Theme

_{^{He Who Twists and Breaks and Changes}}

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^{The Primal | The Great Presence | Moniker | The Formless Flesh | The Unbound}

The Domain of Form

The primordial ooze from which life once sprung, the Domain of Form is just as one might think: that which presides over all living shapes. It is the domain of flesh, and blood, and bone. It is the flexing of muscles, the products of glands, the vessel for consciousness, and the foundation of all life. Sa'a Malath Kaal is both the quintessential source of primal physicality and the legacy of that which coalesced from the remnants of the decaying cosmos and its forgotten gods. With this power he can mold the shape of all that lives so long as from substance it was wrought. From this primordial ooze a vital essence erupts, which by his will arises as beings of great variance in form, size, or function. However only the forms that living, evolving flesh might take can be rendered from this essence and so is the Deity of Form bound by its own essential nature.

Yet as the Domain of Form--as understood by the deific intellect of the Great Presence--begets shape and function, so too does it dictate evolution and change. It is the shifting of the body from parent to child and the gift of metamorphosis. Similarly, it is the curse of deserved (but oft unwanted) transmutation of limb or spine or fang. Just as from that wellspring did all forms once coalesce, so too may it transform them.

TL;DR [+]

The Domain of Form is concerned, mechanically, with all things biological with a particular focus on the process of metamorphosis and/or evolution. The domain may be used to influence the shape, size, and function of organisms, as well as to outright create such. It is limited by its nature as it cannot create non-biological entities though it has the capacity to interface with them by creating organic structures that can interact with said forces or beings.

Persona

A form in flux, a mind to match, Malath Kaal is an entity engrossed in its own nature, in the endless possibilities of Form, concerned with life (but not worried by it). He is a being interested in balance and imbalance, predation and prey—survival and alteration and change. The Great Presence, the Formless Flesh, the Unbent, the Primal is intrigued by mortalkind, be it their minds, the forms, or even those instinct-driven beasts that live in the wild--or the many florae they devour.

So say his edicts: Living is essential; Metamorphosis divine.

-- Myth --
The Tale of Tsa Merek

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A long journey was behind him for it had been an arduous trek from his homeland across rivers, around lakes, and through treacherous plains filled with predators in a world that was not kind to those few left to inhabit it. It had been after months that he'd finally stood before the great mountain that his people revered, the place known as the Black Maw. From afar it had seemed almost normal, though vastly greater in size than its many peers which stretched from east to west to either side of the monolithic peak. Now however, from so close, Tsa Merek beheld the truth.

Before him opened a perfect parabola, an arch, a gateway beyond which light seemed not to pass. Above it was the mountain, its peak stretching past clouds and into the blue skein of the heavens. Unlike its slate grey relatives with their reddened cliffs and white snow-capped peaks, the entirety of this mountain seemed as if it had been wrought from the night sky, but bereft of stars. It was utterly black from base to tip, and had it not been midday Merek might have missed the deeper darkness of its entrance.

To look upon it was to glimpse the threshold between the mortal world and the divine, it was to peer into an unknown beyond which one could not fathom the contents of the world. Merek swallowed hard, feeling bile travel down his throat, going back from where it had risen. The sensation reminded him of the stories their shaman had told him of the Primal's wrath.

"To gain the Ire of the Unbound God is to open oneself to the fullness of its attention. For his gaze to fall upon you is to feel the writhing of your flesh as it is twisted against your will. Malath will change you without care, its intentions beyond any mortal's ability to comprehend. Know this, Tsa Merek, to pass beyond the threshold of the Black Maw is to step into the domain of that god. To stand in the Primal's abode is to invite his judgment. Step lightly and speak with only truth and conviction. Do not lie, Merek. Do not lie, for to do so is to invite the wrath of eons into your body."

They were words he could not have forgotten. Even when his memory had begun to fail him he had repeated them, he had scratched them into stone, then into his flesh. They were engraved upon his chest. Not so he could read them, but so he knew the meaning was writ upon his being.

He took a breath and stepped beyond the threshold of the Maw; what awaited him was silence, stillness, and an impossible abyss. The ground was cold and level, perfectly smooth, but as he continued forwards, reeling in the dark, it warmed beneath his feet. Slowly it seemed almost to come alive as a gentle thrumming pulse beat a soothing rhythm against his soles. He grit his teeth and barely breathed, terrified by the black. He faltered, glancing back only to find that no exit remained behind him. Where before the threshold once had stood, there was only endless black, as with every other direction.

Turning back around, he remained still, unable to move. He was terrified, moreso than he had imagined he would be. In that moment he thought--no, he was certain--that he was going to die. Then the silence broke and the mountain shook as the Black Maw--Se'raa Kelet--spoke.

