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Vec male Member

Unimaginable Trepidation

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Just as humans grow and change with time, interests change as well. I wish I had the urge to roleplay like I used to...

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In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 5 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

The moon had moved.

Fishermen noticed first. They had been learning the patterns of the tides—the way the waters rose and fell in rhythms that could be predicted, that could be trusted—and suddenly those rhythms were wrong. Not dramatically wrong, not catastrophically wrong, but wrong in the way a familiar song sounds wrong when played in a different key. The water still rose and fell, but at different times, in different measures, as if the great celestial dance had stumbled over an unexpected step.

Then came the dreams.

A woman in a coastal settlement woke screaming from visions of violet light and endless falling. A child in the shadow of the Unfinished Mountains spoke in his sleep, reciting words in a language his parents did not recognize. An old man who had never remembered his dreams before now could not forget them—vast landscapes of silver sand and stars that sang, and always, always, the sense of something watching from very far away.

The dreams came strongest during the three nights surrounding the full moon, when the Violet Eye hung heavy in the sky, and they came to those who slept beneath its direct light. Not everyone. Not consistently. But enough that patterns began to emerge, that warnings began to spread: sleep under cover when the moons are bright, or risk waking with knowledge you never asked for.

The scholars of Excelsium proposed explanations involving celestial mechanics and the geometry of reflected light. The priests of Radanu claimed the moons were testing mortal devotion. The gamblers of Gamblerdise simply added it to their calculations of luck and chance, another variable in the endless equation of fate.

No one knew why the larger moon now hung further from the world than it had before. No one knew what force had pushed it to its new position, or what that repositioning had cost. But the moon itself seemed to know. Its light had changed—not in color, not in brightness, but in quality. There was a melancholy to it now, a sense of something displaced and discontent, like a child moved to a new room and unable to settle.

Those who worshipped the sun whispered that their god had struck against the interlopers in the sky. Those who had begun to revere the moons whispered that something had been done to them without consent, and that such things had consequences. Both groups were, probably, right.

Beneath the world, something stirred. It was not awake, not yet, not fully, but it was no longer entirely asleep. The rhythm that had sustained it for ages beyond counting had been disrupted, broken by the careless actions of young gods who did not understand what they were building upon. Every earthquake, every volcanic eruption, every tearing and reshaping of the land sent tremors through systems that were never meant to be disturbed.

The crystal roots that spread beneath Ashuru's skin pulsed with new urgency. They had been dying slowly, damaged by the cataclysms above, but now they pulsed with something else. It might have been anticipation, or it might have been fear. The difference was difficult to determine from the outside.

In scattered places across the world, mortals noticed small signs. A well that had always given sweet water suddenly ran bitter. A cave system that had been stable for generations collapsed without warning. Strange sounds rose from deep below, not earthquakes but something more rhythmic, almost like breathing, if breathing could be done by stone. Most dismissed these omens as coincidence or the ordinary settling of the earth. A few lay awake at night, listening, and wondered.

One god knew what these signs meant. One god had read the warning carved in light upon an ancient bell: TOO SOON. SHE WAKES TOO SOON. The question was what to do with that knowledge. Whether to share it or hoard it. Whether the other gods could be trusted to help, or whether they would only make things worse. The question was also whether it mattered, whether anything could be done to stop what was coming, or whether the gods of Ashuru were already too late.

Deep below, the rhythm continued. Not quite a heartbeat. Not quite breathing. Something older than either, something that had been waiting since before the world was young. Waiting, and now beginning to wake.

The roads were changing.

Not physically, for they remained the same beaten paths of packed earth and trampled grass that travelers had always known, but in what they carried. Where once a journey between settlements meant weeks of isolation, eating whatever could be hunted or gathered, praying to whatever gods might listen that the next village would offer shelter rather than spears, now there were merchants. Traders. People who walked the dangerous spaces between civilizations not to flee or to conquer, but to exchange.

The first caravan from Gamblerdise to reach Excelsium carried with it stories that spread faster than fire through dry grass. They brought vegetables grown in quantities that seemed impossible and knowledge of stone-working that Excelsium's own craftsmen studied with hungry eyes.

They brought trinkets made of a strange stone that glinted with inner warmth, dice carved from materials no one could identify, and tales of a valley where chance was sacred and disputes were settled by games rather than blood. They also carried something less tangible but perhaps more valuable: the knowledge that other ways of living existed, that the world held more than one answer to the question of how mortals should organize themselves.

The roads between settlements began to see more traffic after that. Not floods, for the world was still too dangerous and too unpredictable for that, but trickles. A family here, seeking the blessed weather of Radanu. A young man there, curious about the games of Gamblerdise. An ambitious woman with callused hands, hoping to learn the secrets of Excelsium's magi. The isolation that had defined mortal existence since the Cataclysm was beginning, slowly and unevenly, to crack.


In Excelsium itself, the sound of stone striking stone had become as common as birdsong.

It had started with Pira. The old woman who had led them through crisis after crisis, who had never possessed the divine spark that marked the truly gifted, had returned from a meeting with a being of living rock bearing marks upon her skin that glowed like captured starlight.

