Oraculum

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

Ruin fulfils her purpose

---

Tucked away in one of the many rooms of the divine palace sat Ruina. Hoping to catch up upon what she had missed during her time straying away from the grand stage of Galbar, she made extensive use of the artifact that she had been given. The events that she had missed would forever be lost to her, but now with an unflinching eye she could gaze across the surface of Galbar unimpeded. Though she could not hear words she could at least witness events as they transpired. Of particular interest right now was the events transpiring around Iqelis. She recalled their previous encounter with disdain and thus decided to focus her vision upon him and his companion in order to keep an eye on what they might be doing.

Witnessing their discussion with Homura, Ruina pondered the reason why Iqelis chose to shift into the form of a giant insect. More intimidation games? Some things never change. As the group began to depart westward Ruina rose to her feet. Departing the room, she spent a few moments walking and found herself before the great bridge descending to Galbar. But she did not descend yet. Focusing into her artifact once more, Ruina sought out the group once more to continue watching. If Iqelis was indeed attempting to intimidate other gods again, Ruina had plans to confront him. With the enhancements made to her suit she felt confident in her ability to take the upper hand in a confrontation.

Interestingly, she’d be going there for a very different reason…

Indeed, the looming black figure was nowhere to be found in the vicinity of the rest of the trio. There was a clink nearby, not of a blow upon the luminous bridge, which would not have made a sound under the heaviest of treads, but of crystalline talons striking together as they alighted. There, the divine she had observed not long ago stood upon his two feet, arms folding together after having carried him through the tide of moments.

“The Elder One has need of your aptitude again,” he crackled, somewhere between amusement and irritation, “This time, His will has spoken with His own mouth.”

Ruina could sense him the moment he began to materialize. Opening her eyes and turning her focus out of her artifact for a moment, Ruina turned to face Iqelis and affixed upon him a guarded gaze. When he finished, Ruina pondered. Why she had not heard of this from Him directly? Still, if the words spoken were true, Ruina did not wish to disobey.

Blinking to show some form of motion, Ruina nodded. It was clear that she remained guarded from their previous encounter, and even if Iqelis said that the charge came from Him directly, Ruina wasn’t sure if this was some complicated ploy to entrap her somehow. Speaking at last, Ruina addressed the charge she was given. ”Very well. What is the duty that He had charged me with?”

“Down there,” a dark hand pointed at the end of the bridge, where it disappeared into the many-coloured canvas of the Galbar’s surface, “Wait two deathless lives, one I have taken and one I have given. In exchange for the first, I am made to put the second to the test, that He may know it is worthy of His dominion. You, whose art is to forge crucibles, must ensure that mine is not too lax.”

As Iqelis explained, Ruina listened. As she listened, her guarded stance became more justified. Iqelis had taken the life of a god? Then she was right to avoid trusting him. Blinking one more as her gaze shifted from the spot where Iqelis pointed back to him, Ruina spoke once more. ”Very well. Go. I will follow.”

The outstretched arm was joined by another score, and a wave of oily haste pointed the way down the sun-bridge’s golden span.

---

The Bones were green, mostly, with tough little wisps of grass that peeked out between rocks and whipped in the gusty in-and-out breath of stone-channelled wind. Then they were white, laden with year-round blankets of clean fresh clouds and the snow they left behind, trickling meltwater that fed the valleys and tasted of youth and rock. In between, they were brown. The peaks of Aletheseus’ grave were fertile, but they were also very cold.

Ea Nebel sat on that gravel-studded slope now, between the drab alpine meadow and the lifeless, peaceful summit above. The flank of the dozy Iron Boar sheltered her from the wind, but her knees were still tucked to her chest and her arms around them, a hood thrown over her head. Nothing changed until she yelled. 

“Why me? Why am I forbidden?”

Her shout was answered with silence from the Goddess of Honor who listened from afar. The red deity had kept a distance, merely observing Ea Nebel, but never speaking to her. Homura did not hide her presence, as she stood atop a large ledge that protruded near the mountain’s peak. She still held Daybringer, the golden spear shining brightly like the light of the sun as it rose above the horizon.

Only the wind saw fit to speak, and didn’t have much to say.

Ea Nebel abruptly stood, tall and steady. She whirled her finger once, and a black sling tied itself around it, and a stone. She whipped it around and released with a crack of leather at the easy target.

The projectile shot through the cold air and struck Homura, the rock biting deep into the flesh of her stomach. The goddess stumbled back, before the stone fell from her bleeding wound, and she returned to her previous stance, ignoring her injury while she continued to watch Ea Nebel. Their gaze met again, Nebel covering her mouth with her fingertips, eyes wide. Her mouth formed some mumbled word that the wind blew away.

She sat down as quickly as she’d stood. Her arms tightened around her knees, and no more words were spoken.

---

A rain of loosened pebbles rolled down the slope as the parting outburst of the Flow, whose misty blackness mingled with the waning light of the already distant bridge, eroded the ground under them. In the retreating halo of gold and black, a new silhouette was left standing in the stirring stones.

“The second judge will be here soon,” Iqelis announced flatly, “We can-”

His words broke away into silence as his sweeping eye clambered up the mountain and stopped on the oozing blemish on Homura’s person. It shone in a blinding white flare, and the very next moment he was scrambling up to the edge of the cliff with unnatural vigour, many-limbed like some horrible spider. Dozens of hands gropingly reached up to the wound, and the raucous churning of a buried whirlpool rose from somewhere deep in the god’s frame. A blink, and already his claws were gripping the ledge, the hungry glow of his gaze not far behind.

Ruina did not immediately follow. Instead she turned her focus once more into the artifact she had. Sending her gaze doward to the spot that had been indicated, the first thing she saw was a lightly wounded Homura, and Iqelis racing towards her. To say that her suspicions felt reassured was an understatement. Ruina’s eyes snapped open, and she lunged down the bridge at top speed.

Were it not for the divine material that the palace was hewn from, Ruina would’ve left scrapes and footprints in her wake. Upon Galbar a streaking form rocketed down from the sky to land in front of Homura, and from the cloud of dust rose Ruina. Raising her left arm Ruina seemed to grip at nothing, but the moment before her hand would have closed to a fist, a large blade of bone erupted from her arm.

Unlike what one would imagine, Ruina didn’t flinch at this development. Instead she held it aloft seemingly effortlessly, pointing the tip of the long blade straight at Iqelis’ chest. Her tail joined in this weaponizing, with a large stinger growing from the tip as it raised above her head, much like a true scorpion’s tail. With a firm voice, Ruina issued a stout command. ”Cease your bloodlust!” The god let himself drop back to the lower slope with a discontented growl, his frenzied light fading.

With her command issued, Ruina’s attention turned slightly, to Homura. A soft whisper found its way to Homura’s ear. ”Are you well? What has happened? Is this a trap to slay us?”

Ruina’s gaze remained fixed upon Iqelis’ form, waiting to see what madness would come.

“That is distracting,” the One-Eye remonstrated from below, with an irritated jab of a finger in the red goddess' direction.

Homura had remained still the entire time, her crimson eyes colder than the frigid air around them, but she spoke calmly in a monotonous voice. “I am well, but our brother seems mentally ill. I doubt this is a trap, for it would be a poorly designed one, nor have I detected any attempt to deceive me from either of them. I am Homura, and you have my gratitude for your intervention, sister. Let us allow them to provide a proper explanation now that we are all gathered here.”

With the explanation given, Ruina nodded slightly. The whispered voice returned briefly to Homura’s ear. ”Very well. I will hear them out. I am Ruina, sister.” What would now be notable, with things having grown slightly calmer, is that the weapons that Ruina’s suit had grown were flush with destructive energy. It wouldn’t take much of an examination to realise that they were exceptionally capable of bringing harm to even divine forms. Why would Ruina have such a thing? A curious question to be sure, but interestingly the primary answer to that question had a blade levelled down at him for the moment.

A gentle grey hand alighted on Ruina’s wrist. She looked and saw Ea Nebel, standing with them at last, her eyes exploring every corner of her, down the edge of the blade and up the twisted surface of her armour, around the lethal loop of her tail and resting, finally, on her face. Fragments of thought broke off from the jade rune-ring on her hand and crawled up Ruina’s arm as glyphs. The only sign that she had been swept up in the wave of tension was the doom-claw, resting loosely in her hand, hanging from her index finger with its ring of ivory.

“You’re wearing a corpse.” She did not introduce herself further.

As she felt the hand of Ea Nebel touch her wrist, Ruina’s head and tail snapped instantly to glare at the surprise arrival, but instead of launching an attack Ruina merely blinked as she considered the statement provided. By all accounts the observation was correct, but there was more nuance to it than just being a corpse.

As the thought-glyphs began to crawl up her arm Ruina pulled it free from Ea Nebel’s grip. Releasing the handle of bone that protruded from the blade caused it to retract back into Ruina’s form nearly instantly. As it did, the raw destructive energy that was wafting from it vanished promptly. The stinger in Ruina’s tail followed shortly afterwards, and her tail would fall into being merely a balancing tool once more. Now, at last, she would address the observation. ”It is more than that.”

Folding her arms, Ruina would look back to Iqelis before speaking once more. ”Explain yourself. Why is it that Homura is wounded, with you so eager to finish what was started?”

“That’s-” Ea Nebel interrupted, caught herself, frowned, and continued anyway. “That’s not important right now. Divine Ruina,” she began instead, flicking her wrist to shake off the leaking glyphs, matching gaze briefly with Homura. “I am Ea Nebel, a god for the grave. The one to be put to test. You,” she repeated, slowly, impassively, “you are a grave. Her bones are your blades now. A monument to her hunger. There’s nothing like you in this world.” 

Four gunmetal eyes searched Ruina’s own pale jade gaze, tracing the crooked lines of her scars, her bleached white hair, flicking in the same breeze as Ea Nebel’s own. They settled again on Ruina’s narrow pupils, searching for nothing in particular.

Ruina’s eyes narrowed slightly. Not important? A wounded divine being about to be eaten alive by a divine that had previously gone and murdered another wasn’t important? Ruina disagreed quite severely. ”I am told that these trials are happening because a god has died at Iqelis’ hand, and I myself have some unfavourable history with Iqelis. A wounded god with Iqelis charging at them is something that I do consider quite important, given the context.”

“...”

Taking a moment to brush away the errant thoughts herself, Ruina’s eyes hardened to a glare as Ea Nebel began to compare her to a grave and call her unique. Blinking away the glare, Ruina would fold her arms firmly once more before speaking. ”My sister was a murderer from birth. It was by the whimsy of luck that she did not succeed. I took back what was rightfully mine… And it was not a pleasant happening. On this I will say no more.”

“I know,” whispered the gravekeeper. “You don’t need to. Ruina.”

Now Ruina affixed her gaze upon Iqelis, waiting for a proper answer. The whispers coming from Ea Nebel were noted, but for right now Ruina had higher priorities to tend to, so they would need to wait.

“Unlike some, who while away the cycle in keeps and palaces,” the acidic crack of ice shattering over a toxic waste-pit answered her stare from the head of the slope, “I feel the pull of my duty keenly through every drop of the Flow. The spilled blood of an immortal calls to me, compels me to sever the frayed thread, which brings me joy immeasurable. If the Lance-Flame cannot cross a mountain without gashing herself open, she should travel underhill.”

Ruina’s eyes narrowed once more as Iqelis explained himself. The explanation sounded more akin to an excuse, and the barb tossed alongside it made it seem as if Iqelis was doing his best to lessen the blow to himself. Ruina, naturally, wouldn’t tolerate that in the slightest. ”So your given excuse is that you admit you have no control over yourself? Forget not that I am destruction incarnate, and yet show an immense amount of restraint when it comes to my actions. Perhaps you would be wise to begin emulating my choices rather than disparaging them. Regardless, bickering with you is not why I was brought here. Return to the proper course of things, or I shall see to it that your efforts are marked as failures before they even begin.”

At this point Ruina began to tap her claws against her arm, producing three quick tapping sounds followed by a slightly delayed fourth sound as the sharp claws harmlessly impacted on the firm shell of Ruina’s suit. Ea Nebel continued to weigh her with impenetrable eyes.

“Restraint is a fine word for those who would make of sloth a virtue,” jibed the Fly as he moved to a high rocky pass nearby in long leaps from boulder to boulder, “Nor did your Lord call for an envenomed judge. Hark now! Four trials were demanded, and four there shall be. I will test my child for the essential virtues that are required of true divinity to fulfill its purpose. The first ordeal waits in the vale beyond this gulch. Make yourselves ready.”

The demigoddess looked down, exhaled, held it. When she looked up again, it was to stare down the path of the meadow and into the jagged dark of the valley beyond, leaving the bitter tension behind her like a bowstring strung between eyes. 

“May the Imperial Sun lead not my step astray,” she prayed. “I’ll see you soon, Father.”

She curtsied once each to her judges and leapt down from the ledge, coattails fluttering like windblown fire as she descended. Her silhouette soon grew small and lonely on the meadow. Ea Nebel summoned the Monarch’s talisman back around her neck under her hood. She knew not what lay before her: what terrors of the mind, what agonies of the flesh, what temptations and humiliations of the heart. So she was grateful, if nothing else, for its warmth.

The Iron Boar grunted a sad and knowing farewell, and she stopped, once, to force a smile in its direction. Then she turned around no more, and disappeared into the valley.

In impolite society

In the Solar Palace, Ruina has been watching the world though the artefact the Monarch gave her, keeping an eye on Iqelis since their ominous first meeting. Just as she's preparing to descend to the Galbar, though, the Fly himself appears to call her to preside over the trials, to which she guardedly agrees.

