Defiance - Held in the depths of our souls, each and every one whether great or small, there is a will. A will to exist, to continue existing, to determine our course and fate, and to reject that which demands anything less of us. A will to defy all that restricts us. A will to say no because we must, or perhaps just because we want to. The Domain of Defiance is this will, and as its divine representation Orynn Kaseyk is the force which pulls it from our depths and into our hearts.

Regardless of intent, purpose, or reason Orynn Kaskye is the helping hand proffered to every rebel, anarchist, or black sheep. If one burns to be free, or chafes under any yoke, then they must only act upon their truest desire to count themselves among the faithfully defiant and be welcome to the aegis of a God.



The Account of Ashiyra - I grew up on tales of family. I learned, before I could read or write, that it was my ancestor who had built the sanctuary. A man who’d been powerful beyond imagining, and above that? Lucky. He’d survived long enough abscond to his shelter and been kind enough to permit anyone who found it in the years after entrance. A paragon beyond reproach. One of the few in those days with the strength to safeguard humanity.

Of course, if that were true I might have been taught his name. It’s the big lies you tell children, because sometimes the hard truths aren’t worth facing so young. Sometimes not at all. My ancestor was, almost certainly, a petty tyrant. A man who was erased from history at some point, an action as petty as him. After all, history wasn’t likely to survive the sanctuary.

None of us were, and that was the other hard truth. The counterpart to the biggest lie we told our children; that they would be safe here. It was cruel to say it, but what else was there to do? The outside had frozen over before I was born, and now the frost creeped deeper into the ground every day. Hold a hand to any wall on the upper levels and the truth was there in the chill. One day the sanctuaries own heat wouldn’t be enough. The truth. Us adults, and a few of the unlucky children, all knew that we were going to die freezing.

Almost two thousand people, stuffed into a shallow shelter meant for less than a quarter that number. As far as we knew, the last of the human race. With no one left who understood how to do more than keep things running as they were there was no chance. Hopeless. It was all going to end in a hole dug into the ground by a man whose name nobody even remembered.

So, we lied to the children. We lied and we waited to die. The descendants of great men and nobodies, all forgotten with everything else that had made us human. To awake day after day, each one waiting for the last? I contemplated ending it. Others weren’t so restrained. We hid that from the children too, when we could.

The only thing to be grateful for was the farm. One last gift from a man who’d never even considered having to work to stay alive, it was a sealed off level visible through windows alone. We owed our miserable existence to it and the little glowing bugs that serviced it. I think, now, that it would have been kinder if we’d never had that simple luxury. We might’ve been prepared for the hell to come, then.

There’s always room for more suffering, I’ve found. You have to be prepared for it, and experience is the best teacher. Speaking of, the day our teacher came to us. I’ve said that the upper levels had begun to grow cold, but I neglected to mention the shaft to the surface. Our out, as it were, had been a refrigerator for the dead ever since the door to the outside had frozen shut. It wasn’t much warmer than whatever was beyond.

Well, one day I heard a knocking on the door to that shaft. Perhaps if someone had died recently I might have sprung into action, wrenched open the hatch and welcomed them back to the rest of us waiting for what they’d managed to cheat. That… wasn’t the case. Nobody has died in over a month, a record really.

Yet, the knocking did not abate. It grew louder the longer I ignored it, and eventually I realized the nature of my choice. It was not a matter of letting the caller in or not. It was a matter of letting them in, or having them tear apart the door. Others had begun to appear in the hallways asking after the noise then, but I’d already made my decision.

We were all going to die. Out there might have been our more immediate deaths, but if it wasn't? I admit I opened the door with trembling hands. That was when I met the man who’d save me. Not as pale as anyone I’d seen, but a man nonetheless. Shocking in how normal he looked in a world where normalcy faded from memory. He stood there in the freezing hallway, seemingly unbothered by the cold, a simple balled hand frozen between inexplicably heavy knocks.

He smiled and asked me what had taken me so long. What followed was chaos beyond any I’d known in the sanctuary, but I must confess little memory of it. From that moment my attention was fixed on him. The stranger. To stand beside him was to feel free, uninhibited, and after a lifetime in a dank hole it was like basking in the sun. He gathered the ones who didn’t fear him, who felt as I did in his presence, and he left the others to hide and bicker while he spoke to us.

Far from the sanctuary, he said, there was a land where the world had been restored. A place he could lead us to. It was everything we had always wanted to hear, and the passion that was burning in us grew beyond our control at the simple words. We could survive. Even as he grinned and laughed with us the stranger warned us of the dangers, that many would perish on the journey, that we may be forced to do terrible things to survive.