She had touched a boulder, and the boulder had become bricks. She had looked at a cracked wall, and somehow known exactly which stones needed replacing to prevent collapse.

The Covenant of Civilization, they called it. A bargain struck with something that was neither god nor mortal but something in between—a Patron, the magi said, one of the Ideals given form and voice. It demanded no worship, extracted no promises of devotion. It asked only that they build to last, record what they learned, and maintain what they created.

The first stone wall rose within a week of Pira's transformation. It was not elegant—rough-hewn blocks fitted together with more determination than skill—but it did not burn. It did not rot. When the ground shook with one of the minor tremors that still plagued the region, the wall stood firm while wooden structures groaned and swayed.

More walls followed. Then foundations. Then, ambitiously, the beginnings of what might someday be called a proper building—four walls and a roof, all of stone, cool in the heat and warm in the growing cold.

The workers who built it complained of aching backs and bloodied hands, of labor far harder than raising wooden frames had ever been. But when they stepped back and looked at what they had made, something shifted in their expressions. Pride, perhaps. Or the dawning recognition that they were building something their grandchildren might still use.

Pira walked among them with her glowing marks, touching stone and sensing weakness, guiding repairs before collapses could occur. She had begun scratching symbols onto clay tablets—the same symbols that covered her skin, given meaning through careful repetition. "This mark means 'wall,'" she would say, tracing the shape. "This one means 'strong.' This one means 'repair needed.'" It was crude, barely a language, more a collection of labels than true writing. But it was a start.

The children learned fastest, as children always did. They scratched the symbols in dirt with sticks, argued over which mark meant what, invented new ones for concepts Pira had not yet addressed. Within a month, messages were being left on stone tablets at the edges of fields: "Water here." "Danger—unstable ground." "Good hunting north." Words, captured in stone. Thoughts that would outlast the thinkers who thought them.

The Patron of Civilization, wherever it had gone after bestowing its covenant, would have been pleased.


The smiths were the first to understand what bronze truly meant.

Copper had been useful—soft enough to shape, pretty enough to wear, capable of holding an edge if you didn't expect too much of it. But bronze was something else entirely. Bronze held its edge through cuts that would have dulled copper in moments. Bronze could be cast into shapes that stone-knappers had only dreamed of. Bronze made a sound when struck, a clear ringing note that seemed to announce its superiority to every other material mortals had yet mastered.

The knowledge spread unevenly, as knowledge always did. Some settlements had tin; others did not. Some had smiths clever enough to discover the proper ratios; others produced brittle failures or soft disappointments. But where the secret took root, everything changed. Axes that could fell trees in half the time. Knives that sliced through hide like water. Arrowheads that flew true and struck deep. Jewelry that caught the light in ways that made copper seem dull by comparison.

And weapons. Always weapons.

The first bronze sword was probably made as art—a smith's declaration of mastery, too expensive and labor-intensive for practical use. But others followed, and those who carried them walked differently. They stood differently. They looked at conflicts differently, knowing they held an advantage that stone and copper could not match.

No wars had been fought with bronze. Not yet. But the possibility hung in the air like storm clouds on the horizon, waiting for the right spark to release the thunder.


Alongside the gleaming newness of metal, a humbler discovery was changing how mortals lived: salt.

It had been found in a failed well, water so bitter and strange that no one could drink it. But someone—a cook with more curiosity than sense, the stories said—had boiled that water down and discovered the white crystite remains. And someone else had buried meat in those crystite, expecting rot, and found instead that the flesh remained edible far longer than it had any right to.

Salt preservation spread faster than bronze-working, if only because salt was easier to find than tin. Coastal settlements boiled seawater. Inland communities sought out mineral deposits. Meat that would have spoiled in days could now last weeks. Fish could be stored for trade. The desperate mathematics of survival—how much can we hunt today versus how much will rot before we can eat it—shifted in humanity's favor.

It was not a glamorous change. No one wrote songs about salt or forged it into symbols of status. But in the quiet accounting of lives saved and hungers prevented, salt may have mattered more than all the bronze swords ever made.


And through it all, the doorways kept appearing. They showed themselves at crossroads and forest clearings, at the mouths of caves and the bends of rivers. Archways of twisted wood and woven light, promising music and laughter and the smell of foods that should not exist. Most who encountered them felt the pull—that gentle, insistent invitation to step through and see what wonders waited on the other side.

Most resisted. The stories had spread too far, too fast: tales of the lost and the found, the trapped and the transformed, the hours that became days and the days that became seasons. Parents warned children. Elders warned travelers. Even those who had never seen a doorway knew to fear them, or at least to approach them with caution.

But some still entered. The desperate, who had nothing left to lose. The curious, who could not resist the mystery. The grieving, who had heard whispers that lost loved ones might be found within. And yes, the genuinely joyful—the rare souls who heard the distant music and felt not fear but recognition, who understood somehow that this place was meant for them.

The Carnival took them all. It gave some back. It kept others. And it made no promises about which fate awaited any particular visitor.

