!” Apostate pinched his chin. “Don’t lose that, for your people’s sake. If it were to be lost, who knows what might happen…”
The prophet from that Nalusa post (guy who got overthrown by Darius) is wandering through the desert with his diminished band of followers, making progress towards the stable river promised by Arvum. But they’re all thirsty, and when they find an oasis, some lion is guarding it and they’re at a loss.
The desert explodes and Apostate arrives. He lets Medes (that's the prophet's name) borrow a sword and distracts the lion while the dude slays it. Then he imparts Leadership 101 unto Medes and hands him a palantir before dipping out.
Apostate starting: 6
1 Vigor: Another indestructible glass orb of mystery
Under the moon’s frosted light, the snowdrifts almost glowed. Their luster was a bloodless white, almost like bone. Even as he crawled through it, Kono was unbothered by its chilling touch upon his bare flesh.
The woods seemed just as alive tonight as he felt. His heart nervously raced, the leaves whispered and the wind howled. He stalked further, crawling slowly through the snow and keeping to the shadows beneath trees. In the distance there was a crackling sound -- not that of twigs breaking beneath feet, but rather of them snapping in a bonfire’s heat -- and the flames’ orange glow seemed as bright in the distance as the morning sunrise. Good; that brightness only meant that they would be all the more blind to what dwelled in the shadows.
He inched closer at a snail’s pace, taking care not to brush against any bushes or bring his weight to bear upon any twigs. Beneath the snow in places where the blanket was thin, pine needles dug into his flesh, but this was worth that discomfort. When he had at last come close enough, so close that he dared not inch any nearer to the firelit clearing, he waited with all the patience of a giant sabertooth.
The words of the afternoon before echoed in Kono’s head: “So they truly gone then! It’s been three sunsets since we’ve seen them. What are we to do now without the womens’ warmth?” Wilu had asked.
“They aren’t far,” Kono had answered, “I know they haven’t wandered far. When the day is clear, I have seen the black pillars rising from where they make camp.”
“Perhaps we could steal some of them,” Honon had half-japed. “Just one or two to share, eh?” And then Wilu had laughed, but not Kono. And they must have seen the realization in his eyes, for they had immediately tried to sway him back.
“Hesutu said we are not to enter their camp, nor bother their band,” that craven Wilu had said. Well, at least Honon had been easy enough to convince. This wouldn’t be like that other time, kono had promised his friend, not like with that Lansa… that had grown horribly out of hand, when she had shrieked and clawed at them they had lost their calm. The snow in their minds had melted, and boiled, and they had acted on rage and instinct from then… all that came thereafter had been disaster, and they hadn’t even been thinking clearly enough to hide the signs of that mishap.
Ah, and speaking of snowmelt… they had stayed still for so long that their warmth had started to melt the snow about them into slush, and Kono’s simple clothes were beginning to grow damp. He looked back to his accomplice just a short ways behind him, near another tree, and was about to signal that they should reposition… but then came a sharp snap. The two of them whipped their heads to the side and peered into the darkness, making out the silhouette of a lone figure heading out into the woods. She might have left the fire on the edge of the camp and separated from her friends for just a moment to make water, but that was all the time that it took. The two Childan men silently signalled one another with hand gestures, then crept after her with rocks and balls of moss in hand.
The night was of course dark, but not so dark that they stumbled over roots or gave any warning. When they were close enough, they leapt upon the unsuspecting woman, and abducted her as easily as an eagle might take a hare.
Far away, through dark woods and blizzards and then some ways past a mountain that walked, there was a land with many lakes and rivers. One neck of a stream, once-wild and filled with rapids but now tamed by a small dam, was home to the floundering Blackmoss Clan. They have thrived here not so long ago, but that was before the First Betrayal and the dozen more that had come since then.
A small group of sentries paced atop the dam on that frigid night, keeping watch for any threat -- be it bjork or beast. The full moon illuminated the surrounding environs well enough to make the lot of them feel safe; it was so bright that only one of them even bore a torch -- Ruslan was that one’s name. On dark moonless nights it was easy to get on edge, for you could hardly see anything more than ten feet from your torch, but now it was easier to relax.
So relax they did, until they beheld a sable shape in the moonlit waters. It was making steady progress downriver towards their dam. Ruslan slapped his tail upon the water out of precaution, and manbjorks scrambled out from the nearby lodge with spears.
“You’re being too hasty, that could just be a log,” murmured one of Ruslan’s fellows, but Ruslan had sharper eyes and he had seen a tail bobbing behind that shape. It was a bjork, perhaps an enemy spy trying to sneak into their lodge in the dead of night…
The swift current bore the bjork downstream until it thudded against the dam. The bjork was swollen and waterlogged. “Just a corpse,” Ruslan announced, and that was met with a curious mixture of relieved sighs but also concerned murmurs.