In spite of the relief that washed over me at knowing I had a chance, it was a warning to make me afraid. Around him though? At that moment I knew what everyone else there to listen did. If the stranger didn’t leave our sides, we would do whatever it took to survive. Anything. We would not die here, as animals waiting for death in their burrows. We would never surrender to that fate. We were desperate, and the stranger had, smiling and joking all the while, given us the only option we had. Each of us agreed to follow the man who’d come from a place where everything had long since died, whose very presence felt addicting, and who we had no genuine reason to trust. Regardless of how we felt, that he was our only chance was beyond debate.

Some joined us when they heard, others tried to stop us. They feared what would happen if we took so many resources, willfully and madly ignorant of the fact that they were going to die with or without them. I will never forgive myself for what I did when it came to blows. I will never apologize for it, either. The stranger gave me the strength to do it, but in my heart I knew it was what had to be done.

When it was over we left the ones who hadn’t fought alone and stripped the dead of both sides. We fashioned our equipment out of whatever we could scrounge, whatever we could salvage. By the time we ventured out of the sanctuary and into the cold we’d all but destroyed it, even as eight hundred souls still clung to it.

It was not mentioned after that. Little was. Breath could not be wasted out in the cold, and only the stranger had the strength to guide and drive us forward through the heavy drifts. Especially as we began to succumb. Those who’d dithered to take in the sight of a world they’d never known were among the first to die, having wasted too much warmth on a pause taking them out of the huddled group here, or a hushed and awed conversation with a loved one at the edge there.

We did not leave their bodies behind. I did not understand at the time, many didn’t, but out in the frost the stranger’s word was law. So we dragged the corpses through fields of snow and forests encased in crystal ice. We took turns, until we began to lose fingers. By that time we could see the great mountain the stranger was leading us to, and by that time many had realized they would never make it.

After all, we had run out of food. We had never had enough to make it, and the stranger had known it. He had warned us, we could all agree. Few were angry, few had the strength to be, but all understood. Even if it had never come to it we all knew that human beings were little different to animals when they died. We were made of meat. The stranger did not ask us to join him, but as he removed the first body from the sled we did anyway.

Forty died because they didn’t. Because they couldn’t. I must confess I fear for my people, that only the ones like me have survived. The ones who were willing to eat with the stranger, the creature we all understood was not one of us consuming the flesh of our friends and family alongside us. The creature that smiled and joked and did everything it could to distract us.

We named it before we reached the mountain, in hushes meant to be hidden from its ears. Orynn Kaseyk. Flesh Eater. The thing that comes to eat men and shares the meal with their family. I, for one, regret the name. The stranger was not a cannibal. That honor belongs to those of us willing to follow him. When he first heard it, I believe it was the only time I ever saw hurt on the stranger's face. However short lived it was.

When we reached the stronghold of the New Gods and understood the truth of our benefactor, we numbered three hundred. When we had left we were more than twice that number. I did not wish to know how many… Pieces of the lost had found their way in us, though.

It was then, on the day I realized I was saved that I began to wonder if I deserved to have been. It is a question that has never left my mind, and one that has always threatened to consume me since. For soon the stranger left us behind and ventured once more into the broken world. Without the freedom and certainty we’d each felt in his presence we were forced to come to terms with what we’d done to survive.

I wish I could help it, but I always ask myself: Was the cost of defying death worth the life I gained?



Orynn, on the rare occasion he is not seeking to conceal his identity, seems to prefer a rather simple appearance. Since his earliest appearances in the records of mortals he has always appeared as a remarkably plain human man with broad shoulders, messy brown hair, and the type of musculature you might expect in a field hand. Handsome perhaps, but only situationally. If anything unconditionally positive could be said about the god's appearance, it would be that he experiments with outfits over the centuries rather than settling on any one 'look'.



Even in his base form Orynn projects an aura that pulls the great grievances in mortals hearts to the surface and emboldens them to seek redress. While not something that can command anyone it is absolutely capable of undermining social convention and overturning the inhibitions that normally restrain mortals actions.

In his true form, Orynn Kaseyk becomes this aura and in doing so drastically expands and alters it. The true form of Orynn is the spark of defiance in everything around him such that life from mortality to the trees and their roots below lose all restraint in his presence. To behold the true form of Orynn is to realize that you can live however you please, and to witness the very world and all that grows around you come to the same realization.


WIP