This was the bargain that Alechior had made with the world: wonder and danger in equal measure, joy that could save or joy that could consume, doors that opened for anyone lucky enough to find them and unlucky enough to step through. The mortals of Ashuru were learning to live with it, as they learned to live with eclipses and cold seasons and moons that moved without explanation.

It was simply another truth of existence now. The sky held new lights. The dead did not always stay dead. Metal could be made stronger through secrets of fire and mixture. Words could be carved in stone to outlast the speakers.

And somewhere, always, the music played on.

In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
@Shovel Accepted both.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
The 8th GM post has been uploaded.


This post does not include what Khthon found during his investigation. Depending on what @Rekkuza wants to do, we might drop it either as a collab or I will write a separate post in a few hours to detail what happens.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

The sky broke twice, the first breaking coming without warning. Farmers in Radanu looked up from their work to see the sun disappear behind a disc of absolute darkness, that great fire they had only recently learned to trust swallowed by something that should not exist. The darkness wore a violet crown, a ring of impossible color that hurt to look upon but demanded attention nonetheless. Day became night in the span of a heartbeat, and across every settlement and scattered homestead, the world simply stopped.

In Excelsium, a woman dropped her water vessel. It shattered against stone, but she did not notice, her mouth working soundlessly as she stared upward at the wounded sky. In Gamblerdise, dice clattered to a halt mid-roll, and for the first time in living memory, no one cared about the outcome. In Kur-Laka, slaves paused their labor and overseers forgot to beat them, all eyes fixed on what had become of the light. The screaming began shortly after.

Some fell to their knees and prayed to whatever gods they knew. Others ran, though where they thought they might escape to, none could say. A child in a coastal settlement asked her mother if the sun had died, and her mother had no answer. An old man in the shadow of the Unfinished Mountains simply sat down, closed his eyes, and waited for the end that seemed so obviously coming. But the end did not come. The darkness passed. The sun returned, seemingly unharmed, and the world exhaled a breath it had not known it was holding.

The sky, however, was no longer empty. Two shapes hung where nothing had hung before: one large and violet, scarred with craters that caught the light strangely; the other smaller, white, wrapped in a haze of shimmering dust. They had not been there yesterday. They had not been there an hour ago. Now they were fixtures, permanent as mountains, watching the world below with the patient indifference of stone.

The mortals gave them names, as mortals do. The Violet Eye. The Pale Sister. The Wounded Moon and the Veiled Moon. Some called them omens of doom while others saw them as new gods, or the eyes of old ones. Shrines appeared within days, rough cairns topped with violet-dyed cloth, offerings of white flowers left beneath open sky. Arguments followed close behind.

If these new lights were divine, whose were they? What did they want? What did their presence mean for the sun, which had so recently learned to dance closer and farther in its strange new pattern?

That pattern was the second breaking, and it terrified the world in ways the eclipse had not. The sun had been reliable once. Harsh, yes. Burning, certainly. But consistent in its cruelty. It rose, it crossed the sky, it set, and the rhythm was as dependable as breath. Now the sun moved differently, pulling away from the world to distances that made the air bite and the ground harden, then returning to press close until sweat ran freely and rivers shrank in their beds. The elders called it madness. The young called it the sun's dance.

Neither name captured the terror of that first true cold.

The cold came first to the highlands. A hunter named Vasek noticed it on the morning he set out to track a wounded elk, his breath making clouds in the air. This had never happened before. He stood for a long moment, exhaling deliberately, watching the white vapor curl and dissipate before touching his arms and finding them prickled with strange bumps, his skin trying to do something it had never needed to do.

By midday, his fingers had stopped working properly. They were stiff, clumsy, refusing to grip his spear with their usual surety, and when he flexed them they responded with a dull ache that worried him more than the elk's dwindling trail.

That trail led into a valley where frost had painted the grass white and brittle. Vasek did not know the word frost, had never encountered the phenomenon it described, and so he walked through it like a man walking through a dream, leaving dark footprints in the pale coating. He did not catch the elk. He barely made it home.

Within a week, three members of his settlement had died. They had not fallen to violence or illness, but to something they had no name for, something that turned their skin blue and made them stop shivering. The cessation seemed like improvement until they stopped breathing shortly after. The survivors wrapped themselves in every hide they owned and burned their fires larger and longer, but the cold crept in through every gap, patient and thorough and entirely without malice. It was simply the way things were now.

In Radanu, where Orranoth's weather regulation held firm and ever expanding, the cold barely touched them. This made the refugees pouring in from surrounding regions all the more desperate, all the more numerous. The settlement that had once struggled to feed its original inhabitants now buckled under the weight of hundreds seeking the blessed stability of controlled skies. Fights broke out over sleeping space. Food stores that should have lasted months vanished in weeks, and the people of Radanu began to mutter about walls.


The Tree at the world's heart had always been strange. Those who lived near it told stories of whispers in its roots, of dreams that came more vividly when sleeping in its shadow. But it had been benevolent strangeness, the kind that comforted rather than threatened. That changed when the dead began to walk.