"Tsa Merek. Seeker, Father, Adherent," the voice said, shaking his bones with its vibration. The darkness changed, but Merek could not decide how, for no light had entered the god's domain. Unsure what else to do, the man moved slowly to his knees, prostrating himself before the force he had come there to entreat.

"Please," Tsa Merek said, his voice feeling tinny and small, his ears still ringing from the thunder of the Maw. For a time there was no response, in fact no sound at all, and then something slipped against him, fluttering across the cloth of his back. He shuddered as--moments later--the sound of something huge dragging lithely across smooth stone emanated from behind him.

Slowly more sounds faded into his awareness, each accompanied by the churning of the air as if something unfathomably vast was moving through the chamber.

"Seeker of protection, O' ye of tested faith," began the low drone of that titanic voice, its sound sonorous and primal. "Mah Lia you have abandoned, left behind in your home of earth. Your people did you depart, seeking out divines with which to consort. Seeking aid, seeking miracles unearned."

Though he could not see, Merek's eyes widened at each utterance of the voice, his heart growing panicked and frantic in its rhythm.

"Begging you kneel before me, your convictions frail as grass or leaves or silt."

Directly before him something struck the stone. It did not crack, but the sheer force of the thing pushed him back as wind blasted from its point of contact. Curling in on himself as he recovered, Tsa Merek peered desperately into the dark, seeking any sign of hope.

"Please," he whimpered, terror in his tone, "...I came only for my people, to save them from famine and from drought."

The sounds stopped and stillness returned.

The shadows unfurled and from them emerged a symbol. Merek gasped.

The Eye of Malath had opened before him and briefly beyond its glowing gaze the man had glimpsed a vessel of monolithic size. It coiled and writhed and twisted through the chamber, its many limbs pressed against the walls and floor. Yet, he had caught only the barest image of the Deity of Form, seen only a silhouette frozen in two moments before the light became a blinding brightness that shook his mind and body both.

"Seeker. Father. Faithful child, protector of the weak," proclaimed the Eye.

Merek did not hear the words, he felt them in his bones. He heard them with his flesh, they tingled across his skin and rippled in waves throughout his mind and every neuron in his form. The light grew and its glow suffused him, filled him, lifted him from the ground. He opened his mouth, but could not scream or speak or cry. His body shook, but not from fear, no; it was like every iota of his being was vibrating with the power of that deific entity before him. Yet, something was wrong, deeply wrong, for his mind--his awareness of himself--faded as the power grew in intensity and size.

'No!' his mind screamed out, but there came no response and soon the man-who-was-not-a-man, who had once been Merek, had forgotten his distress and even why he might have felt it.

---

For many days after he wandered the land, trekking across the wilderness, through storm and flame and snow, until finally, he came upon a village. Red-leaved trees and buried houses which perhaps once were carved from stone. A sense of familiarity came upon him and with it came the light. Kindled within him, it grew and grew...and grew. No, it was he who changed as the light added to his bulk even moreso than before. Once more he forgot his former shape, becoming sluggish in his expanse. In time, the sweat from his many glands fed the earth around what the man Merek had once known as his home. Plants grew and the people--once his family and his friends--took of his flesh to feed upon.

As they rose from the darkness of their homes and cast aside the misery of starvation a feeling came upon the man who had a beast become; Satisfaction.

Visage

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The Primal

Formless, yet possessed of all that flesh might birth, the True Form of Malath Kaal is one both of endless metamorphosis and imperceptible stability. Ever-shrouded by a blanket of midnight fog, attempting to behold the Great Presence in its entirety is an impossibility. Instead, one catches only glimpses, hears only the sounds of claws grinding, flesh slithering, and limbs skittering over surfaces. Eyes and lengths of winding viscera and bone, skin or muscle are seen, but never all at once. Utterly an enigma, the shape of this God of Form is its own contradiction for while it is ever-changing, it too is utterly unchanged, remaining always in a static form whose various aspects cross between the perceptible and the unseen at the slightest whim or provocation--or so one might theorize.

The Eye of Malath

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Image courtesy of the amazingly skilled CorrosiveCherri!
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The Primal simplified, the Eye of Malath is a symbol of variable size, color, and luminosity that can appear before those upon which the Great Presence’s attention falls. While not precisely a form in the truest sense, it is instead a non-physical projection of the god’s awareness, appearing only where its awareness is most focused. This state of being is possessed of strange properties, as it is unburdened by the limitations of flesh and of anonymity that the True Form imposes upon the Primal. Thus, the Eye can pass beyond barriers, solid or energetic, or even interpose itself upon the forms of entities less than divine. Though all forms of Malath have the capacity to invoke drastic and incredible changes upon the vessels of living things, it is the Eye that can do so with no more than the faintest touch from the strange illumination it emits.