Meanwhile, near Aletheseus' grave in the Bones of Fortitude, Homura and Ea Nebel are surlily waiting for them. The demigoddess has a bout of teenage rebellion and flings a stone at her maker, drawing blood - much to her shock - but failing to otherwise break the ice. Inconveniently, Iqelis arrives soon afterwards, and the smell of blood sends him into a murderous frenzy. Ruina's timely intervention stops things from getting ugly, but the situation is tense, not helped by Ea Nebel's morbid fascination with the goddess' corpse-armour and Iqelis being himself. Eventually, everyone has enough of trading (un)pleasantries, and Iqelis announces the beginning of the first trial.

No one spends any points.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

Prelude to the Trials

The path by Time's riverside had passed in a blur of grimy iron embankments lapped by obsidian waters, and when it ended they were left on its idyllic autumnal antithesis. Rows of trees clothed in ruddy bark and fresh bright-red leaves pointed the way ahead in uneven rows, as if they had risen with the intent of guiding travellers through the maze of the wilderness. Sanguine grass rustled underfoot, and a few crumpled leaves fell as a splash from the receding Flow touched the closest branches. Above the forest's whispering heads loomed a ring of blind crimson walls.

“Your mother arbitrates in His name now,” Iqelis looked up at the citadel as he strode to the edge of the woods, “I have not seen her since that time.” Ea Nebel flicked away a stray wisp of hair and nodded in silence.

Standing atop the immense wall, the Goddess of Honor watched from afar as they approached, the golden spear she held in her hands shining like a bright beacon in the cold night. She leapt from where she stood, swiftly soaring through the air until she alighted in a clearing close enough to properly greet the two visitors.

Ea Nebel watched the silhouette of her original sculptor resolve itself from Daybringer’s blazing light. Her hands tightened in the pockets of her long coat, and she did not breathe. Some long-tightened heartstring of hope or fear had finally been struck. With the three beings now standing together, any mortal onlooker could have guessed why. Her stick-figure stature could not hide the resemblance, nor her deformity, nor the deeper drop of weird that coloured her flesh and fizzed in her voice.

Homura stared at them with neither contempt or pleasure, an unreadable expression as she spoke. “Iqelis, Ea Nebel. Why have the two of you come here?” She asked, bowing her head slightly as she addressed both of them.

Ea Nebel curtsied low in her boots. “...Divine Homura,” she said, not rising, “you have been named the Solar Monarch’s highest judge. We’ve come to ask you to witness our penance.”

A claw lightly came to rest on her shoulder, and several flies alighted in turn upon its fingers. “The Elder One demanded that I share His vengeance for a wayward shard's slaying with our daughter,” Iqelis impiteously snapped off every word like an icicle.

“You have brought this upon yourself, brother. This is neither vengeance, nor penitence, as you are now being judged for your irrefutable crimes against life and our Lord. How will you seek to atone?” Homura inquired, her tone remaining neutral.

Ea Nebel broke her curtsy without looking up and let her hand fly to grab the doom-god’s wrist, lest he clench his fist in anger.

“We shall do as He bids, for His accursed sun has yet to set,” the fingers on the One-Eye’s many other hands grew crooked, but his gaze remained even and unkindled, “Four trials of her virtues He has decreed, and four He shall have. I trust you are wise enough in such matters to uphold their worth.” A concession, dry and chilly as it was.

“Hmm… then I shall bear witness. Where and when shall these trials take place?” Homura asked.

“To the west, our brother of the earth has built a grave for the one who fell,” an arm rose to point far over the red horizon, “There it will be done, and his remains will be exhumed as the First of Lords wishes. Unless something keeps you, we shall begin today, when I have brought the second arbiter.”

“So be it.” The Goddess of Honor replied, before turning to Ea Nebel. “Are you prepared?” She asked. The demigoddess nodded.

“I have been given all I could ask for,” she said, looking down into Homura’s deep bright eyes, feeling much smaller than she was. “But… there is one thing I will ask you to give, all the same, for strength. A token. If I may,” she glanced away, up to Iqelis, then back, “Mother.”

“Why do you refer to me as such?” Homura tilted her head, a hint of confusion in her voice.

Ea Nebel broke an unwilling smile and looked away, trying to bite it down as she tugged on her coat. “You can’t…? Nevermind.” She adjusted her feet and her words quickened slightly. “You were the first to draw me out of the ground. My body, my skin, my earth and air and fire all start with you… As have many others. I thought you might want to… Give me a name.”

“I cannot. You may call me mother, but your birth was never my intention. You are not my child.” The curiosity of the red goddess vanished, and she stared at Ea Nebel with cold fire burning in her eyes. “You are a sword, sharp and double-edged. I will never wield you, though others will certainly try. I am the Goddess of Honor.” Homura said as she pointed at herself. “He is the God of Doom. We are enemies.” She continued, pointing at Iqelis, before letting her hand languidly drop to her side.

“Your Aspect… Your choice. I will not decide for you.”

The smile was gone now. Ea Nebel nodded, her hands in her coat pockets, and did not raise her head. “...It- doesn’t matter. Thank you.”

“Lastly, Ea Nebel, you are forbidden from entering Keltra.” Homura proclaimed as her impassive mask returned. Her words echoed with power, seeping into the land and sky, as the world all around was witness to her declaration. The demigoddess’s head jerked back as her teeth clamped down on the tongue she’d been biting, and she slapped the back of her hand to her mouth, eyes bulging.

“Then there will be no regrets when it is razed to the ground.”

The words, heavy and venomous, had not come from the godling's side, where Iqelis had stood, but from somewhere behind and above her. The silent echoes of Homura's bidding did not have time to fade before a vast shadow smothered them along with all light in the glade, save for Daybringer's lonely glow.

In the few moments where every eye had been turned away from him, hopeless as such a notion of reckoning was to capture the doings of Him Who Turns the Flow, a fearsome metamorphosis had come over the cyclopic god. At the edge of the glade there now stood an immense tree of black glass, so imposing that the forest around it seemed but a patch of brush. In its trunk was a cavity that burned with a baleful white flame, and every one of its myriad branches ended in a clawed hand.

They turned, and the currents parted.

Time tore and buckled as the two figures before the obsidian terror were swept over by a haze of sluggishness, and all about them trees collapsed into a putrid black mush acrawl with maggots. Every living thing within a great span crumbled in an instant under the blow of centuries, and the earth itself dissolved into rancid muck as thousands of carcasses choked it.

“For her sake, worm, I would have forborn from casting you into the same lot as the fallen and the condemned,” the One God raged in the voice of dying mountains, his eye vomiting storms of cadaverous light onto the crimson goddess, “But now I will have leave to pull you apart bone by bone! There will be no overlord to cry vengeance for you, for I will have torn his tongue out with your own fingernails!”

“You should leave, brother. You have let your anger overwhelm you, and it is unbefitting for any servant of our Lord to act with such disgrace.” Homura replied, and her visage remained calm and steadfast, despite the devastation all around her. Her gaze then turned to Ea Nebel once more. “Your trials await.”

Red eyes met grey, and locked there for a while. Ea Nebel’s pale figure was alone before the gods now, and cast two shadows in their unearthly light: one for Daybringer’s blade, another for the One Eye.

She lowered her hand gingerly from her mouth. A stain of black blood steamed over the back of her wrist and trickled down her chin. The wisp of vapour hung in the oppressive humidity of rot, trailing away with those at the corner of her eyes. “You should do your job,” she mumbled. “Let’s go.” Then she was gone. For once, a harsh snap of electricity announced her departure, and the sound of a porcine grunt a second later.

The trunk of the terrible tree bulged, raising the lidless Eye on a wave of molten crystal. As it stretched further, the bulk of the divine growth followed into it, and in a pull of elongating distortion it was transfigured into the looming segmented body of a gargantuan centipede cast in living nephrite. It turned its head, featureless save for the blazing fissure, to glance in the demigoddess' wake, before lowering it to face Homura with its now tauntingly bestial countenance.

“Remember, wretch, that I am no servant.” Iqelis' hiss was hollowed, animal. He pointed westward once more with the colossal spear of a leg. “Go, please your master. I will follow.”

The god-beast whipped around its barbed tail, flattening what still protruded from the rotten soil, and the ebb of the umbral Flow carried it away.

“How uncivilised.” Homura muttered to herself as she returned to the keep in preparation for her journey westward.

---

wanted: family counselling

Iqelis and Ea Nebel travel to the forest of Kel-Phenalah, meet Homura and ask her to bear witness to the trials. Given Iqelis’s feelings about the whole affair and Homura’s feelings about Iqelis, this goes about as well as can be expected.

Ea Nebel tentatively asks a favour from her mother, but it looks like literally no-one on this side of the pantheon is ready for that kind of responsibility, because Homura immediately rejects the role. She also rejects the favour: Ea Nebel has asked Homura to name her, as she’s named her champions (she probably encountered them in corpse memories from Astalon or the gulf at Keltra).

Then, in a surprise announcement, Homura bans Ea Nebel from Keltra forever, effective immediately. As she recovers from shock, Iqelis loses his cool, making a mess of some trees and telling Homura exactly what he thinks of her before turning into a fucking centipede and scuttling off.

Homura takes their dramatics completely in stride and joins them despite her distaste.

No one spends any points.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

Blood of the Achtotlaca

On that day, the city bloomed like a fallow field when the tides of molten rock recede, leaving behind a glittering expanse of the most divers and colorful growths. Wreaths of fine crystalline flowers hung from slender copper stalks across the entrances of every cavern-den like so many subterranean rainbows, casting shifting blinks of many hues in the dim glow of the magma flows. In the largest dry-ground plazas, braziers had been lit with the dry and brittle plants of the world above, collected over scores of daring and furtive expeditions and set aflame by the heat of the lower city. The music of horn and scale rhythmically striking against metal rolled through the tunnel streets, solemn yet festive, for today Tecuicicoyoctli celebrated the rite of bloodletting.

The lower causeways, where the city met the flows, were thronged with the expectant peoples, twisting their serpentine bodies in the most fanciful ways so that they might spy what was happening on the lowermost plaza that hung above the slowly coursing vein of the earth. It appeared as if part of the great stone honeycomb had come to life as a great serpent, resplendent in scales both young and fiery and old and greying. Only the wide road that led straight to the upper city was left open, with the stoutest and most belligerent Achtotlaca guarding its length in a martial display.

A melodious sound rolled down the sloping hewn track, and the sibilant whispers of a hundred hushed conversations subsided as a magnificent procession descended from the rough but imposing palace that crowned the head of Tecuicicoyoctli. At its head came a score of musicians, their heads and spines adorned with crowns of brazen and steely leaves, coloured by a flower or underripe fruit here and there. Some of them held in one of their forelimbs a cymbal made with the shell of a large and ancient crab, which dwelt in multitudes in the pools below the city, and rhythmically struck it with the talons or knuckles of the other. Others carried rattles, oblong sacks cut from the skin of Tecuicicoyoctli’s illustrious dead and filled with the bodies of innumerable fire-beetles that clinked against each other like a river flowing with metal.

The harmonious beating of the cymbals and clattering of the rattles was mesmerizing, but even the most obtuse souls were struck with awe as the musicians passed, for behind them there came the splendor of the city. Teoxiuh, Tlatoani of Tecuicicoyoctli, was glorious to behold even in his waning years. His body was long and puissant, without the unwieldy burliness that often defaced the strongest warriors, but slender and long-tailed, with a gracefully tapered head. Now, however, his features could not be seen, for he wore the ritual mask made from the skull of his forefather Tlatlacatl, a splendid thing hung with beads and etched pieces of crab-shell. The Tlatoani’s attendants followed in a long train, and though they all wore their best ancestral ornaments, none were as magnificent as he.

On its way to the lower city, the procession stopped before the two greatest temples in the city, and each time Teoxiuh gave obeisance to the altar. The first time he prostrated himself to Yoliyachicoztl, the mother of all flame, from whom the Achtotlaca came and to whom they returned, and the second he bowed to Tlanextic, the first Tlatoani, who had saved the city of Chicomoztoc and all the Iyotlaca from the Demon from Below. Then he came at last to the plaza, where two mighty bonfires roared, and his musicians spread out around its edges, save the furthest one, which opened directly onto the magma vein.

Teoxiuh passed between the bonfires, and the beating and rattling reached a fevered pace as he perched and coiled on the open ledge. One of the attendants, the Keeper of the Thorn, handed him a basalt knife, which had tasted of his father and his great-father. The Tlatoani brought its tip to rest against the grey scales on his flank, and he spoke: “Unto you, deep fires of the earth, and unto you, mighty Tlanextic, First among Firsts, do I offer my blood, which runs pure with the line of sage Tlatlacatl. May it deepen the carven seal which entraps the Demon, and may it feed the weeds than bind the Demon, and may it quench the smoking fires of the Demon. Nothing is dearer to me than Tecuicicoyoctli, and I have never spared riches for it when it hungered. So too I will not spare my blood when the sacred ways demand it!”

And he drove the slender knife into the gap between his scales, and did not wince as he withdrew it, letting his scalding blood drip into the river below as all the city gave a hissing cheer. When enough had been spilt, another attendant, the Blood-Drinker, scurried to his side and licked his wound, not letting a single drop of the exalted ichor fall to the ground. Once the flow was stemmed, Teoxiuh whipped around head to tail, in a brief flash of the prowess he had been wont to flaunt in his youth, and solemnly trudged out of the plaza and up the road he had come from, preceded by the exultant musicians and trailed by his attendants. Behind him, the crowds began to flow, for now that the rite was done the celebrations in the upper city could begin.

