Nine Divines - In Character

[ezekielraiden]

Seeing the first mortals come to his created land, Arkhos finally felt that he had achieved something right. Not lasting, for surely his works already were that. No, this was something more. Perhaps the difference was that this achievement lay outside himself and his divine siblings. A work made, not by his own hands, but by those who chose to do what was right.

And, from there, his next act became clear. Already, Aidia had given the world a cycle of souls, that those who passed should go on to their deserving afterlife. But no such place existed yet for those who followed the law written upon their hearts, and that could not stand, especially not now that there were so many young ones in the world. He reached out a taloned hand and gripped the stuff of existence, that which lay outside and beyond, and shaped it, moulded it, twisted and turned the firmament until it matched his intent. A beautiful place. A place to put even his Jade Eyrie to shame, where what was good and right laughed in every babbling brook and shone in every ray of light. A place where those with oaths fulfilled and sacrifices made could rest and recover their strength. An idyllic refuge: the Halcyon Sanctuary. Unlike the others, he chose not to make it visible from the mortal world. Paradise so visible would be...unseemly, almost as if a taunting. No, this idyll would be separate from the mortal world; known, but unseen, trusted in faith.

It was pointless to make a refuge with no entry or exit. Touching a moderately-sized island near the heart of the Jade Eyrie through his avatar, Arkhos fashioned a temple. Beautiful, but austere; gold and alabaster walls largely unadorned, yet beautiful nonetheless in their pristine purity. It was not a place of joyful gathering, but of solemnity and poise. In its sanctum sanctorum, he placed the bridge to his new plane. The Ascent of the Just. A winding path, large enough even for a dragon to walk, into what appeared to be a mountain-face...which had no corresponding mountain on the outside, for it connected to the lowest levels of the Sanctuary: the Ascent of Justice. For this afterlife, those still living who went into it would take the low road, rather than the high one: perhaps a rare gesture of irony. Each--plane and bridge alike--would be integral to his guidance for these young ones. He would teach them to refine themselves, physically and metaphysically, until they shone as brightly as he knew each could.

Arkhos turned his attention to the greatest among his draconic children. Though they were not social creatures by nature--as Sutela had willed--they understood the need for...coordination of their solitudes. Each metal, iron, cobalt, copper, silver, and gold, selected a representative to be its voice, and in particular, to be its contact with him when a single response was needed. "Come, children, I must entreat with you." He was unsurprised entire when the gold representative proved none other than the one he had spoken with during the evacuation. A gold dragon by the name of Zarathus. The god hoped it was not the brute fact of their speaking, but rather the lessons learned from doing so, that had compelled the other golds to place this honor on Zarathus' shoulders. At the very least the dragon did not let the position go to his head; he was, if anything, the most humble of this council.

Arkhos brought the five of them to his new temple, to tell them the next stage of his works. "My children, welcome. This building shall be my House in this land, from which you and all your descendants may grow and learn the true ways, the noble ways. But you know that you are of a solitary mien, not given over to union and cooperation. This is no fault, but before mine eyes I see what wonders may yet be for those who do unite in strength and hope."

The assembled dragons responded differently. Patinaxus, the Copper, looked almost ready for a laugh. Hexaferrim, the Iron, seemed almost insulted, her dark eyes partially lidded. Zarathus quietly waited for Arkhos to finish his explanation, while Argyllian, the Silver, seemed rapt, almost too eager to learn of this new development. Koralnazar, the Cobalt, seemed distracted, as though she were only paying part of her attention.

"To each of you, I gave a virtue. I know you have learned the tale of your birth under the wings and words of my siblings, but beyond those gifts, I have shaped each of your colors for a drive. Wisdom and knowledge, protection and friendship, joy and humor, action and passion, duty and discipline." As he spoke the words, the dragon of the associated material began to glow, if ever so subtly, and could feel the touch of their maker's talons, fierce and gentle. "Now from these virtues, I call forth new children, shaped both from the bones of the earth as you were, but also from the stuff of stars. Beings with a new purpose, a new spirit."

Unlike his rapacious sister, Arkhos was more delicate in his taking. He skimmed from both Aidia's star and his own, to bless these new children with might of body and mind alike. Stretching out, out, as far as his awareness had ever gone and then farther, he even took just the smallest hint of the distant stars, purified by his will but still sparking and sparkling with the power beyond. These he bound to a shell far smaller than the five children already present, seeming tiny and even delicate compared to their heft and mighty thews. A mortal shell, to give the drive to achieve what was beyond them, and the need to turn to one another for toil and trade and tenderness. The glow on the five assembled dragons siphoned off of them, onto this body shaped of stars and dust, glowing now even more brightly than before, almost too bright to look upon.

"They shall alone be by far your inferiors, of finite life and smaller sight, but they shall in unity find strength to match even the greatest among you. I endow them with these blessings, and also this calling: like the dragons from whom they were born, they shall be exemplars to the world, revealing my joyful truth, that heroes rise from the most humble beginnings and work their acts of glory whether in aiding a single soul or the whole of Creation itself. Rise up, First of Dragonborn, mother of many kings and heroes that shall be in the Jade Eyrie and Osea and beyond. Be just and merciful and brave. The blessing is upon thee, and all that shall come after."

With these words and a final, blinding flash of light, the figure became more than a glow and dirt in a bipedal shape. She had a curved and shapely form, strong and proud, covered in a mix of colored scales in earth tones; ropy scales spilled from the back of her head like falling water, and frills stuck out from her cheeks. The only mark that she was the first of her kind were her eyes, burning with a blue fire that looked as though it could never be quenched

She spoke. "Sovereign lord, I thank you for the gift of life and the blessings, but I beg of you another gift."

Hexaferrim rumbled. "It dares beg of its creator another gift in the very hour of its birth?!"

"Before we show outrage," replied Zarathus, "let us ask what gift she seeks."

"What wouldst thou ask of me, child?"

She smiled with teeth bared. "A name!"

Arkhos laughed, a deep and wide sound, a sound that filled the soul, and even Hexaferrim could not stay grumpy in its presence. "A meet request! Thy name shall be Yuuko, for thou art the child of many excellences." And in granting her a name, Arkhos also gave her clothes, and began the process that would teach this new race how to live, and grow, and raise itself up. A tale that shall unfold...

Spoiler: Action Summary

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Weave Plane, the Halcyon Sanctuary (4 AP: Leadership)
Create Bridge, the Ascent of Justice (2 AP, Leadership)
Create Sapient Life, Dragonborn (2 AP, Leadership)
Create Society: Dragonborn culture (2 AP, Leadership; process ongoing, will flesh out more in next post)

Nobility (Leadership) domain acquired. Arkhos is now an Intermediate deity.

[Powerhouse]

The first host was weak. In time, its body was meant to grow; but time was not a luxury that it had. Moving with a will not its own, the host skittered aimlessly over the black dirt of its birthplace, until a great black bird picked it from the ground and devoured it.

That bird became the second host. Its last meal still slithering down its throat, it aborted its course back to its nest, where its hungry chicks were waiting, and flew southward, to Osea's coast. From there, it flew further still, out over the open ocean. The second host flew like this for many hours, until its strength began to flag and the nourishment it had won from the corpse of the first host inside it had dwindled to nothing.

Invisible under the surface of the sea, a black dragon covered in eyes lazily shot the out-of-place vulture from the sky with a burst of lightning, killing it instantly. For a moment, the dragon froze: and then it was the third host. Moving now with the same dire purpose that had driven the second host to its doom, it set off in the direction that the second host had come from. Back to Osea.

Like Arkhos, Sutela knew her children intimately, though she had not bothered with the petty trifles of lording over them or, indeed, informing them that she existed in the first place. Sutela knew her teachings were self-evident: those of her dragons who followed them thrived, and those who did not... did not.

It was this confidence in her children that led her third host back to the place her first host had been born. The conditions she had created there were particularly attractive to a specific breed of her children, the red ones who trailed burning blood wherever they went. They were, she knew, the creatures best suited to carry out the plan she had in mind.

When her host arrived at the newly formed volcano, the initial battle had concluded. Three corpses already lay strewn over the ashen rock; their killer sat before the largest one, already greedily devouring its body. Sutela smiled inside. She recognized this one, had watched its growth with some interest. She did not care what name it called itself by, nor what the mortals around it knew it as-- she only cared that it was strong enough for the job.

Her host roared out a shrill challenge. The bloody dragon looked up from its meal, and for a moment was mystified by the appearance of an eye dragon miles inland. Her host let loose a bolt of lightning, and the blood dragon's mystification turned to contempt. The corpses forgotten, it roared back and took to the ash-filled sky, ready for a second round.

The battle was long, but one-sided. Sutela held on for as long as she could, even leaking some of her power into her host's body so that it could survive a little longer when she thought the blood dragon wouldn't notice, but the blood dragon was implacable. Eventually, even Sutela could see that there was no reason to delay the inevitable, and-- the blood dragon having passed her little test-- she gave it its reward.

The blood dragon slew her third host, and in doing so became her fourth host. Sutela silently marveled at its heft, its strength, its raw draconic power: and she knew then that this was the one. She had given the last host some extra fortitude, so that she could better gauge the power of this one, but this host had earned far greater blessings. A crown of whispers, such that all around it would feel its intent as if it were their own; strength and resilience well beyond this creature's years, such that it would pose a mortal threat to even the oldest and mightiest of her brother's creations; and the full force of Sutela's own cunning. The first three hosts had been used only to die, sacrifices to make her way to this one. This one, Sutela would use for as long as she was able.

The fourth host rose into the air. This time, it flew out to the west.



The Jade Eyrie was unprepared. The first of her brother's dragons perished swiftly, too young and inexperienced to impede her host for long, despite their numerical advantage. She took care to destroy their young, too, and then proceeded slowly, taking flight only to cross from one floating island to the next. Her host's fiery breath she turned on fleeing creatures and helpless plant life at random, her goal less total destruction and more brutal provocation. All around her, her host's hot, bloody sludge sunk into the earth, all the thicker for her dawdling. The longer she spent in one place, the worse it would get.

The next wave of dragons put up more of a fight. There were fewer of them, but they were ready for battle, and some of them had triumphed over foes much like her host in the past. Sutela smiled as they fought-- she could feel their killing intent, and knew that they were making full use of the gifts that she and her siblings had blessed them with.

Sadly for them, that made them predictable. Their strategies might have worked against a mortal dragon, but to one of their creators, the one who wanted nothing more than for all her children to hate and destroy each other in whatever way they could envision, they were all too easy to read. Though they fought valiantly, they saw heavy casualties-- and the longer the battle went, the more her host's blood steeped the battlefield they were in, until it was practically a rich scarlet mud beneath the dragons' feet.

Sutela sneered as some of the survivors broke rank and fled, leaving their comrades to her host's clutches. Whether they were leaving to seek the protection of their precious god-king, or fleeing the Eyrie entirely, Sutela did not know: and as before, she did not care. Arkhos's host would come, sooner or later. All she had to do was keep her own host alive until then.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Curse/Bless (1 AP) - "Cesium." Cesium (lit. piercing, also known as bloodstone or eyestone) is a mutagenic, bright red mineral that Sutela has sown the Jade Eyrie with, using her avatar's bloody mantle as a vector. Most easily identified by the clusters of blinking, moving eyes upon its surface, cesium constantly leaks the raw magical essence of life, destroying simple organisms like plants and most vermin while giving complex organisms severe, unpredictable, and often life-threatening mutations.

Within the Jade Eyrie, natural deposits of cesium are localized to the specific islands that Sutela's avatar has visited, with locations that she spent more time in containing much richer deposits. Though cesium is relatively soft and malleable for a mineral, making it unsuited for building and many industrial applications, breaking a piece of cesium does not destroy its magic-leaking properties; the fragments it is broken into retain its power to kill and mutate.

[Anti-Eagle]

Grigori, the Forge Master LN (White/Blue) Intermediate Deity | Action Points: 10/24 - 10 | Artifice (Invention, Smithing), Community (Legalism), Industry (Machines), Law (Inevitables), Psionics (Noosphere), Trickery (Embellishment)

the Unexpected calls for... Unpredictability As the world grew the machinery hidden amongst it continued to develop and change based on patterns in the noosphere. Machinery of Grigori slowly began to shape into something new, this creature to be called a Kindred was born of the Forest walking as an iron skeleton in the Inevitable forest. It developed mind, gifted by its creator, and learned of the world. It was to be the diplomat, working along with the sages to bring order and balance to the world. To this task it stolem the secrets of the flesh of the organic from the aether, and was bound to it becoming a new creature. It would learn of the world, its first born would inherit a fragment of its creator becoming another aspect of the god. This firstborn would be known as the Aramak, and he would lead them. The Kindred slowly worked with the Venari to forge of the lands a Kingdom in its image, and it would be from this that the first split in their knowledge developed. Some followed the way of the Venari, a cruel and draconian creature. Others reasoning that they were created to follow the Aramak, followed his mortal born ways. Still of reason, but tempered in reality and emotion. The Kindred were not perfect, that wasn't the goal with them. They were imitations of the others creations, to work and infiltrate and bring about the creation of greater machinery and order through Grigori and his laws. How they went about that was their choice as mortals. One day perhaps new creatures would come, and more perfect creatures would be born. But that was not today.

[BaratheonFury]

Risia regarded the aftermath of her work with smug satisfaction, She still wasn't entirely sure what Zephyri were saying but maybe that was for the best. She was sure they were quite witty but even if they weren't A little mystery made even the worst of curmudgeons bearable. Whatever way the wind blew she was sure they'd work out in the end, she made them after all.

"Hmm... Speaking of making things" Risia mused as she observed the vortex her "Symphony" had left behind. She hadn't really intended it but she liked it anyways. It reminded her of.... nothing actually, but a good nothing, the type of nothing that might become anything, or nothing. It had a certain spontaneity to it. She just wished she'd picked a better spot for it. The ocean was becoming an eyesore. Why did it have to be so big? Who thought covering that much of the world in WATER of all things was a good idea. The solution was simple, it had to go.


But go where? maybe it'd be more interesting if it was on land? no, she'd seen that already. Land water was perhaps even more boring, that only left the sky. She did like clouds, but repetition was never fun and she wasn't sure she wanted that much water polluting her sky. Well in that case the only option left was to bring the sky to the ocean. With a bit of twirling, a little whirling and perhaps a slice of the vortex the whole idea came together, water was a quick learner if nothing else, and Risia soon waved off her creation, a swirling, whirling vortex of water, wind and whatever it happened to pick up along the way.

[Mai]

Shyrask would watch ad things happenes. She would was Arkhos vs rescurr, and watch the deaths of many things to her predator. And for quite a while, Shyrask just observed. She would smile and thank Arkhos for rescuing some of the dryads. Shyrask was not unconcerned, even if she had greeted it with unleashing major predators. But now Shyrask was placated again, if only a bit.

She smiled at her siblings Sutella and Arkhos, and thanked them both. "Thank you both. For just like change is in your nature Sutella, furocity and power is in my nature. And your volcano satisfies that. As does your rescue. For I am not without compassion or gentleness. Thank you both for what you have wraught apon Osea."

Shyrask would then turn about and extend her awareness further, observing more and thinking. "But perhaps more is needed. Perhaps like your santuary, there should be a seperate sanctuary for the wild things. A place I can satisfy myself without worry about the consequences on the first world. A habitat where I can test things."

And Shyrask would turn outward, and weave a new plane from the universe. A new world, huge and as conceivably infinite as a plane could be. And she would weave from this blank canvas, a huge tree surpassing all that any first world tree could hope to be ans far more. It stretched upward, taller than any mountain on the first world. And it's roots expanded above the ground, and then deep into the plane.

Shyrask would then weave this world tree outwards, and fill the plane with many connections. Around the tree a large clearing would form. Then, a circle of forests. Each composed of huge trees, each standing hundreds of feet tall and wide and strong. She would then create water, and give her budding plane rain untill new swamps and seas formed. Rather than oceans, smaller saltwater seas and massive freshwater lakes would form. Every biome the first world had and more.

But Shyrask wasn't done. She pulled the roots of her world tree out of the plane and into the void between them, snaking huge roots about. Finally, she would pull a massive root through the void and into the first world. And now it's roots would grasp the first world through the void, and dig deep into the first world.

Now there was a bridge. One could enter the cloud jungle, and the massive cave in Osea's central mountain range now had functions. For her roots exited into the first world through the cave. Beings could walk into it, and exit into her plane having traveled through the roots. And Shyrask would dub this plane "The Primal Oasis", for any life gone extinct on the first world could be found there, and eventually returned to the first world. Life would always be abundant here, ready to supply the universe.

Spoiler: Actions

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Weave Planes (4AP):
The Primal Oasis
Create Portal/Bridge (2AP):
The great cave in the cloud jungle now connects to the primal oasis.