Ruslan held the torch above the body, squinting at it. It looked as though some of the limbs had been gnawed on by fish or some other scavengers, so there was no telling (for his untrained eye, anyhow!) just what had slain that bjork, but he liked to think it was one of their own war parties camped upriver. Finally, he shook his head. “Not a face I recognize. Must’ve been one of those Wickedtooth bastards.”
A raucous cheer erupted, but a cold breeze stifled it soon after. Most of the spearbjorks went back inside where it was warm, while Ruslan and the other sentries lifted the corpse and threw it on the other side of their dam. Let it keep going downstream, become someone else’s problem. It was bad to leave the corpses out in the woods -- the smell drew in the giant wolves and other predators -- so they usually just threw them in the river and let them drift away.
Their enemies -- those of that wretched Wickedtooth Clan upstream -- cared little and were wont to just leave their slain enemies where they had fallen, or sometimes even make macabre examples of the bodies. Barbarians. At least that meant it usually wasn’t a familiar face that they found washed up on their dam.
When their shift was over, Ruslan and his fellows went to the larder and took their meal; times were hard with so many of the foragers having been slain by the Wickedtooth and so many others having been forced to take up the spear, so there was somewhat pitiful picking among the foodstuffs. A few morsels remained of that black moss for which their clan had been named, and each of the young bjorks claimed a bite or two of it to take with some berries. There were a couple of odd mushrooms too -- in recent days, those fungi had seemed to have begun growing everywhere, and never before had their kind been seen. But thus far none of the Blackmoss had been willing, much less especially eager, to try them. Hunger could gnaw, but there were many such fungi that could cause pain even worse, or potentially even kill.
Ruslan ate the berries, but left his chunk of black moss untouched. He made his way deeper into the lodge and found Tanas, a once-mighty manbjork that had been maimed by a spear to the gut, and who in the past days had begun to stink of infection. It hurt Ruslan to see him like that.
“Pa,” the youth began, “I brought you some of the good stuff.”
Through blurred vision, Tanas saw the moss in his kit’s hand and smiled at the sight. “No, savor it for yourself. You still have strength in you. Death is near, boy. I feel the fire creeping through me -- don’t think that I can’t smell it too -- and your presence is enough.”
The manbjork’s words were interrupted by a sputtering series of hacking coughs; the sound agonized them both.
“Eat something, at least,” Ruslan pleaded.
“Dust. I’ll eat dust, and save what’s left of the larder for you young lot. You know we don’t have the supplies to waste, boy.”
Ruslan stymied a tear. A warrior never showed his heart, not unless another bjork hacked open his ribs. “There is something, though. Some mushrooms we found. The others won’t touch them; we don’t know if they are good for eating. Haven’t seen their kind before. So take them, if you will have nothing else.”
“Oh? Well, I could try a few then, for the good of the clan… bring ‘em to me. I’ll tell you lot if they’re fish-shite or if they’re good to eat, ha!” his father managed, before the coughing returned.
Some time later, his son returned, and the old warrior graciously devoured the head of one mushroom in a single bite. He’d been ravenous, truth be told, and was grateful to have found an excuse to eat something. He ate the stalk of that first shroom, and then began working on a second. The fungus tasted odd, and smelled like wet fur. Still, the stuff was not as foul as it might have been, and they seemed to settle alright in his stomach. It wasn’t a terrible last meal, but of course, he would’ve rather had something else.
Or would he?
The taste was beginning to grow upon him. There was a strong earthy flavor but something more palatable layered subtly beneath; it was like aspen cambium, only muddled with a bit of dirt. More voraciously now, he consumed more and more.
“I guess you like them, pa,” Ruslan managed to chuckle.
Seeing Ruslan smile for a moment rather than give his piteous form that look did more for Tanas than anyone else could have known. Between bites, he offered back a, “Ya, not so bad. See if I don’t croak from them within the hour, and then maybe try a couple for yerself.”
Then he settled back into the mat where he’d been left to rest. The heat in his head and the horrific burning in his infected wound both ebbed, while the aches in his back all but vanished from mind. Tanas felt his muscles relax, and was at peace. It was a good feeling, not like that ominous lack-of-sensation or queer warmth that you felt in a toe before frostbite took away its feeling entirely. But was it?! Tanas suddenly felt cold, and chills wracked him as his heartbeat pounded. Was this what dying felt like? Was he being lulled into the long sleep already? He’d thought that he was ready, but panic still set in.
“Pa, what is it?” he suddenly heard, but he didn’t see his son.
“Ruslan! Ruslan, where are you?”
“I haven’t moved!”
“Oh, of course… my fever, it’s the fever. Please, I need water. Help me to the water…”
Even as a wave of coughs punctuated that request and the remaining mushrooms tumbled out of his father’s hands, the shaken youth jumped to comply. With help from Ruslan as well as what little strength remained in his limbs, once-strong Tanas clambered up to his feet. Leaning on his son, the two slowly made their way through the den and to the river-entrance. Tanas half-stooped, half-collapsed faceshift down, and he greedily began sucking down the water. But this water looked strange. In the gloom of their clan lodge one could hardly see, but some moonlight filtered through the water of the exit, and it seemed to give the water an otherworldly glow. The stuff looked odd too, its hue almost mauve, but maybe that was just Tanas’ imagination.