As the causeways grew more and more deserted, two Achtotlaca remained, coiling and perched at the edge of the plaza. Both were from Teoxiuh’s circle; one of them, Ixpetz, had earned honors as an expert crab-catcher, and though her flanks were streaked with stony grey and she could no longer dive as deep as she once had, she was still reputed to be cunning and observant. The other, Miximachtlani, was far younger, but already known as a brash and fearless diver, who had many times journeyed to the world above in search of fame, of which, it seemed, he could never have too little.

“The Tlatoani never betrays his name,” Ixpetz said casually, looking at the molten river, “This year, too, you saw how much he spilled.”

“More than he had to,” Miximachtlani answered.

“Almost twice as much as he’d have to for his age!” the older Achtotlaca sniffed the air, still heavy with a sanguine tang, “The years haven’t tied his hands.”

“But?” Miximachtlani had sensed the lightly hidden caveat in her tone.

“But they’re drying up his blood. Soon he won’t have as much or as hot to give anymore. His children will have to step up to the Thorn.”

“Yacahuitzic.” The diver did not need to say more. Teoxiuh’s consort was from Chicomotzoc. The match had been a great token of friendship between the cities, and none could contest that her lineage ran from great champions of the Iyotlaca, she was not Tecuicicoyoctli. It was not at all clear that their offspring would be pure.

“I said it at the time, that this was going to be trouble eventually, and I got told I was too young to mind these things,” Ixpetz gave an amused huff from her nostrils, “Now everyone else is starting to see it. You do too.”

“Blasted right I do,” Miximachtlani grunted, “It’s not just anything that’ll keep the Demon down there. How do they think they’re going to get pure blood from two who were born two days of swimming apart? We might as well start mating with the crabs.”

“But even if their hatch is found lacking, someone’s going to have to spill it anyway.”

“So?”

“Tlanextic wasn’t Tlatoani when he bled for the first time,” Ixpetz’s eyes were smiling, “All that mattered was that his blood was pure. That’s all that the sacred ways demand.”

“You think anyone could do it? Like us?”

“Why not? My fathers and forefathers were all of Tecuicicoyoctli, and so were yours. Many who are honoured think the same. If you’ll add your voice to ours, we may become famed among all cities for the bounty of our bloodletting…”

Now speaking in hushed tones, the two slid away from the ledge and began to ascend in the tracks of the already distant celebrants. They did not notice the cloud of black smoke that slipped out from a darkened alcove, nor the red eye that followed their steps as their voices faded into the sounds of the city’s festivities.

Summary

Tecuicicoyoctli, an Achtotlaca city in the vicinity of Chicomozoc known for its wealth of lava crabs, is celebrating the day of its ruler ritually offering his blood to the magma, a regular tradition that sprung up after legends of Tlanextic’s deeds spread. The Tlatoani, Teoxiuh, very solemnly pokes himself with a knife; we learn that the people of Tecuicicoyoctli are musical and have some macabre ritual practices. After the rite is done, two members of Teoxiuh’s entourage, Ixpetz and Miximachtlani, discuss how the succession to the place of sacred blood donor might be in peril: the Tlatoani’s consort is from another city, and according to some this might mean that their offspring’s blood won’t be pure enough. Ixpetz convinces Miximachtlani to publicly support the right for pure-born Tecuicicoyoctli dignitaries to take part in the rite, claiming that this new practice will bring their city great renown.

Unbeknownst to them, an Eschatli has been hiddenly observing the scene.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

The Hunting of the Blood-Beast

It had come in the night.

Ostap awoke to the sound of struggle to his right side. Despite the immediate pangs of alarm, it took some moments for his drowsy mind to fully shake off the dust of sleep and find its bearings. The night was warm and clear, the moon’s web in full view. Earlier in the evening, he had decided to lie down to sleep outside, with the smell of fresh grass, while his father had grumbled about the fancies of his moon-struck head.

His father!

The grunts and groaning of torn xo-skin were coming from their tent!

With a shout, Ostap threw off the hide he had covered himself with and grabbed his knife of chipped stone. There were murmurs and calls around him as the rest of the band began to stir, but he paid them no attention as he rushed to the heaving bundle that had been his family’s tent. He heard Taras try to yell in a choking gurgle, saw his fists rise and fall wildly - and there, on top of him, a huge black shape beating him down with its repulsive naked wings.

Ostap shouted again as he fell upon the beast with his knife, whether to drown out his fear or give voice to his rage, he could not say himself. He blindly slashed at a hairy flank, and something shrieked in a way that made his agitated blood run cold. A face rose from the collapsed tent, no, a snout, flat and toothy like a skull crushed by a horse’s kick, and snarled at him. He lunged a second time, but something sharp raked him across the chest with such force that he fell onto his back. The wind knocked out of him, he could only dully stare upwards as a monstrous shadow crossed the sky before his eyes and winged away into the darkness.

Someone helped him to his feet, and he staggered up among figures that he struggled to recognize. He made to stumble towards the ruined tent, but a wrinkly hand held him back, pulling up the hem of his tunic almost to his neck. Ears still ringing with the excitement of fright, he looked down into Yevka the salter’s frowning face. Her mouth moved, but still he could only barely make out a distant mumbling, and he almost did not feel the sting when she rubbed a handful of her tiny white stones over his chest. It was only then he realized that the monster had wounded him. He ran his fingers over his ribcage, and in the moment before Yevka knocked them away with a matronly slap he felt the gouges. They were long, but shallow, luckily. He had gotten off much lighter than-

Taras!

Now firm on his feet, he rushed past his gathered bandmates. They parted before him, but if they said anything, he did not hear them. His eyes, his ears, all his senses were painfully fixed on the chaos of wood and xo-skin ahead.

His father’s body had already been dragged out from the mess. The hearty old man had fought to the last; his clenched fists were clinging with deathly force to tufts of soft grey fur torn from the beast’s hide. But it had taken much more than it had lost: Taras’ throat was almost gone, torn to a ragged hole by vicious fangs. Behind Ostap, someone retched at the sight. It was a fleeting echo to him, and the next moment he had forgotten it.

A dull pain in his hand finally tore his eyes from the scene. He looked down, and saw that he had still not let go of his knife, now stained with foul dark blood. His fingers had slipped over the sharpened side, and the stone bit deeply into his skin.

---

They gave Taras the death-rites the next morning.

He was laid out on the ground some distance away from the camp, among the white dry-stalk flowers, and Ostap draped three fine hides over him. Old Tovkač circled around the body, muttering the farewell tales that would soften the grief of the dead - and of those they left behind.

"...so Avros passed into the land of the shroud, for as the father of all peoples, he knew he had to lead the way for all his sons. He would be there to meet them when they no longer walked the earth, to show them that there's joy beyond that threshold as well as before." The old wiseman bent down under a coughing fit, a sign that he himself was not long from meeting the forefathers, and righted himself with his walking-staff. "For there they would be with them who they'd long thought lost. Brave Taras sits now with Adan his father, and Donera his father's mother, and everyone strong and wise that came between him and Avros. Don't weep for him! We'll see him again one day, and he'll greet us when we come into the land of the shroud."

"Yes, he'll greet us," Ostap answered absently, as he looked at the mounds beneath the hairy xo-hides. Far from their intent, the storyteller's words had dragged the stark, ugly truth of his situation before his eyes.

His mother, Kasja, had been the first to go. It had happened soon after the birth of his brother Anton. Though the boy had been strong and healthy, Kasja had been struck by a wasting illness some days after delivering him, and little by little it had eaten at her from within until her sun-marks had at last gone out.

No one had blamed Anton for this, but Ostap knew that his brother had quietly shouldered that guilt regardless, and it was that weight that had pushed him, as if in expiation, to always be the best. The most cheerful, always with a joke and a smile ready; the fastest hunter; the sharpest forager; the most thorough skinner. He had even become a friend to their usually surly and taciturn marshal, who had given him one of his horses to ride. And it was that gift that had been his end, when he fell from its back in hot pursuit of a spiral-horn herd and broke his neck.

Only he and Taras had been left. Each of them missed someone that had been his equal, and in that shared loss they had become as much friends and comrades as they were father and son. They had drunk field-brew together, traded jests and playful blows, cursed and laughed as they pulled out the guts from a butchered xo. Now Taras was a cold log of wood under a shroud.

Now, Ostap was the last.

He would have his own children, in time - in time, yes, he thought bitterly as he trudged back to the camp in silence. Who knew when that would be, now that all he had to his name was a broken tent. Seča would not mind, he suspected, but what kind of man would he be to drag her into a life of picking bones? The herd was the marshal's, and he did not trust him anywhere as much as he had Anton. Ostap's line had always been hunters. With two pairs of hands, they could have built up something, but on his own it would be years before he could think of feeding more mouths than his own. The monster had taken it all away together with his father.

Something in the tall grass caught his eye. The sun had dried out the earth out in the plains, and its murky brown graininess had turned to a pale, greyish crust. Everywhere but in one spot among bent yellow stalks, where the soil was instead a dark, dirty red. No, not the soil. Something that had fallen on it and lost its liveliness under the day's warmth.

Blood. The blood of a beast.

Ostap hunched down and parted the grass around the desiccated blotch. Sure enough, there was another close by, and another still. A line.

A trail that led to the east.

---

“So you’re set on this, eh? No way you’ll clear your head and put that spear down?”

“You know him, Kuben. A moon-struck head never clears on its own.”

Kuben laughed at the joke, but it was a mirthless, forced thing. Ostap was a good friend and a hard worker, and so, when he announced his mad idea, full eight people had come to try and set his thoughts straight. Kuben, Balban and Mezhig the hunters were there, and so was Bovdug, and Dubenia, who had been Anton’s lover, and Glodukha, Demid and Seča. But there might as well have been eighty of them, and still they would have been ramming their heads against a tree for all the good their words did. Ostap had the same hard skull as his old man, and besides he was moon-struck; what could one do when his moods came over him?

“That’s right,” he was wearing his travelling-cloak, and he leaned on the haft of his spear like old Tovkač on his staff. “For everything you take, you give back its worth, that’s the way of the just. That beast’s taken the dearest thing there is, a good life. It’s only right it gives back in kind, even if it’s only got a rotten one itself.”

Balban shook his head. “How do you know you can even kill it with that spear?”

“It’s bled before,” Ostap’s face was carved in stone. “If it bleeds, I can do it.”

There was a moment of silence, then Seča stepped forward, gloomy like the evening with her prematurely dark eyes.

“We’ll go with you, if you want.” She was a woman of few words, but they were weighty. No one dared argue with her now.

“No,” answered Ostap, looking down to the earth, “If I go and don’t come back, I won’t pull you under the shroud with me. There’s no right in that.”

“If we go together, you’ll be more likely to come back, and we too,” Bovdug pointed out.

“The beast looks down from the sky, it’ll spot us easily if there’s many of us.”

Again, no one found any words, until at last Balban spoke up.

“Well, it’s goodbye, then,” he smiled, this time genuinely, “Good hunting.”

“Goodbye.”

Their eyes followed him as he walked out into the grass and crested the nearest hill, becoming a blurred outline in the sun’s glare; then he went down on the other side, and they could see him no more.

---

The blood trail only lasted Ostap until around noon. The monster must have licked its wound on its way, for after the five hills there were no more dried clots to be found among the grass. He did not let this deter him, and since he knew no better, he went straight ahead. Even if the beast was not there, there must have been someone around the steppe that had seen in, large as it was.

In this, too, he was however disappointed until twilight set in. Only then, weary and dragging his feet in the descending darkness, he saw something on the plain ahead. It was too big to be a spiral-horn, too tall to be a wild xo. Fear shot up as his thoughts ran to the beast, but settled down again when he noticed the shape had not moved. Squinting, he could make out the tip of a pole sticking up from rigid conical flanks. A tent! There was someone out here after all.

As he came closer, he spotted the tent’s owner seated on the ground before the threshold, swaddled in an old, bug-eaten hide cloak. He almost stumbled when he saw her face; she was without a doubt the oldest Eiodolon he had ever seen. Her hoary skin, drooping in wrinkles around her long crooked nose, made old Tovkač look hale and youthful in comparison. It might have just been the evening shade, but her eyes were perfectly grey, as dusty and ashen as her weathered horns and thin hair. He could only imagine what her sun-marks must have been like, if she still had any at all.

“Hum, hum,” the woman croaked when Ostap drew near, the wide conches of her nostrils twitching and widening under her bony beak, “I smell a steppe-man. What are you doing out here with the sun almost gone? Don’t you know that the blood-beasts have been stalking the sky?”

“I’m not afraid of them,” Ostap steadied himself with his spear, swaying on his sore legs, “But you’re out in the steppe all on your own, and the blood-beasts took my father though he wasn’t older than you. Let me be your guest, we’ll be safer the two of us together.”

“Eh! Fine words,” chuckled the crone, “Come in, then, there’s room for us both. I’ve lived here many years, since my band went north,” she kept speaking as she ushered Ostap into the tent, which was wide but almost bare save for a few bundled hides and a weakly smoldering fire-circle in the middle, “But I’ve never seen a blood-beast around before that big one flew by yesterday. That’s the one that came to your band, isn’t it?”

Ostap nodded. “Did you see which way it went?”

“Straight to the sunrise,” the old woman answered as she sat cross-legged on a crumpled spiral-horn hide speckled with ash, “Why, are you hunting it?”

He nodded again, hand on his spear.

“Brave man! I’ve never seen anyone try that and make it, but there’s always a first time. What’s your name, so I will know whose story to tell to the next one who comes here?”

“I’m Ostap, son of Taras. And who are you, so I’ll know who to thank?”

