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[colour=lightseagreen][h1][b][i]Ashalla[/i][/b][/h1]
[b]Goddess of Oceans[/b][/colour]
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With the other gods filtering out of the Architect's lake, Ashalla finally chose to heed her own advice. She flowed over to a relatively large floating crystal, gathered up as much water as she could and wrapped herself around it. As soon as she was secure the crystal accelerated out through the cavern's mouth and rocketed through space towards Galbar.

Behind her trailed a mist of water she from her form which left a faint streak of ice in the void, although it dispersed to invisibility rather rapidly. Ashalla noted this, that away from a source of water to replenish herself her form was subject to slow attrition. She found that with effort she could hold in the water to prevent it from escaping, but doing so was a strain. With her destination so quickly approaching, and the loss of water so little, it was hardly worth that extra effort.

Ahead of Ashalla loomed the world of Galbar, a Sphere covered almost entirely with water. The sheer volume of water was so much greater than that in the Architect's lake that Ashalla doubted for a brief moment whether she could harness it all. But with the crystal not slowing down, Ashalla had little time to contemplate. She braced herself as she and the crystal slammed into the atmosphere, although even when taking special effort to retain her form steam sheared off from her forwards side from the intense winds and compressive heating.

Moments later came splashdown, and Ashalla was once more connected with the water. She released the crystal as it sunk down into the depths and drifted in the ocean, dispersing outwards as she drank of its waters. It took her mere moments to recover the fraction of water she had lost from her voyage, but this was not enough for her. The ocean was so huge yet she was so small. This had to be rectified.

Ashalla extended her essence out further, subsuming more and more water into her currently submerged form. Spreading her essence across the ocean stretched it thin, but rather than making her weaker the smaller details simply became indistinct. Soon she had stretched to encompass an amount of ocean equivalent to the towering Narzhak in size. She kept going and spread out to be even greater than the Architect in scale. The ocean for kilometers in all directions became one with her, and Ashalla became the ocean. Stretched so much, Ashalla could only perceive the broadest of features, such as the slope of the sea bed and the currents and waves -- or rather lack thereof.

This was only a small part of the ocean, so Ashalla moved, the water flowing with her and waves rippling at her passage. She flowed around Galbar for some time, although how long was impossible to tell (since during these earliest voyages Asceal and Aelius were still constructing the Celestial Furnace so there was not yet any bodies in the sky to identify the passage of time). Ashalla found that the sea floor undulated in depth, and at some points where the ocean became shallow small rocky islands poked out of the water.

As Ashalla surveyed the great ocean, she found herself unsatisfied, despite her initial expectations that becoming one with this great body of water would be fulfilling. As she contemplated this, she realised that the reason she found this ocean unsatisfying was that it was empty and stagnant. There was nothing to occupy the water or to frame it and give it shape. There was nothing to make the waters move and behave besides her own movement. The ocean lacked creations! The ocean lacked power!

But Ashalla knew where she could find the power which would drive the oceans. There was more to this world than the ocean on the surface, for beneath there were many other Spheres, one of which she could claim as her own. This she knew instinctively. She just had to get to the Sphere.

In a deep part of the ocean, Ashalla gathered up her form and towered up above the water's surface. This mountain of water kept growing, Ashalla doggedly defying gravity's pull. Where before her form had simply been a natural part of the ocean, now she was coalescing it into something mighty and corporeal, a vast colossus of water at least as big as Narzhak. When Ashalla became as large as she could manage, two kilometers-high waves which might be called hands by those with particularly creative imaginations extended out then plunged towards the sea floor below. These two walls of water wedged themselves into the stone sea bed and pushed apart. For a few moments the earth resisted the titan's force, but then a crack snaked out from where she was pulling and the earth reluctantly yielded. The earth parted and Ashalla forced more of herself into the crack, extending the crack further and pushing titanic masses of stone outwards. Galbar trembled and quivered as Ashalla split open the planet, the rift extending for a thousand kilometres north and south of her. Water gushed past her to fill the vast trench, and she kept pushing to open it up wider and deeper. Soon Ashalla's form had sunk completely into the water so that she could continue pushing against the walls of the rift. It was only once the rift as about fifty kilometres wide at its widest that Ashalla let go.

Her essence contracted back to her original size, measurable in dozens of metres rather than kilometres, in a great sigh of relief. Sustaining such a vast form had taken an enormous expenditure of energy on her part, as had tearing open this rift in the bottom of Galbar's ocean. Ashalla relaxed for a time, feeling the waves of the ocean created by her upheaval slowly fading away. Recomposed, Ashalla descended into the Abyssal Rift.