“Alright, that’s better. Take me back to my bedding,” Tanas mumbled. He wanted to say thanks, but some odd alliance of fatigue and pride held his tongue. Perhaps that was for the better; seeing him in such a state had to be hard on the lad; he needn’t remind Rustlan -- his little kit, he still remembered how tiny he had once been -- that time was so limited. They both already knew, but it was best to pretend that they could each banish it out of mind.
Tanas didn’t hear any reply, just the rushing of the river through the walls. How mighty was the river’s roar! And in the darkness of the den, the long shadow twisted and writhed. He saw figures in the darkness: they were fighting, they were filing out of a lodge and walking out over a dam, they were climbing a mountain. And that mountain was climbing a hill, and the trees bestride it were lurching and leaning to view the whole odd scene with better angles. “Aho,” one of the trees laughed, suddenly twisting its shadowy trunk all the way around to look right at Tanas.
He had thought that it was a pine tree, with that trunk and then the triangle-looking shadow atop it, but it was not so pointed at the top like a pine should have been… it was rounded. It was a mushroom!
“You’ll be with us again soon, I hope?” the pine-made-mushroom loudly asked. Its tone was not a forgiving one. Tanas closed his eyes, but instead of darkness between his eyelids and his pupil there was a pattern of color. Maddeningly, when he stared into the color, he saw a mushroom that wilted and became earth, a pinecone that fell, a mighty tree that erupted from that soil and then fell, and finally the divine mushroom revealed itself anew as it sprouted from the rotting log. The cycle repeated, a hundred times and one, and yet he had only taken a single step through the tunnel in that span of time.
“I’ll be back soon, we’re almost to my bed. I’m, I’m sorry for letting you down,” he found himself apologizing to those mushrooms that he had so callously cast aside. How could he have not eaten them with the rest?!
Somewhere far away, as though distorted by being underwater, he heard his son’s voice echo something back before the lad began to sob. But that didn’t matter; he could always set his kit aside later and tell him how to behave like a real manbjork, but right now Tanas needed the mushrooms’ forgiveness. It was a terrible thing to offend a god -- these parts were far from Clan Rod or Mish-Cheechel and so they had never heard of the Green Murder, but even so they just instinctively knew not to offend the divine -- and these mushrooms most certainly were divine.
Tanas understood it now. The revelation came to him, even as he felt the strange sensation of himself laying on the ground and sinking into his bedding, so too did he feel a sort of cosmic understanding as it sank into the depths of his now-so-pliable mind: the mushrooms were not organized as clans, or even as individuals. They did not have one matriarch, and nor did they have just one grand mushroom lording over all the rest as the mushroom god. No, all things were connected! The mycelium tunneled through ground and soil and stone and river and space and time, linking every mushroom altogether in one incomprehensible and vast network. They were all one and the same, collectively and cohesively a whole, and they were God, all of the mushrooms.
It was hard to grasp, and Tanas realized that as he’d grasped the truth of that arcane enigma, he’d been clenching his jaw, gnashing his teeth, and closing his eyes with an almost crushing strength in his eyelids. All of that ended at once when he threw his eyes open. He was no longer inside of that dank and sickly smelling chamber in the lodge where they’d holed him up to die, no, he was outside again and could smell the fresh air. He was curious about his son though, as a father was wont to be, so he stuck his head through the walls of woven timber and mud (it all gave way as easily as water, no, more easily -- sticking his head through was as much hindrance as walking through the air) and observed his son there, looking down upon some shuddering mass of fur that lay on the ground. Ah, that was good, his son was still safe. The thing laying on the floor suddenly vomited, and it was only then that Tanas realized that he was looking upon himself, and yet that was no reflection in the pond. He was well and truly outside of his body!
But if he’d left it behind, then surely he was dead. Yet if he was dead, how was still he writhing and vomiting right there? Tanas was a simple manbjork, but even he saw the inconsistency there. He concluded that he must not be dead, but merely liberated, unshackled, perhaps even ascended. It seemed logical. He had become a god, one with the stars and the mushrooms.
As a god, the affairs of mortals now seemed somehow beneath him. It was quite a different perspective that was thrust upon him all of a sudden, and normally it might have been hard to adjust to, but he was spurred on by instinct. So with a great slap of his tail upon the ground, he propelled himself into the sky. With that single bound, he thrust himself above the tallest of aspens. That still wasn’t good enough, so to get the ideal vantage point he slapped his tail against the nothingness of the air below him and provoked it into slapping him back (that was how bird flew, he suddenly realized) such that he was sent even further skyward, and now found himself comfortably suspended even above the pines. Yes, from here he could see a long ways away, all the way to the damned dam of those damnable Wickedtooth bastards, damn them all!