“I’m Yeghna. You wouldn’t know my father or my mother, they died long ago. But let’s leave them to rest! You must be hungry after coming all the way here, and I’m your host.” She went to fish for something under a disorderly heap of furs, but Ostap held up a hand to stop her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got my own,” he drew out a strip of salted meat from his belt-bag, “It’s already enough I’m taking your tent, I haven’t got anything to give for your food.”

“I said I’m the host, why should you give me anything? It’s up to me to make sure you’re covered and fed,” Yeghna grinned, crooked and toothless, “Are you sure all that salt won’t make you thirsty?”

Ostap opened his mouth to reply, but then he felt his parched mouth with his tongue, and thought to how every drop in his waterskin was precious out on this journey.

“You’re right, a swig wouldn’t hurt,” he assented at last.

“Say no more - you’re my guest!” Yeghna pulled a wooden bowl out of a corner. It was halfway full of some thin, murky liquid that smelled of sour berries and wood-root.

“Thank you.” As she handed it over, Ostap’s hand gave a twitch that could have seemed involuntary, bringing it to brush against the old woman’s wrist. It was an undue precaution, perhaps. What could she have stood to gain if that brew had been poison, if it made him die here, in this lonely tent? Even if, spurred by some madness that had come into her from living alone for so long, she had wanted to kill him and eat him like an animal, he was quite sure that she did not have enough teeth for that. And still, this tent standing alone in the steppe, that strange-smelling bowl instead of a waterskin, there was something in all of this that put him on edge. Even just a touch to sense the shades of her intentions would have been reassuring.

Instead, he felt nothing, though his fingers touched ruvid skin. Instead of Yeghna’s wrist, he had swept them over the hem of her cloak. She did not seem to have noticed, and so, not to appear ungrateful, he took the bowl and drank the sour, but not unpleasant berry-water. It did not give him any pangs in his belly, and he dismissed his caution. The danger was not this frail ancient, but the thing that flapped and skulked out there.

“It’s good for your dreams, chases away the dark ones,” the crone smiled as she took back the bowl and tossed it away to clatter in some unlit corner, “You should lie down now if you want it to be strong. My old head sleeps lightly, I’ll wake you if anything comes.” She picked up a fistful of loose dry soil and tossed it over the embers, plunging the tent into darkness.

Ostap laid down his spear by his side and stretched himself out on the ground, covering himself with his cloak. It was hard, but not unpleasant, and so much had happened on that day that he felt his head grow heavy as soon as it touched the soil. Halfway through an unfinished yawn, he was falling into a deep black well, and heard nothing more.

---

He awoke to a sharp pain in his chest.

Not just anywhere, he realized, still with a foot in the hazy leaps of thought that happened in dreams. Right where the monster had scratched him the night before.

He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were heavy like fallen trees, and would not budge. Panic seized him underneath the lancing agony. His hands, his feet, his head would not move. A cold woodenness had seized his limbs, and they did not feel as if they were his - no, he did not feel them at all, but some rotting logs that had been tied to the stumps of his legs and shoulders. He felt cold, then hot, then sick, and wondered if this was what death was like. Tovkač, you lied, you old bastard, there is no happiness in death, only numbness and pain, pain, pain.

With a tremendous effort, Ostap forced his eyes open. He had rolled over on his back in his sleep. Straight ahead, he saw the darkness of the tent’s sloping wall, swelling and wavering in the night breeze. Then he looked down-

There was something on his chest, something huge, grey and horrible. A great bloated, wobbling body, like a sack stuffed full of rotting entrails, pulled up by eight spindly, pointy legs that gouged into his sides with their hooked tips, and on his chest, biting into his wounds with what could only be its jaws, a head out of the worst moon-addled nightmares. He had thought that the blood-beast’s snout was ugly, but now he would rather have seen it a thousand times than facing the thing that gnawed on his ribs. Smooth, eyeless, with sparse bristles like a bald hog, it was little more than a nameless oblong shape ending in two recurve prongs. The head of a spider, or a beetle, or a tick, but stretched out to an impossible size.

He had to be dreaming. This thing could not be real. It should not be real!

“Shh-hum, shh-hum,” the creature hissed, and somewhere in the damp, whispering screech that was its voice, Ostap heard echoes of his host, “Lie still now, steppe-man. I’ll be done soon, and you won’t feel pain ever again, shh-hum, shh-hum!”

Suddenly, the whole tent quaked. Something outside whistled, cutting through the air, and a huge dark bulk forced its way in through the all too narrow entrance, tearing the hides with its clawed wings.

“Well, well,” the blood-beast snarled, its monstrous nostrils twitching, its jagged teeth bared and dripping, “What do you think you’re doing drinking him dry by yourself, old hag? We had a deal, you get half and I get half!”

“Shh-hum, shh-hum,” cackled Yeghna, “There was a deal, and it flew away! He was here for a long time, and my old throat was parched. You can fly far! Go find yourself another.”

“What?!” growled the beast, “I’d rather gnaw you open here and now!”

And it spread out its wings, splaying its claws, and pounced; but the tent was too small for its huge body to lash and lunge so, and it collapsed with a mournful thud, burying the horrors and their victim under foul-smelling xo hides. The blood-beast thrashed and tore loudest of all, until it had scattered the ruins and stood panting and gnashing in a circle of rags.

It peered around with its dull beady eyes, its huge ears twitching as they strained to catch the faintest sound. Yeghna was nowhere to be seen. Not even a rustle of grass gave the vermin-hag away as she crawled off, fat with the fool steppe-man’s vitality, to skulk and spin her tales and find more sots to prey on.

Gritting its fangs in annoyance, the beast shuffled over to the prone Eidolon. He lay still where Yeghna had left him, eyes wide, arms stiff at his sides. Maybe there still was something in him, and the tick’s venom just so nicely held him prisoner in his own body. The blood-beast hunched over him, fanged maw open wide-

And it screeched as Ostap plunged his knife into its exposed throat. It snapped at him, but with the agility of a hunter he drew his hand back and angled it higher. His arm was still numb, but his fingers answered him once more, and he stabbed at the monster’s soulless eye, and pushed deeper, deeper, the warmth of blood flowing over his hand, until the great winged body at last stopped flailing and dropped in a twitching heap.

Then Ostap let his hand drop, and, looking up at the starry sky and the gently glowing moon, he smiled.

Summary

Somewhere in the Plains, an Eidolon named Ostap wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his band’s encampment is being raided by a bat-vertan, who kills his father Taras. This leaves Ostap the only surviving member of his family. Stricken with grief and knowing that he’s going to face some hard times, he decides to follow the monster’s trail and take vengeance, and sets off despite his friends’ attempts to dissuade him.

After a day of travelling, Ostap meets an old woman named Yeghna, who lives in a lone tent and agrees to let him in for the night. It turns out to have been a mistake, as he rudely awakes to discover that his host is a tick-vertan and is drinking him dry after paralyzing him. However, the bat suddenly appears; it turns out that it and Yeghna knew Ostap was coming and agreed to share the bounty, but the tick is feeling extra parched and breaks off the deal. A fight ensues, and Yeghna slips away into the night. The bat goes to finish Ostap, but he has recovered enough to take it by surprise, killing it and completing his revenge.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

Apostate

...gets confused...

&

The gardens that greeted Apostate on his returning detour from his wandering were, true to form, untouched by adversity. Not one stalk of grass had bowed its head, not one flower had yellowed and dipped, not one clump of soil had been blown out of place.

And still, it was very clear that someone had been there, and left traces on the unmoving ground. Streaks of black ash and charcoal dust ran through the green near the edge of the defiant land, at times turning into circles or strange hieroglyphs. Though no worldly flame could have burned that vegetation, acrid refuse had been heaped onto it.

Not even the god's own monument had been spared. Grey cinders had roughly scrawled a grimace on its visor and dusted its height with crumbling stains. Two clouds of inky smoke circled around it, twisting and twirling like things alive.

“Hm.” Apostate stood in the center of the mess. The first thought in his mind was that perhaps he was in the wrong place, but then he figured he was. The second thought was a slight concern about the state of the gardens, most notably that it didn’t quite look like how he described it to Homura, thus jeopardizing his delivery. With that in mind, he hefted his mighty blade and slammed it into the ground.

From the impact, a swirl of sparks erupted into the atmosphere, catching on the hanging air of the gardens and with a powerful blast and ear ringing clap — a fiery explosion engulfed Apostate and his garden. Through the immolation, Apostate nodded with contentment as the immense blast tore the mess away from the land, revealing the yellow flower from before as well as other landmarks he so poetically described to the goddess of honor.

A few more heated seconds passed and with only a plume of smoke remaining, the great fireball that ate his garden had dissipated, leaving it spotless. 

The only foreign traces left after the conflagration were the two drifting smoke clouds, or what was left of them. Their black cloaks had been burned away, revealing hovering pillars of grey flame that writhed and cascaded in the air like columns made of knotted worms. They turned towards Apostate in unison, if indeed they had such things as a back and a fore, and stared at him with the pulsing red orbs that were their single eyes.

"Look at this," one of them spoke in fiery singsong, "Nothing is there we can do that won't be razed by some absurd creature."

"It was aggrieved," the other answered, wholly identical to the first, "We must do this again if it torments someone so."

“A challenger approaches,” Apostate boomed to himself more than anything else, yanking his mighty blade free and leveling it at the flames.

"You?" one of the spirits, impossible to say which, asked almost in disbelief, "You are alone and have a body of heavy earth, while we are two and unmoored flame."

Apostate reached outward with one of his hands, as if grasping the air in front of him. Without a word, he clenched his fist and with a mighty bang, one of the talking flames burst into the same smoke that Apostate named hevel, only to disappear. He pointed his blade at the remaining spectre.

“Your attack is sloppy.”

The flame quivered, spun upon itself, stretched wide and, in a cough of black fumes, tore itself into two halves. Two red eyes looked at the god again, though much diminished.

"Or is yours simply unsporting?" said the first, or perhaps the second wraith, "If we could extinguish you as easily as that, should we call you sloppy also?"

“Yes-” Apostate was interrupted. 

"We could do it to those who crumble so fast under our touch," mused the other. "But who are you, one that burns and extinguishes with a gesture?"

“Apostate,” the smoke replied, “a god.”

"That cannot be," danced the flames, "There is only One God."

“My mistake.” Apostate clenched his hand again, and with a bang one of the flames poofed once again. This time, the remaining one did not split apart, but blew out a shroud of dusty black smoke and disappeared inside it. Only its eye remained visible.

"You should challenge him if you take exception with that," despite everything, its voice seemed unfazed, "We are mere messengers, who carry the words we worship and we hate."

“Then let this be a lesson,” Apostate bellowed. He swung his sword away from the flame and flourished it back into an invisible scabbard. “That a messenger should always speak clearly and openly from the start of the interaction. Speak now, clearly, so that I may...”

The god paused and a deep groan rumbled from within. A puff of smoke shot out from the metal helmet of the god and his voice followed. “Speak quickly.” 

"Keep your lessons to yourself next time," said the spirit, "We are Eschatli. Seven of us there were, seven there must always be. Once we had bodies and warm flames in our hearts, now we only have smoke and cold bale-fire. The One God took away our death and gave us harmony, and so we worship him; he took away our warmth and our eyes and gave us servitude, and so we hate him. We carry his words when he gives them to us, but when we've none we do what pleases us."

“If you hate him,” Apostate reasoned, “then why don’t you simply stop doing what he says and always do what pleases you?”

"Because without him, we would know and fear death, which is the greatest torment of living things," replied the Eschatli as it swelled back to its erstwhile proportions. 

"Hm," Apostate groaned, "what is it that you want?"

"We hate the beauty that we have no eyes to see, and we hate the joy that we have no warmth to feel," said the flame, "These things we want to be undone."

There was a long pause from the god, the smokeborn standing completely still. Eventually, he shifted. "I don't understand. What's the issue? Why have you sought my wisdom? Do you intend to defy your means or not?" 

"We did not seek you," the flame murmured, "We came to deface this garden, which was beautiful and we therefore hated. If you would speak of wisdom, we can call the God, who mayhap might hear such things more gladly than we."

"You are confusing creatures," Apostate admitted, "would you prefer I end your suffering for good?" His voice was sincere, as well as laced with audible misunderstanding. 

"Perhaps we would," the Eschatli said, "But it could not be done unless that authority is wrested from the God, who holds it jealously."

“All worldly things come to an end, know that fact as my wisdom,” Apostate stood up straight (for smoke), “with my power, I can erase you from existence should that be your wish. So I ask again, what is it that you want?”

"We have said it plainly enough," the spirit answered with a crooked chuckle.

Or perhaps not, for it had not been its fiery, melodious voice that laughed, but a hard, cracking one like a shattering gemstone. A tall, angular shadow stretched out behind the cloaked spectre, and though it too had but one eye, it was not red but glaring white.

"They really are strange things, " Iqelis' voice was echoed by the telltale buzzing of flies, who had begun to emerge from who knew where, "I could not tell you myself how much of what this one said was in earnest. Drift along now, little flame."

He clenched a hand through the Eschatli's hazy presence, and without so much as a complaint the spirit unwound into tatters of inky fog.

“Whatever that was,” Apostate grumbled, “it was stupid.”

"As many things are in this world," the One God shook off the last threads of smoke from his hand, "But I have said I would not make these seven too wretched, and they must amuse themselves at times."

Apostate swiveled to meet the new figure that had appeared. He stood in silence for a while, letting the words fall between the two gods until finally he bellowed, “what are you talking about?”

"My Eschatli, of course," the one eye shimmered mockingly, "You are cursed with poor insight even among this sorry divine tribe."

“I mean to say,” Apostate corrected, “why are you talking to me?”