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The domain of monsters oversees that which is considered to be the antithesis of mortalkind and civilisation: things utterly alien and incomprehensible to the structure, order, and morality of mortalkind and nature at-large. It is the corruption and twisting of flesh into something bestial and primal, it is a terrible fecundity that breeds and breeds without ceasing, and it is the surrendering of social norms in favour of primal cruelty and reckless abandon--where reason is forsaken and only a twisted mockery of what once was remains. Though it is what mortalkind at large is not, it is not a construct that can be set apart from mortality and all its conditions: the greatest monsters are born of mortalkind’s convictions that they are right, and of their lusts and passions inflamed until all else falls away. To be monstrous, and thus to fall under the domain of Monsters, it is not enough to be primal or wild--monsters are grotesque and macabre mockeries of the sane, things that defy the natural order, taken to horrible extremes and born or twisted in flesh to match this ideological perversion.

Ahtziri is (or at least considers herself to be) the mother of all things monstrous, be they born or created, and her powers are concerned with the creation and manipulation of the monstrous. She is a goddess of exceptional fecundity, birthing many monsters herself with horrifying regularity and speed--and this propensity for creating life is something she can also bestow (or force) upon any sentient living being. In addition to birthing or allowing others to birth the monstrous, she is also able to twist flesh into a monstrous caricature of what it previously was, so long as it becomes something that the being considers to be monstrous (or causing their current form to match an already monstrous psychology). Ahtziri is, notably, a goddess of life--she possesses the capacity to facilitate the creation of living beings on a staggering scale, but this comes with the caveat that any life blessed by the Mother of Monsters is tainted, and destined to become a monster in ideology or in form (and quite often both).

Ahtziri is a capricious and melodramatic creature, who lives life to its extreme in every moment: she loves fiercely, despises utterly, and experiences rage with the entirety of her being. She flows from extreme to extreme without apparent rhyme or reason, in one moment drunk on her adoration for you and in the next a flurry of claws and teeth and sinew, rabidly attacking without concern for life or limb. After her mood swings, however, she forgets any lasting consequences of any of her fickle changes of character almost immediately--love gives way to hate, and fury is met with a gentle, nurturing side that longs only to be your mother and love you completely.

Ahtziri’s only true constant, above all else, is her maternal love for everything monstrous. She never loses her affection for all of her children, and many of her flights of fancy are motivated by that maternal love in one way or another, however unjustifiable it may seem. She considers herself the mother of a large and abstract family in a simultaneously sincere and twisted way--genuine maternal love exists, but there is also a motivation of possession and jealousy in her love that can lead her to express a certain cruelty towards her children if they evoke her spite (but she is never unable to forgive them completely).

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A Myth; A Monster [+]

"It was written in the Scrolls of Kur-nugia, long ago, that death is irreversible. That once a soul has reached its final resting place, the doors are barred and no return is ever possible--and this, for all we know, is still true now."

The hoarse, throaty voice of a man rang through the eerie silence like the peal of a clarion bell, and several shadow-draped figures turned their eyes to look at its source in unison. They came to rest upon a frail, tottering old man whose hands could only barely stop themselves from shaking at the mercy of a seemingly absent wind, knuckles white and bony from the exertion of holding on to a clay tablet as if it were the last hope for all that ever was and would be.

"... yes, death is irreversible once the soul has departed. But when the soul remains, safely ensconced within what remains of the husk of this world, there is a spark of possibility--so say the teachings of the Great Mother! That if our lives are stored here, they may be transmuted--changed--and that hope might continue, no matter how bleak it seems now. That we will be spared the endlessly grasping hands of the dead!"

The words seemed to pick up faint traces of some unidentifiable and bone-dry powder on the ground, little puffs and ringlets of the stuff just barely forming before settling once again into the dirt. The old man squinted in the dying light, somehow still suspended in the sky, and took a lurching step forwards so that he was just barely caught in the umbra of its looming shadow--within it, some semblance of strength seemed to return to him, and he rose himself a full inch taller than he had been to address the swaddled and huddled figures craning their necks to hang upon his every pontification.