He supposed that his first act as a god may as well be to smite his enemies, or rather the enemies of the mortal that he had once been, and so he soared yonder with a malevolent mien about him. But then a soundless roar accosted him, and bid him stop. Furiously, he turned his head toward the source of the silent shriek, and then he beheld the greatest star of all in the night sky: the moon! And how had he never before noticed that Great and All-Seeing Eye socketed in its very center, that uncanny orb that stared?
“You,” he proclaimed in an accusatory tone, pointing right at the moon, “may be a god also, but try and stop me! I shall summon the beasts of the land, and conjure malady and malaise, and cast it all upon those insipid fools. Let them worship me as their god, and mayhaps I will show them mercy!”
A ghostly dart flew faster than he could comprehend. It cut through the heavens faster than any shooting star, descending from the moon all the way down to the Galbar’s sky in a thousandth of an instant, and it iskewered him through the chest, right where his infected wound had been. He felt pain again, and this time it was more vivid than ever. Even as an ascended ghost-god-mushroom, he could only gasp for air. But this was not a mere dart, it was a harpoon, and it wrenched him up into the heavens. He was spirited away at an unbelievable rate, but it felt so slow from the pain, slow like the Galbar’s incessant pull had suddenly become a push and he was left to slowly fall all the way to the moon. Still, with the push never abating, his climb grew faster and faster and erelong he was trapped midway between the two bodies, a tiny island of fur amidst the void-sea of space. Fractal lights and eyes peered at him from everywhere between the endless stars and galaxies all around, but his attention was focused solely upon the moon.
That moon was so much grander and terrifying in scale now that he’d approached it; in truth he’d always supposed the thing was just the size of a fist or so, but it sorta made sense that it was really big and just also really far. But none of that mattered; the Eye demanded and commanded his attention, and he was utterly powerless to break contact with it or to avert his gaze and it bored into his mind. With oppressive callousness, the Eye sifted through his memories, and it was as though he relived his entire life in a few quick moments. Then, seemingly satisfied, the Eye ceased and desisted -- for a moment, at least.
Waves of images and condensed concepts, information and understanding, were forced into his mind. He caught tiny glimpses of the storms of thought that raged through Yudaiel’s vastness, and even just the smallest window into her alien mind was terrifying in a dozen different senses.
The concepts co-opted his memories and took familiar simulacrums, that they could retell his life with new meaning and wisdom imbued. In that manner, he could understand that which he could never have understood as words.
He saw the familiar shape of his aunt, the Blackmoss clan’s heavyset matriarch, only her eyes were black voids, like dried and shriveled little blueberries haunting sockets as empty as space. Instead, she looked at him through a great white glow that had been chiseled through her skull and forehead. Through that third eye, she Saw, as did the goddess of the moon. Tanas thought he could see the moon back in there, if he gazed deep enough into the white abyss.
“Y̜̌ȏ̦͔̽u͙̅ ̬̐s̗͎̓͛ę̣̿͑r͉͊v̬̈́e̺̍ ̜̲̂̓m̛͙é͉̣̚ ̠̫̇̚ṇ̙͂̇ǫ̖̽̀ẉ͎̀̃,” the matriarch and goddess stated as fact, “b̺̓͢͝ų̗͈͑͑͡ṭ͙̟́̎̕ ͙̝̳̥͋̓̑͞t͖̻̬̋̈́̈̎͟ḥ̝̘͕̏̏̃̕e̙̺̻̬̍̎͊͘n̡͕̳̗͛̉͊̔,̣̙́͝ ̬̟̩̆͗͘y̺̖̣͒͊͊o̧͍̹̹͂̾͑̀̐͟ų̨̤̣̏̒͘͠ ͎͓͋͢͡͡à̦̥̖͖̃͞͞l̳͚͈̠͑̆̇̄ŵ̧̟̼͘͠a̪̝̋̅y̻͈̦̿̐͆ş͚͋͞ ̡̲͋̄̇͟h̡͈̤̗̃͑̋̓ǎ̙̞̍̚͟v̡͖͂͊e͖̠̗͗̽̓.”
Ah, the reality of the situation was laid bare. He was a lesser god, subjugated to this great one. As all things had to be, and should be. Her truth imprinted itself easily into his mind, engraved itself into his soul, such that believing in it was at once as natural as breathing. But… what was the implication of it?
“How am I to serve your will? What is it that you want? Who shall I smite? I cannot possibly serve you if I do not know these things.”
The matriarch smiled, with teeth that were made of bloody diamonds. Then she chortled.
Ruslan plodded into the room, a burden upon his shoulders. He laid a hand upon his father’s shoulder, and to Tanas that hand and its warmth felt realer than life itself. “You need only survive,” the young manbjork insisted. And then the dam collapsed and so too did the ideabstraction.