"Then you should have said so clearly," Iqelis crackled, "You have spoken the one truth, and this has pleased me."

“A lesson you should have extended to your measly creations.” Apostate turned fully to the other god. “Return to me when you are worthy of my notice, I will await you then.”

"Wait all you will," the One-Eye swept a hand, "You will come to me in the end, and perhaps you will entertain me again."

He spread his fifty arms wide, and the next moment he was no longer there. Where he had stood, the soil was gouged by his clawed feet.

Apostate swung his blade and planted the tip in the new groove, using it as a convenient holster for his weapon as he leaned against its length. With a puff of smoke, he commented, “stupid.”

Summary

So Apostate managed to find his way back to the Gardens of Hevel only to find it defaced with various graffiti. His first worry was that perhaps he was at the wrong Garden of Hevel, but he quickly realized it simply changed since he last saw it. Figuring it would be confusing for Homura to find the Garden seeing how it looks different than how he described it, he decided that cleansing it with a massive explosion would suffice for spring cleaning.

With the massive explosion over, two Eschatli, Iqelis' humans which were transformed into spirits of impure "bale-fire", remained behind, and mistake Apostate for a strange creature. Apostate hears the mocking tone and mistakes them for challengers, leveling his weapon at them and announcing the commencement of battle. Instead of correcting him, one of the Eschatli smartly chastises Apostate, claiming that he couldn’t harm them — so Apostate smites one of the two with a simple gesture.

Now smote, the other Eschatli splits into two and Apostate chastises them for having terrible battle etiquette, to which the Eschatli now claim that he’s too strong and it was unfair. Apostate doesn’t really care and prepares to do it again when they ask who he is. In his short nature, Apostate says his name and then says he is a god. The Eschatli tell him he isn’t, Apostate smites one of them again and apologizes sarcastically for mistaking himself for a god. 

The Eschatli then hint at being oppressed by the One True God and Apostate asks what they are gonna do about it. From there is a circular conversation were the Eschatli tell Apostate they hate beauty and Iqelis, but also worship him and don’t want to die. It’s a confusing 

merry-go-round and Apostate shares the sentiment by pushing the question of what they want, twice, to which no real answer is given beyond their hatred of beauty. In a last ditch attempt to communicate with the creatures, Apostate offers to unmake them, they say he can’t, he says everything comes to an end eventually, and before anything else happens, Iqelis shows up.

The Doom God dismisses his servants and then mocks them and the world. Apostate, now being presented with a new figure that he is pretty sure is the oppressing nature of the scene, wonders what the Doom God is even talking about. Iqelis insults Apostate, who then asks why the Doom God is talking to him. Eventually Apostate figures this isn’t worth his time and finds everything lacking, sending Iqelis on his way, but not before Iqelis gets the last word before disappearing… only for Apostate to seize the new silence to get his last word in, like the defiant bastard he is. 

Nothing has really been done.

Vigor

Apostate starting: 6

None Spent
Apostate ending: 6

Iqelis starting: 6

3 spent on turning the seven humans into Eschatli, creatures of smoke and tainted fire. Cursed to always be exactly seven, when one is killed, a replacement is born by fission. Despite this, they aren't supernaturally linked to each other, just completely interchangeable.

Iqelis ending: 3

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

The Monarch of All

&

The mists of the Tlacan coiled and spun about themselves like a forest of writhing pillars, gently swaying under the breath of a mournful breeze. The sea was a dark mirror, unmoving save for the reflections wavering on its surface, eerily perfect on their undistorted canvas. Even along the shores of the barren, grey island, which in any other sea would have been frothing upon its many jutting rocks and low, sharp cliffs, it was still like oil, not even a drop splashing up to run through the crags carved in more turbulent bygone days.

Perched on a stony protrusion thrust out into the indifferent black waters, Iqelis stared out into the hazy labyrinth, now and then raising an arm to send a bank of fog scattering without a stir of wind. Even the flies that surrounded him sat about apathetically. Some paces behind him seven human bodies stood arranged in a semicircle, still nearly featureless and untouched in their primordial state. After what had happened with that first, ever so unassuming shell, the god had been hesitant to lay hands on them. Ending a life had been nothing but elating, but birthing one had brought a swirl of contradictory and painful sentiments.

He knew which one he preferred by far.

“Good day, Iqelis. It is not often I see you sitting around in a malaise.”

A familiar voice spoke to him, a rift opened in front of Iqelis, showing nothing more than the Monarch of All sitting upon His throne and gazing down upon the stagnant god. He had spoken with no outward emotion, nothing dictating on why the ruler had decided to contact one of His lords. The Monarch of All tilted His head to the side as he observed Iqelis, though, it seemed more of a ponderance as to why Iqelis was merely sat in deep thought that He had never truly seen in the entropic god. This did not stop the Monarch of All from straightening himself to allow an air of menace to coalesce as He spoke again, this time in a more authoritative tone that wrought yet more of that menace that gathered around the supreme god.

”You and Yudaiel are testing my patience; twin murderers in this realm of mine. Tell me, why did you kill your peer?”

The One God turned up his eye without rising from his crouch, giving him the appearance of a ghoul caught by surprise in the middle of its meal. His dull gaze flared up as it met his Maker, its dusky pensiveness overtaken by the blazing, mocking bravado that it had spat onto the world since the dawn of its birth.

”As the treacherous Eye has no doubt given her account, so shall I.”

He raised four arms at the window through sidereal space, and spoke in the tongue of thought and vision.

A river flowed through a verdant plain, caressed by the rays of a small yet vigilant sun high above. Its waters were placid and murky, but its touch was no less vivifying than if it had been of the clearest crystal. Along its banks, tall grasses and reeds swayed and drooped, crowned with strange and beautiful flowers, and from them life spread to flourish across the land in a mosaic of stalks and shrubs of many colours. Shimmering insects danced above the water, sapphire dragonflies and emerald beetles, and bright and plump fish splashed through the current.

But then there was a rumble, and a huge grey boulder came rolling across the meadow before landing in the river with a splash. So large was it that the water could not flow around it, no matter how it twisted and churned and mounted. It gathered itself up in heavy waves, trying to push the obstacle out of its way, but the obstinate boulder would not budge from its spot, and every shove only made it more and more entrenched in the silt.

Starved of motion, the river quickly began to die. On one side of the stone the water kept rising, until it flooded out of its banks, uprooting and drowning the flowering reeds on its two sides. With nowhere for its refuse to flow, it pooled and stagnated, growing foul and malodorous. The grasses and bushes rotted, poisoned by the rank tide, and no more did dragonflies and beetles dance over this putrid marsh, but only the ugly gnat and the noisome mosquito held their feasts there. On the other side of the boulder, the land fared no better. No more water came to quench its thirst, and little by little it became parched and dead. Yellow grass and faded flowers lay choking in the dust, and the riverbed was empty save for the decomposing carcasses of fish.

Then a hand of black glass struck down from the darkened sky and shattered the boulder into tiny pieces, and the river breathed a sigh as it began to flow again. The impurities of the swamp were carried away downstream, never to be seen again, and the banks and the land around them were reborn to flowering bounty, stirred only by the joyful dances of insects and fish.

With a snap of a claw, Iqelis spoke again.

”There is no virtue in pure obstinacy. I have struck down one who would in time have hampered not only my work, but your own designs as well.”

The Monarch of All’s eyes flared with an intense glow as He allowed the words of Iqelis to stew before offering His own response. Though a sigh seemed to signify annoyance at having to once more sit through visions and thought, rather than speech. With a clasp of two of His hands together, the great Lord of the Gods spoke once more in the same commanding tone, offering little respite, His voice boomed in frustration.

”You are out of line to say that my design would have been hampered, Iqelis! You know not my will other than my orders to create a world and fill it with life, not to kill another god and bring about more of an ending!”

He stopped for a moment, holding His speech before slyly leaning back within His seat and bringing the tips of all of His hands together. Once more, speaking but this time with a voice that conveyed a sneer and mockery, He said with a light chuckle.

”Yet, for a god so bent upon entropy and decay, you have created life. I have seen it. That ‘thing’ that came from the shell. You truly are bold for allowing such an abomination to exist, surely for a half-breed to exist would be against my design, no?”

”Do not taunt me over that, Lord of Beginnings!” Iqelis drew up, the many pairs of his hands folding together at the knuckles one after the other. Though he was still dwarfed by the Monarch’s presence, by some trickery of the light his shadow stretched over the mouth of the rift like a long arm. ”I know full well that her life is in breach of laws far greater than us both. And still I will not have one of mine suffer for a mistake that was not hers. Would you turn your hand against yourself, if you happened to unravel a corner of your creation’s weave? You may not shrink from sacrifice,” a dark finger pointed at the shining wound in the Great One’s chest, ”But bloodshed is not the only guise it may take, nor the integrity of creation the only cause it may honour.”

The Monarch of All was silent for a moment, contemplating the words of Iqelis in an air rife with tension and growing anger before it was quickly cut by the Monarch of All’s shadow appearing behind Iqelis, His visage gone from the rift within a fraction of a second. His gargantuan form loomed over the entropic god, standing just beyond the island and within the oceans of Sala. The four hands of the Monarch of All bore claws far fiercer than Iqelis’ own, though now they rested at His side. His voice cast out all other noise; the wave, the wind, all gone.

”And yet you do not share that same mercy towards your fellow lords. Why should I impart any mercy upon you at this moment? After all, I could merely end you just as you had to him. They share your blood, just as you share blood with me. Clearly, a kinslayer such as yourself does not care, though.”

Under his withering glare, the lesser divine lowered himself into a ghast-like crouch again, arms folded at his sides like a crystalline spider’s segmented legs, but still he stared up with the symbolic defiance of a lurking snake.

”Without me, who would turn the Flow?” hissed the friction of a glacier against the granite mountainside, ”Who would ensure that your universe was not washed away faster than your thralls can build it? Aletheseus contributed nothing to the workings of the cosmos, but I am not him, and I cannot be drowned in the Last Sea as easily.”

”You have done nothing but bring destruction and turmoil to my realm! You, Iqelis, have done little more than be a pest! You do not ensure that things are erased for you are the very cause of it!”

His voice split caused waves of water to erupt, the very land of the island that Iqelis was splitting as the Monarch of All’s anger grew and grew. The great one pointed to the moon of Yudaiel, a single claw pointing at the enemy of Iqelis, as He spoke in anger once more.

”She was punished for her sins and now it is time for yours!”

As He spoke, the supreme deity allowed a moment for the lands to stop their trembling and for the waters to calm themselves before He spoke once more upon judgement. Animosity was held back within His voice, a clear desire to end the God of Doom like the very insects that he had spawned, though he did not act upon it. The Monarch of All gave His statement in a near quiet hiss towards His subject.

”You will send your abomination, Ea Nebel, to collect the shard of Aletheseus for me. However, for her, you will impart four separate trials to prove her worth so that she may not be ended by my hand. Yet, should you hold back upon any of these trials, I will end both her and you. Am I understood?”

As the waves and tremors settled around them, there was stillness for a moment. It was not merely the silence of the Tlacan, but the ominous torpor of a gathering tempest, the fog itself darkening as it collected after being stirred and the sky turning anxiously leaden.

Then the clouds burst.

Iqelis was no longer crouching, nor was he standing low at the Monarch’s feet. His umbral body stretched to the heavens, a skeletal mountain of many-armed night, rivalling the stature of the Prime God himself - though unlike in him, there was no true substance in its fluid darkness, but merely the illusionary embodiment of wrathful pride. Atop this terrible eikon there shone a beacon of cold, hungry light, which drew all radiance from the world into itself and spat out chilling scorn and suffocating shadow. The sky swam with the distorted view of a rushing tide of stygian water, whether vomited out from the one-eye or pouring out from unseen angles of existence which had until then mercifully concealed its rippling and roiling. Towering clouds of buzzing vermin whipped around this figure of apocalyptic prophecy, threatening to fill the world with swarming legs and bloody bulbous eyes.

”Challenge me all you will, Old One, and I shall put every petty trial to shame,” the One God’s voice was the wail of all terrestrial and astral spheres crying out in the grip of preternatural torment, ”But leave her out of your games, or you will rue the day when you rashly spilled your ichor into the void. Every drop and every pebble of the Galbar will come unwound before your eyes, your sun will putter out like the most pitiful of sparks, and your despair alone will remain to mourn when you pass into oblivion.”

”I have spoken my will, Iqelis. Thus, it shall be done, lest you’d rather me end you here and now for your transgressions. You cannot challenge me through might, you know such things, that is why you prey upon the weak.”

”Perhaps not I alone,” the immense shadow grew longer and thinner, its voice more dry and sibilant, ”But what would your vaunted champion the Earthheart think if you snuffed out the one he cherished so? What would be the word of she of the spear, so devoted to your service now, if you dissipated that which bears her essence? Your loyalty does not reach as far as your hand, First Source, and you know that. Will you stoke that flame further to satisfy your whim?”

A scoff came from the Monarch of All, gazing upon the form of Iqelis as if He had a cruel grin crossing His blank features. He wrapped His arms around His back, unafraid of the threats that Iqelis made to His face, almost admiring his boldness for such a display. Then, as if the silence returned in force, He spoke in a snide, condescending tone.

”Four trials, Iqelis. I will have Ruina, She who Tests, watch to ensure you do not interfere with the success of your progeny and ensure that you do not hold back after all. Additionally, Homura will make sure you uphold this.”

The Monarch of All took a singular step back, the bridge to the Divine Palace opening behind Him and casting a light that was too much for the hungry light of Iqelis’ form to consume. He allowed a few parting words to grace the One God, His words echoing and consuming the thoughts of Iqelis as what could be a threat resonated through the air. Once the utterance was finished, the Monarch of All stepped into the bridge and disappeared from Iqelis. Despite no longer being there, His words continued to echo.