The first sighting came from a woman gathering fallen branches near the Tree's outer roots. She saw her father standing among the undergrowth, her father who had died quite some time ago, whose body she had helped prepare for the soil. He looked at her with eyes that held no recognition, only a terrible hunger, and when she screamed he opened his mouth and a sound came out that was nothing like a human voice. It was cold and empty, a void given form and desperate for filling.

She ran. He did not follow quickly, but he followed, drifting through the forest with movements that suggested he had forgotten how legs were supposed to work. By the time she reached her village, he was gone, but others had appeared. Shapes in the mist. Figures at the edge of firelight. The faces of the beloved dead, returned wrong.

The Wraiths spread outward from the Tree in waves. Some settlements lost half their number in a single night, not to death but to terror so profound that hearts simply stopped. Others learned quickly that fire held the spirits at bay, that salt drawn in circles seemed to confuse them, that prayers to certain gods could banish them for a time.

But the Wraiths were not the only change the Tree had wrought.

A child was born in a village far from the Tree's shadow with memories she should not have possessed. She knew the name of a woman who had died before her birth. She knew the location of a cache of tools that had been buried and forgotten long ago, and when her parents dug where she pointed, they found the tools exactly as she had described them, wrapped in rotting leather, waiting.

She was not the only one. Across Ashuru, in scattered and seemingly random patterns, the newly born arrived carrying fragments of lives they had never lived. Most remembered only impressions: feelings, skills, half-formed knowledge. A few remembered everything, and woke screaming from dreams of their own deaths.

The dead, it seemed, were no longer staying dead. Not all of them, and not cleanly. The cycle had been broken and rebuilt into something new, something that mortal minds struggled to comprehend. Some called it a blessing while others called it an abomination. The Tree at the center of it all simply grew, its roots spreading deeper, its branches reaching higher, half white and half black and somehow both at once.

The blue crystal caught the morning light like captured sky, and Yeren could not stop staring at it. Meris held it aloft for all of them to see, this thing that pulsed with veins of darker color, this thing that had been pulled from their teacher's opened skull not ten heartbeats ago. The avatar's fingers were clean. There was no blood. Somehow that made it worse.

"This is the spark made manifest," Meris declared, and his voice carried the satisfaction of a craftsman displaying finished work.

Beside Yeren, someone retched. He thought it might be Dalla, who had always been closest to Aristel, who had spent extra hours practicing her geomantic shapes under his patient instruction. She had arrived this morning expecting another lesson. They all had. Instead they had found their teacher's body laid out in the teaching field, and they had watched the god's servant kneel beside it with ritual purpose, and they had seen the skull open like a door that had always been meant to open this way.

Yeren's legs wanted to run. His mind wanted to understand. Neither impulse won, so he simply stood there with the others, frozen in the space between horror and awe. The crystal in Meris's hand contained Aristel. Not his body, which still lay cooling on the ground, but his knowledge, his memories, his understanding of the Ideals and the rituals that called them. Everything that had made the broken old man valuable was now compressed into a fist-sized stone that glowed with stolen thought.

"The flesh fails," Meris continued, apparently untroubled by the pale faces before him. "It always fails. But knowledge need not die with the vessel that carried it. Lord Excelsis has shown us a path beyond that limitation. Aristel's wisdom will endure. It will teach long after his bones have returned to earth."

Maret, who stood at the back of the gathered students, turned and walked away. He did not run. He did not speak. He simply turned and walked, his shoulders rigid, his hands clenched at his sides. No one called after him. Within the hour, Yeren would learn that Maret had packed his belongings and left Excelsium entirely, preferring the dangers of the wilderness to whatever future awaited those who studied here. He was not the last to make that choice.

But others stayed. Yeren stayed, though he could not have explained why if anyone had asked. Perhaps it was because the alternative seemed worse: to abandon the pursuit of understanding, to return to the ignorance that had defined his life before Excelsium, to pretend he had not already glimpsed what lay beyond the boundaries of ordinary existence. The crystal was terrible. The method of its creation was terrible. And yet some treacherous part of his mind whispered that it was also magnificent, that Aristel had achieved a form of immortality that kings and warriors could never claim.

In the days that followed, the students sorted themselves without discussion or ceremony. Three left as Maret had left, vanishing into the hinterlands with whatever supplies they could carry. Two others threw themselves into their studies with a fervor that bordered on mania, their eyes bright with ambition rather than fear. If crystallization was the fate of the greatest minds, their logic seemed to run, then better to be the one performing the ritual than the one subjected to it. They began to watch Meris more closely, to volunteer for tasks that brought them near the avatar, to ask questions about the nature of divine power with an eagerness that felt almost hungry.

Yeren found himself in neither camp. He continued his practice of the geomantic shapes, continued his study of the symbolic correspondences that Aristel had taught them, continued to show up each morning to the teaching field where the grass still bore the impression of a body that was no longer there. But something had shifted in the foundation of his purpose. He no longer studied simply to understand. He studied because stopping felt like admitting that what he had witnessed was wrong, and if it was wrong, then everything built upon Excelsium's promise was wrong, and he was not ready to accept that conclusion.