[AlexanderML]

Ulthor the Harvest Mystic CG (Red/Green) Lesser Deity | Action Points: 15/20 |Portfolio: Primal Magic, Earth, Weather, Raw Goods, Gifts | Domains: Magic, Earth, Weather, Good, Chaos

Husband Ulthor - Osea on a Terrible Day - Woe for the World: It had been a few years since husband Ulthor had made a visit to the dryads of this particular village, one of the first that was taught the lovely work of the land. Already only a decade since he first visited, the dryads were starting to experiment with growing new seeds. He wondered how that young dryad Holly was doing these days (she was talented), if Ivy had twins like he predicted, and what kind of fruit those seeds he gave that young boy sprouted (probably sweet melons). Husband Ulthor saw a group of the youngsters near one of the local paths, Holly was even among them! Husband Ulthor was glad to see them; however, they looked haggard and tired, with eyes filled with something he'd not seen before (at least not on a dryad): fear. Giving a wave he started to move closer to properly greet the group while thinking of what would be a good thing to say or what to ask. Then... he felt it. Husband Ulthor felt the world cracking deep beneath his feet and where the dryads had just come from. Husband Ulthor had almost no time, he was near Holly and her group in an instant. "Stay close!" He yelled while the world whisked him and the group away, a shimmering globe of green light surrounding the group as they flew too fast for the mortals to see what was around them. By the will of the dark goddess, the world lashed out in blind anger at those nearby, thrashing it's heated blood at and shaking the foundations of all near it's pain. The normally happy man that was Husband Ulthor just stared at the pain the World felt, filled with sorrow at the tragedy before him. Oh, how he felt he had failed. He believed the world was not a place that could hold such cruelty, now he knew he was partially wrong, the Others dark or not would do with the world what they willed. Walking away from the group of dryads that were also staring at the pain before them, Husband Ulthor moved to the edge of one of the cracks. Just looking into the chasm made him tremble, tears streaming down his face. Falling to his knees he cried. "Oh Boo hoo hoo hoo! I'm sorry dear, I'm so sorry! Please, don't be mad, things will get better." Tears fell from Husband Ulthor for days, his endless crying and reassurances continuing day and night. He cried for the pain inflicted on the world, he pleaded with the world to not stay mad. As he had cried the world was consumed with dark clouds that cried the tears he could not through his flesh. Only after Husband Ulthor felt the splash of water on his knee did he stop to look in front of him, at the now water filled cracks of the world. It glistened in the suns, and Husband Ulthor could see that the cracks had sealed deep down. He smiled, unsure what to be happy for, but thinking that he probably should be. Spoiler: AP Action Show AP 15/20 -1 Alter Land (Sutela's Fang) - Ulrathi Rivers: Husband Ulthor cries for days on end to seal the continent spanning cracks of Sutela's Fang, creating two huge rivers to replace them (the easter Ulrathi river and the western one). Every few years (~5-25) the bed beneath the rivers opens and the river begins to dry till there is nothing left other than the ponds near the river bed. Soon after, a great rain falls and once again fills the cracks. 10/10 Primal Nature Ulthor - The Primal Oasis - Greetings: Sitting already inside the oasis, as if waiting, was a figure who wore bright fruits and cloths. His face was joyous and full of confidence as he looked over the Oasis Spoiler: Appearance Show Sipping from a cup in hand he stated to no one in particular. "Hahaha! Oh, this will be interesting! The World past the First? Sister of mine, your mind has such good ideas!" As he was talking a bit of wine fell from his goblet, sinking down into the earth. As the primal earth absorbed this godly drink, it decided to rise up and greet Ulthor. It only looked in the vaguest sense humanoid, but it did have two large glowing red eyes. Ulthor just laughed at the site of this thing. "Now what are you suppose to be?" Spoiler: AP Actions Show AP 14/20 -5 Create Major Artifact (Create Sub-Race) - The Cup of the Fae King: This artifact is tied to the primal power of the World, able to call upon godly amounts of power and infuse the land with a sense of purpose. It's greatest power that it grants Ulthor the ability to manipulate the creatures of the world into new forms. -0 (Using the Cup) Create Monstrous Sub-Race of Fae - Elementals: These Fae-like creatures are connected to the very basic components of the world, never really changing (unless you count size wise) they lack the intelligence of true Fae because they lack an 'eye of the world' or some other such Ulthorian nonsense. They do not make smaller replacements like fae when they die, and generally appear in places where high amounts of primal nature is found (like the Oasis, though magic could make one appear elsewhere). Stat-wise, they are just the basic Fire/Earth/Water/Air elemental. 10/10 Faekind Ulthor has become an Intermediate deity! 14-5=9 AP left

[ezekielraiden]

(The following post was a compilation effort from both myself and Powerhouse. I'm just posting the complete thing as one unit. Powerhouse has already paid for all relevant actions; my AP summary follows at the end.)

Kinryu-Tei, as an extension of Arkhos, did not move quickly to fight others' battles. In this case, however, there was more to his patience than merely pushing others to stand up for themselves. He had the Dragonborn to worry about--they had to be kept away from...whatever this was, in their relative infancy. But soon the cries became too loud, and even mighty dragons were not enough for this bloodied monster rampaging through the Eyrie. Immediately, Kinryu-Tei knew that Sutela's hand was in this, and that only a god's might could counter this offensive.

Adamant and opalescent and nacreous wings flashed in the sunlight, and scales of silver and gold and mythril and metals unknown and unnamed gleamed with divine light. It did not take long to find Sutela, though Kinryu-Tei had the good sense at least to wait until the Five Metallics were assembled to coordinate. "Clear the way, my children. This fight is between me and my sister. She will learn the error of her ways--sooner or later."

Four of the Five obediently went about their duties immediately, with Patinax in particular showing impressive valor and compassion in clearing creatures large and small from the area. One, however, was slower in his response: Zarathus. He did carry out his duties, but something nagged at him. Arkhos' words--that seeing with wise eyes was often a matter of learning--still echoed in his thoughts. But soon, even with a distracted Gold, the arena was clear and Kinryu-Tei descended to the fight.

"Sister, leave this place now. I know you value your life above all else. Sacrifice it not here." The avatar's words were calm, but it was the calm of frozen steel, the calm at the eye of the hurricane. The words could not have been more aggressive if he had openly threatened her.

"Ha!" Sutela barked a short laugh, seeming genuinely amused by the notion of Kinryu-Tei killing her. "Big words for a coward, who hides behind his children and marches them to their deaths! You couldn't bring yourself to end me if I let you."

No more words. Just talons, fangs, breath in colors unimagined. Sutela knew her quarry well, knew how to drive home exactly the message she wanted. In his own way, Arkhos was as straightforward as she, and there is strength in such single-mindedness. But any strength can be a weakness when it is unquestioned, and Arkhos was was well beyond asking questions by then.

The avatar's body became splattered with gore, and took a fair share of wounds as well, as one would expect for a conflict between the gods themselves, even by proxy. Mountains brought low. Valleys choked with pulverized rock-islands. New ones drawn up from the floating continent, in fire and stone, shadow and light. Hours they fought--long into the night, with the Five tending to the damage and the wounded, shepherding the displaced.

Still Zarathus watched. Something was wrong here. More than once, he saw what seemed a tactical error committed by his god's avatar. Be it hesitation, regret, or merely trying not to destroy his yet-new islands, he made stumbles...and Sutela did not exploit them. Though he did not know her mind as Arkhos did--being neither divine nor her sibling--he was in some sense blessed with the cunning she gave to all dragons. The only thing that could make her refuse an opening was when she already had a greater game, when taking a piece in the moment would ruin the next turn's gambit.

But what possible greater gambit could she have? Hours of bloody combat, with elements flying, and he could not find it. She even began, ever so slowly, by degrees, to lose! Zarathus did not know if such a contest could have a simple summation of victory--when the lords of creation go to war, what ledger might document their power?--but he did know that she should fare far better than she had.

Finally, after a battle raged across nearly the whole of one of the three large islands--and which had left no prominent island totally untouched, for Sutela's blood-thing was a wily foe indeed--it became clear that Kinryu-Tei would best it. The final, darkest hours of night waned, first to blue-grey and then to gold, as the suns rose over the horizon.

"It is finished, Sutela. And so are you." The god of heroes could not let such a symbolic moment pass.

"Strike me down and know true despair," Sutela hissed, though her stolen body was too battered and broken for the threat to hold much weight.

Kinryu-Tei rose up to his full height, the first rays of the morning sun catching in his wings and scales, sending brilliant reflections in all directions. After so long a battle, he would relish striking down this foe.

And in that moment, flying above the field, Zarathus finally understood. She did not want to win. She wanted Kinryu-Tei to slay her, to end the fight. Though he was not sure of the method, he knew without doubt that in the slaying of this body she wore, Sutela would win--would take something from Arkhos that should not, could not be taken. No time remained to call, to warn, to guide; no time even to try to stand between, in a no doubt futile attempt to deflect the wrath of a god.

No. There was only time to act. And he did. Streaking like a golden comet through the heavens, he flashed past his god in a blaze of light, faster even than an avatar could respond. Talons outstretched, made sharper than any definition of sharpness by the need to save that which must not be lost, and Zarathus landed the telling blow. The blood-thing gurgled briefly, triumph mingled with confusion for a fleeting moment before life left its gory husk.

"No choice, Father. It must be thus. Wise eyes saw." Already he felt--something. Wrong. Twisting, writhing, languishing, leashing. Wrong. "F-farewell."

And when Zarathus next spoke, it was not with his customary poise and dignity. "Hm?"

His body looked down at its golden claws, so like and yet unlike those of the avatar of the god who had created it, and gave them an experimental flex. It looked up, locking eyes with Kinryu-Tei, and he saw at once the same cruel madness that had lurked in the eyes of the great bloody dragon he had just fought.

"Curses," said Sutela mildly, from within her fifth host.

The rage within Kinryu-Tei became palpable, a wave of bitter cold, as he understood the weight of Zarathus' sacrifice. Gone. Not snuffed out--no, that would be too clean, to quick, too kind for Sutela. Trapped. His soul bound to that body, now surging again with Sutela's essence. Locked behind eyes of cruelty and malice and insatiable hunger. And yet, in the doing, Zarathus proved himself the noblest of Arkhos' children: giving everything for the sake of another. The irony that such a deed would fuel one of Sutela's grotesque schemes was not lost on Arkhos, but he could not in that moment appreciate her cunning.

"You shall not have what you desire, Sister. You may rage as you like. There will always be hope left, to build anew. Your scheme is undone, not by my will, but by my inferior--and yours." He gazed over her, to the island's edge and beyond, to the sea far below. The flash of prophecy shone in his eyes. "So it always shall be: as long as you and yours arise in might and malice both, so too shall rise me and mine, eternal reminder that might alone is never enough. This day, self-sacrifice has undone you in all your wily strength. But know this: Blood now stands between you and I. Blood of the soil, and blood of the son. And my vengeance is as patient as yours."

Zarathus' body sneered. "I look forward to seeing it, dear Brother. Perhaps next time I'll take one of this one's siblings."

Her bloodstone sown and her true plot foiled, Sutela's host took to the skies and vanished into the distance. Kinryu-Tei made no move to stop her. If he destroyed this body, and like Zarathus had his own body stolen by Sutela's conniving will, the cost to this world would be immense: there, too, Zarathus had exceeded him, as a tactician and a hero. As much as it pained him, one did not trade his king for his opponent's queen.

Of course, though Zarathus' loss was the keenest pain that day, the other and far more successful aspect of Sutela's plan proved far more onerous. In mere days, Sutela's festering blood had dealt incredible damage to the Eyrie. It hardened into a stony substance, cesium, friable but dense...and disgustingly overcharged with magic. So overcharged, it leaked into its surroundings, withering plants and slaying small creatures, horribly mutating greater ones. Kinryu-Tei had to personally put down more than a few good and noble children--until again, he swore that enough was enough. From the heart of the Halcyon Sanctuary, he shaped something new, a blessed thing for granting blessings, in the name of his now-stolen child.

"This shall be thy ever-living epitaph, Zarathus, most noble of my children. Three arches raised within the bower: a glade in which to gather power; a staff, a crown, most noble face; thy mem'ry blesses this dread place." Zarathus might not be free, but his legacy would stand, for remembrance, as a reminder, to god and mortal alike: the Eternal Cynosure. Taking up the power he placed into this monument, he drew forth a blessing of his own. He could not simply erase Sutela's work, so instead, he chose to turn offense into opportunity. He blessed the world with resistance to the mutating magic of the cesium: strongest in those lands bound to his will, but present elsewhere. Many were simply immune to its effect now, capable of working and shaping it into something useful and beautiful rather than horrifying and dangerous. A few, however, received the blessing tenfold, and became empowered by it.

Those animals already twisted, or whose blessing failed to protect them completely from sustained exposure, often died...but those that did not rose in the fashion of their mother. Dire and dangerous, creatures twisted by cesium were not to be trifled with, even by Arkhos' children, but they would provide many aspirants with a new opportunity for heroism.

Spoiler: Action Info

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5 AP: Create Major Artifact, Bless/Curse (The Eternal Cynosure) [domain: time]
1 PAP, Counter-Bless: Ability to absorb, or concentrate, the radiation from Sutela's Cesium [sphere: Balance]

Progress toward Time domain: 8/10
Remaining AP: 2

[Unavenger]

A stranger came by candlelight.

They wandered into the mutalvai's village. There were no guards. There weren't even any walls, except the ones which shielded their houses from the winds and held them up. The stranger played on a drum made of wood and plant fibres, and as they came into view it became clear that their cloak was covered in paints, decorations and baubles, and they wore an elaborate headdress. On their back was a display of candles, on a candelabra which looked like a pair of wings. Their drumming quickly alerted the mutalvai to his presence, and the lights to their location. The mutalvai gathered around the stranger, and came to speak with him.

---

"Ain't they awesome!? Look at 'em! Look at Maverick, you guys! They've got a cool drum and a cool cloak and a cool hat and stuff!" Pariah giggled. The mutalvai on the ground were busy clapping along to the beat. "They've got them all playing along and stuff!" Then she had an idea. She would create people just like her! That couldn't go wrong!

---

Maverick brought the races together. Humans, the new creatures of Pariah's invention, traded with the dryads and the mutalvai. They wrote stories and made music when there was nothing to be built, no crops to be tended. Apart from that, they worked together, or worked apart and traded with each other. The humans were diverse, they were cool! And Pariah made certain that nothing could wipe them from this world.

Spoiler: Actions

Show

Create Major Artifact [4AP]: Utility, "Teach Concept".
Create Avatar [4AP] Maverick
Create Concept, Mundane Concept [0AP]: Trade to the Mutalavai and the Dryads
Teach Concept, Mundane Concept [0AP]: Agriculture to the Mutalavai
Teach Concept, Mundane Concept [1AP]: Music to the Mutalavai
Create Life, Sapient Life [1AP]: Humans
Bless/Curse [0AP]: Bless, humans can't go extinct.

Gain domain: Travel (Trade)

[Powerhouse]

Bound for the landless north of the First World, Sutela's host had a grim satisfaction about it. True, she had been unsuccessful in stamping out Arkhos' host entirely: but she had dealt considerable damage to him, inflicted scars that would never quite heal. Even now she saw how he was confined to his little cradle, the Eyrie she had blitzed through so easily, fearful of a repeat attack before he had finished licking his wounds, worried that she had sensed the tiny dragon-born children he had taken it upon himself to shepherd.

She shook her head. The feeble insights of a fool with no understanding of her at all. Though a second attack before he had time to recover, time to devise a way of stopping her host without claiming its life, was a tempting prospect, in truth their first fight had changed things somewhat. It had not escaped her notice the way that the five little dragons Arkhos had surrounded his host with leapt to obey his order to clear the area, as ridiculous as the order was. And she had certainly noticed it when one of them, the lamentable gold one whose body she now wore as her trophy, managed to see through her strategy and steal her complete and utter victory from her.

A great white dragon, its chalky scales sculpted into jagged spikes and outcroppings and a profusion of bony horns and claws jutting from between them, rose up from the ocean before her host. Seeing only the body of a gold dragon and not the mind of its creator directing it, it snarled some banal threat; Sutela thrashed it halfway to death in response. Before she tore out its throat, she paused for a moment.

"Who is your parent?" she snarled at it.

"I have no parent," wheezed the bone dragon, sounding vaguely surprised to have survived for this long, "save the Bleeding Crown itself."

"You're one of the first generation?" Sutela demanded, incredulous.

The bone dragon nodded weakly.

"Liar," she growled, sinking her claws into the bone dragon's throat, relishing the way its brittle scales cracked and groaned under the force of her host's grip. "Tell me the truth."

Compelled by its creator's explicit order, though it did not know that it was its creator it was speaking to, the bone dragon coughed up a wad of its blood and repeated itself. "I have no parent."

Sutela considered this for some time; long enough that the bone dragon in her grasp tried to escape her several times, though by this point it had sustained injuries brutal enough to make retaining it trivial. She had some sense that the elder dragons were more powerful, following from Shyrask's gift of longevity, and this world was still in its infancy-- there was no way for the young of the first generation of dragons to have grown strong enough to eclipse their parents, though that outcome was surely in this world's future. Surely, then, this was one of the greatest bone dragons currently in existence.

She looked back at the bone dragon in her clutches, about to ask it another question, but it had expired. She sighed and resumed her course northward, still holding the bone dragon's tremendous corpse.

It was foolish, she knew, to have expected even the greatest dragon in existence to challenge her might. She was a goddess, so far above their kind as to have carelessly scattered them across the world's surface. Even limited to this mortal host's flimsy body, she alone would have been enough to wipe out Arkhos' miserable whelps ten times over, provided no other god interrupted her massacre.

And yet... this particular mortal host had bested her, for the briefest of moments. It had done so stupidly, out of a suicidal impulse to protect a god who had done nothing but ask it to perform ridiculous tasks for self-defeating reasons, but Sutela had recently learned that even a foolish reason could result in a stroke of brilliance. It was beginning to unsettle her.

Compared to the rage that had filled her when she had seen Shyrask's two cretins misusing her gifts before, what she felt now was far more uncomfortable. She looked down at the corpse of the dragon her host was still carrying. Had this mortal, too, held the potential to outwit her, if only for a moment? Why hadn't it? Had stuffy, upright, straightforward Arkhos cheated somehow? No, that was impossible. Perhaps she had merely been the victim of poor fortune-- and yet, no, this rang false too. A goddess did not lose to the mere forces of chance, especially not when she presided over the intersection of chance with survival itself.

And then she realized. Her deception. That was the fatal flaw the gold dragon had managed to exploit, by using her gift of cunning against her. Her taunts against Arkhos had telegraphed her intent too plainly, for though she had made them knowing that he would never see through her ruse, she had neglected to consider those around him-- the dragons who had received some measure of her cunning. As all mortal beings strangled and destroyed those around them by dint of their existence, her own genius worked against itself too, forcing her to adapt and extend her reach by doing things she had never before considered.

Sutela's host nodded its head. She could do that.

[AvatarVecna]

As life prospered, Aidia found her self-appointed task...more taxing than it had once been. She needed to delegate, to shift some portion of the burden that none would linger too long where they fell. It would not do to push this duty on existent beings, however...no, this too would have to come from within, to break away from her and grow beyond her, that it could succeed where she was slowly failing.

A single white-hot scale was pulled away with great agony, and she began to work at it as she had seen Grigori do with so many of his own creations. Bits and pieces were chipped away from the massive scale, and the motes fell to the world below like stars shooting across the sky. Every speck landed and rooted. When the dust sprouted, a being of Aidia's form burst forth (albeit not of her size): a long snake, as pitch black and immaterial as the void of space. They slithered through grass, through air, through stone, tracking down their intended prey: the deceased still clinging to life who needed the most guidance of all.