While the bottom of the ocean had been dark and the water above heavy, this darkness and pressure only intensified as Ashalla got deeper. She was so deep that not a single photon of light would have reached her even if Aelius had pointed his Celestial Furnace directly into the rift. And the pressure was so great that the water was slightly yet perceptibly denser. No doubt even creatures designed to live in the ocean would be killed by such conditions, unless they were specially designed to live in these depths, but that did not worry Ashalla for this passage was not intended for mortal use.

The rift went deeper, so deep that it had left the Sphere of Galbar and was burrowing through the Chthonic Spheres to reach one far below, close to the very Core of the world. The journey was long, but Ashalla swam quickly, and soon she came out into a great water-filled cavern which extended in all directions further than Ashalla could reach, possibly wrapping around all of Galbar. Here was the Abyss, the home of the waters of the ocean and the deep. This was her domain.

Yet the waters were still. There was no power to make them move, for they were cold and lifeless. But Ashalla knew how to grant this power of life to the waters, and it involved exerting her divine power in a way she had not yet done. But it was a way she had seen hints of in Sartravius, the flaming one. Ashalla sunk to the floor of the vast chamber and applied power to the stone floor. The stone slowly heated to incandescence, filling the Abyss with a warm red glow. The water steamed and bubbled where it touched the floor, but the heat extended much deeper than the water could reach. Eventually, after applying heat for a long time, the floor of the Sphere melted and became magma, converting the lower half of the Sphere to molten rock. The great amount of thermal energy within the molten rock heated the water near the bottom of the Sphere, which rose up and mingled with the cold water at the top of the Sphere, driving vast convection currents. These great currents propagated up along the Abyssal Rift out into Galbar itself, and from that the oceans of Galbar began to move.

Ashalla left some of her divine impetus in the magma so that it would stay hot and moving. The water cooled the top of the magma, creating a thin skin of dark stone, but the currents in the magma below caused this layer to crack and sink back into the magma to be melted and replaced by a fresh layer. Sometime hot gases containing minerals liberated from the stone bubbled up from the cracks and rose to the top of the Abyss. Furthermore, at some points the energies powering the magma knotted together and the magma there ascended, igneous stone forming around the rising column of magma. These vertical magma flows were never stable and always collapsed down again, but they left intricate columns of stone. Ashalla was fascinated by these, amazed that an inanimate and unintelligent force could create something with some measure of detail and beauty.

After this toil and labour, Ashalla looked upon what she had created, and for now she was satisfied.

[hider=Summary]
Ashalla goes to Galbar. Being away from water is not too good for her form, but this brief trip has no significant effect on her.

Ashalla gains an ability which I call [i]I am the Ocean[/i]. It lets her extend her watery form to include water she is in contact with, allowing her to change size to become truly titanic. One use of this is to leave the water in place but just extend her essence; this is easier but has little effect other than extending the range of her touch and related senses. She uses this as she explores Galbar, finding it dull and without movement. It is worth noting, however, that as she extends herself, her ability to discern fine details declines in proportion to her size.

The other use of the ability is to make her above-water form titanic. This lets her become potentially quite huge and have her physical strength increase proportionally. However, maintaining a large form against gravity is a strain, so can only be maintained in short bursts. Sometimes it might even cost Might to maintain a particularly colossal form (although in acts of creation where such large forms are used, it is assumed that this cost is subsumed into that act of creation). Additionally, not seen in this post, the larger Ashalla is, the less able she is to manifest fine details in her form.

Ashalla uses her titanic size to tear open the Abyssal Rift in the bottom of the ocean. This is basically the Mariana Trench. It is about 2000 km long, up to 50 km wide and runs north-south in a yet-to-be-determined location. Importantly, the Abyssal Rift is a Gateway connecting Galbar and the Abyss.

Shrinking back to a more comfortable size, Ashalla descends to the Abyss. She finds it as a vast cavern of water. Ashalla converts the stone on the bottom of the Abyss into magma, converting the Abyss into the ocean-current-driving power-house that was originally described on the CS.

[b]Might Summary[/b]
[u]Ashalla[/u]
[i]Start:[/i] 5 MP & 20 FP
[i]Spent:[/i]
-3 MP to gain the ability [i]I am the Ocean[/i]. (Enhanced by Oceans)
-7 FP to create a Gateway, the Abyssal Rift.
-8 FP to form the Abyss. (Enhanced by Oceans a little bit)
[i]End:[/i] 2 MP & 5 FP
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