The mind crystal that had been Aristel was installed in a locked room in Meris's quarters. Occasionally, when the light was right, students passing nearby claimed they could see a faint blue glow leaking from beneath the door. They whispered about what knowledge it might contain, what questions it might answer, what secrets their teacher had carried that were now preserved forever in crystalline form. Some whispered with reverence. Some whispered with fear. A few whispered with the kind of calculating interest that suggested they were already thinking about whose mind might be worth preserving next.

The doorway appeared on a merchant's road three days east of Gamblerdise.

Kell noticed it first because he was looking for shelter from the wind, which had turned bitter with the sun's retreat. There was an arch of twisted branches at the road's bend—he was certain it had not been there when he passed this way a fortnight ago—and through it, he could see... something else. Colors that did not belong to the scrubland. Sounds that did not belong to the wind. The smell of roasting meat and fermented fruit, impossible and enticing.

He told himself he would only look.

The carnival stretched in all directions, larger than any settlement Kell had ever seen. Stalls lined paths that curved and doubled back on themselves. Dice clattered against wood. Laughter rang out from every direction. People moved through the crowds—people who looked almost familiar, almost right, their smiles fixed and their eyes empty of anything but joy.

A woman pressed a cup into his hands. The liquid inside was sweet and sharp and made his head spin pleasantly. A man clapped him on the shoulder and invited him to a game he did not understand. He won. He won again. The prizes were trinkets, worthless things, but the winning felt better than anything he had felt in months.

He did not remember deciding to stay. He did not remember how long he stayed. But when he finally stumbled back through the archway, the sun had moved in ways he could not account for, and his legs nearly buckled beneath him from a hunger he had not noticed feeling.

His traveling companion was gone. The campsite where they had made fire together was cold, the ashes scattered by wind. Kell called out. He searched. He found nothing but footprints leading toward the archway—an archway that was no longer there, just empty road and bitter wind and the growing certainty that somewhere behind reality, his friend was still playing games that never ended.

The doorways multiplied in the weeks that followed. They appeared at forest bends and cave mouths, in the arches of ruined structures and on lonely stretches of road where travelers walked alone. Most passed them without noticing. Some noticed and kept walking, warned by instinct or fear or the stories that had begun to spread. And some—the curious, the desperate, the lucky and the unlucky alike—stepped through and discovered a place where chance was made manifest and time was merely a suggestion.

Not all of them came back.

Far from the breaking skies and walking dead, smaller changes rippled through Ashuru.

In Gamblerdise, a child's accidental discovery of pleasing sounds had blossomed into something new. Rhythmic patterns filled the air—tapping on hollow wood, stones struck against each other, voices finding harmony through trial and error. The village had not invented music so much as been gifted the understanding of it, and that understanding spread through their games and their gatherings like fire through dry grass.

Ten travelers bearing faint yellow marks on their foreheads walked roads that had never been walked before, their nerves steadied by divine blessing, their presence somehow less threatening to those they encountered. They carried Fortunite and stories of the gambling god, and wherever they went, they left seeds of change behind them.

In the wilds far from any settlement, a golden-furred pup that should not have existed ran across the surface of the sun, immortal and unconcerned, chasing flames like a normal hound might chase rabbits.

In the geothermal valleys, a man named Hammon stared at a sacred fire that burned white-hot and steady, dreaming of permanence, dreaming of structures that would outlast memory itself.

And in the dreams of a young cat-woman named Teefee, something new stirred—an ability to walk where others merely slept, to visit the dreams of those she loved, to navigate a realm that had always existed but had never before known a mortal traveler who moved through it with such deliberate purpose.

The world was changing. It had always been changing, since the first god opened their eyes, but the pace had quickened now. The sky held new lights. The dead walked and were reborn. Fire could be commanded. Knowledge could be crystallized. Chance itself had built a kingdom where the lucky might wander forever.

The mortals of Ashuru did not know what came next. Neither, perhaps, did the gods who had set these wheels in motion. That was the nature of creation: every action echoed forward into consequences no one could fully predict, and every consequence became the foundation for actions yet to come.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
@Shovel

Before I approve, I need clarification on a few points:

1. Show me Amut.
You've demonstrated First Cephalopod's voice vividly. Can you write a comparable example post from Amut's perspective? I need to understand how the two differ and whether Amut has the same interior depth.

2. The black whale tension.
In your example, First Cephalopod fears black whales—has been hunted and maimed by them. But Amut is a black whale. Is this intentional? I would like to know what's the actual relationship between your two entities, not just the meta one that pertains to conviction mechanics. Predator and prey? Two halves that haven't yet recognized each other? As I understand it, they are responsible for different parts of the ocean and thus we'll see little interaction between them. Do correct me if I am wrong.

3. Collaboration with other gods.
Your solo writing works beautifully, but this is a collaborative game. Gods negotiate, debate, form alliances; if Orranoth descended to the sea seeking to parley, how would your entities participate? How do beings that think in sensory impressions rather than language engage in pantheon politics?

Answer these and I think we're good to go. The concept isn't a problem, I just need to see the complete picture before accepting them.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
The 7th GM poast has been toasted. Dig in.