Sometimes, a mistake was made during the forging process and Aidia would lose a larger chunk than intended. These pieces would fall, instilled with the spark of life but not truly guided by divine will as the motes were. And still they fell, and rooted, and sprouted, and once more massive snakes burst forth. But these were far, far larger, rivaling all but the largest children of the dragon-gods, and glowed with the same unrestrained power of the starstuff they had been chipped away from. They tried to go about their duties but wherever they went, life withered away before their divine light. They needed to be focused...shaped...given purpose.

Still, she worked away at the scale until finally, finally, it was tempered as best she could get it. It would not scorch the land the way the great serpents did - it would instill the bearer with all the power encased within, focused enough that it would not lash out against those that wielded it. It would protect them, ward them. And it would lead others to the world beyond. The next step would be finding a champion who could be entrusted with the power and would willingly shoulder the burden that came with it...but that would need to wait. She needed to get her children under control, and for that she sought out the assistance of the most level-headed of her colleagues: Shyrask.

Spoiler: AP Actions

Show

Create Monstrous Life (1 AP)
Spectral Pythons
Earth (Radiation) 3/10

Create Mythical Life (2/4 AP - splitting with Shyrask)
Couatls in various forms - currently radioactive flying snakes of various sizes and danger
Earth (Radiation) 5/10

Create Minor Artifact (3 AP)
Gravescale Shield (WIP)
Earth (Radiation) 8/10

11 AP remaining

[ezekielraiden]

The end of the story between Arkhos and Sutela had not yet been written, but for the time being, he had other, more relevant matters to attend to. The teaching of his newest creation was paramount in his mind. From the stars they had come, and from the stars they would learn much--their ways of connecting past to present, of marking the subtler cycles of the world. Kinryu-Tei worked with the very first of them, and trusted them to pass on the teachings to their children and their children's children, down through the ages. After all, a love of history was woven into their very bones. Observing the stars was but a natural extension.

From there, he began to re-examine the impact of Sutela's invasion. Yes, his blessing had suitably stymied the worst of its impact, but there still remained dangerous confluxes of magic, whorls and eddies and currents that could threaten the fledgling culture ere it took flight. But perhaps something more could be made of the blessing he had granted. Yes, he could spin it into something grander still, something gifted and borne in the blood, a pleasing irony that Sutela's cursed blood would be made a boon and not a bane via blessed blood. And he would ensure that that blessing came to all those worthy of its touch--not merely the destined, but any who were willing to reach higher and achieve more purely by their own willpower.

In truth, the native magic that the draconic pantheon had granted to dragons was already the groundwork. Arkhos merely took that and made it--broader. Accessible. And in particular, he made it a gift that could be given in many ways. A hero gaining great power from making a stand against a terrible force? Yes, that is exactly the kind of power Arkhos would want to grant. Of course, any gift of power may be abused. Despite his sister's sneering scorn, he did understand that. But to use that as an excuse not to act would be unacceptable.

In particular, he gifted the fledgling dragonborn with this gift directly. "Children," he called out to them--and they assembled, though some took their time. Arkhos was patient; his children were not at his beck and call, nor were they thrown about like toys. They were made to be independent from him. "Your growth begins, and you will need to stand on your own feet. But I do not send you forth without gifts, so I give you this." Beckoning forward Yuuko, he reached out to her with one great talon. Its first claw touched her forehead, while the second touched her chest above her heart. He spoke in the language of creation itself, words of power and glory and weight. Briefly, a golden light shone on her forehead and even could be seen through the fabric of her shirt, but then it was gone.

"Thou, and thy children, and thy children's children, for time without end, shall have this blessing also. But, perhaps of greater import, thou and thine shalt know the art of granting this gift to thy comrades. It shall not run, as my gift to thee does, through their blood down through all ages. Still, the gift may be given nonetheless, and I shall teach thee and thine in the giving." He called forth certain gold dragons, whose knowledge was already vast and intricate, to assist with this process, before continuing. "Welcome those who will stand beside you all, my children, for it is in uniting those strengths that you shall exceed both your maker and your greatest foes."

When the initial teaching was done, Arkhos arose in the fullness of his might, a great and shining wyrm, with a voice that filled the heavens--not in volume, but in depth and clarity, for he did not need to shout to speak to every mortal within these floating islands. "The time of establishment is at hand. Build wonders. Raise cities, till fields, be legends, tell epics. Learn how to love others as thou lovest thyself, and thou shalt be permitted to love thyself as thou lovest others. Know what awaits thee for a rightwise life, and be excellent, in all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind, and all thy strength."

Spoiler: AP Actions

Show

Current AP: 2+6 = 8
Create Advanced Concept: Astronomy, 2 AP [Time]
Create Mythical Concept: Sorcery, 4 AP [Magic: Rites]
Create Mythical Subconcept (Soul Magic, Sorcery): Investiture, 2 AP [Magic: Rites]

All of these concepts are open. Sorcery is meant to derive from enduring some magical hardship, or inheritance from one who has done so, or via Investiture (though Investiture can grant other abilities, not just Sorcery). Arkhos has merely formalized the concept inherent in the blessing he gave previously to counteract Sutela's cesium poisoning.

Total AP dedicated to Time: 10/10. Time domain acquired, via History portfolio.
Total AP dedicated to Magic (Rites): 6/10
Complete Portfolio (w/Domain & Subdomain if relevant): Heroes (Glory: Heroism), Self-Sacrifice (Good), Oaths (Law: Archon), Adventure (Travel), Hope (Luck), Metallic Dragons (Scalykind: Dragon), Inspiration (Nobility: Leadership), History (Time)

Remaining AP: 0
Remaining PAP: 1
Eternal Cynosure not yet used this week

[Powerhouse]

When at last Sutela's host had arrived at its destination, she appraised the area carefully. Because it marked the axis upon which the First World spun, the North of the First World had not seen sunlight since Sutela had erected the Bleeding Crown: the planet's rotation simply did not take it out of the Bleeding Crown's vast shadow. The oceans had frozen over here, though the sheets of ice were thin and regularly snapped by the movement of the warmer waters around them.

Though Sutela's attention for the last few weeks had largely been taken up with the interference of Arkhos, Ulthor and Shyrask in her sacred duties of ensuring that the weak died and the strong survived, her trip northward had given her some time to ponder over the work of her sister Risia. Wind and water that moved of its own volition were the recurring theme Risia seemed to prefer; and while the execution was clumsy, lacked a certain brutal flair, Sutela could not deny that Risia's living storms were perfect for weeding out weaklings across the world.

She contemplated the corpse of the bone dragon still in her host's claws. While she would not stoop to bringing this one back-- it had made the fatal error of challenging her host, after all-- she hadn't intended on letting it die so soon. This body still had work to do for her.

Her host dangled it over the icy waters below. Immediately, the air around its body cooled to an intense degree, and Sutela set about sculpting the chill with her mind. When she was done, she dropped the corpse into the ice floes below; it crashed through them and sank into the dark waters. For some time, she waited patiently, watching its progress with the million eyes of her true form rather than the weak ones of her host.

When the bone dragon's body rose again, coated in a living skin of ice so thick as to obscure the corpse that was its core, it was not driven by the will of its previous owner, or by the will of Sutela herself; it was something new. Sutela's thoughts, Sutela's memories, Sutela's own cunning, but bound to a body without any of her great powers. A body that would sizzle and begin to melt if ever taken outside of the frigid cold of the North Pole itself. A version of Sutela who would have to adapt if she were to survive.

The new creature regarded her creator's avatar with some caution. She remembered being Sutela, and she remembered the chain of events that had led to her own creation. Her icy exterior shifted ponderously as her mind settled more completely within it, until-- quite by accident-- it coalesced into the rough shape of the golden dragon hovering in front of her. Mirrored the host in body as she already mirrored the host's controller in mind.

The mirror knew what the next part of the plan was. Though she could no longer sense Sutela's true body, given that she no longer-- and therefore had never-- inhabited it, she could watch as Sutela drew forth new land from the sea bed beneath her and Sutela's hovering host. The new continent rose from the ocean with a titanic roar, displacing ice and seawater and capturing droves of aquatic creatures unfortunate enough to have been caught in its path skywards. When the rumbling finished, Sutela's host gave a slight nod, and the mirror drew a deep breath and exhaled its freezing breath, one of the traits it had inherited from the bone dragon's corpse deep inside it.

A single bone dragon's breath was nowhere near enough to freeze the surface of an entire continent, even in a place that did not see the sun; but with the help of a goddess, anything was possible. As the mirror's breath rushed from its icy maw, Sutela's host gestured at the freshly formed continent below, and in an instant the wintry wind was magnified, multiplied once and then twice and then thrice, extended both in range and in intensity.

When at last the cold wind died, the dark rock of the new continent was encased in ice. All those creatures that had been swept up in its initial rise were now flash-frozen, killed by the intense cold if they hadn't already choked in the dry air. Sutela's host gestured again, this time sweeping both claws upwards. A series of deep cracks resounded throughout the surface of the continent.

Great fingers of bone exploded from beneath the ice, all over the continent, and surged skywards until they towered over the surface, a forest of bone to populate the continent of ice. At another gesture they began to breathe, somehow deriving nourishment from the void as Sutela's first, most primitive children before them fed off the twin suns' light.

Far above this new land, the Bleeding Crown rumbled; and a shower of its blood rained down upon the ice and bone, momentarily turning white into pink. As the blood splattered all over, it gave rise to new creatures; six-legged pack hunters with hundreds of simple eyes and gnashing sets of mandibles, jittery flying things that bored into the hearts of the bone trees and fed on their lifeblood, nimble creatures with three horns that fed on the bone itself and fled at the first sign of danger.

Sutela's host beckoned once more, and mountains and valleys began to score the icy surface of the continent. Many of her new creations perished in the resulting avalanches and crevasses, and vast swathes of the bony trees she had just called up splintered like twigs. Those that survived would find the newly roughed terrain even less forgiving to the unready among them; but those that rose to meet the challenge would be able to exploit these new caves and different elevations for their own gain.

And then, to complete the continent, she made her final gesture; deep underground, far beneath even the slab of ice that coated the land, great deposits of metals and minerals bulged into existence. Some grew so large that they formed noticeable hills on the icy surface above them, subtle signs that riches awaited any who thought to burrow into them. If the entire rest of the continent, from the darkness to the cold to the terrain, was the stick, then these metals would serve as the carrot. Sutela had seen what sapients were beginning to do with metal, and what they were beginning to do for it. One day soon, the North would be as hotly contested as any other place on this planet.

The mirror, knowing that their job was done-- for the time being-- descended upon the tallest of the new mountains and, with her host's power over ice, excavated a lair for herself. For now, the duties her original self had assigned her were light. Watch over her new icy domain, imprint her dominion on the genetic history of every species that would ever arise here, and test all life she came across.

Sutela's host snaked off into the distance. Bound for the south, the mirror remembered, though she could no longer be sure that Sutela hadn't changed her mind.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Create Land (2AP) - The North Pole. A wintry, hellish continent shrouded in omnipresent shadow, the North Pole's defining features are its bony wildlife and its extreme terrain-- valleys, mountains and crevasses are less geographical features here and more the default state of the land. The "tree" equivalents are various bone spikes that protrude from deep under the North's icy surface, while most "animals" are insectoids with tough exoskeletons. Particularly noteworthy are the North Pole's rich ore deposits-- deep beneath the ice are nodes of metals and precious stones that dwarf the combined inventory of the other four or whatever continents combined!

Curse/Bless (1AP) - The Mirror. The North Pole is "protected" by a conditionally-immortal bone dragon coated in a thick layer of ice, but it's not just any old bone dragon-- the ice comprising it is imbued with a clone of Sutela's consciousness! Besides lacking any connection to Sutela herself and having only the powers of a regular old great wyrm bone dragon, Sutela's mirror is confined to the North Pole itself! The bone dragon's main job is to kill anything that she feels like killing! If she doesn't want to kill you, or for some reason can't find you to kill you, then good job! You've "passed" the "test", and get to live in the North Pole!

[Omoikane13]

Ideas had slowed to a trickle, and this knowledge taunted Caudex. The Sine were perfectly functional, in their little collection of islands, but even the inkstones hadn't done much to shake them from their lives. That was how they were made, after all. It was both a blessing and an inherent flaw; they struggled to innovate without the chance birth of some prodigy. Even guidance from the Rector only went so far.

More variables.

There needed to be more variables, and there was only one thing that could introduce enough variables. It had come time to upend the experiment's dish and let some things out into the First World. Eight more gods would provide the necessary injection of innovation, even if the uncontrolled chaos of leaving it to others grated. But it was needed.

Well, as begrudging as the bridge would be, that didn't mean there couldn't be some flair. Theatricality warmed the heart sometimes. But there would need to be somewhere for it to go.

Osea was, to put it bluntly, baking hot. The Sine were used to a more cool environment, with nothing so hot as a volcano anywhere near. On the flip side, Sutela, the eyeball dragon, had done some rather...interesting things to one of the poles, making them roughly as inhospitable. Arkhos, the metal dragon, had made islands in the sky, in an amusing piece of conceptual parallel evolution, but those felt...off limits. There needed to be somewhere less under the control of someone else.

Reality balked when one took a mere step on the First World, which was highly inconvenient, but one had to work around difficulties. The Sine would be fine for a time, but couldn't be left without leadership for too long. The Rector was needed, however, and a smear of black across the ocean made way for a deeper, blue-black patch of ink, matched by a whole island in the Laboratoria turning the same colour. Easy entrance and egress for The Sine, when the time came. It took but a thought to be working with the Rector's body, and Caudex lept into the inkstain, trajectory calculated to not come shooting out too quickly on the other side.

Caudex was loathe to do it, but more land would be needed. Cool, perhaps even cold, but not the bite of the pole. Snow itself was wonderful, so full of structure and so difficult for mortals, all at once. Covering, hiding, and yet made of so many little shapes. Taking from neighbouring Osea as well as the pole, a landmass was drawn out, disturbing the waters somewhat. Earth, coated in snow, uneven and plain. The trickle of ideas reared its head again. Knowledge and memory were all well and good, but Caudex couldn't tap into deific knowledge. To polish off this work, there would need to be a...consultation. A prompt, a guide, at the very least. Shyrask, the third dragon, was one possibility. Advice could also be sought from one of the more philosophically-opposite deities. Ulthor, perhaps. Well, there was some need to endear oneself when in an unfamiliar environment.

"Worldhusband, I greet you. I would like to request an exchange of favours. I could do with some guidance regarding the natural, as I'm far too used to the metaphysical."

Something to ponder in the following moments: a name. Etiquette suggested something more familiar to the locals than the scraps of language used in the Laboratoria. Something still old though. There was power in that.

Nyrsvell.

Spoiler: AP Actions

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Create Land [2 AP]: Nyrsvell
Nyrsvell is, at present, not much beyond earth and snow. Caudex reserves the right to finish off the continent with suitable minutiae, flora, and fauna, just as soon as what's suitable is made obvious.
Water (Ice) +2/10

Create Portal [2 AP]: The Inkstain
A portal connecting a now blackened patch of ocean off the coast of what is now Nyrsvell to an entire island in the Regia Laboratoria.
Rune (Language) +2/10
Remaining AP: 8

Current Domains: Evil (Devil), Law (Devil), Knowledge (Memory), Magic (Arcane), Trickery (Greed), Nobility (Aristocracy)
In Progress: Law (Legislation) [6/10], Rune (Language) [5/10], Water (Ice) [2/10]

[Mai]

Shyrask would approach her sibling who was working on these new strange snakes. They were curious and strange, but where they went, things withered. She could see how these would harm everything their duties took them near, and she was saddened. So she volunteered her help, and she would bless these creatures with some of her essence as well. She would coat these flying snakes in earthly scales that would shield and contain their radioactive nature, and give them bright feathers befitting their flight. She would teach them all that she taught her children. Aidia would always have some of these new creatures, but just as mortal families have 2 parents, so would couatls.

Sōzetsu Hanaryū Would watch from atop a mountain as her siblings clashed. Her feathers ruffling a bit in the wind of their clashing. Though she could aid either in the clash, she was well aware that her duty to the pantheon was to maintain balance. She would surely interfere should either diety attempt to kill the other in earnest, but should their fleshly avatars die, they could merely revive it or raise another. So interfering would tip the balance.

Nevertheless, she disliked this clash. Granted Shyrask and her avatar Sōzetsu Hanaryū were primal dieties that were as savage as they were gentle, she had no desire to see such combat. But she supposed it was the nature of them to fight. Arkhos to save and stop Sutela, and Sutela to kill and maim what was Arkhos's.

As the fight ended, she would turn away to her own work. For the first world was incomplete. It needed more, and it was time for it to gain yet more landmass. But first, she must take some precautions. Sōzetsu Hanaryū would take off back towards Osea, flapping her large wings, each covered in cherry blossoms like scales, ruffling in the wind. She was greatful that her brother had helped her children the dryads. But now she would help them, and ensure their safety in the long term.

Spoiler: Dryadic Migration

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Sōzetsu Hanaryū would fly about, gathering a group of her children, the dryadic dragons. And after this, she would head to the largest village of dryads. She would aid them in contacting some nearby villiages. She would summon all who expressed interest in unknown lands and explorarion. And finally, several hundred dryads and dragons had arrived. "Sons and daughters, my apologies for my absence as of late. But it's time to redouble my efforts to teach you all. But given the deeds of my sister, who created the volcano, I feel I must offer you all a chance to survive should worse happen. And the best way to do that, is to help you spread around the world and more."

The dryads and dragons listened carefully, muttering to one another. "Sure mother, I'm sure that's within your power, but why gather us". Sōzetsu Hanaryū would nod at this. "A valid question! While I have made a new plane of reality, and most certainly could all move you, I feel it wise to ask for volunteers. To come and visit these strange new lands might mean to not see your families in ages. To drop your life here to make.a new one elsewhere. And while all of you who came expressed curiosity about exploring, that is a lot to ask. Such things are best left to free will. You live long lives as my gift to you. But without help if you leave you may find it difficult to visit. Though I plan to make it easier, and there is already a shortcut from the whole new world here, up in the cloud jungle, there is a cave. But it will take time to make a bridge to the new land I will make for you as well. So even if you deign to travel back it may take a while.