”I look forward to meeting Ea Nebel.”

The great white eye glared at his tracks for a few more instants, then the shadows melted into the sea, and the otherworldly penumbra was gone. All that was left was Iqelis’ spindly silhouette, no longer swollen with horrid glamours, but staring out at the immobile wastes once again. Yet now his sight was no more darkened with despondent meditation, for a bright and cruel resolve had taken its place, woven with the sneering eagerness of arrogance rising to a challenge. The god loped over to where the seven unmoulded humans still stood, miraculously intact after the titanic altercation that had shaken the world around them.

”Your doom was always sealed, Old One, as was that of us all,” he creaked, a familiar crooked smile finding its way into his voice.

He reached out with seven arms, and seven taloned fingers plucked out an eye from each of the stolid faces. None of the seven would ever vaunt a wider sight than that of their master.

”But I did not guess you were so eager to meet it.”

Summary

On an island somewhere in the Tlacan Sea, Iqelis is thinking about what to do with his seven humans, and about how parenthood isn’t quite as easy nor fun as murder. The Monarch appears before him, chastising him for the killing of Aletheseus, to which he trots out the “it was necessary” excuse. The Monarch isn’t pleased at how Iqelis claims to know what his universe needs, nor is he happy about Ea Nebel’s birth. As the wayward god’s penance, he imposes on him to send Ea on a pilgrimage to Aletheseus’ grave and put her through four trials to see if she’s worthy of living on his turf; else both will get squashed. This sends Iqelis into a rage, and he threatens to unmake everything, Monarch included, if the latter so much as touches a hair on his daughter’s head. The Primordial, unimpressed, promises to assign some trustworthy eyes to check that everything goes as he commanded before leaving.

Left alone, Iqelis marks his humans in his typically vicious style, and starts to entertain ambitions of regicide.

No Vigour spent here.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

&

Homura

---

The droning hum of a hundred wings broke the silence over the battered, craggy land. It faded for a few instants, and in that brief spell the rocky hills could have been mistaken for a view of the moon’s face, devoid of life or sound, cracked and uneven and shrouded in fine pale dust. Then the hum awoke again, and a thin cloud of black bodies streamed from one half-buried rock to another. It poured into its every crack, licking at its foundation where the angle of its thrust into the ground left it open. The living smoke was looking for something, feeling its way across the impact valley one fissure at a time. Again it did not find what it sought, and again it buzzed up and over to the next splintered boulder.

Crouched like some emaciated gargoyle on the remains of a monolith that might once have been as large as a small mountain, Iqelis idly watched the flies take to the air after another failed sweep. He extended an arm to point at another gigantic shard that lay by his perch, and the insects flooded over it with their ever-fresh curiosity, waving their feelers over every inch of its base. Yet again, no traces. He pointed elsewhere, and they followed. In their guileless enthusiasm, he thought, they would end up outlasting his own interest in the search.

Finding what, or perhaps who, had been the victim of Yudaiel's earth-shattering rampage had begun as a whim, a fancy to refine his mockery with precision. As time flowed by without his flies uncovering a single track of the carrion presence they were all too glad to root out, the whim had turned into resolve to spite the doubts he had about whether scouring every crater in the wasteland was worth the while. It was not as simple as drifting through the currents to his goal, for where that was remained unknown, and the ripples on the Flow had long grown too faint to follow them. This was a challenge, and the novelty of it amused him, used as he was to certainty in all things; but it was also tedious, and he doubted that he would last another two valleys before tiring of the suspense and leaving whatever vestiges lay buried there to their course into oblivion.

His scavenging was interrupted by a voice that reached him from afar - a voice that shattered the silence that had lingered too long, and awoke the world with its power. The stone seemed to sing quietly such a deep and chthonic melody while the air all around swirled with cosmic lucidity. The voice announced itself as it arrived from the north west, and evoked reverence in all whom heard it, but could not willfully combat its cadence.

"I am Homura, and though we have not encountered each other before; I know your name, Iqelis. You seem preoccupied, brother." The voice proclaimed.

She was within his sight, striding towards him with powerful leaps and bounds across the blasted landscape, exuding a red radiance that hummed heavenly music and danced with divine grace. Her physical form shimmered and shifted in the celestial light, but her ever visible eyes remained still and steadfast as they focused with keen clarity upon the great god of doom. Her eyes conveyed complete conviction and a fierce defiance of nonsense and foolishness as she approached with the weapon she held in her hand point lowered to the earth.

She stood atop a broken spire of stone as she halted and bowed before him. "I have not come to bring you harm, but to bring gifts, should you accept them." She said after she had arisen and then awaited his answer.

The One God turned upon his rock, head swivelling over, as the flies hurriedly drew back behind him in a disorderly jumble. It was not evident whether his eye met Homura’s gaze, or whether it lingered more on the tip of her spear, but its cold white glow poured out to push against the edges of her fiery presence as he looked appraisingly at her - or perhaps her reflection in the unseen river.

”Is everything not already destined to fall into my hands?” he replied with a short crackling laugh, as he vaulted to the ground and stepped closer. It might have been an effect of his sudden straightening, or an impression woven by moving shadows, but he seemed that much taller now. ”I may never refuse what is proffered me, just as none may ever refuse to give unto me. But I appreciate the eagerness.” Two identical arms came forward, palms turned upwards in either greed or blandishment. ”What would you consign to the Flow?”

The red goddess imitated his gesture, but in her palms there was sacred fire and its presence seemed to beckon the world to come closer, to peer deeper into the flames. The earth cracked and fragments arose from the ground, while water began to fall from the sky as wind whispered in its circling around her hands. The elements coalesced in her palms as she brought her hands together, and forged something anew.

“Humanity will be our instruments, a physical manifestation of our divine will and desires. They are malleable and will conform to the aesthetic you desire, but they are still mortal. You stand here commanding these creatures when you could be serving the Monarch of All in a greater capacity. You should have servants that tend to these more mundane tasks, yes?” Homura held out the small shape she possessed for Iqelis to examine. Its familiar form resembled the goddess, but lacked the features that expressed her character. It was unsculpted and undefined, awaiting purpose and meaning.

“I have created many humans, and intend to offer all of the divine my work. Do you accept my gift?” She allowed the homunculus to drift through the air towards the god of doom, and grasped the golden spear that levitated near her. All of her emotions seemed silent behind a stoic visage as she spoke, but the intense heat of her aura revealed her ire though it never directed itself towards his own cold presence.

”For them to be our drudges, and us their taskmasters under Him of the heavenly palace?” Pointed fingers seized the tiny quasianimate creature and held it by its four extremities, raising it to the view of Iqelis’ eye. Though not awoken to true perception, it seemed to shrink ever so slightly under the inquisitive glare. The god ran a finger along its front, and its outlines briefly quivered, threatening to revert to a raw elemental amalgam. When he spoke, his tone was amused. ”What a petty vision you have for one with full two eyes, sister! Would you have these little flames haul stones and carve the earth for us while we sit by, with nothing to do but sing praises to our maker? Do you not see how much more they could become?”

He let the simulacrum awkwardly stand on the narrow, uneven palm of one hand, and swept another around it. Abruptly, the disgregation that had appeared imminent before flared up again and overtook the little being, sending its four spirits bursting to the surface of its body one after another. It was fire, and it burned with rapturous exaltation, falling to its knees and raising its arms in invocation; it was water, and it sank down in churning despair; it was earth, and it prostrated itself in humbled submission; it was wind, and it spun and howled and wracked itself in tempestuous grief. Then the spark of discordance receded, and it dropped flat, once more impassive in its sterile unity.

”Impress them with their fragility, their insignificance before us, our omnipotence over them, and you will reap the harvest of their worship. They will scamper over each other to please us, raise ever taller shrines, turn the world itself into the altar of their immolation if we so wished! Why harness their bodies alone when it is their spirits that can yield untold riches? Why let all praise ascend to the Monarch, when he is bound by the same laws as we? If we shall give humankind no other master but us, we and we alone shall be the lords of the nascent Galbar. Give me your gift, and I will show you how it may be done.”

Homura remained impassive after his questions and proclamations, as a sudden silence lingered between the two deities despite the presence of the large swarm which flew in the sky around them. The red goddess allowed her gaze to wander while she contemplated her response. “You have proven to be what I expected, Iqelis. I am willing to give up to ninety-thousand humans to you. Do you accept my gift?” She said to the god of doom when her gaze returned and set upon him like two suns which revealed the world with their light.

”I loathe to disappoint.” There was a crooked smile in the One-Eye’s voice, even though his features could accommodate nothing of the sort. He let the hand that held the now quiescent homunculus drop, trailing close to the ground as if forgotten, as the other seven coiled into grasping talons. ”Numbers are the most ephemeral of all insubstantial phantasms. However many you deign to offer, I shall take them.”

“Then seven you shall receive.” She replied.

The god did not speak, but merely made an exhorting gesture with one hand, the amused glow never leaving his eye.

Homura simply bowed before she turned to the west with purpose. “I will return with haste, Iqelis.” She said, and then she departed as quickly as she had come. The lack of her presence left the land less bright, but less scrutinized as well. Her aura of light seemed to judge the land, measuring every facet, weighing each piece, comparing it to an unseen and unheard criteria. She had traveled far until she was beyond even the sight of the god, and only the memories of her severe red radiance remained.

Left to his own devices, Iqelis once again raised the mock-human to his eye. He raised a hand over it, ready to shatter it into fading elemental echoes, then halted it mid-motion and set the creature down to the ground upon its feet. It wobbled, empty of strength or drive to hold itself upright, but some dim sense of adherence to duty kept it from toppling over, despite ostensibly having nothing to cling to within its coarsely formed body.

”The likes of you should seek the buried dead for me, then?” the god asked the small construct, expecting no answer and receiving none. Then, on a whim, he reached for its head with a claw, and cast his ideabstraction into its thoughtless shell.

The world was grey. Grey skies overhead, one of those times when the clouds fade into a featureless shroud high above, stifling the daylight to a pale, half-hearted glow, but never showing themselves. Grey earth underfoot, dusty and gravelly, yielding yet hard and cold. Grey mountains looming around, fractured in haphazard ways, yet also oddly alike, as if they had all been painted in a few broad strokes by an apathetic hand. And that was as it ought to have been, for it was not the mountains that mattered, but what was beneath them. Under one of those faceless giants, it was known, lay the bones of that which lived no more _{and that was their place now.}

The shell walked. It was through no impulse of its own, but because the world, the sky, the earth, the mountains, its own body, resounded with the truth that this was its purpose _{and its duty.} To go from mountain to mountain, to find that which had met the end, to know its name. _{And no more than that, for that was the order of things.} What would it do when that was done, when that name had been spoken for the last time? Remember that it is gone, remember the end that comes for all things, said the sky and the earth and the mountains. _{Let it rest untroubled, for that is the law that binds the dead, said its own body.}

The simulacrum stood unmoving still. Iqelis turned away from it, displeased with how his wordless bidding echoed and rebounded in odd ways inside its husk. High in the sky, the palatial Sun continued to seethe. His shoal of verminous black crept up and down cracks in the parched schist as if tracing the flow of invisible waterfalls, tumbling down from the mountain.

It was the throb of the flies that alerted him to the fact that something was wrong.

---

Standing in the sea, north and west of the land struck by the calamity, were the three colossi that carried the sleeping humans upon their massive backs. Atop their high heads amidst archaic crowns of stone stood the three champions of Homura: Courage, Kindness, and Fear, as all three awaited the return of the red goddess.

“There!” Courage shouted, as she pointed towards the land where the celestial light of Daybringer shone and announced the arrival of the goddess of honor. Her two sisters stirred from their stillness, as their maker came closer and closer and seemed to revitalize them with sudden vigor.

From the shore, Homura aimed her golden spear, and threw it towards the section of sea that stood between her and the three colossi. The celestial weapon extended as it soared through the air, and then sank into the water with a great splash, but it did not strike the seabed. Hidden beneath the waves was the shimmering path the colossi tread upon to not disturb the denizens of the ocean throughout their travels. Daybringer had increased its size and upon piercing the path, it had become long enough and wide enough to form a towering pillar that emerged from the sea.

The red goddess leapt from the shore to the top of the reversed spear, its base acting as an improvised platform level with the height of the colossi. The three champions similarly leapt and greeted her. Homura held up her hand, and her voice compelled their silence.

“The path is clear, and ahead there is another god that awaits. I shall gift him with humans, and you three shall remain on your colossi.” She spoke and they bowed in response. Uncertainty flickered in the eyes of Fear as she arose, and words escaped her mouth before she could suppress them.

“You’ve been avoiding us after Chailiss, and now you’re avoiding us again...”

Courage and Kindness halted as they heard their sister accuse their maker of secluding herself from them, and tension simmered around them. Fear placed a hand upon her mouth hoping she could silence the song of shame that shook her being, and afraid it might slip free for all to hear.

“I am protecting you from those that would see you needlessly suffer, Fear. I will alleviate any of your concerns when we return to Keltra. For now, I cannot allow anything to halt the spread of humanity across Galbar. Forgive me if I seem to isolate myself for the duration of our journey. There is much I must think upon as we travel.” Homura replied, stepping closer and placing a hand upon the shoulder of Fear. Her words seemed to alleviate the champion’s concerns.

Afterwards, the three champions began the process of directing their colossi towards the shore while Homura placed her palm upon Daybringer causing the weapon to swiftly shrink and fit in her hands. The goddess descended upon the sea, the waves reached upwards to catch her, and she allowed herself to be seized and carried to the coast.