Ripples of oscillating color consumed his whole field of vision. Hanas’ spatial sense was completely unraveled, and so he was swept along by the mushrooms’ power just as surely as a twig was carried away by the river. Time’s subjective nature was intensified; he did not know or feel its passage, and felt simultaneously reinvigorated and exhausted when he finally awoke and saw a familiar setting of the lodge, only without strange colors or wild hallucinations. “You have to survive,” he heard his son’s voice echo from the ideabstraction, and when he turned, he found Ruslan asleep right by his side. No doubt the boy had watched over him all night, until he had lost the long battle with sleep. Tanas sighed and stood up. Unassisted. He looked down, and saw his festered wound miraculously healed over, with only a scar shaped like a crescent moon left to show for it.
This was supposed to be a tiny little surprise post, but here we go. It’s divided into two parts, both of which take place in the Giant Lands:
The first part remained short, and just established names and such for a few malevolent Childans. At least some of the males are not content with the way things went with the women, and so the same ones that killed Laysa are back at it again.
Part two involves the Blackmoss Clan, who have fallen on hard times due to their ongoing fighting with their enemies upriver, that Wickedtooth Clan that Zenia saw. Bodies occasionally float down the river and stuff, there’s a bit of a warrior culture developing. That mushroom that told Jiugui it was a god might have been on to something, because now we’ve got a very reliable bjork as a source who says that the hallucinogenic mushrooms are indeed a god!
A wounded warrior named Tanas eats a bunch of them because he was dying and the clan wanted to know if they were poisonous, but he not only survives, he sees all kinds of wild crap, gets texted by Yudaiel, and wakes up miraculously healed! Only now Yudaiel seems to own his tail.
Yudaiel started and ended with 4 vigor. 1 vigor discounted to 0 to send yet another poor (lucky?) soul on a wild trip. Who knew that the Deep State was behind the drug trade? 0 vigor to heal Tanas’ infection; that’s minor enough for a god to do for free.
Before there was life, there was the Dream. Stars and aurorae of color wheeled overhead, and there was serenity. A great multitude of souls drifted through the phantasmagoria like so many little fireflies in the night sky. They did not and could not speak or smell or touch or feel, but they could see, and the world was a beautiful garden. There were many dimensions, and yet there was no time to sully the majesty of creation; everything seemed immortal and immutable in its permeance, and there was only one infinitely long instant of experience before the colors faded and they were dragged into the grim reality of corporeal life.
In an instant all that they had known was uprooted, and they had been trajected to somewhere else. These first people suddenly found that they could feel, could touch, could scream and cry, and they did. But they could not See; the world was too small in its three dimensions, and that horrid yellow orb in the sky was too oppressively bright!
They writhed on the ground, dazed and confused, until sunset’s reprieve finally afforded them the mercy of being able to see. A kinder orb with a softer and more pallid glow appeared in the sky as night began to fall. It was there in the sky that their future was born. Even in the dusktime the light was blinding, but a few of them could See past it. They took it upon themselves to lead the others forward, and so a long journey began.
They walked the land in great roving bands, not staying as one great horde but splitting into many groups. They were not true nomads, for they each followed the guiding light, and knew that at the end of their road was a destination where their journeying could end. But until their arduous trek to paradise ended, they could only march.
Led by the radiance, a mob of nascent humans found a large barrier of water. Continuing their unknown pilgrimage, they journeyed along the land adjacent to it until they came across a circular pool of water, on both sides of the river it was flanked by three pillars of stone with strange symbols etched into them. A lone stranger paced around the pool, unaware of the approaching humans.
The prophet who walked foremost among the procession made for this enigmatic figure who paced among the standing stones. That man walked with his eyes closed, even in the daylight, and he did not stumble. The moon, even on the far side of the Galbar, guided him onward. Like all those behind him, his flesh had been baked red-brown like clay bricks in the sun, for he was clad like the hairless animals of the land. He hummed in his approach, and when he finally drew near enough that he felt it right to speak, his voice was soft and musical, “An auspicious light has brought us together.”
The stranger peering into the lake mused, “A light, or perhaps something else.” he said, turning to face the humans. He was dressed in the traditional furs of Eidolon. His face was different from theirs, bearing two horns with one broken. His eyes did not match each other, with one red and the other blue. If one could glance over his face and look at his arms, they would see rectangular patterns also colored one red and one blue.
He continued to speak, “I did not know that anyone else was here. This might complicate matters.” his voice trailing off towards the end. Beyond the strange color, if one looked closer they could see a certain weariness in his eyes.
The prophet opened his eyes at last, and the two mud-brown orbs gave a knowing look to the stranger before him. He Saw more than most mortals could, and perhaps more than any of them ought to. “If you keep to your path and walk ever on as do we, perhaps you will find the answers,” the man mused, looking to the lake. “It seems so wrong that with these two eyes I behold these waters and see that they are tired, so tired, all but slumbering -- and yet my third eye Sees something else, something beautiful and terrible: the water is alive and thrashing, and it surges and washes away the banks and cleanses the hills.”
”As said, your presence complicates matters. Within this lake is well and woe. It was not meant for you or your kind.” he said with a resigned voice.
“For whom was the lake filled, then, if not those who walk these lands?”