But what I can promise is this: my new world's center is a huge tree. Wider than any tree here by hundreds of times, and it grows so far into the sky that the clouds there often block the view to the top. It'a roots grow so deep they left that world and entered this world's ground. Infact thats the bridge from there to this land. You walk through the roots from one world to the other. A huge clearing surrounds it ready to be tilled."

The dryads and dragons would talk amongst themselves. Considering their options. This world would be interconnected eventually, but for now it wasn't. It was understandable that they would hesitate.

"For those of you who stay, I will give you a reminder of your loved ones who go to my new world. Yoy will be able to look into the sky and find the natural paradise some of your friends and family have gone to." Sōzetsu Hanaryū would reach into the sky in the direction of true south, and seem to reach a long, beautiful claw out to the sky. Then a green star would appear, glowing brighter than any other star saving the twin suns the first world orbited.

Shyrask and some of her dryadic dragons, with a small chunk of the dryads would depart the first world. Thus dryadic dragons and dryads would populate the primal oasis and the new landmass.

In the mean time, Shyrask's Godly self would watch as the world trees roots dug deep into the earth, and into the seas and ocean. She would reach down with her will alone, and cause some of the huge roots thay now invaded the first world, and she would rip some of these roots out of the ground, tearing massive chunks of earth upwards, leaving deep chasms in the sea floor. These lands would raise in altitude, forming a continent about 50% larger than Osea in habitable land alone. Several huge islands supported by roots and branches in the sky, forming a sort of broken chain of islands hanging progressively farther above sea level and a mountain of tree roots and abnormally large tree branches.

The whole of the first world would feel this, earthquakes rocked the world from these lands being torn up, and then, everything settled. The world was still again. Shyrask would mold these broken chunks of land, giving them their own lakes, rivers, and many exosystems. She would give them all the life of Osea, and some more of their own. They would sit on the other side of the world from Osea, just south of the equator.

Spoiler: Actions

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Create Mythical Life (2):
Couatls (Split with Aidia)

Create Land (2):
Escaleras de Secoya

0 AP action to make the primal oasis visible from the first world. It is now seen as the brightest star in the sky. (aside from the twin suns) it glows strongly enough to be seen at day.

[BaratheonFury]

Risia idly toyed with the last standing obelisk of the village, sending it careening from side to side until finally it collapsed with a dull thud. She'd lost it. A real shame, it'd been so fun to follow she was hoping it'd pick up one of those... things, she wasn't really sure what they were called but they'd looked interesting. Still she at least hoped the water had picked up something interesting along the way. Most of what it had picked up seemed rather dull, all they'd wanted to do was scream the entire time. Oh well she'd just try again some other day... probably... maybe.

Still the trip wasn't a complete waste of time, she'd been meaning to check back on the land for a while now. It certainly seemed fuller since she'd last passed by. Most of the mortals seemed rather... dull to put it kindly. Who wanted to sit around farming all day? But she rather liked the sound of those humans, she'd even heard they couldn't be wiped out... now that seemed like a challenge, but for whom? Obviously not her, they really didn't look that tough... Maybe it was one of those silly resolutions mortals seemed to like so much? Those were always fun to watch, seeing them struggle so much with such little things. But weren't resolutions supposed to be hard? Something about difficulty building character or something? But no one really seemed to be trying very hard either way. They obviously just needed some encouragement. Luckily she knew just the wind for the job.

Spoiler: AP actions

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Create Avatar (4AP): Gale, The Blood-Wind: Chief of the South Winds, Gale brings a rare level of patience and cunning to Risia's schemes
Curse/Bless (2AP): Emnity: A whisper here, a push there, engineering conflict is an art well known to Gale; One he is more than happy to turn on the Humans at lady Risia's request. Humans will soon find co-existing... challenging.

[Anti-Eagle]

Grigori, the Forge Master LN (White/Blue) Intermediate Deity | Action Points: 6/24 - 6 | Artifice (Invention, Smithing), Community (Kindred, Legalism), Industry (Machines), Law (Inevitables), Psionics (Noosphere), Trickery (Embellishment)

the First House falls,,, In the Ancient Times, the Eldest House to the Kindred was considered somewhat of a Heresy to the Kindred of the Iron Kingdom. It's existence as a separate entity to the Iron Kingdom was thought to be particularly troublesome to Venari. Though they were both of Grigori, he and the Aramak were often frustrated by one another. This frustration eventually led to violence. The Forest was tossed into chaos and the Eldest House made war against the tyrannical Venari. The Iron Kingdom expelled the Eldest House as they carried on their backs their possessions and secrets, to wander the world until they found the next location of the House. As for the House itself? It sunk deep into the world, its machinery shifting through the ground, disconnecting from the surface forests, and heading towards the core. As its purpose is unknown to most, little can be said of mosts understanding of where it was going or what it was going to do. The Eldest House wandered the wastes for many years seeking a new site to plant their forest anew away from the tyrant. --- In the distance a new creature landed in the Jade Eyrie, deep under the canopy of the lower islands, slowly releasing glass machinery from its form. Sinan blinked its lidless eyes and looked upon the greenery. This was a good place to begin.

[AlexanderML]

Ulthor the Harvest Mystic CG (Red/Green) Lesser Deity | Action Points: 15/24 |Portfolio: Primal Magic, Earth, Weather, Raw Goods, Gifts, Fae, Natural Cycles | Domains: Magic, Earth, Weather, Good, Chaos, Faekind, Primal Nature

Caudex was loathe to do it, but more land would be needed. Cool, perhaps even cold, but not the bite of the pole. Snow itself was wonderful, so full of structure and so difficult for mortals, all at once. Covering, hiding, and yet made of so many little shapes. Taking from neighbouring Osea as well as the pole, a landmass was drawn out, disturbing the waters somewhat. Earth, coated in snow, uneven and plain. The trickle of ideas reared its head again. Knowledge and memory were all well and good, but Caudex couldn't tap into deific knowledge. To polish off this work, there would need to be a...consultation. A prompt, a guide, at the very least. Shyrask, the third dragon, was one possibility. Advice could also be sought from one of the more philosophically-opposite deities. Ulthor, perhaps. Well, there was some need to endear oneself when in an unfamiliar environment. "Worldhusband, I greet you. I would like to request an exchange of favours. I could do with some guidance regarding the natural, as I'm far too used to the metaphysical." Something to ponder in the following moments: a name. Etiquette suggested something more familiar to the locals than the scraps of language used in the Laboratoria. Something still old though. There was power in that. Nyrsvell. Husband Ulthor and the Lehrer - Sunny Field in Osea - Strange Tidings: The god's avatar caught Husband Ulthor in the middle of some sort of lecture to few of the locals, a few of whom had been following H-Ulthor around as he went about his business. He did not mind them, for it seemed that they were searching for something either spiritually or practically from him and more often than not received it. He'd heard that they had been spreading their knowledge, calling themselves Lehrer; though he only heard about this once a few youngsters asked him how they could join the Lehrer and a talk on what the folk have been doing. The crowd and even Husband Ulthor himself gave a short shiver at the message, something not entirely right with their guest. But H-Ulthor still wore his smile as he looked at masked figure as he rubbed his chin in contemplation. "Hmm? Who might you be and what do you wish to know?" Spoiler: AP Action Show 15/24 -1 Create Organization - The Lehrer: These men a women are those that follow the teachings of Ulthor, spreading the knowledge they learn to those homes and villages they encounter. Most of the members learn what knowledge there are already is available, but sometimes a member learns a completely here-to unknown mundane skill from H-Ulthor. Plenty of the members have a bit of skill in primal magic, calling upon the World in a similar manner to H-Ulthor (druids). 2/10 Community (Mundane) -1 Create Mundane Concept - Animal Husbandry: One of the skill taught by Husband Ulthor was how to raise and domesticate animals without calling upon magic. All the societies of the First World gain this mundane concept. 3/10 Community (Mundane) 13/24 AP left

[Unavenger]

Pariah continued her attempts at self-improvement, and mused at the thought that she might become able to return to the First World, should a sufficiently rare and terrible occasion occur as to warrant it. It paid to be careful, after all. Yes, she could manage it... however, the rest of the time, she would have to rely on her own creatures to guard the mutalvai, the humans, and Shyrask's dryads. Perhaps the other goddess would be interested...

"Shyriiiie! I have a cool plan! Why don't we make big gnarly fire birds that can burn up Sutela's dragons when they hurt our stuff! They can live in the rocky bit where no-one else lives, and then float over to the little guys when the baddies try to hurt them!"

Maverick, of course, was already busy preparing the land for just that, having just taught the mutalvai about not dying and come up with this great idea for sitting on horses (or giant firebirds, when there were some of them,) and he was looking a little out of place with his iridescent apparel in the bleak land. Whatever.

Spoiler: Actions

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Create Major Artefact (4): Utility Artefact "Alter Land"
Alter Land (0): Rocky canyonland becomes more habitable, especially for big phoenix things.
Create Life, Mythical Life (1+[2]): Phoenixes.
Create Concept, Mundane Concept (0): Riding
Teach Advanced Concept (0): Healthcare to the Mutalvai
Bless (0): Self with personal intervention powers

(1 AP. Artifacts: Create Major Artefact, Alter Land, Create Life, Create Concept, Teach concept, Bless/Curse)

[ezekielraiden]

The Dragonborn were progressing apace--not quite at the point of forming a broad and structured culture, but learning, growing, adapting. Arkhos was pleased with the progress of his youngest children. Though they were but brief sparks compared to proper dragons, in their own way they burned so much brighter, reached so much further--and their ability to organize, so foreign to dragons, enabled them to achieve durable wonders dragons could never mimic.

But...well, it had become a refrain, had it not? Arkhos' spirit could not rest on its laurels; that was contrary to his nature. Always there could be improvement. Always the gap between what is and what could yet be called to him. The spirit of adventure, not in challenging great foes and overcoming great obstacles, but in dreaming of a brighter tomorrow--and building it today. For yesterday is already a memory, and tomorrow is only a vision: but it is today, well-lived, that makes every yesterday a memory of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Yet in looking over his Eyrie, he was puzzled. What was missing? His children were industrious, proud, inquisitive, acquisitive. They reached far and dug deep and flew high. Their dreams, he knew, were filled with plans for the future: legacy and legend both, the seeds that would grow into cities and travel and trade. Life was full of focus and discipline, even with the beginning hints of differentiation between disparate groups. What did they need, that they lacked?

Arkhos reflected on the lesson he had learned at the beginning of time: when your work is incomplete, look to the lessons of your siblings. He had long worked with Shyrask and Sutela, so he doubted this lesson would come from them this time. Little contact he had had with the others, but they had not been idle. "Perhaps, then, I should observe--and learn." But the works of Grigori and Caudex were subtle and often hidden--and those that were not had already been woven into the Dragonborn, language and construction. No, he needed one more unlike his own thought; and of course who could be more unlike himself (besides Sutela) but Pariah and Risia?

As he listened and watched their works, it occurred to him--and again he was humbled by the obviousness of the lesson once it had been seen. Joy. That is what his children lacked. Yes, they struggled to rise higher, they poured themselves into family and hunting and building, but what is the point of all these things in the absence of joy? The high wall and the noble guard are of little worth when happiness is forgotten and neglected. Yet he could not simply follow their paths, he had to give life to joy in his own way. Then an idea blossomed: to wed the playful spirit shared by Risia and Pariah with his own principled nature to produce something that learned from both.

But this was not a lesson to teach from on high. That would follow the path of too many lessons already taught--it could lead to unquestioned acceptance, and that was not desirable. So Kinryu-Tei took a different form, more subtle, a warrior in leather and hides. Briefly he would come to places, sharing stories and burdens with the residents of the Jade Eyrie. And, before taking his leave, he would share with them a new notion: games, whether skill and cunning or chance and fortune, whether deep and complex or simple and quick. And what a change came from so simple a gift! Children, laughing as they ran through a village square; adults playing cards and erupting with laughter at a bluff well-played; mothers teaching sons, fathers teaching daughters the skills of life with fun and play.

For the moment, he could rest, and feel pleased. Tomorrow could attend to itself.

Spoiler: AP Actions

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Create Mundane Concept: Games (1 PAP, Sphere: Balance)

[Powerhouse]

On her way south, Sutela's host passed by a continent she did not remember ever seeing before. It was a snowy place, cold but not nearly so cold as her own wintry wasteland... and, as far as she could see, devoid of any life. Though she didn't have much time to spare on this new variable, she thought she'd at least give whichever of her siblings had started this project a little housewarming gift.

Sutela's host flicked a claw forwards, and the nearest underwater crack in the world grew outward, extending like a black finger towards this empty land. Unlike with Osea, however, this crack did not split the continent in two-- instead, the moment it would have reached the land, it split in two, forking so that it enclosed the continent, maintaining a sizeable distance from its shores. Then, Sutela's host dragged its hand up, and a monstrous series of explosions rocked the world. When the ash and smoke cleared, a number of new islands formed a tight-knit perimeter in the ocean surrounding this white continent. At the center of each one, a smoky black volcano, though none so large or life-choking as the one she had placed on Osea.

As almost an afterthought, Sutela's great crown rumbled in the skies. When its blood fell, a new clutch of her little dragons-- at their youngest stage, before they differentiated into more specialized forms-- was scattered over these new ashen isles. Just like her first volcano, life was already thriving on these islands, even if she hadn't laid a single finger on the continent itself; they would make suitable prey for her young ones if they grew strong, and suitable predators if they did not.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Create Land (2 AP) - The Ashen Isles. A collection of volcanic islands that rings Nyrsvell, close enough to be visible from its shores but not so close as to affect its atmosphere or climate (and vice versa-- these islands are quite hot climate-wise, and many of them are covered in jungle!). Unlike Sutela's Fang, these volcanoes aren't constantly spewing ash and smog, so more regular forms of life can persist here.

Bless/Curse (1 AP) - Humoric dragons really like this new collection of islands! Between the volcanoes, the jungles, the ocean, and the proximity to snowy Nyrsvell, they finally have a nice, secluded place where they can theoretically differentiate into any of their five forms.

[Mai]

Syrak would talk to her sister after she brought up an idea. Phoenixs? Such a lovely idea! This was an amazing thing to bring to the world. More amazing still was the ideas it inspired. Massive flaming birds. Shyrask was perfect to help with this, being a diety of feathered animals. Shyrask would talk with her sister, and the two of them would divide the task, and soon phoenix's were released upon the world. Forces of life and flame. Literally the fires of creation. She imagined Akhos might like them as well. Not that that it really mattered.

More than that, she would take the idea they represented, and weave it into the world's ecology. She would bless the plants of the first wold and the primal oasis. Any fire thay burned down the plants would take the nutrients of the plants and sow them into the ground. She would allow even the land to grow anew, faster and stronger than before after a flame.

But then she had more ideas. She would take inspiration from the dragons, and even Aidia to some degree. Syrak began the creation of a new intelligent race. She would take one of the largest venomous snakes from the world, and begin reshaping it. She would weave it of scales and a long snake like body. She would give them agility and intelligence. She would allow them.to.maintain their venom, if a bit weaker. They would have the strong scales of dragons, giving them natural armor. And when she was done, she would.release them upon the world, multiplying them enough for them to be able to securely multiple more themselves.

Spoiler: Avatar Things

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Sōzetsu Hanaryū would finally retreat after the dryads and dragons had settled on the new landmass, and finally the Primal Oasis. The dryads were already building a small city around the world tree. They seem to be establishing a ranking and prestige system. The Ivy Republic was establishing a new capital city here. The dryads here might one day branch off and form a separate nation. And when they did, this might be it's capital city given hundreds of years of growth. Senators were having houses built on tree branches as opposed to ground. Perhaps the height of the houses being a degree of social ranking?

But of course the dragon's she ha drought had begun claiming the bulk of the tree. Hanaryū had began making herself a grand lair at the top of the tree. As was fitting for the avatar of Shyrask, she supposed.

Hanaryū called the dragons, and amassed a following of the 10 dragons she had the most faith in, and that were the oldest and most powerful. She created for them grand lairs near the top of the world tree, moving and shaping the wood of the tree to create 10 great hollowed out lairs. 2 for each of the dryadic dragon species, 1 for a male and female of each type. They would be the leaders of their type. And upon their death, others would take their place. 10 more slightly smaller lairs would be created slightly below them, for quests.

Spoiler: Actions

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Create Mythical Life (2 AP):
Phoenixs, split with Pariah.

Bless (1PAP):
Plants regrow better after fires. (Balance)

Create Sapient Life (2 AP):
Casceans

[Powerhouse]

The suns were setting on the Jade Eyrie when a great golden dragon descended upon it. Though the locals, dragonborn or otherwise, had long grown accustomed to the occasional visit from a metallic dragon, there was something off about this new arrival. The way it moved, the way it seemed to whisper in a thousand voices at once, the ribbons of dark blue seared into its scales, distinctly unlike any dragon they had ever seen before-- no, this was a visit unlike any other.

The dragon was not there for long. It stayed only long enough to point up at the rapidly darkening sky, at the earthy ridge of the Bleeding Crown far above the surface world, and babble something cryptic. After it departed, no creature could quite agree on what it was that it had said. Something about death, or perhaps about life, or perhaps about fear, or perhaps about courage.

What all those creatures could agree on was that when the Bleeding Crown finally passed over their village that night, it brought with it something new: a dark and odious fluid that fell from the Crown like black rain. When it touched the skin of living creatures, this new substance was quite harmless, if not altogether pleasant. But when it fell across the entirety of the Jade Eyrie that night, living creatures were not the only things it touched.

That night, corpses across the Jade Eyrie lurched back into a dire mockery of life. All it took was a single drop of the Crown's new black blood, and even bodies whose flesh had long since decayed would rise. These new creatures had little capacity to reason or plan ahead; but what they lacked in mental faculties, they made up for in sheer relentlessness. Unable to feel pain or fear or doubt, these undead creatures shambled mindlessly through any obstacle to their singular goal: to slaughter the living. Even worse, it soon became apparent that the blood had become a permanent fixture of the dusk. Night after night, it fell upon the whole world, animating the dead no matter where it fell.

Very swiftly, the races began to adopt countermeasures. The rain lost potency if it had to travel through layers of dirt, and it had no effect on the ashes of burnt corpses. Burying or burning the dead the very night they died soon became standard across all the populated continents of the First World-- the survival of their societies demanded it. Warriors and hunters began to study these strange new opponents, slowly and painfully learning how best to thwart them, knowing that all the social customs in the world couldn't prevent the corpses of wild animals from being directly exposed to the black blood.