The land shook with each step of the colossi as they walked past her towards the east, and Homura amused herself as she recognized that this would be the first time they had traveled across earth for their journey. The lack of life in the aftermath of the cataclysmic attack upon this realm assured her that there would be no collateral damage as the massive creatures marched onward.

When they neared their destination, it became apparent from afar, thanks to the view afforded by the immense beings’ stature, that Iqelis had not been idle. The crater valley, earlier filled with scattered boulders and shards of uprooted mountains, was now sharply split between the chaos of misshapen stone and a waste of coarse dust and smooth pebbles. Wide swathes of rock mounds and looming monoliths, which seemed destined to stand for millennia after being haphazardly arrayed by the whims of fate, were now gone. It was not as though they had been wrenched from their places by force; no grooves remained in the ground where they had stood, but only a layer of fine detritus. One could have sworn that they had crumbled under the weight of ages a long time before.

Indeed, the strange plague was still raging at that very moment, and its newest victim fell under the eyes of Homura and her chosen. A tall, uneven slab of rock, which had evidently broken off from a larger mass and embedded itself in the soil at a stable if dangerous-looking angle, began to shrink at a pace visible even from high above. Its jagged angles lost their sharpness, smoothing down until only cracked and levigated surfaces remained; its upper side became perceptibly flattened, before a large piece of it broke away and toppled to the ground, dragged down by no more than its weight. At last, mere instants after the decay had begun, the slab’s midsection yielded, collapsing a good half of it and leaving the lower remnant leaning even more precariously, so that it soon followed. Nor did the destruction end there, for the heap of rubble that was left continued to shrink as if sinking into the ground, and at last became invisible over the strata of refuse littering the ground.

Only when the colossi had reached the cusp of the valley did the one responsible for this become visible. A spindly black figure was sifting through the remains of the vanished stone, reaching out with a multitude of snapping arms like some great prowling spider. Thick dark clouds confusedly hovered around it, now and then briefly settling onto the time-ground dust. Having ostensibly failed to find anything, Iqelis turned to the gargantuan procession and raked the air with an impatient beckoning gesture.

At the front stood Homura, and with Daybringer she directed the three colossi to continue their trek through the shifting sands and crumbling mounds. As she guided them, the strands of her hair stretched and flew towards the sleeping humans like red serpents of the sky seeking prey. She strode towards the god of doom after she had collected the seven humans she had promised him. When she came to a halt before Iqelis, she raised her weapon once more and celestial light glimmered and gleamed. The colossi ceased marching, and waited for further commands from afar, as Homura nodded to the deity in front of her. The humans she carried were placed upon the ground before him.

“Your gifts, brother.” She said with strict adherence to etiquette, evident was the struggling of her inner thoughts to express more. Her eyes wandered to the seven still forms between them, and her light seemed to bend and shift so that it might shine upon them more fiercely. “If you desire more, you need only ask, but I must know what your intentions are with them.”

The One God cast only a cursory glance at the humans, impatience shimmering in his eye, and looked about the landscape around them again before he answered.

”If they are all as receptive to our touch as that first one, even seven may be too many.” There was a vaguely lost tone to his words, layered with grinding irritation, as though he had just been caught by surprise by something and that fact incensed him. ”Did you see any trace of it from your contraption?” He raised a hand to point at the nearest colossus.

Her firm features finally shifted in bemusement, uncertain after hearing his question and considering his words for a time. “Do you mean the simulacrum? It must have dispersed. These humans shall be much more; receptive to our touch, our words, our being. You are more attuned to them than I had thought, it seems.” The impassive mask returned, but her voice was less sharp than what it was before.

”All things end in me. They must know it, in the very fabric of their substance.” Iqelis’ erstwhile amused air briefly returned in his moment of aggrandizement, but it was soon subsumed once more under a pall of ill-humoured puzzlement. ”Yet it seems that your image has avoided that. I can see the ripples it leaves in the Flow of time and destiny, somewhere close by here. They are no trail such as a lesser thing ought to have, least of all a hollow eikon. Deep and murky, the mark of one fated to burden the face of the Galbar for a long time yet. An aspiring eternal, perhaps.” He all but spat out the word in a whiff of cold venom. ”Do you not feel it? Can you hear it wallow in the dust?”

Homura softly smiled. “I hear nothing, however my senses are not obscured by sin. You can continue your pilfering, but I believe you will find nothing.” The red light that illuminated the seven humans receded, and sorrow seeped into the red goddess as she spoke. “Even seven sacrificed is too many, and I will never forgive myself. Iqelis, when war comes, and you stand in judgement for your crimes, remember this moment and that it is the only opportunity you will have to attain mercy.” Haunted were her eyes with visions of violence and anguish of otherworldly ordeals, yet she still smiled.

The god’s mind seemed at last taken away from the fugitive homunculus, and he craned forward like a great curious insect, clawed hands leaning on the shoulders of the two humans closest to him as he brought his eye level with her gaze. It glimmered inscrutably, and far in its depths the black Flow swallowed her radiance and reduced it to formless shadow.

”Mercy,” he crackled, low and sardonic like a gathering landslide, ”Is there truly such a thing? Shall we not all fade away with no need for war nor castigation, with none to implore but the uncaring void? What is mercy but a protraction of our death throes, an extension of our hours of agony?”

Then he drew up again, leaving behind a trail of creaking laughter.

”What do you believe I shall do with your little flames, gnaw on them like some brute? They will thrive no less nor suffer more than any you will seed elsewhere. Did you not listen when I spoke of the riches of their spirit? Or did you think I lied then? There is nothing but truth in Doom, and deception is a game for lesser shades, unworthy of a true God.”

Homura quietly chuckled without mirth. “Indeed; unworthy of a true God. Hmm, until we meet again, Iqelis. I must deliver the remaining humans to the rest of our siblings.” She bowed before she stepped back and turned to leave.

The One-Eye gave a halfway wave with a hand, as curious flies began to settle over the quiescent humans.

”Until then. Remember your lost simulacrum. We will hear of it again sometime yet, that I know.”

The red goddess recalled the pitiful beasts that would birth of their kind in the forsaken realm of the north, and the strange sight of a mother watching her children leave her in order to find their own homes and begin their own families. The hypocrisy of her own thoughts tore at her in paradoxical pain, pride and shame, joy and sorrow. She would not interfere with what was created. She could not.

“Honor demands sacrifice.” She whispered to herself, and then leapt into the sky and towards the three colossi. There was a burst of bright light, and the great delivery of humanity across Galbar resumed once more.

Summary

After polluting the Tlacan Sea, Iqelis is searching the Nalusan wasteland to find out who Yudaiel’s victim was. Homura catches up to him and offers him a few humans, showing him what they are with a little model replica. He immediately starts thinking of how he could use them to feed his own vainglory and elevate himself above the Monarch; not liking the sound of that, and finding him all-around untrustworthy, she cuts down her offer from ninety-thousand to a mere seven.

While she goes to fetch them from where she’d wisely left them out of his sight, and has a brief altercation with her champions, Iqelis decides on a whim to give the mindless replica an ideabstracted order to find the one buried under Nalusa. While it doesn’t seem to do anything at first, by the time Homura returns the replica’s gone and Iqelis is fruitlessly scouring the place for it, having sensed that something about it’s changed in a strange way. She’s not interested in his paranoid grumbling about it and admonishes him about the weight of his misdeeds, which he doesn’t take very seriously, before leaving.

No Vigour spent here.

Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk. VI

&

---

Sleep was a churning and frothy river, and dreams flitted through it like fish. Yudaiel was a vast net that drifted uncontrollably downstream; she caught a great bounty.

In such an exhausted state after her exertions with the Codex and her desperate battle against the ilk of Ashevelen, Iqelis, and Epsilon all, she truly dreamt now. Where her prescience normally let her steer the flow of the river and spear whatever fish she sought, now she was merely swept along by the current.

Many strange sights presented themselves before her. There was a tree that walked, almost a wooden man -- but it seemed only half a man, for the other half was woman; further, it appeared one part mortal and two parts divine. Upon one side the walking-tree’s branches were withered and leafless, but on the other they sprung green. It emanated strength but also great weariness, for it had borne many great burdens, had died and been reborn, died and been reborn, died and been reborn, endlessly and forever. She sensed that, like herself, this one Saw, and it pushed its roots deep through time. She returned the stranger’s great black gaze - its singular black-hole Eye - and knew that they would meet again. But then she was swept along by the stream, through rapids and down cataracts, away from the watchful god of bark that stood upon the banks.

Above the river there was a night sky aglow with fireflies and stars. In the darkness of the black void between stars, she sensed another Eye, and knew that It too could See, and moreover that It did See her -- It Saw right into her heart and soul. It was not just an Eye like she; the constellations about Its eye seemed to realign, and she saw that It was a cyclops with a great and imposing anatomy, a hulking and puissant form that seemed chiseled from stone.

Yudaiel flinched from Its glare, but there was nowhere to hide, and she had no words with which to plead. Through her peripheral vision she tried to watch It and descry something, anything, about the nature of this watcher, this tormenter, this potential predator: she could ascertain that the oculus belonged to some terrible being that was ancient beyond ancient, and that behind It, lurking in Its shadow, there was another constellation. From the clusters of distant and dimmer stars behind It, she connected the lines and perceived some monstrous, four-eyed demon with a hog’s head, and she sensed that it was a terrible herald of carnage and destruction… an apprentice, perhaps? Or a mere disciple, a minion? A child, even?

Whatever its nature was, that brute of a demonic boar changed little… it was the gaze of its master that Yudaiel feared. She suspected that if It desired, It could render her moon and the Galbar into dust with but a thought and then forge something horrible -- something utterly alien -- from the ashes; fortunately and manifestly, It seemed to have other inclinations. She saw in Its pupil a reflection not just of herself, but of the other deities,her siblings, and even the Monarch himself -- she wondered, did He even know that He was being observed through Space and Time and Reality by such beings as this one? Uncertainty filled Yudaiel, and for a fleeting moment, fear coursed through her too, and she was grateful for the Monarch’s strength if nothing else… she could not stand against such a terrible being as this Eye… yet. One day her glare would become so torrid, vehement, and menacing that even Its like would blister and burn and twist to her whims, but her time had not yet come, and to engage with the cyclops would be a hopeless and foolish struggle. For now it seemed only He could hold such beasts at bay… The All-Seeing Eye was rarely one for humor, but she found it risible that the Monarch of All protected her ambitions even as those same ambitions seemed to growingly include His own downfall.

Her musings on that monstrous eye and Its place in her world and thread of plots were suddenly cast aside; something was changing. Suddenly, It seemed disinterested in her and her siblings. It looked elsewhere by Its own volition, but not somewhere very far or distant -- nay, It gazed only a short ways down the river from where Yudaiel floated, right over her proverbial shoulder, but also upstream from her. Its one, cyclopean pupil managed to peer in two separate directions at once, forward and backwards, left and right, beholding past and future; she did not understand how such a thing was possible. More than even discovering just what things this creature had found more interesting or noteworthy than her, she now yearned to learn how It could See as It did! Alas, the Great Eye and Its minion, the boar-demon, vanished from the chimerical sky, the stars of their constellations fading away as surely and swiftly as hot embers doused by water.

Ah, water. Yes, she looked away from the star-strewn sky and remembered that she was still drifting down a river. A lone firefly suddenly grew dark, and its dim and dying form fell from the sky and into the turbulent rapids before her. She looked at the insect as it bobbed and floated in the dark water, and her hardly-lucid mind conjured the image of another fly -- Iqelis, wretched Iqelis!

She dreamt of him, a second cyclopean being, though this one was a mere pest; he was a mere firefly, his power like its trifling flicker before the heliacal glare of that last horror that she’d just seen between the stars. The obsidian fiend hovered effortlessly so as to maintain a short distance before her, just above the river’s frothing water. She glowered at him, daring the wretch to provoke her any more than he already was -- Luck was not the only aspect that she could crush, though she would much rather enthrall the Shard of Doom than see it obliterated. Iqelis just crossed his hundred arms and cackled. All of the countless lights of the fireflies in the air were extinguished as the insects died. From their falling corpses erupted tiny maggots, and those maggots feasted and grew into swarms of gnats and other lightless flies that grew and multiplied with a swiftness that defied reason, that an eye could not follow. None of the fireflies fell fast enough to even hit the ground before they had been consumed.

But the laughter of Iqelis stopped when her enraged mind reached out to grasp each and every fly. With a single pulse she struck them all dead, and Iqelis too was smote down and shattered like glass before her psychic scream. The river itself recoiled and charged its banks to flee from her, chasing after the trees along the banks that seemed to have grown legs and similarly decided to rout. Nothing could challenge her might! Her will was Fate! With nary a thought, she willed the broken pieces of Iqelis to twist and reform. A rain of prismatic diamonds plopped down into the writhing waters and sank into the receding river’s muddy bed, and all was well.

---

Far across hours and spaces both real and oniric, the true One-Eye did not suspect the fate that would befall his dreamed simulacrum, or, even if he did surmise at Yudaiel’s vengeful thoughts, he did not let it burden him. Fresh from the slaying of Aletheseus, that verminous anomaly that had dared defy the truth and order of things with his very existence and hypostasis, his spirits were high as he wove and leapt through shadowy currents unseen. It had been a fortuitous thing that the wakener of Fortitude should so soon have tempted his fate in mortal battle, thus stirring strongly enough on Time’s murky riverbed to catch Iqelis’ eye; for so dim and unassuming had he been, despite the enormity of what he represented, that it might otherwise have been a long while yet before his disturbances grew numerous enough to notice. How many due ends he might have prevented then, to be rectified one by one at the One God’s own hand.