From this week onwards, all Surreal+ actions will cost +1 Conviction on top of their base conviction cost displayed in the Divine Actions Reference Guide. For actions that display a range, treat the min and max values of the range as having been increased by 1.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

The first sighting came three days after the massacre.

A coastal settlement, small and struggling, built where the retreating ocean had left tide pools rich with stranded fish. The people there had learned to harvest what the gods' catastrophe had inadvertently provided. They were practical folk who asked few questions about divine will and focused instead on smoking enough fish to survive the next day.

The woman arrived at dusk, beautiful in a way that made eyes linger too long. Her skin was dark as charcoal, her movements fluid as water, and when she smiled, which she did often, her teeth caught the last light like polished bone. She carried nothing. She wore less. She claimed to be a refugee from inland, fleeing some unnamed disaster, and asked only for shelter until morning.

They let her in. Of course they did. Hospitality was sacred, even in hard times, and she seemed harmless enough. Hungry, certainly, but what refugee wasn't?

By dawn, three people were dead.

Not killed violently. Not torn apart or obviously murdered. They simply... didn't wake. Their bodies were cold, bloodless, faces locked in expressions that witnesses would later struggle to describe. Empty, some said. Hollow, others claimed. As though something vital had been drained away during the night, leaving only meat behind.

The woman was gone. The only trace she left was a single footprint in the ash outside the village, pressed so deep it looked as though she'd stood there for hours, watching. Waiting. Deciding.

Word spread slowly at first, carried by the few who'd glimpsed her in the night and lived to remember it. Then faster, as other settlements reported similar visitations. A woman with black skin and white eyes. A man who walked bent and wrong, too fast on all fours, too slow when upright. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, yet always hungry.

The people gave them names, as people do when confronted with the inexplicable. The Shadow-Drinker. The Bent One. The Twice-Cursed. Mothers began to tell their children new warnings at night: bar the doors, trust no strangers, and if you see someone beautiful who smiles with too many teeth, run.

But running, as some learned, was not always enough.

In the settlement that would one day bear the name Excelsium, magic ceased to be legend and became curriculum.

Aristel, the old man whose sanity had fractured beneath divine revelation, proved a surprisingly effective teacher once his students learned to separate useful instruction from incomprehensible rambling. He taught in the mornings, when his mind was clearest, and by afternoon would often be found drawing elaborate geometric patterns in the dirt, muttering formulae to audiences of confused chickens.

His students were fewer than expected. Many had watched his first successful demonstration—the walking tree trunk—and decided that such power was not worth the risk of paralysis, madness, or worse. But a handful remained, drawn by desperation, ambition, or simple curiosity.

The first principle Aristel taught was this: precision matters more than power.

A circle drawn carelessly would not hold. A word spoken with the wrong inflection would not call. An offering selected without understanding its symbolic resonance would not satisfy the Ideal being invoked. Magic, they learned, was less about commanding reality and more about negotiating with it, using a language that predated words and would outlast them.

The second principle, learned through painful trial and error, was this: the Ideals do not forgive mistakes.

A young woman attempting to invoke Motion accidentally used honey instead of wax as her binding agent. The ritual succeeded—technically. Every object in her workshop began vibrating at a frequency just below audibility, rattling teeth and bones until she collapsed from nausea. It took three days for the effect to fade. She never attempted another ritual.

A middle-aged man, impatient with the slow progress of his studies, decided to invoke multiple Ideals simultaneously. His ambition was admirable. His preparation was not. The competing Ideals manifested briefly, recognized the impossibility of coexisting in the narrow confines of his ritual circle, and departed with emphasis. The resulting backlash left him deaf in one ear and prone to sudden, involuntary tremors. He lived, but served as an effective cautionary tale.

Yet for all the dangers, for all the failures and setbacks and moments of genuine terror, progress was made. Slowly. Carefully. With the kind of methodical determination that characterized Excelsium itself.

Within weeks, three students could reliably animate small objects—bones, sticks, stones—for brief periods. Within a month, one had successfully created a working kiln that maintained perfect temperature through invocation of the Ideal of Heat. By the second day, Aristel's pupils numbered seven, and whispers of their work had begun to spread beyond Excelsium's borders.

The god who had forced Aristel's enlightenment watched from a distance, impassive. Whether pleased or disappointed by the pace of mortal discovery, that was only for him to know.

The place that had been a wild valley was becoming Kur-Laka, and Kur-Laka was becoming a scar.

The transformation did not happen overnight. Lykaon was many things—brutal, ambitious, pragmatic to the point of cruelty—but he was not hasty. He understood that the god who had reclaimed the Me of Cooking and bestowed new knowledge in its place expected results, not excuses. And so he set his people to work with the kind of methodical ruthlessness that would have impressed even Sarhush himself.

The first stones were cut within days of the god's departure. The Me of Masonry had shown them how: where to strike, how to split, which rocks would hold and which would crumble. The hillsides surrounding the valley bore fresh wounds where quarries had been opened, pale stone exposed to sunlight for the first time in epochs.

The work was hard. Brutally so. And it fell, as such work always does, upon those least able to refuse it.