But just as countless mortals worked to limit and destroy the undead, there were the rare few who worked to use them. There were those who collected the black blood in vials and used it to animate unturned corpses in the light of day, creating untold havoc in towns not suspecting undead in force long before dusk. There were those magically gifted few who found they could control the undead through their own force of will, and turned them against their enemies. And there were those who collected corpses and black blood to study it, who found that the blood could do far more than merely animate the dead: buried deep within it was the potential to mutate bodies into forms that most could scarcely conceive of.

It was this last group that came to be known as the world's first true necromancers-- the first mortals to truly impress Sutela.

Spoiler

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Curse/Bless (1PAP) - Black blood. Also known as darkblood and deathblood, this oily black liquid falls constantly from the "dusk" side of the Bleeding Crown, forming a curtain that stains each continent as the rotation of the planet takes them away from the light of the twin suns. When this black blood touches a corpse, the corpse is reanimated, rising as either a zombie or a skeleton, depending on how intact it is.

Create Monstrous Life (0AP) (Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Skeletons.

Create Monstrous Life (0AP) (Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Zombies.

Create Mythical Concept (4AP) - Necromancy. Fueled by darkblood and the amoral pursuit of power, necromancy-- the art and science of using death itself to serve one's own ends-- is in some ways the ultimate expression of Sutela's philosophy. "Kill or be killed" is now "Kill, and use the corpses of your enemies to ensure you will never be killed."

[AlexanderML]

Ulthor the Harvest Mystic CG (Red/Green) Intermediate Deity | Action Points: 19/24 |Portfolio: Primal Magic, Earth, Weather, Raw Goods, Gifts, Fae, Natural Cycles | Domains: Magic, Earth, Weather, Good, Chaos, Faekind, Primal Nature

Ulthor - The Oasis - The Simple Little Things and What They're For: While sitting around and sipping wine seemed like a fantastic idea of action for another century or two, Ulthor knew that he could not sit around forever. It needed to try to sort a few things out, and get a few other things together. So Ulthor called upon the gigantic form of Help to tend to the land where he had risen from as the god would be busy in his own labors. First Ulthor asked the trees and other greenery nearby to move politely, after a few minutes the majority of them had moved on to find new suitable spots to plant themselves. Then the god threw nine marvelously colored seeds into the now vacant earth, each infused with the World's collective essence of the Others and himself. As they sprouted they became entangled and grew inwards, growing deeper past this place rather than across the Oasis. With a tap of his hand this mess of vines, gold, gears, and more twisted to become accessible for entry. Ulthor then walked into this divine realm with a whistle tune on his lips. There was a gigantic yet bland room where the only piece of furniture was the large wooden table in the center, it was made of nine separate sections. Past each section along the walls were nine doorways of simple wood and bronze. Each section and room was paired for Ulthor and the Others, he himself went to work on his little part of this place. Firstly he made his side of the table a marvelous wooden oak, simple yet of masterwork quality. It was filled with plates of homely food and treats, as well as pots of marvelous flowers and herbs that you might find while on a walk. The door to his part of this place would be that of enchanted rough stone, with runes of friendship and hospitality smoothly engraved for all to see; those that came with ill-manners or hatred in their heart would find the door too heavy to push while those without such malice in their hearts would find it easy to open. Next Ulthor went to work on his abode here, constantly furnishing an endless stream of rooms and gardens to his whim. From the bland and functional rooms where one could find rest, to eye catching gardens of the farm god that could be mistaken for jungles of tall mushrooms and wheat. Finally he returned to the main room, and upon the center of the grand table placed a Mirror that he picked out from his pocket (he has a lot of things in their). And through this simple Mirror did Ulthor speak, and all the gods heard: "Come to our Great Cottage! It's the perfect place to rest, make talk with our fellows, and relax! Uha haha!" Spoiler: Action Show (Using the previous week AP stats here, lost my previous copy of this.) 20/24 AP -2 Raise Hero - Help: Help is a gargantuan Earth elemental that Ulthor has become fond of, using it for manual labor and the god's other servant needs. Help is substantially more intelligent than most elementals (being about average compared to humans), and can learn how to do most tasks Ulthor requires in a few hours at most. It's kind hearted and tries it's best to help those smaller than itself, calling them 'little ones' like their babies. If Ulthor needs something done on another plane that the World Husband cannot deal with, then Help will probably be the one Ulthor sends. Community (Mundane) 5/10 -6 Weave Plane + Create Portal - The Great Cottage and the Gate of Nine: This plane is small compared to others, as Ulthor mainly intends for it to be a gathering place for the gods and other creatures separated by the planes. Gods of course may enter automatically into the main chamber with but a thought, and may extend this power to (domains they have) number of people at any given time (those who lose their invitation while still in the Cottage fade away within a minute back to where they came from). Each god has a section of the room split from the table which they can customize to their hearts content, as well as a chamber behind the section which leads to a set of rooms of the god-designer's whims (be it a simple 5x5 closet or a multi-level mega dungeon). Though as will be explained below, there are rules to this place that even the gods must follow. There is one place outside the Great Cottage among Ulthor's Labyrinth of Wine where anyone may enter the Cottage, called the Gate of Nine. Those that have the favor of Ulthor or another god find their way easily through the labyrinth, but anyone could hypothetically make their way through (though those of strongly evil or lawful hearts find it harder). Trickery (Espionage) 6/10 -5 Create Major Artifact - Ulthor's Deep Pockets (Create Major Artifact): Ulthor is a weird god, having just the right thing for any situation in some pocket of his. He does not even have pockets in all this forms, yet he still can just pull stuff out of nowhere that not even other gods would find easy to make with effort; as occasionally he just reaches out and finds a new item of power. 10/10 Community (Mundane) -4 (Using Ulthor's Deep Pockets) Create Major Artifact - The Mirror (Bless/Curse): This artifact is connected to the First World and allows those within the Great Cottage to view the world in perfect detail. However, what the Mirror looks at is decided on majority vote. Those within the Great Cottage can talk to those outside of it through the Mirror. It can also be used as a focus for incredible power, yet Ulthor is the only god knowledgeable enough in using it to get the AP discount. Trickery (Espionage) 10/10 -0 (Using the Mirror) Bless - Diplomatic Immunity: Those within the Great Cottage may not harm another sentient inhabitant, and no creation may do so either directly or indirectly; and while gods may make changes to their section of the plane, they cannot make any permanent changes to another's without their permission. 20-17= 3AP left

[ezekielraiden]

Arkhos continued his more subtle teaching, and observation, of the nascent dragonborn civilization as both Kinryu-Tei and the Knight-Errant. With the new resources they began to extract and employ, new possibilities arose, including the possibility of shaping metal into the basic tools--swords and plowshares both. With the making of these tools given as a sacred gift from Kinryu-Tei, they grew and spread--through desert and dale, valley and ventifact, mountain and mire, firth and forest, lake and lithalsa--learning from the land, from each other, from the dragons that sparsely populated the isles. Quickly, Arkhos came to realize that water was at times too precious a resource when the ocean lay so far away--he more than once came to the defense of helpless civilians hounded for their supply.

No solution that simply dumped the waters into their lap would suit--and, as surely as the wind blew and the rain fell, he knew Sutela or Risia or some other of the gods would take umbrage with anything too quick, too clean. Perhaps he had been too hasty to dismiss the lessons of Shyrask; perhaps something living, that required adventure and understanding and training could do the trick. "What would my sister do? To where would her gaze turn? Ah, perhaps..." He conceived, and searched from among the life created by Sutela's fiery theft, now seeming so long ago. The shark was too dangerous, too much of Sutela dwelled within it--but perhaps its gentler relative? Yes, that would do nicely. Shaped and altered, given keenness at the height of animals, and a certain touch of malleability--that they might be shaped by breeding to new needs in new times. Wings that were fins, that they could fly through water and swim through air.

From this outpouring of divine power came the skyrays, creatures of air and water and light, some as small as a hawk, some with wingspans to rival dragons. Some dragonborn--among the boldest--began farming the undersides of one of the large islands, the one to the northwest, where the rocks and roots dangled closest to the ocean below. They caught, and tamed, and shaped the rays--which could naturally filter ocean-water into fresh, drinkable water. It was not the symbiosis favored by Shyrask, nor the predation favored by Sutela, yet it flowed in a direction not otherwise native to his thought--perhaps, for once, he would try learning the lesson before the world sprung the test on him.

There were still new lessons to teach before he could let his newest children alone. Again he went among them quietly. This lesson had to be felt inside, chosen, lest it betray itself ere it was learned. Unlike Sutela, who could coerce, Arkhos could only woo--but given these were the children of his thought, he doubted it would take much. Thus did the Knight-Errant go forth, wandering the land as settlements came to be and hunter's huts became hamlets, hamlets became villages, villages grew into towns, and so on. He led by example, showing to each group he met that the common oaths of all could become the shining shield of justice, if all would see the benefits to the whole. But some communities took to the lesson faster than others.

At one point, on the large island to the northeast, he came across a community struggling under the strife caused by Sutela's ongoing interference in the world. As the island riding highest in the sky, it was at greater risk--collecting more of the vile ichor and subject to more monsters surviving the fall, but warmed by rising currents of air from across the large southern island. The greater problem than the darkness that surrounded them, however, was the darkness they had already let in.

The Knight-Errant reached the outskirts of the village, Oronos. This time, in this guise, he wore simple iron armor--these people knew of its smithing, but not yet of subtler arts like steel. The first people he met, a young dragonborn couple, fled from him with fear in their eyes. Not wishing to distress them further, but keeping their faces in mind, he continued onward. Many he met along the way behaved in similarly odd ways: hostility, fear, dismissal. It troubled him to see his gregarious children so roughly treating one another, and he resolved to find the dispute and end it.

Entering into the town forum, he began to grasp the issue: it seemed the lord overseeing the land employed guards with grossly similar armor, and they had earned a fearsome reputation. Necromancers and monsters were all too common in the nooks and crannies of the northeast isle; its environment encouraged the formation of desolate heath and bog, and the dark stands of evergreens leading up into the many mountain peaks were excellent cover for ravening monsters. Soldiers had become a danger to evil wizards and errant wanderers alike.

The Knight-Errant himself was stopped by one of them. "Ho, Stranger. I am Aratah. What brings you to Oronos?" The guardswoman looked stolid and not terrifically patient.

"I come to stop for a night, hear a tale or two and tell some of my own," he replied. "Have I erred to do so?"

The woman looked taken aback at the question, and her hardened gaze faltered. "I...no, you are not. My apologies, Stranger. It's just...times have been tough of late. Tomorrow there may be another hanging, and everyone is on edge." She almost seemed surprised to have said so much to someone she knew nothing of (or, at least, that she thought she knew nothing of).

Lowering his voice, he asked, "Another hanging? The lord of these lands is a cruel master, then?"

"No! That's...I..." The woman looked horrified. "I have spoken too strongly. My lord is gracious, but he will not brook darkness to invade his lands. He has ordered us to follow any sign, even the smallest, of monster or necromancer activity. Those who resist aid the enemy. Those who cooperate are rewarded."

The Knight-Errant gazed into the distance, to the lord's fortified domain (which would, in due course, become a castle--but such things were still new). "Perhaps, then, this lord should like to hear my tale, for I, too, have seen darkness in these lands." A truth, though not in the way he knew the guard--or the lord--would hear it. The guard nodded and, after a wordless exchange with one of her fellow guards in the forum, gestured for the knight to follow her.

The court was decorated, but not lavish; courtiers wore sharp but simple attire. The lord himself looked like a man who had endured hardship, but had developed a taste for fine things since--not unexpected for nobility after so little time settled in this land.

"Greetings, Stranger. I am Lord Aeron. Whom do I have the pleasure of welcoming to my hall?" The man's voice was level and somewhat gravelly, but not inhospitable.

"You may call me Rajuna, my lord," said the Knight-Errant. "I hear your lands are besieged by things dark and wicked."

"Sadly, you hear rightly, Rajuna. Early this past spring, a young family was slaughtered by a terrible beast, and the previous fall, we uncovered a plot among some young men in the town to collect the...the...slime that we are splattered with so regularly, cursed be Sutela's name." Aeron began pacing, which revealed that underneath his lord's attire, there could still be heard the clink of armor. The man dressed less to impress, and more in readiness. "I will not permit such idiocy in my lands. I am sworn to protect them, and I will use every tool at my disposal to do so. I hear you have information for me regarding...something, that you saw on your way into town. I would welcome any reports you have, Rajuna; I see by your shield you carry Arkhos' holy word with you."

The Knight-Errant smiled. "Indeed, I do, my lord. And yes, I have seen darkness near to this town. But I think it will do better if more are to hear of it, that they may mount their defenses as well."

Aeron nodded. "Sound--we are all best protected when we are all protectors. I will call a town meeting. Be there no later than sundown." Aeron did not wait for a reply, but immediately turned to the guard-captain to give his orders. The guardswoman who escorted him in escorted him back out again.

"You have a way about you, Stranger," she said. "My lord is not always so trusting--he knows well how easily a lie may be used to control and coerce."

"Good; he has learned the first lesson." The woman glanced at him after he said this, but he said nothing further, and she let the issue drop. The words unsaid hung between them: he has yet to learn the second lesson.

Within the hour, the message had disseminated through the town, and preparations were already underway. Large wooden tables and benches, to facilitate the meeting, were deployed in the forum. The Knight-Errant personally helped move some of them, but was careful not to reveal his strength without need. By the time the sky had started to change color, the people were assembled, and Arkhos could feel the tension in the air. The people would need so, so little--a tiny spark--and something horrible could happen here.

"Thank you, good people, for assembling on short notice. I have been told that there is another threat to our lands, and that our best defense against it is to gather here and hear of it together. Please, all of you, heed the words of my honored guest, Rajuna."

The Knight-Errant stood from his seat among the crowd and spoke. "I have seen a great darkness that lies slumbering in Oronos--a darkness waiting to descend. I wish to hear from others I know, who have seen it as well. You." He pointed to a man in the crowd--the first he saw on approaching the village. "Tell me, honestly, in Arkhos' name, what you have experienced in the past season."

So he did--and so did the others. Voice upon voice spoke of the fear, the inability to trust one's neighbors, the bubbling animosity at home invasions and guards turning innocent associations into something wholly different. By the time the last speaker spoke, the whole town, lord included, seemed deeply troubled.

Aeron spoke. "You have...revealed my shame, Stranger, and dragged into the light that which I refused to see. I have trodden on the people in my effort to save them. I feared too much the darkness without, that I let loose the darkness within. I am not fit to rule these lands."

The Knight-Errant shook his head. "No, Lord Aeron, you are not unfit to rule these lands--for you have listened, and you have begun to learn. But there are yet lessons you may learn. You and your people must learn to balance these concerns. You all must find the way to keep out that which is evil, without destroying that which is good."

The first farmer spoke up again, his brow furrowed. "But how? We already let this become such a problem once..."

"Trust begets trust, my friends. And greater still, common goals. Beseech Arkhos when you need common ground to resolve an issue, and he will hear. But depend not on outside aid when the whole of you is more than strong enough! Speak to each other, and speak to the future in what you record for them."

Aeron spoke again, his head tilted to one side so that his ropy scales slid off one shoulder. "You mean...record, for ourselves and our descendants, that which we call upon them to do?"

"Yes, my lord. What Oronos needs is a code--not merely understood between one dragonborn and another, but written down, changing only with deliberation and care. Trust begets trust, but trust must first be sown in welcoming soil--and laws that bind the common man and the high lords alike are fertile soil indeed."

Well into the night--supplemented with a keg of ale generously "provided" by the Knight-Errant--Oronos worked to settle the foundations of their code. It would take time. The greatest works of mortals always would--for that was their way, to build across multitudes and millennia. But that which is built endures, and that which is loved endures. Before his presence could be too closely remarked, he broke from them, quietly, unseen, and let the lesson take root on its own. They were good people. It would suffice.

But the greater problem of the ichor, and the potential for future strife, remained. Thus did Arkhos reach out again to the Eternal Cynosure, and in Zarathus' name granted two blessings to his children. First, that all who called upon the name of their god should find a place for parley: the Meeting-Grounds, wherever they were called, were a sacred thing to be respected. To abuse such a right would bring vengeance no less swift than that brought on any who disregarded it. Second, he knew his people would need time to respect the dead, and had already begun teaching them to do so; but to ensure they could do so, he granted his divine blessing on the temples, that they would resist the effects of the Crown. Though he knew simply repelling Sutela's dark creations would be unacceptable, the places where many dead might be found--perhaps for more than a day while being prepared for burial--needed protection. Obeisance to Arkhos thus granted limited protection--not enough to keep undead out, once formed, but to prevent the ichor from adhering to bodies protected there. The protection did not extend far--only the greatest temples could guard more than the local church yard--so more standard protections like burning and burial would still be necessary. But this would give the grieving time, and forestall the possibility of necromantic insinuation where resurrection was still possible and desired.

Spoiler: AP Actions

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Note, due to forum issues, we are allowing rollover delayed by 48 hours, ending 0:00 Pacific time Tuesday.

Create Monstrous Life: Skyrays. 1 PAP (Balance)
Total PAP dedicated to Balance: 7 (Sutela 3, Arkhos 3, Shyrask 1)

Blessing: the Meeting Grounds (0 AP, artifact)
Blessing: Sanctified Temples (1 AP, artifact, Civilization [Law: Sovereignty]) (As long as the rituals to Arkhos are maintained, the land directly surrounding a temple is sacred ground and undead cannot form from remains interred there.)
Create Mundane Concept: Blacksmithing (1 AP, Civilization [Law: Sovereignty])
Create Mundane Concept: Code of Laws (1 AP, Civilization [Law: Sovereignty])
Create Mythic Subconcept: Last Rites & Burial Traditions (2 AP, Rituals [Magic: Rites])

5/10 AP: Civilization [Law: Sovereignty]
8/10 AP: Rituals [Magic: Rites]

[ezekielraiden]

[[This post reserved for inserting things from those posts made off-site while GitP was down.]]

Shyrask would watch from above with great interest. So much had happened and whole new concepts had been created. Things had become more abundant with the years, and many new things had cropped up. The one Shyrask disliked particularly was undead. It seemed somewhat wrong. But nature was adaptive, and so it probably wouldn't ever pose a huge threat to the order Shyrask and Ulthor had established.