His face grimaced as he looked out to the lake, ”While you were still, these waters were here. When you return to stillness, they will remain. This a monument ” he paused, attempting to find the correct word, ”This is a monument to well and woe, unpredictability, chance, happenstance.” There was another deliberate pause, ”Potential. The word has become cruel to it and conspired against it. Within these boundaries, it is protected. However it would be a disgrace to confine it to such a small container, it would become its prison. It wanted, it needed ways to sneak back into the world that is hostile against it.”
“A monument,” the man echoed back. He didn’t understand, not yet; while his body was in its prime just like all of the other humans that followed him, they all had young minds. How could a people without history know of history or the sentiments that drove one to build monuments? “I See many things: the path that we must walk, which leads beyond this river; my brothers, who followed another and who are beyond the hills and the horizon; the moon, even as she sleeps below that same horizon; and you, who are more than you seem. But while I sense that this river bears rage and that it will flood, I know not when or why or how. This ‘happenstance’ defies order and reason. What is to become of we who must suffer its whims?”
Devoted to his cause, the stranger replied with a soft anger, ”Your understanding is not required.” He mused upon that idea. ”No. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps you do need to understand.” He pulled something from beneath his furs, a red gemstone stained with a blue coloration over part of it. He pushed it towards the prophet, ”Take it and understand.”
A trusting hand claimed the offered gemstone, and the man curiously inspected it.
The stranger peered into the sage, seemingly annoyed, ”You are still blind to it.” A moment of revelation passed over him, ”But how can you understand without experience?” He reached over to his back and pulled something that shouldn’t be there, a grain of barley and a fruit, before eating them. He conjured another few grains of barley and a fruit before handing it as well to the man, ”Do as I have and eat it.”
The prophet complied once more, without question.
The stranger pulled a handful of water from the lake and dumped it to one side of him. He waved his hands over the ground, and on one side of him was a plate with the same amount of grain as he gave to the seer and on the other side where he had first wetted it with water was a covering of animal skins. ”I shall permit your entire group to have either what is on this plate, or what is on this other.” he said gesturing to below the animal skins.
The prophet only stood statuesque in silent contemplation. After a pregnant pause, one of his followers at last stepped forth to gesticulate toward the furs and inquire, “Brother, what is hidden beneath that?”
“Were that I could See, I would disclose that to you,” the prophet confessed, “but alas, the images are like those in the clouds, hazy and ill-defined. I see this stranger hiding a lustrous stone that glows like the sun beneath it, but I also saw him hide a fruit, some grain, some odd-smelling water that foams and froths like the river’s rapids. It must be influence of this lake; like a dust-storm, it obscures the way.”
”This is risk, danger or reward.” he said. Gesturing towards the revealed plate, ”Do you accept the mediocrity of certainty?” and then towards the hidden plate ”Or the grandeur of potential, knowing it might betray you.”
Much clamoring ensued between all of those humans that were close enough to have heard the offer, but the prophet paid them little heed. He finally pointed one finger toward the cornucopia that he could see, and a raucous outcry sounded out from the throngs behind him. For the first time, the prophet turned his back to the stranger and addressed his own people, “You looked to me for leadership and followed because I can See, and yet to walk the hidden path is to travel in blindness. Fate is like a lion; it is not to be tested or prodded.”
”It is unfortunate that you did not choose the greater of the two plates.” he said, before revealing the second plate which had a larger amount of grain than the first. At that, the tumult only grew. ”Know this prophet: there are greater forces in this world than mere lions.” he said, waving his hand and the revealed plates vanished. But as promised before each human gathered a plate identical to the disappeared one appeared before them.
A few angry outcries pierced through the din of the rest, because they questioned the Sight that their prophet had claimed to possess. The leader heard them, of course, but he kept calm even as one mighty man who towered over most of his peers advanced toward the head of the column. “This is proof,” that second man proclaimed, “that it should be the strongest, the bold, who lead us down the path and choose the way. I would have chosen the hidden bounty, and earned us more than this.”
The challenger held up his fistful of barley; it wasn’t much. Though he was hungry, he cast the grains to the ground to make a point; in time, those seeds would sprout. That band of men, who remembered his act, would uncover the nature of grain and seed. But in the moment, all eyes were upon the challenger. “The soles of our feet crack and our legs grow weaker; we have walked far enough, and with this water now, we have arrived at paradise. I say that the journey is finished,” the man dared to shout, and many nodded in agreement for he said what they had hoped to hear for many days. More quietly, he murmured, “But perhaps I will still lend my ear to you if you submit, prophet.”
The prophet was troubled by none of it, having only offered a soft ’So be it,’ when he saw that the crowds’ mind was made. More concerned with the stranger, who he had turned to face once more, the prophet finally asked, “Who are you?”