The Me of Slavery had been taken by the god, but its lesson remained. Lykaon needed no divine artifact to understand the principle of compulsion through force. Captives taken from weaker settlements found themselves collared with rough leather thongs, marked with ash and ochre, and driven to labor under the gaze of overseers who had once been their peers. Some went mad. Some died. Most simply learned to endure, because endurance was the only path that led anywhere but a cooking pot.

The first structure rose at the valley's center, where the god had stood in judgment. Not a dwelling but a platform, broad and flat, constructed from massive stone blocks fitted together with obsessive precision. It stood taller than two men and took thirty days to complete. Atop it, Lykaon placed a simple altar: a flat stone stained with the blood of the first worker to die during construction, whose body had been butchered and distributed among the laborers as encouragement.

Around this central platform, the settlement spread outward in rough concentric rings. Permanent structures replaced the sagging hide hovels—stone foundations supporting timber frames, roofed with thatch and clay. The new buildings were crude by any standard, but they were deliberate, constructed with intent rather than desperation. They would not collapse in the first strong wind. They would endure.

Pottery came more slowly. The Me had revealed the secret of shaping clay, but finding suitable clay deposits and constructing kilns capable of firing them proved challenging. The first dozen attempts produced nothing but cracked, useless vessels. The eleventh resulted in a kiln explosion that killed two people and burned a third so badly he would bear the scars until his last day.

But the thirteenth attempt succeeded. And the fourteenth. And soon the settlement boasted working kilns that produced storage vessels, cooking pots, and—at Lykaon's insistence—small clay tablets on which marks could be pressed and preserved. What those marks represented, none could yet say. But Lykaon understood, in the way that all would-be kings understand, that memory was a form of power, and anything that could be recorded could be controlled.

By the time two days had passed since the god's visitation, Kur-Laka had transformed from a sprawling camp of savages into something that almost resembled a settlement. Almost resembled civilization, if one squinted and ignored the screaming from the slave pens and the smoke from the cooking fires and the casual cruelty that greased every interaction like rendered fat.

Other tribes, seeing what Lykaon had built, reacted according to their nature. Some approached cautiously, offering tribute and alliance, hoping to share in the prosperity that divine favor had granted. Others attacked, seeking to claim the god's gift through force. Still others simply fled, recognizing that Kur-Laka's rise meant danger for any who stood in its shadow.

All would learn, in time, that Sarhush had not simply blessed a settlement but jumpstarted something that would bring insurmountable change unto the lives of Ashuru's inhabitants.

In the lands surrounding Radanu, the weather had become wrong.

Not violent. Not immediately catastrophic. Just... wrong. Predictable patterns dissolved into chaos. Rains that should have come in gentle afternoon showers arrived instead as week-long deluges that turned fields to swamps and swamps to lakes. Dry seasons stretched longer than memory permitted, until wells ran dry and livestock began to die of thirst.

The people affected did not understand what had changed. They knew only that the land no longer behaved as it should, that the signs their grandparents had taught them—the shape of clouds, the direction of winds, the behavior of birds—no longer predicted accurately. The world had become unreadable, and in its illegibility lay danger.

Some migrated toward Radanu, following rumors of a blessed region where the god of sky had tamed the heavens themselves. They found the rumors true: Radanu's skies were generous and measured, its fields lush, its people prosperous. But prosperity attracts, and soon the settlement swelled beyond its capacity to feed newcomers. Tensions rose. Resources strained. The blessing, it seemed, carried weight.

Meanwhile, Gamblerdise discovered that not all gifts arrive wrapped in obvious fortune.

The fortunite, beautiful and strange, had been received with appropriate celebration. The first jewelry pieces were cherished, their effects noted with wonder—some wearers found themselves consumed by creative urges, others experienced profound calm in a world that offered little peace. Both seemed blessings, and for a time they were.

But then the miners who had extracted the first stones attempted to dig deeper, seeking richer veins, and discovered that the mountain did not surrender its treasures lightly. Tunnels that seemed stable collapsed without warning. Air that had been breathable turned foul within hours. One miner vanished entirely, his tools found neatly stacked beside a shaft that showed no sign of his passage in or out.

The earth beneath Gamblerdise, it seemed, was paying attention. And it had opinions about how quickly its gifts should be taken.

Far from settlements and divine drama both, the world continued its slower transformations.

The plants, drunk on sudden sunlight, were beginning to learn moderation. Not through conscious choice—they were plants, after all, incapable of thought in any recognizable sense—but through simple attrition. The species that grew too fast, too voraciously, depleted soil and died en masse. Their seeds lay dormant, waiting for conditions that might never return. The species that grew more slowly, that paced their consumption to match the sun's intensity, survived. Thrived, even.

Forests that had erupted into violent canopy wars were sorting themselves into new, more balanced formations. Shade-tolerant species reclaimed the forest floor. Sun-hungry trees stretched toward light without strangling their neighbors. Vines learned to climb rather than constrict. It was brutal education, written in countless small extinctions, but it was education nonetheless.