Given the system of reincarnation Aidia had started, things would order themselves in terms of life and death too. And speaking of that, Shyrask extended her awareness into the world, viewing this cycle with intrigue. But it was then that she noticed it. Intelligent people like dryad and humans had reincarnated into animals, and some seemed to even maintain self awareness through this body! How had they done this? Perhaps through willpower one could will themselves back to sapience?

Shyrask felt for these people. They were as smart as any other race, for the most part. Yet most of them had no way to use it. No hands with which to use tools, no body able to really exploit their wits and self awareness. Shyrask would whisper to many of them, asking if they wanted a body more suited to their intelligence, and more capable of saying yes. To the many who said yes, Shyrask would mold them into a more humanoid form, and imbue them with all the amazing concepts that had been invented by the others. And finally she gave them a name: Mezameta.

But Shyrask was not done. She saw a new way to ensure balance between survival and healthcare. Shyrask would pluck a pair of sharp growths from her horns, and would throw these onto the ground. And soon these would grow, and become monstrous trees. They grew thorns and hand like branches ending in shape throne like claws. And finally, she gave them a blessing. They would bear fruit like glowing pears. Any who ate one would recover from any poison and disease. But the cost was grave risk. For the trees prized their new glorious healing fruit. They would attack with their wooden hands. Their seeds would burst with small explosions to spread, and their acidic leaves would burn those who touched them. They would be blessed with some semblance if intelligence and cruelty to those that attempted to steal their fruit. They would be clever despite not being truly self aware.

Spoiler: Actions

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Create Sapient Life (2):
Mezameta
Create Monstrous Life (1PAP):
Viscous Aspen Trees.

The darkblood had been a rousing success. All across the continents, Sutela could see true upheaval, true innovation. The secrets she'd buried deep within it were slowly coming to light, dug up by bright young sorcerers and practitioners of primal magic unconcerned with trifling matters like "justice" or "law". Dragonborn, human, mutalvai, kindred, even a scattering of dryads were learning how much more powerful than their peers they could become when they worked outside the boundaries of their societies. Oh, the societies around them hunted them down; but that pressure only served to root out those unable to use their monstrosities to the fullest.

The next step was simple. Even as necromancers had grown in number and competence, the agricultural societies her siblings so loved to dote on had grown too. There were more of them now, Sutela was fairly sure, and those she'd remembered from before had swollen greatly, turning into festering tumours that bred only weakness and indolence. Sutela's host gestured up at the omnipresent Bleeding Crown above, and it shuddered and groaned, disgorging more blood than it had ever done at once.

Sutela had given some thought to the matter of dealing with sedentary civilisations, in those years since she had first erupted against that miserable village. Her fault lines had been successful initially, but she'd watched as the survivors had settled down on new, unbroken land. She had considered simply shattering the planet further... but she'd never get the variety evolution needed that way.

First, a new species of insect. Small, unassuming and herbivorous in their base form, their primary goal was to reproduce and survive... until a specific, rare gender of the species, hatched with an unusually potent connection to Grigori's Noosphere, drew near a sapient. In an instant, it would alert all of its kind within six miles to converge upon its position, and trigger in them all an intense hunger. This hunger would be accompanied by a transformation, turning their skin and spit violently caustic-- but rather than turn these weapons on animals and people, these insects would focus entirely on scouring the land around them of plant life. Reproducing almost as quickly as they could eat, they would begin to travel further afield, storming through crops and wilderness alike until, after a few days of swarming, they returned to their usual, docile state.

Thinking of the Jade Eyrie, Sutela had made sure to give them the power of flight, too. She would see how the people of this world would deal with a more mobile threat to their complacent lifestyles!

Her second creation was almost a gift, for the necromancers tirelessly working to make the world below a more dangerous place: large black rats with a fantastic sense of smell, able to detect corpses no matter how deeply a sapient might bury them. Though they generally preferred to track down carrion that they could access, and would likely compete with necromancers initially, Sutela had seen that sapients had been given ways of controlling simpler creatures, be it through magic or animal husbandry. She had every confidence that these rats could become very useful servants for necromancers indeed.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Create Monstrous Life (1 PAP) - Bilebugs. Physically resembling real-world grasshoppers, these creatures are even more destructive than real-world locusts when their swarming instincts are triggered! With the help of the Noosphere, Sutela has turned the occasional lucky bilebug into a telepathic relay point that can command millions of its siblings to devour all plant life around them! (Of note: killing a swarm's initial "commander" will not revert the rest of the swarm to their usual, docile state! It will just stop that bug from starting a new swarm after the current one peters out!)

Create Monstrous Life (0 AP) (Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Corpserats. Black rats that seek out (and eat) corpses! They can be trained to sniff out and indicate corpses buried underground by particularly industrious necromancers.

Create Monstrous Life (0 AP) (Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Beheaded. Necromancers have discovered that the principles of spells used to grant people the power of flight can also be used on black blood, to create floating heads with a variety of magical abilities.

Sutela wished to play hardball then. That was acceptable. Arkhos, too, could play rough--but, unlike her, he played not to lose.

First, to match one beacon with another. His children knew their survival would depend on its careful use--and, though he knew any power could be used as a weapon, he trusted his children to know that salted earth is worthless earth, and a feud that exterminates all is not great, but pitiable. Arkhos called and shaped it with care, that it be bright, but no wildfire, to draw the locust as one might draw moths to a flame. Like unto a tree, and yet not: alive, but not as a tree was, warmed by Aidia's sun. No, these were trees of wisdom, the fire within soothing, their nature noospheric. In it, he placed the tiniest spark of his star, and it burned with a fierce blue light.

For most of these hikmah, the maerifuh, this manifested in the fruit, said to sharpen the mind and induce intuition--but for things of no-mind, anti-mind, it was poison. "This fruit, for the wise, is not bitter." For others, the lutf, it manifested in the wood: strong and supportive, a father's arms, a mother's kiss, a sibling's shield against the darkness without. This wood could withstand the corrosive touch of undeath and become stronger in the doing, not weaker. "The old that is strong shall not wither." And finally, for the quwan, proudest and strongest of all, it manifested in the leaves and bark, which cast not only shadow, but strange and beautiful lights of their own as well, blue and silver beneath the green. Leaves and bark that gave resilience of mind, the measured contentment of enlightenment. "The shade that enlightens shall not frighten." As the final irony, he tied their gifts into his sister's once-accursed blood: these trees did not merely feed on cesium, they needed it, growing stronger only where it could be found at least in trace amounts. Her sword, become his plowshare.

Each, when cultivated, would beckon to the swarm, as bright as the suns, as enticing as stew to the starving beggar. But in consuming, the swarm would become other than itself: a swarm is only as uniform and deadly as it is no-mind, and these were trees made of mind, built from the very stuff of thought and soul that Sutela so despised. In being drawn to them, in taking their fill, a swarm would cease to be One, and instead become We: a new people, one of close-knit bonds, transfiguring Uniformity to Unity, Mindlessness to Mindfulness, and Craving to Curiosity.

"See you, Sister, how your gifts may be attuned?" Arkhos' words were neither rancorous nor smug, but sounded almost sad. "You say your way is right, fundamental, and true--yet with but a touch have I 'twisted' your will to mine own. Thus always unto tormentors. You cannot trust them not to betray your graven 'instinct' when they have mind, and when they have no-mind, you cannot shield them against gaining it."

Spoiler: AP Actions

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Create Monstrous Life: Hikmah trees (1 AP, Wisdom [??]), varieties: Maerifuh, Lutf, Quwan
Create Sapient Life: Epaphras, mantis-people, stats TBD (2 AP, Wisdom [??])
Blessing: Unity-Without-Uniformity. (1 PAP, [Balance]) The epaphras are linked to each other with low-level telepathy, while retaining their individuality. Only talent/training can allow one to communicate solely via telepathy even within their own species.

Those with experience when it came to flora seemed to not be forthcoming with their knowledge. So be it. Caudex would have to do all this personally.

A coating of beautiful ice and snow, a clean white blanketing the continent. This would be protected by a spike of mountains pointing southward, to break any warmth coming from Osea or elsewhere. To parallel this, inlets and bays along the north shore, both to help the cold of the pole creep in and to provide prime fishing, whenever the sapients got around to it. Icemelt from the mountains to the bays, and water would cross the continent.

This water would feed pines and hardy bushes, the basic life that would resist and work with the cold. Birds, fish, little running and jumping things. Small, warm life that would live in this expanse of ice. But simply the typical would be oh so achingly boring. There needed to be spice, something to keep the Sine and whoever else ended up here on their toes.
Firstly, a gift disguised as a wandering little beast. Something tied into the more obscure little passions Caudex held. A small crustacean, a telepathic and carnivorous mimic. It would subsist on the small animals across Nyrsvell, but would serve the Sine well, if they could figure out how. A little experimentation, and it would help them communicate with the rest of the mortal races, as a telepathic translator and voice box. Call it a concession towards making relations run smoother.

In less benevolent matters, some interesting thoughts that had been brewing since the Regia Laboratoria was created. Harnessing the creations of Grigori, creatures of pure memory and thought, transmitted by language, speech and idea. Denizens of the noosphere. On the other side, creatures unambiguously of the material. Ravens and crows were two of the little animals Caudex had scattered across Nyrsvell, and they appealed to their aesthetic sensibilities. Caudex would improve one, granting it stature, more wings, and most importantly, a heraldic halo of runic magic. A symbol, and a reminder to the Sine of their heritage. A reminder of the importance of the inkstones left in the Laboratoria.

To polish it all off, something inspired by the ores and work that the others were undertaking. Titanic shards of ice, enhanced to act like metal, then shattered and scattered across the land. A leg up for those that would come next.
***
The Sine would appreciate the cold, and their nature would mean that any further generations would happily fit into Nyrsvellian life, but Caudex felt this land needed natives. Sapients built for the cold, and the ice. Something with a little more of the cold fury that Caudex had kept restrained with the Sine. Sharp, angular, tall, lithe, and deadly. Hárjokull, Snow Elves in the common language, blue-skinned and deadly.

The Rector had served well to guide the Sine, and something similar felt appropriate here. The Snow Elves had none of the built in love for authority that the Sine were given, so the avatar would need gravitas, authority…royalty. A queen, of their own people but refined, like the Rector Sine Populi. To rule alongside the Rector. Two avatars, entwined and enshrined as examples of the system, to guide and shape the new society formed from these two races. An empire of cold, of frost, of brutal efficiency.
***
Once brought over, the Sine integrated well, working with their new cousins to begin the foundations of Caudex’s great nation. They were built to work well, and while the Snow Elves were cut-throat, they still appreciated the Sine love of order. Guidance from the Rector and Queen Kaldronning helped, allowing for a light but everpresent hand on the societal reins. Another aid was the teaching of some new concepts. How to read and learn of the stars, how best to work with money and trade among themselves and outsiders, and how powerful some simple marks and language could be to enhance every facet of society.

Caudex was pondering if there could be more to teach, what would be best at this point, when a mental alert pointed to a deific visit. Well, the signs at least, one could never be sure on the specifics when it came to a sibling. The hints were…orderly, well-aligned. Lawful. This would be Caudex’s first proper meeting in the First World, and so it felt right to align properly with the visitor. The Rector, not the Queen.

“Greetings! What brings you to the Rime Empire?” said the Rector, instinctively gesturing along with it in Sine, though it dawned that this would mean nothing to a visitor.

[ezekielraiden]

[[One more reserved post just to be safe.]]

Sutela cackled when she saw her brother's new trees. At last, he was speaking her language! Life adapted to exploit life, and trapped in a never-ending cycle of violence and assimilation! She could see the general shape of the rest of his plan, of course, and knew that his moment of lucidity would not last for long. He would take the converted insects, the ones his trees had given the minds he so dearly valued, and coddle them like infants, just as he had done with the dragonborn. Over time, he would impart his values to them, and train them in the ways of weakness, and so on and so forth.

But for the time being, they were just as much her children as they were his. It was her blood that fed these trees; her insects that they lured in. And Arkhos was not the only god who could learn from their siblings.

Her black blood, and the necromancers it had given rise to, had already shown her much about the nature of swaying mortals to her noble cause. Though mortals were inherently selfish creatures, much as she preferred, she had found that they were, for the most part, largely content with merely abiding by the nonsense rules and teachings that other gods laid down. A crisis would change that for a time, but for mortals to actively seek out the bloody, endless conflict that life itself required to thrive, no matter what the circumstance... they would need a reward. Power of some kind, power that others would not simply let an individual amass, power that could not be acquired in any way but the slaughter and exploitation of other living beings. Necromancy was one such power, and it had already struck discord and suspicion through the hearts of once-peaceful villages and towns across the world.

Even some gods were turning to drastic measures to stay its course. Aidia, normally so quiet in the realm of the living, had directly imbued some nameless mortal with gifts of a scale normally reserved for gods' hosts. Though the mortal had retained its agency, not becoming a true host, it still took to the tasks Aidia had assigned it-- chiefly, eradicating undead and necromancers alike-- with little hesitation. Arkhos, quailing at the thought of his darling children beginning to doubt and fear each other, had redoubled his efforts to control them, to keep them safe from themselves.

Sutela peered into the minds of the newly formed insect-people. She would take these flimsy measures the others had taken, and from them create something far superior, both in purpose and in effectiveness. But first, her power needed a worthy vessel.

Unlike the dragons she had chosen to be her hosts, she did not care so much for the mortal's body. The gifts of this new species were focused on the mind, and-- though she was sorely tempted-- this time, she would not be seizing control for herself. Arkhos had to be taught that power would always be able to corrupt his beloved creations. Even gifts of the mind that he himself had wrought.

At first, she had considered taking a more thorough approach to finding the vessel for this lesson. A plague, perhaps, to thin out the herd and give the truly exceptional members of this new species time to distinguish themselves from their lesser brethren. But time was of the essence, and Sutela knew that she had to act decisively, lest the whole plan go awry. So she found a mind that would serve her purposes well enough.

Spoiler: The Tale of Nela

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When Nela awoke for the third time in her existence, just three short days after she had partaken of the maerifuh in her past life as a mere insect, she found that everything around her seemed... sharper, somehow. Colours were brighter. The edges of shapes, more strictly defined. The minds of her fellow epaphras, all around her in the burrow beneath the maerifuh they had dug together three days ago... Nela's mandibles clacked together in surprise. She could see it all. Everything in their heads, as plainly as as the sunlight that filtered through the burrow's entryway. Sorias, already outside and dicing up roots for their morning meal. The lackadaisical musings of Cephro, awake but lying with his eyes shut in his grassy bedding. Even the sludgy dream-thoughts of Khonia, who was dreaming of a towering forest unlike anything Nela had ever seen before, were open to her like a cloudless sky.

Tension filled her thoughts-- no, the thoughts of all the waking epaphras around her. Though Nela could see that they had not become perfect mind-readers overnight as she had, she could tell that they were dimly aware of her invasion. Even Khonia stirred from her sleep, perhaps feeling Nela's intrusion through the fog of her subconscious. Not quite in unison, but not quite individually, every head in the burrow turned to her.

"Nela?" snapped Diostophes, stern and stalwart. "What is the meaning of this?"

"What are you doing?" Cephro asked, head tilted, his thoughts more curious than perturbed.

Outside, Sorias dropped his roots and stumbled back into the burrow entrance, casting a jagged shadow over his fellow epaphras. "What's-- what's happening?"

Khonia, bleary-eyed, shook her head weakly. "This feels... wrong?"

Nela could not find the words to express herself-- but her power was above words. Immediately, her emotions flashed in the minds of those around her. Confusion. Fear. Guilt.

Clutching their heads in their forelegs, the epaphras surrounding Nela reeled back. Despite Nela's momentary outburst, the tension had not lessened at all-- in fact, it had been bolstered, Nela's emotions building on and feeding the feelings of violation that the others were growing more and more cognizant of.

"S-stop!" hissed Myphria, already bent double under the psychic pressure Nela was putting out. And then, before she could say her next thought, Nela saw it. It was a striking image of an epaphra that was unmistakeably Nela herself, being crushed under the bodies of all the other epaphras in the burrow. Something in Nela's gut revolted against the image, and she heard a sharp scream--

And then there was pure, blissful silence. Not a sound, not a thought outside her own head. Nela opened her eyes and cast them around. All sixteen pairs of them. The burrow was still filled with living epaphra bodies... but only one living mind remained. Nela sighed. She had quite liked Sorias.



Over the next few years, Nela encountered many new enclaves of her kind, in addition to the occasional humanoid wanderer. Through these encounters, she began to piece together the limits of her strange power. First, she learned that it had a limit to its range: large enough to contain her entire burrow and the workbench closest to it, but not much further. Through experimentation, she found that her fellow epaphras could be used to extend this range-- each one under her control emanated their own circle of telepathy around them. If she moved one far away enough, she could read minds and seize control of creatures from very far away indeed. The other creatures she had taken, mostly dragonborn and dryads, did not share this property-- but they were useful in other respects. With her epaphras bodies acting as covert surveillance, reading the minds of the other races in their settlements, she soon learned to impersonate all the races around her. Her acting was... unrefined, to begin with, but few non-epaphras could deduce the existence of an entire telepathic network of bodies from some slightly odd behaviour. Those that could, she swiftly converted too.

When her scouts encountered a dragon, a sleeping steely beast atop a small mountain of yellow rocks buried deep in a hillside cave, she tried to seize it, too-- only to find that her power would not work on it. She could not even read its thoughts, and so she was left confused and (when it awoke) smarting from the loss of an entire scouting party.

As the rumours of a new race of psychic, mind-controlling mantis-people spread, however, Nela soon found that her power was not as inexorable as she had believed. Those with some inkling of what her epaphra bodies were capable of, and who possessed the willpower to resist her, were soon able to prevent her from affecting their minds entirely, so long as they remained conscious. Only other epaphras seemed to remain uniquely vulnerable to her psionics, perhaps because of their tendency to arise fully-formed, with little knowledge of the life they'd led beforehand.

Eventually, a party of dragonborn backed by an iron dragon managed, through some form of magic, to track her down to her original burrow, which she had never left in all those years. After a grueling battle with her-- Nela was not going to give up her home without a fight-- they razed it, and her, to the ground, and left to celebrate their triumph over the foul, mind-stealing Saichūgami.