Ignoring the prophet inquiring about his identity, the stranger addressed the challenger, ”Is that so? Grant me the chance to prove your words to be more than sounds. You may settle upon this river, but know that he was not speaking false when said that one day the waters shall overtake the dry and carry away whatever it can grasp. And upon other days, it shall escape the ground and leave you with little of itself to take. You will not know when these times will come, except that will. But when the waters choose to remain steady, you will not find more prosperous land. At least, any that there are will be further than your feet could carry you. On the other hand, this is just one of several great rivers. I know a river which is far less fickle. It shall still wet the earth around it, but at times that are known to you. And rarely shall you find a lack of water there. If you settle there instead, it shall provide a meager but certain living.”
The prophet showed a hint of a triumphant smirk upon his visions being vindicated, but the vigorous and mighty contender only scoffed. “I do not fear water,” he declared, for of course he had not Seen the river’s wrath as the prophet had. “We are tired, and you say that this will be the most prosperous of lands at times, so we shall stay here. And if the river should overstep, we need only carry ourselves and our things to the high banks and the hills, and then return. Our brothers that wander the badlands still will envy us for our place beside this river, and in time, they might even come to join us here.”
Many agreed, but a few muttered dissent and looked once more to the prophet. He squinted at the stranger, and said, “If you will not disclose your identity, then at least tell us of this tame river and where we might find it, that we who care not for the fickle can make our way to it, and leave these others to their doom.”
The stranger replied, ”Choices have been made, and I shall respect that.” he said, looking towards the seer. Reaching his hand out, the gemstone shifted from the prophet’s grasp and returned to the stranger’s. ”Possibility eludes you, but the safe path will be known to you.” and his words were true. He looked towards the brute ”You are likely correct that the others shall envy you. Some shall join you, while others might attempt to take it from you. If you wish for my blessing for when that time comes, follow me.” he said, walking along the lake and towards the river.
So it was that four of every five of them followed the bull-like man-who-be-Shah as he advanced at the stranger’s heels, and the rest of them looked to the prophet, and soon took back to the badlands and the deep desert. After walking a short distance among the river, ”For my protection, I ask that you do as the leader before you did and claim this gemstone. So that you understand.” he said, tossing the gemstone into the river.
The stone skipped once, twice, and then fell into the rushing water. So far upstream, the water carried little sediment and so the jewel’s shine gleamed even from its place on the muddy bed. It was so close to the bank where the man of great stature stood beside the stranger, and yet it was so far. “How is such a feat possible?” the man demanded. “We cannot walk upon the water, for we were meant to stay upon land. We are not like those there fish darting back and forth in the water, nor like the birds that fly. Our feet must remain upon the ground.”
”It is a skill you must learn.” he said, diving into the water and swimming as a mortal would. While he could have done the miracles mentioned, as he had said, they could not. It was important to show it was possible. He moved to behind where the shine emerged and paddled in place. ”If you can not even enter the water, why should you have a claim over it?
The eyes of the hundreds behind burrowed into the mighty man's back, spurring him on where his courage might have otherwise faltered. His bare feet stepped into the river's cold shallows with trepidation; he was afraid, and yet in that moment he was also brave. Carefully, the man watched the stranger as he swam, examining how he paddled and made strokes to push himself through the water and stay afloat. Calling out to those that he claimed to lead, the man said, "I will do as he asks and claim that stone. If I perish, remember that my name was Darius, and that I died trying to conquer the water and seize for us a blessing."
He trudged forward into the river, one step after another, and suddenly was submerged up to his knees. His body faltered, but he pressed on and took another step, and now the running water brushed against his thigh. The current threatened to sweep him away, and he hadn't even begun to swim -- still his toes clung to the muddy bottom! Strengthless he felt, and not from fear or the water's cold, but by some power that he did not understand.
But the gemstone's sparkle urged him onward, so he strode forth and the water came to his waist. His jaw clenched and his bronze head reddened, his back glistening with sweat that gleamed in the sun even brighter than the river. He suddenly threw himself forward, no longer standing but floating on his stomach, and desperately tried to imitate the stranger's strokes and swim further.
As Darius continued to flail about the water, his strength only left him faster until he faltered. His head began to fall beneath the current, and his breath was taken from him. However, within a second, he found himself once more along the shore, laying on his back with the stranger standing above him. The gemstone laid right within his reach, and after heaving and coughing out a lungful of water while the crowds watched apprehensively, he finally rose to his knees and clambered over to the gemstone.
”As I have been truthful to those who left, I shall be truthful to those who remain. Know these waters can be capricious. You will need to learn to manage its ebbs and flows, and how to cross it with your own power. Know that the sacred lake is not for you, and that I am its defender. I stole away your strength so that you will know it will not serve you against me. However, should invaders attempt to steal your land and you have not offended me or the lake, I shall grant you my aid. ” he said, before turning away from the group.
Darius grasped the gemstone and rose to his feet once more, trying to project strength even as his robustity had been shown its limits. Still, now none among those in his band would be able to fault him for a lack of courage. “So it is done, then?” Darius asked the clearly-divine stranger. “What is it that you will us to do next? How are we to flourish here in this land that you say is prosperous?”
The stranger stated, ”I did promise you prosperity. Thus, I suppose you are entitled to the secrets of its fertility.” he said waving his hand once more. Burlap sacks and tools appeared on the ground in front of him and a seed of inspiration placed in the mortal’s minds. ”The work shall be hard, but the work shall be rewarding.”