The animals blessed with Beastcraft proved adaptable in ways their mundane cousins could not match. A blessed hawk could manipulate air currents to hunt in conditions that grounded normal raptors. A blessed rabbit could harden the earth beneath its burrow, creating warrens that would survive any predator's digging. The advantage was subtle but real, and over time, the blessed and unblessed populations began to diverge, not through conflict but through simple differential survival.

And high above it all, a cloud drifted lazily across the sky, golden-bright and utterly immovable, casting its shadow over a valley where dice clattered and laughter rang and a god smiled at the beautiful chaos of chance made manifest.

The world was changing, had changed, and would change again. Such was the way of things, when gods walked and mortals learned and the dream that contained them all continued its slow, inexorable unfurling toward some end that even the divine could not yet name.

She walked through the broken land with the unhurried pace of someone who could not be late, because time itself waited on her presence rather than the reverse. The woman (though that word was insufficient, a label that fit poorly like borrowed clothes) moved through devastation with wonder rather than sorrow.

Cracked earth fascinated her. She would stop, crouch, press her palms to fissures still radiating heat, and listen to what the stone remembered. The black rain that fell intermittently from ash-choked skies did not burn her skin; it evaporated before contact, hissing into steam that wreathed her form like reverent incense.

Where she walked, things responded. Not blooming, for that word suggested intention, purpose. No, the world simply remembered what it had been before the breaking, and for a few moments in her wake, it forgot to be ruined. Grass pushed through ash. Flowers opened in her footprints, confused by the season, confused by their own existence, wilting almost immediately as the reality of devastation reasserted itself.

She did not mourn them. She watched with the same curious intensity she had given the apple, the same attention she had granted the small boy who had frozen at the sight of her. Everything was equally fascinating. Everything deserved examination.

The mountains in the distance still wept fire. She turned toward them, tilting her head, and the fissures in her bronze skin glowed brighter in response, as if greeting cousins. The molten light beneath her surface pulsed in rhythm with distant eruptions. Not synchronized, not controlled, but aware. Conversing in a language of pressure and heat and stone remembering its liquid birth.

She walked for days, though day and night held little meaning for her. The sun rose and set. She noticed it the way one might notice furniture in a familiar room: acknowledged, unremarkable. The sun had not existed long enough to be memory, not the way stone was memory, the way water was memory. The sun was new. An intrusion. Interesting but irrelevant to where she was going. And she was going somewhere, though she could not have said how she knew, or why it mattered. There was a pull, gentle but insistent, like the way rivers knew downhill even before flowing began.

The pull led her to a place where the earth had torn itself open with particular violence. The hill had been split like rotten fruit, cloven by a fissure so deep that standing at its edge, she could see magma flowing sluggishly far below, painting the chasm walls in wavering orange light.

The air shimmered with heat. Noxious gases rose in lazy spirals, thick enough to be visible, toxic enough to kill any living thing that breathed them. She breathed them. They tasted of sulfur and copper and the deep earth's exhalation. She held the breath for a moment, considering the flavor, then released it in a long sigh that carried no judgment. This, too, was simply what was.

Atop the ruined hill, or rather atop the two halves of what had been a hill, sat the temple. It had collapsed inward, swallowed partially by the chasm that had opened beneath it.

What remained jutted from broken stone at impossible angles, defying gravity through sheer stubbornness of whatever substance composed it. Not stone, not quite. Something that looked solid but felt uncertain when she focused her attention upon it, as though it existed in multiple states simultaneously and only settled into one form when directly observed.

Walls had crumbled. The roof had caved in on one side, exposing the circular interior to ash-choked sky. Through gaps in the broken architecture, she could see magma flowing from a nearby volcanic vent, a river of molten rock that had invaded the sacred space, pooling in the temple's lower sections, filling cracks, claiming territory with the patient inevitability of water finding its level.

The woman who was not a woman stood at the chasm's edge, studying the ruin with the focused intensity she brought to all things. Then she stepped forward, onto nothing, and descended.

Her bare feet found purchase on air, or perhaps the air solidified beneath her soles, or perhaps the distinction between solid and not-solid was less absolute than it appeared. She walked down the invisible path as casually as one might descend a familiar staircase, her translucent violet garment drifting around her like colored smoke, her hair floating in defiance of any wind.

The heat intensified as she descended. It would have been unbearable to mortal flesh. To her, it was attention: the deep earth noticing her passage, acknowledging kinship. The fissures in her bronze skin glowed brighter, orange-red light pulsing with each step, answering the magma's greeting.

She reached the temple's broken entrance, a doorway without door, a threshold without definition, and crossed over.
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
@Thayr I am going to accept him. I really like the accidental birth origin and the potential for a growth arc as he learns his own nature. To strengthen the concept before play begins, please clarify whether he's purely harsh or multifaceted by committing to one characterization, add a brief note on his worshiper base (farmers, smiths, etc.).
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
https://discord.gg/AbgdWY4x7Y


Here's the new invite link for the discord, now in perpetuity!
In Forgotten Sands: A Divine Journey into the Unknown → 6 mos ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
Ooh, my bad. I will create a new one.
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