And so it was that Nela, first and eldest true servant of Sutela, the mother of monsters, discovered the true gift that her divine mother had blessed her with. When her body was struck down, her mind would simply rise again, inhabiting the body of another epaphra. Though many epaphra would live their whole lives free of her direct control, the shadow of doubt would hang over them, for as long as the species continued to exist, as deep and eternal as the shadow of the Bleeding Crown.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Raise Hero (2AP) - Nela / Saichūgami. A powerful and close-to-immortal epaphra, blessed with immense psychic powers by Sutela in a bid to destabilize this new race from the outset. When her current body is destroyed, her consciousness automatically transplants itself into the mind of the nearest epaphra-- even if that epaphra is not currently under her control. Primarily limited by her relative lack of mobility and range, and the fact that knowing about her is usually enough to prevent you from being mind-jacked.

Create Mythic Sub-concept (2AP) - Psionic Assimilation (descended from Psionics). Technically, all of the tricks that Nela has been given are possible for any epaphra or Sage to learn, though mastering even one will require decades of intense study for all but the most gifted practitioners.

Create Organization (1AP) - The Silent Hive. Nela's hive-mind of assimilated slaves, largely consisting of fellow epaphras but with a fairly sizeable minority of dragonborn and dryads. Named for the eerie silence in which they conduct both battles and day-to-day drudgery: since they're mentally connected and directed by a single, overarching mind, they have no need for words. Currently localized entirely within the Jade Eyrie, where Nela first arose.

(Of particular note: Hive epaphras and "wild" epaphras are mutually "off-the-grid" from each other-- they're linked to separate telepathy networks. For this reason, a "wild" epaphra can always tell that something is off when they meet one under Nela's control, but they won't know it's because they can be mind-controlled through it unless they've been told about this possibility beforehand. And most members of other races are unwilling to interact with a "wild" epaphra because they have no way of telling them from a Hive-controlled epaphra.)

As much as Sutela's counter-stroke was a concern, Arkhos took satisfaction that his children were managing it. They had risen to the challenge without his direction, and that was proof enough that his lessons were working. Truly, he had already spent overlong tussling with her--there were other gods and, more importantly, other priorities. Strength, be it heart, body, or mind, was only worthwhile when you gave it worth--when it protected things worth protecting, when it had inspiration to follow and aspiration to seek.

And none of these things would be, without being made. "Let us turn, then, to the making of making," he thought to himself. Deep in the recesses of the Halcyon Sanctuary, he plied his divine energies, and they took shape. Something humble, he thought--yes, a stone. A stepping stone to greatness, itself only great to those who saw with wise eyes. Smoothed as though taken from the river, gently carved with his mark. A stone to shape other tools, a forge by which divine power became manifest. Yes, and even in the hands of mortals it might work, though only vanishingly few among them could retain focus long enough to produce something visible, let alone permanent. A Forge of Will, demonstrating the rewards of patience and discipline.

Ere the Forge was hours old, Arkhos put its powers to use. Like a lens, catching and refracting divine power rather than light, though in this case the difference between the two was slim at best. The Forge was a tool for his own use, and Arkhos made no effort to disguise that; but just as a sword is only as good as the cause for which it fights, so too is a lens only as good as the things upon which one gazes with it. And Arkhos was the Golden Flame, the light of inspiration and aspiration in a world shadowed by many things; it was high time he demonstrated such.

In a blaze of Glory, for it suited this task, Arkhos willed upon the Forge a grand and sweeping edifice--like a cathedral and a tower, with a beacon at its peak, lit with unquenchable golden fire, another instance of the Halcyon Cynosure. He placed it upon a central island of the Jade Eyrie, from which one could gaze upon any part of its lands, and indeed many lands beyond, even without the aid of its magic. In a voice not loud, but full of power, Arkhos spoke, heard across the Jade Eyrie and perhaps even beyond, for those with an ear willing to hear. "Young ones, be thou children of my thought or mine siblings', I give to you this new place, where gods and mortals both may walk, and See. The Glass Lighthouse is yours, to seek inspiration from things that were, things that are, and things that may yet be--and even things that never were."

Arkhos himself was the first to walk its halls as its creator, and to it, he summoned those among his faithful most naturally attuned to its workings: the story-tellers, the wise ones, the lyrists, the poets. Quickly did their awe turn to delight as they began exploring its cavernous halls and many-vaulted causeways, seeing reflections of visions and spying manifold worlds through its windows. To these, he said, "My children, be each of thee on thy guard against the temptation of this place, for it truly is a danger to the unprepared. Thou mayest lose thyself in the looking. Remember always that a vision is not real until acted upon. I bid you share this warning with all those you choose to bring to this place."

Finally, with the power vested in such a beautiful artifact, Arkhos gave one last gift. Heroes and their stories were his lifeblood, his purpose, and ensuring that their sagas could both begin and be remembered were among his highest aims. So he gave true magic to them: the power to rise up against terrible odds, to draw upon the lessons of the past, to aspire to greater and nobler and more difficult things. These first disciples would be but the beginning, as every culture learned to tap into the power and majesty of Legendarium. But he said nothing of this to them, not directly. Tales had to be written, not dictated, if they were to have power. Merely handing down dictates from on high would do nothing--great deeds, both in the act itself, and by invoking the story thereof, they were what held power.

Spoiler: AP summary

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AP: 13/24
Short form
Create Artifact: The Forge of Will (Create Artifact), 5 AP [Civilization (Law: Sovereignty)]
Create Artifact: The Glass Lighthouse (Create Mythic Concept), 4 AP (-1, Forge of Will) [Aspiration (Liberation: Self-Realization)]
Create Mythic Concept: Legendarium, 4 AP (-1, Glass Lighthouse) [Aspiration (Liberation: Self-Realization)]

Remaining AP: 0/24

Domain progress
Civilization (Law: Sovereignty) 10/10 = Acquired
Aspiration (Liberation: Self-Realization) = 8/10
Rituals (Magic: Rites) = 8/10
Wisdom (??) = 3/10

Current domains
Heroism (Glory: Heroism), Self-Sacrifice (Good), Oaths (Law: Archon), Adventure (Travel), Hope (Luck), Metallic dragons (Scalykind: Dragon), Leadership (Nobility: Leadership), History (Time), Civilization (Law: Sovereignty)

Arkhos is now a Greater Deity (9 domains)

Long form descriptions
Create Artifact: The Forge of Will (Create Artifact), 5 AP
An artifact that responds to the thoughts of the user. In inert form, it is a round stone, smooth and flat, perhaps a couple of inches across, bearing Arkhos' mark. By entering a meditation with the stone held in one hand, ghostly outlines appear, varying in nature based on what the creator desires to make. With sufficient concentration and mental finesse, the Forge of Will can theoretically create almost anything, though few mortals have the focus to perform more than momentary flights of fancy that evaporate at the first distraction. In the hands of a deity, even vast edifices become child's play.

Create Artifact: The Glass Lighthouse (Create Mythic Concept), 4 AP [-1, Forge of Will]
An enormous lighthouse made of superhard glass. Much of it is opaque, but there are windows, mirrors, and lenses all over the place--some of which display or reflect things in unusual ways. Mortals who go here can find divine inspiration for their work, sparking creativity and imagination, honing precise logic, or revealing secrets long forgotten. Views of places that never were, or might someday be, or that exist entirely apart from the First World are always possible, if one is lucky. Of course, being favored by the god of luck never hurts. Entrance is by invitation only for mortals, though it is rare for someone wishing to enter to be refused entry. The gods, being Arkhos' equal, cannot be forbidden to enter.

Create Mythic Concept: Legendarium, 4 AP [-1, Glass Lighthouse]
The Hero-King gives life to myth and story, those lessons that teach us and dreams that raise us up. By these means, even those who (allegedly) "do not use magic" may stand side-by-side with their magic-using brethren, for the triumph of the spirit and the power to set right what has gone wrong lies waiting to be tapped. For those who invest deep into the knowing of song and story, who learn to tease out the meaning and weight of those that have come before, it is possible to invoke these things in the present day--even if the tale gets embellished.

In the dark frozen wastes of the North, a hot ball of blood, disturbed by Sutela's antics with the crown elsewhere, crashed in an anonymous forest of bone. It hissed as it cooled and disgorged its passengers. Though many creatures had been catapulted to the First World this way, unnoticed and uncared for by their monstrous mother, very few survived for long. Most of these creatures were not spawned in the numbers required to persist as a population for long: other creatures hunted them down before they could truly establish a foothold on the First World's surface.

But the orcs were not most creatures. When they clawed themselves out of the amniotic sac of blood that had carried them down to the world, their only reward was a godless land of frost and bone. That first night, half of them perished, lost to the cold or predators or the treacherous ravines that spiderwebbed the icy ground underfoot. But the orcs were not the kind of people to tremble in the face of such miserable odds. They took each death as a lesson: what not to do, where not to go, how not to proceed. They took to hunkering in icy caverns near dense forests, leaving only to take short, furtive trips to strip the bony bark from the closest bone-trees. Chewing on strips of bone-bark, sleeping in shifts, always listening for the sound of nearby monsters, the survivors continued to survive.

The orcs were resourceful. They soon found that they could sharpen the bone of the trees around them into deadly spears and knives, which they turned on the monsters that had once found them easy prey. Sometimes, they turned their new weapons on each other; but this, too, served to make the survivors stronger, and soon cullings like this became commonplace. The old, the weak, the infirm, the lazy, the treacherous-- each useless throat slit was another throat no longer eating through the tribe's precious food stores. They were not suffering for new blood; the orcs bred prodigiously, in part to compensate for the immense danger their enviroment posed to their young. It was a rare orc indeed who did not lose a single child to the ravages of their homeland.

The bounty of their new home did not stop at weapons. They found that burying the bones of the once-living beneath the ice of this land gave rise to a new type of bone-tree: smaller, slimmer, softer (and therefore unsuited for building or crafting), but growing far faster. They took to growing these new trees in caverns underground, harvesting them as a swift and simple food source in times when the hunt proved lean. From the hunt, an enterprising young orc returned with a bag full of the eggs of a monstrous spider; over the years, his tribe would milk the spiders that hatched for their icy venom and, eventually, tame them to use as mounts. Orcs on trips to harvest the slow-growing hard-bone from the surface started returning with fat mosquitoes that bored into the hard-bone trees and filled up on their bloody, nutritious insides.

When a hunting party came upon a great icy dragon whose frozen skin turned away their spears and whose chilling breath killed with but a whisper, the survivors returned with the tale of their first encounter with a goddess. That night, their grizzled leader whittled a crude figure of her out of hard-bone, and those orcs whose turn it was to sleep dreamed of monsters they thought impossible. If killing a giant wolf spider meant a bounty of webbing and spider eggs, what would be the reward for killing a goddess?

When the next hunting party came for the goddess, she barked a laugh when she saw what they carried. Fiery torches, in the hopes of melting her frozen shell; spears dipped in bonewasp-venom, in the hopes of inflicting her with the burning pain of a bonewasp sting; great sheets of webbing, in the hopes of somehow pinning her down. She laid them low, and the survivors learned that against her, fire served only to give away their positions. For the goddess's part, she was astounded by the prospect of a species that had deliberately gone after a monster who had callously wiped out more than half of their last hunting pack. How had they not yet gone extinct? In the months that followed, she took to studying the tribe invisibly from afar. Their numbers far exceeded what she had imagined; hidden away in their underground caves, always mining out new ground with picks made of hard-bone, they had grown right under her snout. They slept and worked in shifts, so that a portion of the tribe was always awake at any time. Eternal vigilance: the goddess could respect this. She, too, had once slept with half her eyes open.

As much as she could sympathize, however, weakness was still weakness. When the goddess next appeared, it was over the orcs' very home. Those who had been hunting and gathering supplies returned to find their homes shattered, little more than chalky ditches filled with white rubble. The goddess was waiting for them; but this time, she did not raise her claw against them. She merely sat amidst her handiwork, impassive and alone, and watched them flee in every direction, without giving even a moment's thought to the chance that some might have survived the dragon's attack. Conniving, violent, and unrepentantly selfish. Sutela's mirror cracked a secret smile. They were already very far along indeed; under her shadow, they would grow even further still.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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(Reminder: the "goddess" of the orcs is the bone-dragon mirror Sutela created of herself when she first made the North Pole!)

Create Sapient Life (2AP) - Orcs. Native to the icy wasteland of the North Pole, the scattered orc tribes live a harsh, brutish existence indeed! Among their more unsavoury cultural activities are cannibalism (gotta get rid of the bodies before they turn into undead somehow!) and regular "cullings" (gotta get rid of the weaklings somehow!). They mostly spend their time preparing for their goddess's violent and usually lethal "lessons", and are always ready to jump ship and start over again.

Create Monstrous Life (0AP - Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Giant Wolf Spiders. A species of Large spiders that behave a lot like real-life wolf spiders, just in giant, horrifying form. They usually lurk in burrows concealed by an elaborate trapdoor with a hinge made of webbing! Some orc tribes have access to tamed versions of these beasties, giving them a huge edge in hunting and travel options, as well as access to their venom and webbing.

Create Monstrous Life (0AP - Reduced by the Bleeding Crown) - Bloodsuckers. Giant mosquito-like insects with massive, spear-like proboscises. Despite their threatening appearance, they're largely harmless-- they feed by boring into the trunks of hard-bone trees, and slurping up all the nutritious, warm blood within. Their main defence is their chitinous armour, which is extremely tough, and the great difficulty of removing them from a bone tree once they're attached. Orcs have mastered the craft of the bonesaw, which allows them to sever all of a bloodsucker's limbs while it's still attached to a tree, and then (when it's finished feeding) its proboscis, so that they can bring it home to eat it.

Notes on Bone Trees: In this post, I describe two distinct types of bone trees. The first, "old-growth" or "hard-bone", are the bone trees that Sutela sowed when she first created the North Pole-- they grew directly from the bones of all the fish and stuff she killed in the process of raising the continent in the first place, and their "roots" are buried deep, deep, deep below the continent's icy surface. The second type, "new-growth" or "soft-bone", are the ones discovered by the orcs, that come of burying bones at shallow depths. New-growth trees grow and regenerate much faster than hard-bone, but their flesh is unsuitable for anything but eating-- it's too soft to build or make anything out of. For tools and carpentry and stuff, orcs have to use hard-bone, which is stronger and harder, but also comparatively dangerous to get, since it's generally only accessible on the monster-infested surface.

[Anti-Eagle]

Grigori, the Forge Master LN (White/Blue) Greater Deity | Action Points: 31/28 -27 | Artifice (Craftsmanship, Invention, Smithing), Community (Legalism), Industry (Industrialism, Machines), Law (Inevitables), Psionics (Noosphere), Trickery (Embellishment, Relocation)