He gazed out to where the lake would be, and for a moment he was lost in thought.
“Will you return again? If we have need of you to repel some who would seize these lands by the river, what should we do?” Darius asked, sensing somehow that the stranger was not going to stay much longer.
“I am an honest soul, should invaders come, return the blue and red stone into my lake. I shall grant you aid.” he said, before vanishing.
The remaining humans borne by the three colossi that Homura commandeered were all dumped out and given to Yudaiel. She scoops up their dreaming souls and crams ‘em into the bodies, and they wake up and complain that it’s bright outside. Some cool dudes have sunglasses and can See, so these seers become leaders of the many bands of humans that are left to wander around the area of Nalusa in different directions, looking for paradises to settle.
One band stumbles upon a river and follows its banks until they find a lake, with Arvum-in-disguise musing around some obelisks by the lake. Arvum does a trick to show the prophet’s limited powers, and just like that, theocracy is defeated and Darius -- the biggest, strongest, boldest human present -- becomes leader of the band without anyone really contesting him.
Darius and most of the original band decide to settle on this river, despite Arvum and the prophet warning that it will occasionally flood, because it’s fertile and they don’t want to walk much further. The prophet and some others return to the desert, moving on to settle alongside a calmer (but less fertile) river that Arvum had told them about.
Darius undergoes a trial to earn the patronage and protection of Arvum, who teaches the humans farming stuff and also agrees to return if they cast a special blood diamond into the lake where they met him.
Arvum Starting: 12 Ending: 7
-2: Created Four Great Rivers (discounted by cultivation): One river is particularly fickle and is prone to random flooding and droughts, but is especially fertile. One river is particularly stable, and has very predictable flooding and rarely ever dries up, but isn’t especially fertile. And two rivers are somewhere in the middle ground between the two extremes.
-3: Created Fortune’s Wellspring monument: A perfectly circular lake encircled by six rune-carved pillars. It acts to counter the influence of the codex’s anti-luck properties in the region, and its waters can bless or curse people or items with either good or bad luck. It is also set up to alert Arvum when it is threatened or a blood diamond enters it.
Free: Taught Darius and his group how to farm and provided them with farming supplies (discounted by cultivation)
Laektears, once known as dancerfish, were created out of Rosa’s tears when she was first confronted by Ao-Yurin. They have great wing-like fins and can be found in great groups that murmurate through the water, their scales reflecting refracted right off one another to create kaleidoscopic pulsations of colour even as they individually dance and, in so doing, create a greater cadence as a school. These dances, whether solitary or in a group, appear to have meaning understood by the laektears. One who does not realise they understand the movements of the laektears may perceive their meanings as words or other forms of communication - this happened when the giant mother-laektear 'spoke' with Rosa. On being exposed to Rosa's blood, the laektears were turned from the relatively small and harmless dancers they had been into an extraordinarily powerful non-sapient species. They gained the ability to grow larger than whales, though full size tends to vary by individual - some may grow no larger than tadpoles while others may grow into the largest sea behemoths. The size of laektears seems to adapt to the availability of types of food - they will tend to remain small when their small size does not hinder feeding, and will grow in size with the availability of larger food sources. Thus eco-systems made up of small-sized creatures will be home to relatively small laektears, while eco-systems that boast an abundance of large sea animals will in time result in very large laektears. Those that reach larger proportions are able to filter feed by virtue of sheer size, but laektears are also scavengers and apex predators able to hunt down even the largest whales. As they tend to move in great murmurations, their hunts are dazzling dances of mind-boggling synchrony.
RIP Mamang, eaten by ravenous school of giant dancing fish
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 [s]12 years ago[/s] 2010-ish!
I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.
[center]Word of my splendor:[/center]
[hider=My messenger's letter][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019b0090-4706-75b9-bfe5-fd4ef6737466.webp[/img][/hider]
[hider=My fellow monarch's response][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019b0090-a418-774f-a117-1ae23ac670fd.webp[/img][/hider]
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">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 <span class="bb-s">12 years ago</span> 2010-ish!<br><br>I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.<br><br><div class="bb-center">Word of my splendor:</div><br><div class="hider-panel"><div class="hider-heading"><button type="button" class="btn btn-default btn-xs hider-button" data-name="My messenger's letter">My messenger's letter [+]</button></div><div class="hider-body" style="display: none"><img src="https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019b0090-4706-75b9-bfe5-fd4ef6737466.webp" /></div></div><br><div class="hider-panel"><div class="hider-heading"><button type="button" class="btn btn-default btn-xs hider-button" data-name="My fellow monarch's response">My fellow monarch's response [+]</button></div><div class="hider-body" style="display: none"><img src="https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019b0090-a418-774f-a117-1ae23ac670fd.webp" /></div></div></div>
Member
Lord Zee
Vec
JFK
Fetzen
Thayr
BingTheWing