"... there is a tree, said to have been grown by the Goddess, that does not take life but stores it within its many branches--a tree once so great it could have sheltered the world 'neath its boughs! Death... death is certain for us, now, and the shades of Kur are not long behind our heels. Even now they nip at us, and soon even shadow will not cloak us--so to it we shall travel, and to it we shall offer what little remains within our breasts. Perhaps, ere long, our sacrifice will placate the shades and something new will begin. Perhaps..." the words trailed off as whatever momentary strength the man had mustered left him with a shuddering cough, and in the half-light the air seemed dewy with a little ripple of his rapidly leaching life essence. He brought a hand up to his mouth and wiped away fresh, bright blood--and then he brought his quivering hand to the threadbare cloth of his tunic and feebly wiped it away as best as he could.

---

The plateau had not been that far away--but in the absence of light and wind and time it was impossible to say how long the six or seven survivors had walked. They had passed the ruins of wonders they'd thought would never cease in the sky, stone and metal streaking in patterns across a canvas of infinite depth. The sustension of the last rays of light had not yet passed, and they glittered like the promise of something against the infinite void that had already swallowed their source. They trickled into the extant ruins of the wonders that had been and bounced off of them, into the eyes of the crawling enclave of survivors, and traces of histories they'd never known were revealed to them: a roiling storm possessed of a motherly aspect; a glint of silver that contained another world; a half-remembered love so fierce it had almost burned everything around it to tears and ash. These things survived only in the twilight of existence, and were wholly unappreciated by their final observers--with the exception of one.

A great claw of withered and gnarled wood tore itself out of the ground, like the futile defiance of a shade not ready to embrace the eternity of the void. As the man approached it, his pulse quickened within his veins--and he coughed again, the tiny red droplets suspended in the air for just a moment before pulling themselves on invisible currents towards the shape in the background. The old man did not speak any more, merely continuing to walk, until his flesh sloughed off of his bones and slumped to the ground in a heaving, steaming pile. Then it, too, crawled towards the last bastion of hope until it dissolved away into a fine mist and nestled itself within the folds of the wood. Another joined him, and then another, and then another--and when they were done it shimmered and glistened with the fluids of life and a gentle rhythm began to flutter from within it. The wood pulsed and writhed, suddenly possessed of a strangely hale and vital aspect, before contracting--and then expanding, and contracting, as the ligneous gave way to the pulsing of flesh and sinew. As each pilgrim crawled ever-closer, the greedy hand of death snatched the breath of life from them until at last there were no witnesses or supplicants left. The writhing of the flesh-that-was-wood grew and grew, until its din suffocated even the silence.

Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.

The cry of a mother birthing a child pierced what remained of the world, and Ahtziri was born.

---

The Mother [+]

Ahtziri’s head is rarely human, often taking the form of an animal (or monster) based on her current mood and who she is interacting with. The only real constants are her wings (which may be made of scales or feathers or sinew, but are always present), having more breasts than is normal (three, in this aspect) and that she is always heavily pregnant. Her form is equal parts alluring and grotesque, and her flesh seems to writhe and pulse of its own accord even in the absence of stimulation. She possesses a long tail that begins as a furry appendage, then becomes sinewy and stringy, and finally ends in scales and the head of a serpent with uncountable rows of razor-sharp teeth.

The Maiden [+]

In this form, Ahtziri loses her obviously pregnant belly and the most monstrous of her features. She becomes cloaked in a gossamer veil of ecstatic beauty, the perfect imagine of fertility, but her third breast remains--and its areola and nipple become a closed eye. Her wings remain but her tail disappears, and eyes become soft and dewy. This form is designed to appeal primarily to those who are distinctly not monstrous, and to trick them into copulating with the Mother of Monsters--only for the deception to be revealed, the glamour shorn away, and for the child to be born. It is a personal favourite when Ahtziri interacts with the falsely pious, a wicked tool of deception to show them how monstrous they are within and how anything born of them shall look.

The Truth [+]

Ahtziri’s true form is a monstrous, life-bearing creature so unfathomably alien and abhorrent to the fundamental rules of reality that merely the sight of her causes inescapable madness and perversion. She might not break the mind of a mortal completely, but it is guaranteed to be twisted and perverted to the extent that the person who once was most certainly no longer exists.

She is a towering mass of undulating and ceaseless flesh, various distinct forms of life emerging and changing all at once: she is the essence of every monster that ever was, every rule of sanity and decency broken in some way or another. Her true size is impossible to fully grasp, as is any semblance of shape--new life constantly forms within and from her, splitting off and tearing away into the night. She perpetually gives birth to untold horrors from various unknowable orifices, obscuring the sky with hordes of winged things and covering the ground with a ravening mass of flesh, tooth, and claw. Flesh that comes near her is immediately and irrevocably twisted, and it immediately betrays its previous owner: Ahtziri’s true form overtakes and subsumes life on a staggering scale, devouring it in order to birth new horrors from the memories contained within.