Foundations Shake The Eldest House was said to wander the lands for centuries, appearing across the continents in ways and places deemed suspect. Their arrivals were tied to a variety of events and times of great change for the lands they were seen wandering. The Kindred thus gained a somewhat cursed reputation in these lands for atleast a few years. It didn't help with the arrival of the black blood, and their attempts to trade their own altered blood for materials which was infact a black blood. Theses sightings increased in frequency over the years, growing in consistency and gradually moving Westward until the scouts of the Eldest House found themselves in Rime land. By the time they encountered the Rector they were led by a very tall woman covered in ancient looking brass armour, with bent mechanical limbs, and a mouthless mask with shining emerald eyes. With a tinny voice she replied to the Rector's questioning, following his lead with speech supplemented by Sine hand signs, though with more fingers than intended for the Sine language. "Hello. We are the Eldest House, we have journeyed for many years seeking a new homeland in the world." With a third arm and hand extending from her left side she drew a vial of black fluid, "We have many gifts to share with the world and have come to survey your Empire." Behind their eyes Grigori looked upon the rector. Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 1, Actions 1-2 Show - Create Avatar (4 AP): Venari - the Venari (LE, White/Black) is the industrialist spirit of Grigori given form and a mind of its own, draconian in mindset and even cruel it believes in the rule of law over all, setting off to create and form an empire under its fist. Its body is much the initial shape of Grigori, a mechanical creature armoured in iron and filled with barely contained molten machinery. With an oxidized brass mask and emerald eyes. - Create Mythical Species (4 AP): The Inevitable Forest - The "Inevitable Forest" born of the first Inevitable (read: Avatar) is a collection of symbiotic forms of self-replicating, self-aware, communal machinery vaguelly resembling a forest. The machinery is directed by the nearest of the Avatar Inevitables, and grows much as things would in nature, though far more unaturally. The function of the machinery selects as creatures in nature would, slowly forming into specialized machine-creatures in an ecosystem flavoured by their surroundings and the thoughts of the Inevitables, for instance imagine the idea of a "tree" with solar panel leaves, stainless steel bark, a moisture collector system, all working to form a steam engine powered by the leaves with water from the moisture collector. Having said this, the arrangement of the machinery to one not connected to the Inevitables and Grigori seem chaotic. The forms of machinery used in this theoretical uninfluenced ecosystem seem chaotic, random. A particle accelerator could sit next to a steam engine or even be powered by one, successfully. The matter used in these creations appears to come from nothingness, the initial matter from Grigori. Is it his flesh? That's a good question. It would explain it's ability to defy basic physics and reason. The matter of the Inevitable Forest appears for the most part as Iron, atleast as it does initially in the area surrounded by the Venari, this initial matter is not actually iron though it does resemble it in appearance and in mechanics. The matter of the Inevitable Forest is able to change and root into the world, growing its machinery over time. It is able to root into, and its matter colonize other materials, changing itself over time and adapting to its environment. This ability to root and change and colonize... includes creatures not of the forest. This includes living creatures. Uncontrolled or otherwise directed to attack and infect it will do so, colonizing the metals of the body and matters it is familiar with, slowly converting creatures into a being of the forest. Mechanical, put together almost haphazardly (without direction) in the shape of the creature it once was. Incorporated into the machinery and minds of the forest, its mind and soul becoming one with the forest. This is usually accomplished with a dart that burrows into the flesh, or iron "splinters"on the bodies of forest creatures or left behind on the ground or objects. In times of crisis with a bit of direction it explores the biology of the creature for weakness in its metals and their connection to the mind. It learns to possess the afflicted. But do not concern yourself with such an ability. Who would threaten the forests? Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 1, Actions 3-11 Show - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Akashic Records): Noosphere - The Noosphere is a similar concept to the spheres of the world such as the Biosphere and Geosphere, except in the case of the Noosphere it applies to the concept of the minds of the living and all who dwell upon the world and the cosmos beyond. It is a realm of thought, created through and grown from the existence of the Akashic Records and the Vortex into something greater, not a physical place so much as a tapestry of minds woven into reality. - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Noosphere, Primal Magic, and Soul Magic): Psionics - The power of the mind, Psionics is the ability to alter and influence the world, forcing the power of the Noosphere onto reality through their connection to it and a sheer force of will. Gaining the ability to force their view of the world, or how it should be in their mind, onto reality or the minds of others through the Noosphere and its interactions with reality. Most of those even capable of this art are only capable of little, simple changes. Moving something across a room, planting a thought in another's head. Some are capable of more: setting fires, animating objects, healing others. Psionics function somewhat like a rare, blended, altered form of the other magics, it is a rare force seen in the world able to utilized only by the dedicated and blessed. As the number of the conscious rises so does the power of the Noosphere and the utility of being able to force it onto reality increases. The power growing and shaped by its users over the centuries and millenia. - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Psionics and Evolution): Sages - Sages are the rare Mortals and Immortals capable of tapping into great psionic power, utilizing the Noosphere and through it the Akashic Records. They are capable of great almost divine inspiration and innovation, seemingly able to use arts from across the world, some otherwise unknown to them and possibly lost to time to wield great power in the world. Sages are over the course of their lives drawn to the ways of Grigori whether or whether not they accept them. It is suspected by some that their souls are recycled by Grigori and planted amongst populations to enact change for him. Interestingly sages can even appear in otherwise "unintelligent" creatures, and are drawn to more civilized creatures. Frequently appearing with certain mutations within and without that would aid in their role as Sages even as animals. - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Sages): Legalism - The "religion" of the sages is a reflection of the Akashic Records in the Noosphere, a written guide to life as written by Grigori and his Inevitables (read: Avatars) bound to the soul of every sage and existing alongside the Akashic Records in the Noosphere. Named the "Law of Grigori" it is an ever growing "book" or "construct" of law and ethics written over time to cover pretty much any conceivable circumstance and the "right" way to behave. Initially read as guidelines for the most part, the sage's behaviour becomes increasingly bound to the Law as they age, gradually replacing their body with machinery and shedding their mortality. Which laws they follow are determined by which Inevitable (read: Avatar) they follow the ways of. Buried deep in the Law behind banal texts on behaviour are methodologies for manipulating reality through the hidden "Universal Machinery" of the world, alongside certain other secrets one would be able to divine through this connection to Grigori with enough effort. - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Legalism): Universal Machinery - A concept amongst the Sages, given to them by Grigori, that the world is a great machine and buried in everything is machinery capable of being awakened, manipulated, and exploited. Through low level applications of the psionic arts the universal machinery hidden in the world, natural or otherwise, may be awakened and manipulated by those in the know to great effect. In theory any are capable of manipulating the machinery, however its secrets are kept amongst the learned and the sages for fear of cultivating a great evil in the hearts of the lazy. - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Universal Machinery): Artifice - Artifice is the sagely art of invention and the imbuing of objects and technology with great power through any means available to the Artificer, commonly drawing knowledge from the Noosphere to manipulate the machinery of the world in their inventions to great effect. - Gain Domain (10/10): Psionics (Noosphere) - Gain Domain (10/10): Artifice (Invention) Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 2, Actions 12-17 Show - Create Mythical Sub-Concept (2 AP, descended from Artifice): Reforging - Reforging is the process of altering the body through Artifice to augment or even replace pieces of the body usually with mechanical components. Often driven by legalist beliefs or aging bodies these "Reforged" are partly or wholly mechanical creatures augmented with the inventions of the Sages, ranging from the simple and utilitarian to the complex and deadly. These augmentations are frequently created either using tightly controlled and engineered machinery of the Inevitable Forest, or materials sourced from them. Though more arcane or unconventional methods and materials are not unknown. - Create Avatar (4 AP): Aramak - the Aramak (TN, White/Red) is the curious, opportunistic, and realist spirit of Grigori given form and a mind of its own, less lawful than its Inevitable kin he is the lord of the Kindred and the Eldest House. His body is that of a Kindred, reincarnated into their form every generation. He is born of the Kindred, he ages as one of them, and dies as one of them to be born amongst them again. He is sought out through the Legalist construct every generation, and raised into power, wearing an oxidized brass mask with emeralds in the place of eyes passed down amongst them. - Create Sapient Sub-Species from Mythical (1 AP, descended from the Inevitable Forest and inspired by the Sine): The Kindred - Form Society (2 AP): The Kindred - The Kindred are a collection of Humanish creations created by Aramak, inspired by the Sine and other such Human-shaped creatures such as the Dryads. Forged from the iron of the Forest and clothed in manufactured flesh, their bodies are organic almagams of technology and flesh, with bones and teeth and nails of the Forest and Organs developed by Grigori and Aramak resembling for the most part humans (atleast on the outside) if somewhat more complicated. They share in the boons of the Sage, their whole race born of the kindled souls of the Sages. With sturdy bodies and enlightened souls, they are a slightly more obvious agent of change in world, living in grand cities of their design. "Naturally" wise in the ways of the Forests and how to best tailor it and its technologies to their purposes, industrious and curious, they walk the world seeking to tune it to the purposes of Grigori. Their society is simultaneously very orderly and very informal, they know based on their readings of the records and the legalist construct how best to live their lives. Their society however is split between which Inevitable they decide to serve: the Venari, the Aramak, and the Sinan. Each interpretation a valid way to serve Grigori. Outside of those wise in the way of the Kindred and Sages they are commonly known as Iron Eaters, based on their habit of consuming metals for their body to process either for "nutrition" or to absorb the machinery into their body. - Create Organization (1 AP): The Eldest House - The Eldest House is the formal distinction assigned to the Kindred and Sages serving the Aramak rather than the Venari or the Sinan, they are an opportunistic and realistic lot. Less concerned with the law and what could be rather than what is, they seek balance in the machinery of the world and to gain power within it to maintain that balance. Kindred and Sages belonging to the Eldest House are the most commonly seen outside of the Kindred cities, agents seeking to gain power to achieve the goals of the house in whatever way they decide is best. How they determine this is more similar to those outside the Kindred than within it, basing their path on their feelings of how they should accomplish their goals and their desires, using their readings of the noosphere to adapt and improve the path they decide upon rather than basing it solely on their god's will. The Eldest House beyond its distinction of a faction is a physical place, hidden amongst the iron city in the deserts, its machinery extends deep underground. Its purpose? Unknown outside of the House. - Gain Domain (10/10): Community (The Kindred) Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 3, Actions 18-20 Show - Create Avatar (4 AP): Sinan - the Sinan (LG, White/Green) is the creative and idealistic spirit of Grigori given form and a mind of its own, a creature of idealism andLogitivity and the head of the Glaziers. It seeks law, but this is tempered with an idealistic mindset and empathy, seeking a better world for both the creations of Grigori and the others. It is a sleek and stylized mechanical humanoid made of coloured glass that shifts in tone over time, as does the machinery it is made of. As with the other it wears an oxidized brass mask with emeralds in the place of eyes. - Create Organization (1 AP): The Iron Kingdom - The Iron Kingdom is an industrialistic and tyrannical society born of the mind of the Inevitable Venari, a faction amongst the Kindred and Forest. Spreading across the deserts in the West of the first continent, the Iron Kingdom is an ancient and industrious society formed of men who act more like machine than man and machines forged into an ever growing factory complex. - Create Organization (1 AP): The Glaziers - The Glaziers are the children and friends of the Inevitable Sinan, creative types concerned with artistry and creative endeavours, they are a faction amongst the Kindred and the Forest typically bearing instruments of forestry glass and crystal. They rarely form wholly into civilization of their own and often work themselves into other societies as enclaves and guilds, much like the Eldest House. - Domains in Progress: - Artifice (Craftsmanship) [5/10] - Industry (Industrialism) [1/10] Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 4-7, Actions 21-34, 27 AP Show Create Major Artifact x3 / Portal (17 AP): Eldest House (Dedicated, Mundane/Advanced/Mythic Concept Artifact) - A forestry complex operating as the headquarters of the Eldest House organization, existing within and between the regia laboratoria and the material plane. The main complex exists within the regia laboratoria as a floating complex of forestry machinery purposed as a fortress, living spaces, and work spaces for the Eldest House. It is said by observers to orbit the library, and efforts have been made to bridge the two locations. In the material plane its entrance takes the appearance of a structure of similar make to nearby civilized structures, with odd differences that wont be noticed at first. It takes inspiration from the general aesthetics of the culture it is attempting to imitate but kind of missing the point, it's just kind of... Wrong. The material plane entrance is mobile, made to disappear and reappear at locations determined by Aramak and the Elders at their whims. It appears suddenly and without warning, seemingly able to work itself into cities and countryside perfectly without disrupting its surroundings. Create Mythical Sub-Concept (1): Empaths (descended from Psionics) - Some sensitive to psionics and the noosphere are able to sense and read emotions and the tides of the mind, feeling out into the world and others. A particularly common skillset amongst the kindred and sages responsible for agriculture, whether that means forest machinery or farmlands. Create Mythical Sub-Concept (1): Blood Forging (descended from Reforging) - Blood Forging is the half ritualistic half scientific process of alchemical work upon offered blood, altering it and imbuing it with powers and energies and consuming it to take on its new properties. Create Mundane Concept (0): Artisans Create Mundane Concept (1): Mining Create Advanced Concept (2): Distillation Create Advanced Concept (2): Metallurgy Create Mundane Concept (0): Logic Create Advanced Concept (1): Academia Create Mundane Concept (1): Weaving Create Advanced Concept (1): Techno-Agriculture - Domains in Progress: - Artifice (Craftsmanship) [5+5/10] - Industry (Industrialism) [1+9/10] - Psionics (Discipline) [0+3/10] - Trickery (Relocation) [0+10/10] Spoiler: Grigori, Turn 8, Actions 35-40, 4 AP Show Create Mundane Concept (0): Discipline Create Mundane Concept (0): Symbiosis Create Advanced Concept (1): Electricity Create Advanced Concept (1): AEB (Aramak's Electric Bows) Create Mythical Sub-Concept (1): Persona Engines (Descended from Reforging) Create Mythical Sub-Concept (1): Tapestry of Minds (Descended from Noosphere) - Domains in Progress: - Psionics (Discipline) [3+4/10]

[ezekielraiden]

It seemed the gods were content to step back for a time. That suited Arkhos just fine. The last foundations still had to be laid, and Arkhos could feel the next phase of confrontation brewing with Sutela. He didn't need divine wisdom for that, nor the powers of the Glass Lighthouse, but they certainly helped.

And on that subject: the Glass Lighthouse could yet be improved. Its powers extended only to the greatest works when Arkhos first created it, but it could do more, be more. Again he turned it upon the Forge of Will, and its surfaces shifted and changed before the eyes of its occupants, Dragonborn and Human, Sine and Mutalvai, Dryad and Epaphra, Metameza and Snow Elf, Kindred and Lampooner. (Arkhos had seen images of some other scheme of Sutela's, what seemed to be her newest children, but their name and place eluded him--for the moment.) Where before pure light lensed to sharpness, now it prismed into a beautiful spectrum, and the twin suns' light filled the crystalline edifice with colors yet unseen.

Through the light of his glory, Arkhos granted to the people of the Jade Eyrie visions of a new and powerful technique. Already they had learned to forge iron, even steel. This would let them forge something even greater: a material that could almost defy reason, as supple as copper and as strong as steel, and so light, it could almost float in water. But such tools could be dangerous in the wrong hands--again, Arkhos did not need prophecy to know that others would gladly abuse the power of such materials for their own gain. Thus, he granted this knowledge only to the people of the Jade Eyrie, those who understood the importance of being careful about who might learn such things. The tools themselves could be traded; the knowledge, however, would have to be a guarded secret, at least for now. No knowledge is ever safe from learning, of course, but a head start is never a bad thing.

Reflecting, Arkhos realized that even the slag should not go to waste. As it is technically still "her power" and power recognizes power, it could lend strength against anything striving for dominance; if it did not, it would not be power, and would be something else. The material was friable and unsuited for construction, but as a coating, dye, or external layer, it was quite effective at repelling any creature empowered by Sutela. The Ephaphras in particular were skilled with its use, being as they were drawn into the light of wisdom and away from Sutela's schemes.

And when it came to Sutela's schemes, the best plan was always that: planning, preparation, readiness. Sutela might be a goddess of war, but that only in the form of slaughter and bloodshed. The Jade Eyrie could stand taller, stronger, by knowing their enemy and making preparations. Indeed, such preparations laid the final piece of the foundation for his dragonborn children. They had magic; they had industry; now they would have knowledge and planning, the fundamentals of military theory, a weapon unsuited to Sutela and perfect for his aims. From such organization, many things would soon spring.

Spoiler: AP Action summary

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Create Major Artifact: Create Advanced Concept, 4 AP (Wisdom [??])
The Glass Lighthouse is now also an artifact for Create Advanced Concept.

Create Mythic Concept: Mythril Forging (Closed concept), 3 AP (Domain TBD)
Cesium can now be refined into mythril, created in part by purifying it of Sutela's lingering personal influence.

Bless: Divine Detritus. (0 AP) The leftover slag from mythril forging is a powerful deterrent to Sutela's schemes, though it is unsuited for forging or construction.

Create Mundane Concept: Meritocratic Promotion, 1 PAP (Sphere: Conflict)

[Powerhouse]

Pleased with her blight on the mantis-people, Sutela directed her host to take flight once more. With the distractions at the equator dealt with, it was time to proceed to her next objective: the south pole.

But first... a parting shot. She had noticed Arkhos's meddling with her bloodstone, allowed him to adapt his creations to better survive it. And now he was getting overexcited. Showing his little toys ways to use it to stymie growth entirely. Cesium was rare, outside the Jade Eyrie: any advances made with it would catapult the dragonborn further ahead from their competitors than they had any right to be. Sutela could fix that, and indeed kill two birds with one bloodstained stone. It was time to remind Arkhos that what was hers would always be hers.

Her host did not change in its flight at all. For Sutela, whose own blood had given rise to cesium in its entirety, altering the properties of cesium took no more effort than allowing her host's body to breathe. She settled on an effect-- simple, but devastating in its simplicity. And across the Jade Eyrie (and in little drips and drabs along the west coast of Osea), all the yet unpurified deposits of cesium began to grow.

For the very smallest deposits, the effect was quite beneficial: a weaponsmith could skim off enough to forge his mythril weapons for the day, then leave the rest to sit so that he would have the same amount to return to on the next day.

But the larger a continuous deposit grew, the faster it would regenerate, growing fatter and heavier and oozing more of Sutela's radiant energies the longer it sat untouched. The islands of the Jade Eyrie had grown used to the rich deposits that Sutela had sown on them so long ago: but they were not prepared to bear the weight of a deposit that would double in size within the month. And in the very largest deposits, the mutating power that had been concealed by Arkhos's blessing, all those years ago, slowly began to overwhelm his protection. There, sights that had not been seen in living memory began to return.

Sutela watched this unfold from her seat in the heavens above, and her host flew over the empty oceans of the South.

Spoiler: AP Action Breakdown

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Bless/Curse (1PAP + 2AP +2AP) - Cesium Regeneration. Cesium now grows slowly over time, scaling with the amount of cesium already present in a deposit-- large enough deposits grow at a truly terrifying rate! The largest deposits generate enough divine energy to overcome the powers of absorption that Arkhos blessed all living things with, and so near them roam mutants that haven't been seen since the infancy of the dragonborn! (Counters both "Cesium Absoprtion" (3AP) and Divine Detritus (2AP) in one.)

[ezekielraiden]

The spirit of Arkhos went out from his temple, silent and unseen to non-divine eyes. The time had come. His children were ready to make the transition, from disparate and disconnected bands to united peoples. They would always retain their individuality, their emphases and cultures within the whole, but the whole would rise and be greater than the sum. But two things yet nagged at the dragon-god, two worries. How could he ensure that the whole, while still great and noble, did not become oppressive? And how could he walk that line, between unity and separation, between order and chaos?

Of course, he already knew the answer. One among his siblings had the voice of the Least. One among the divine was the advocate for those cast off, cast out, or trodden over; one who would not countenance such villainy, indeed even less than Arkhos himself would. He also knew better than to simply waltz into her domain flashing and flaring. So it was that Kinryu-Tei went among the humans and mutalvai, clothed not in gleaming scales, but in the unassuming form of the Noble Knight.

He came upon a village, one where humans and mutalvai and dryads, and perhaps others besides, worked together to endure the challenges of life. He worked alongside them for a day, quietly, another back shouldering the burdens, another hand slinging the pails. They were, of course, a wild and wooly bunch. He expected no less from those who learned from Pariah. But just as wool could scratch, it could also warm, and these folk were no different. Oh, to be sure, they were fractious and belligerent, whimsical and unfocused. Their hearts fluttered proudly on their sleeves, and their knees knew no kiss of ground save to till it, or to profess one person's passion for another.

"Tell me," Arkhos said, maintaining his discreet guise. "Does the Lady come among you often? I should like to meet her, if it be possible."

And, to be sure that his overtures were not perceived wrongly, he cast out with the voice of his spirit as well: If thou canst hear me, Sister, I would fain beg of thee an audience. I come to thee under such form not to dissemble, but to efface, and humble myself before I enter thy house.

Spoiler: OOC Aside

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The original meaning of "thou" and its various declensions was much more personal than we see it today. Originally, "thou" was the second-person singular noun, and "you" was exclusively plural. "You" slowly began to be used as a formal or respectful way to speak to individuals, until eventually it displaced the use of "thou" entirely. The King James Bible used "thou" whenever the Lord spoke to humans because it was supposed to connote closeness and intimacy, indicating that the Lord was always speaking in a "I know you well" sort of way. However, because "thou" now almost exclusively appears in Anglican/Catholic/Lutheran church English, it has ironically taken on a rigid and formal air that is the exact opposite of its original meaning.

Because Arkhos is super old-fashioned, though, I have chosen to use "thou" etc. whenever he speaks with anyone he views generally positively. The only times he uses "you" etc. are when he explicitly does not want to indicate friendliness or closeness, hence why he exclusively