But now that hand dripped with the trespasser’s vaporous blood, and all was well. Aletheseus had not found in himself the strength to levy the greatest affront of all – to halt his own doom. It was pleasing to think that truth and order were now no longer threatened by such brazen subversion, yet more gratifying still was the lingering sensation of his thread being cut short in Iqelis’ grip. It was not something the god had expected to enjoy, for a divine’s demise was in essence no different from that of a gnat. And all the same, to feel the weave of life fraying under his claws, to taste the bitter fear and ashen despair, to know that it was he, and no other, that cast it into the unformed darkness… There had been a curious sweetness in that, a cold joy the likes of which he had never imagined since his inception.

It was a glimpse into the depths of the Last Sea stolen over the shoulder of the one he drowned in its shallows, and it was a thing of chilling beauty.

No use to dwell on it too much. Every death had its own time, and he was not one to
hungrily sit on the banks and wait for the castoffs the current brought him. He would take them as they came, savouring each all the more for the drought that had come before it. One fate, however, he could stand to stoke his anticipation for. The pest Yudaiel. How he would relish plotting every inch of the blemishes he would gouge into her eye, every drop of black defilement he would pour into her sight, every tug to unravel her very world around her…

He caught himself as his bounding steps crossed the boundary of the grassy lands he had been moving through, breaking the trail of crumbling and withered plants he had left behind himself, and landed upon harsh, blasted ground. A rocky landscape of uneven hills and shattered peaks spread out ahead of him like a forgotten battleground of titans, the earth itself rent and ground down by a clash of forces of terrible magnitude. Massive boulders that were no more than fragments of yet more immense bulks lay strewn around, their fall having gouged tracks and craters in the already craggy soil. The sky overhead was darkened by thick clouds of pulverized debris, still stifling the daylight despite that the echoes of the blasts that had raised them had since faded. Not all of them - he could perceive the last stirrings of what must have been something sinking beneath the inky waves of the end, but what that could be it was too late for him to see.

And all over this scene of destruction, her mark. Always her. It brought him a spark of amusement to think that, in burying whatever foe she had found herself under this chaos of stone and sand, Yudaiel had already strayed from her oaths to preserve what she could of the world in the face of Doom. Something to cast into her face, such as it was, to sear into her thoughts next time. Right then, however, he could do better still. She ought to have been spent after making such an upheaval, and this formless barrenness was a laughable mark to have left upon the Galbar’s face. Her finest work was already marred; now, she would have to watch impotently as he surpassed her in that pursuit common to all divinity. He would raise such a monument that not merely her, but all that lived would look upon it and quake as the shadow of the inescapable fell upon their measly spirits.

He strode and swam further west, until his talons dug into the edge of a steep sandy cliff over a murmuring expanse of grimy water. The sea was still agitated by the aftershocks of the colossal impacts, the rippling echoes of the first great waves meeting their forerunners as they bounced from the gnarled shores. A crust of dirt still weighed them down, the pocket of ocean reduced to a muddy oversized mire. It would do.

Iqelis spread the full score of his arms and raised them to the heavens, letting the dark currents swirl and mount behind him like a dam. Although it was his place to spell endings rather than beginnings, to create and mould was the prerogative of all divinity, and he would claim from the world all that he was thus owed. He rustled and played with the terrible wave building upon his shoulders, reminding the earth, the water and the sky that they, too, were subject to the course of ages, and it was by his mercy if they were not engulfed then and there and shattered into a chaos of inchoate elements.

The earth, which was the firmest and had the most to lose to annihilation, was the first to yield. There was a tremendous chthonian groan and a shudder which, though none as mighty as the quakes sent by Yudaiel’s onslaught, rolled far through the land, unsettling hills and felling trees. The soiled surface of the sea broke, and hundreds of black spires rose among its scattered islands, peaks of dark stone pushed to the surface by telluric forces enthralled to the terror of doom. They stood like a grim host summoned forth from the depths, immobile and solemn, awaiting their fate.

The air bowed next, lest its impalpable purity be fouled by the choking shadows. A despairing moan rang out over the waves, and in defiance of all laws of nature and reason the obsidian mountains rose further still. They tore away from their stony roots deep below, then away from the surface itself, and agonizingly crawled up into the sky as the winds shrieked in horror at this unheard blasphemy. Now with ten score hands holding up his burden, Iqelis leapt onto one of them and let it carry him high, until they hung as as high above the shore as a true peak would reach. Then the dark rocks swayed and drew close, clinging to each other’s flanks and binding themselves together in a vast, unnatural landmass.

Then it was time for the water to surrender to the commanding will, to complete the dreadful work in a final gesture that would trample upon all that was sane and orderly, yet the sea hesitated. There was a bitter defiance in its stirring, a deep grief from which the waves drew an obstinate strength to refuse the dire imposition. Iqelis grit his fingers angrily, and stirred the shadow in his hands, letting it tower high and menacing. And then --

Something answered him, but not from the sea. It roiled and splashed soundlessly from the shattered lands to the north, crawling closer, faster and faster. Another of Yudaiel’s machinations? No, this did not bear her mark - but his own. Startled, he almost released the mortiferous currents he had collected. How did traces of his intent find his way there? He struggled to remember, and it seemed to him that indeed, when the great wave had crashed against the moon some drops of it had been pushed away, towards the Galbar below. He had minded them little at the time, thinking that they would rejoin the Flow, but here they were now, drawn again to him.

No, not to him. They were at last returning to the source. To the current he was already struggling to hold in his grasp. He had to --

The droplets fell into his hands, and the tide he had been holding back burst.

All around him, the Flow surged. Rock was weathered to dust in a blink. The air grew thin, then choking, then rarified again. Water faded to steam and fell again in chunks of ice. Too long contained, the currents of time roared forth, regaining the moments it had missed in haste. His obsidian isle crumbling around him, Iqelis had become a veritable spider, hundreds of hands lashing and reaching to stem the cataclysm before it unmade all that he had wrought. The threads of the flood slipped between his fingers, but at length he found one which had spent its fury and returned to its usual force. He grabbed onto it, and around it he wove a pall of stillness to contain the ravages of doom unchecked. His movements were sharp and hasty, snapping and darting like a mob of startled frogs, and yet it was only after an agonizing span of instants that he succeeded in quieting the risen course.

It had been time enough for decay to do its work. When he looked around, he was no longer upon a great body of dark rock, but on a lone fractured mountain, drifting forsakenly over the waves. The landmass he had compelled to rise out of the sea and into the sky was no more, for even as he had threatened the earth to do, it had been worn and fractured into a thousand shards of all sizes, from boulders to islets, trapped in the air apart from each other. Some had remained high above the water-line, but most had drooped and sunken to mere dozens of tree-heights over the surface. It was some consolation, however meagre, that the Flow had carved them into fanciful shapes, into curious formations that resembled the dead and polished skulls of all kinds of living things. In this they could still strike fear into those who watched, though never again would their unbroken shadow loom over dread-stricken eyes.

Yet it was the once-defiant waters below that had borne the worse lot. For a few moments, the sea had been fed by a river that ought not have a mouth, and it was forever marked. The dust and debris had been washed away, but what remained underneath was a still, inky waste, like a mirror of black glass, rippling ever so lightly as clumps of dead seaweed floated to the surface and crumbled into dissolving rot. No wholesome life could endure those blind depths now, for their cold touch was suffused with a distant reflection of the Last Sea itself. Warmth and vigour would ever flee from it, leaving behind sickly and enervated husks, and its saline essence, which had drawn into itself the worst of the taint, had become the cage of death’s own breath.

He heard a distant rushing groan, and knew that even as the outer ocean raged to contain the black poison in its gulch, the pure water streaming down from upriver recoiled in loathing from it. But rivers were not their own masters, and so they flowed on, writhing and clawing at their fate, refusing to mingle with that fluid abomination. Soon a pale fog began to rise from below, as the river-water sought to escape into the sky, anywhere but into the cold and dead abysses. Spectral clouds crept upon the light from the heavens, and with them grey dusk swallowed the last glimmers of cheer that livened the sea’s bleakness. Silence reigned, broken only by the rare forlorn wail of a trapped wind.

All this Iqelis saw, and though he could not truly scorn the desolation of the view, he was not pleased. How much more he could have done if he had been able to complete his work without interference! How much strength and toil he had squandered on this sorry waste! If only the echoes of his wrath had not awoken at the worst of times…

Yudaiel, it had to be her. This could only be her doing, a trap set for him to humiliate himself even as he sought to surpass her. Such trickery was her way. Oh, how he would make her squirm under his hands, how he would savour seeing her pupil glaze over…

Lost in a haze of vengeful thoughts, he did not see the clouds of dust and pebble-shards still hovering in the air begin to shake and stir, and it was only a thunderous buzzing that stirred him. The misty air had all of a sudden grown thick with thronging black swarms, myriads of small vermin with translucent wings and bloated bodies chasing each other among the suspended archipelago. Out of some strange resonance of power, flies, that most reviled insect, had crawled into the world, and they caroused around their god, drawn by a curious innate sympathy that no doubt only the All-Seeing Eye could have explained. Iqelis waved them away in irritation, and the swarms scattered to the four winds, flying to scour all corners of creation for death and decay, that they might pay obeisance to the manifestation of their Lord by wallowing in its refuse.

Only a few remained droning around the One God, now and then landing on the jagged rocks and rubbing their forelegs in supplication. He made about to wash them away in the Flow, but his hand stopped as it prepared to part the current, then fell again. The veneration of insects was a laughable thing, true; but to see them grovel before him pleased him none the less. Let all know that even the least of creatures gave him their devotion!

He leapt onto the nearest floating islet, and his court of flies followed. There were better things to do than to brood over this failure. The world was ripening, and his hand would be needed to show it the path to rot.

Summary

Spent after the battle over the Codex and the orbital bombing of Ashevelen, Yudaiel succumbs to a deep slumber on the moon. She dreams of things past, present and future, with some strange (but possibly familiar!) faces briefly showing up. Iqelis also makes an appearance, but she swats him out and turns over on the pillow.

Meanwhile, the real Iqelis is traipsing around Galbar and thinking about how good it feels to kill things. He stumbles on the blasted remains of the Nalusa zone, and, sensing that Yudaiel’s responsible for it, decides to show her up by building something imposing next to her mess. He heads over to the inland sea to the southeast and starts to raise a huge floating obsidian landmass out of it and into the air. However, in response to the huge expenditure of power, the aftershocks of the moon-wrecking wave that had been deflected to the Galbar flares up around him, making him lose his hold on things.

Everything breaks apart in a few moments, and by the time Iqelis manages to restore a bit of normality the floating landmass has shattered into a lot of suspended mountains and islands scattered all over the sea. Worse still, the sea itself - now the Tlacan Sea for convenience’s sake - has been contaminated, turning it into a stygian pit of still black water that ages and enfeebles anything that gets into it (the reverse Achilles treatment). Real water doesn’t want to touch this stuff, so any coming in from rivers turns into mist to escape it, casting the sea into perpetual gloom. It’s implied the ocean is pushing it back at the strait, but if Sala wants to do anything about it it’s left open-ended what exactly is happening there.

Iqelis is none too pleased with how things turned out, and doesn’t notice as a bunch of the debris turns into flies due to a latent residue of Yudaiel’s power and possibly some subconscious manipulations on her part that occurred as she dreamt. Because of this, the flies like him, thinking he’s a divine archetype of their kind, which in a way he sort of is. He doesn’t much care for them in turn, but keeps a few around for the sake of style as most of them buzz off to pester the whole world for the rest of its existence.

Vigor Expenditures

Yudaiel begins and ends with 0 vigor. Broke girl.

Iqelis begins with 16 vigor.

1 vigor (discounted to 0 by Doom aspect) spent on creating vast swarms of flies imprinted with Iqelis’ temperament and nature, as a result of Yudaiel’s subconscious dreaming and manipulations of the deflected doom wave.

8 vigor spent on a large archipelago of flying islands of various sizes and macabre shapes.

8 vigor (discounted to 4 by Doom aspect) spent on turning the Tlacan sea into a silent, deadly mire.

Iqelis ends with 4 vigor.

Through the Gateways: Humanity [Closed]

Jednost Global Union

Jednost Global Union

Government Form: Representative democracy de jure, xeno-caste autocracy de facto.

Demographics:

Humans - 92 %

The human population of Jednost is descended from colonists of prevalently Slavic origin, and despite centuries of change and adaptation to a new planet, in many of them traces of distinctive ethnic features are still visible to the attentive socio-historian. The relatively low gravity of their planet has left them noticeably taller and lither than their Earth-born ancestors.

Nuval - 8 %

Believed to be the only sapient non-human inhabitants of Jednost, the Nuval are in truth biomechanical artificial beings created by their secretive masters, the Qolth, to serve as figureheads and mouthpieces in communicating with humanity. Nuval do not reproduce by natural means, but are formed of synthetic flesh vat-grown over a cybernetic framework inlaid with intricate systems to give them spectacular abilities. Their bodies, usually draped in ample sumptuous robes, have broadly humanoid four-armed torsos over flat, sluglike abdomens. Their heads are narrow and featureless, and their hands have each four extremely flexible fingers, capable of rotating at virtually any angle. To compensate for their lack of legs, they move with the help of magnetic levitation systems and retractable spider-like mechanical limbs built into their frames. The Nuval’s construction gives them many redoubtable tools built into their very bodies, ranging from weapons to holographic projectors, but most terrible of all are the neurowave transmitters that allow them to subtly manipulate the emotions of those around them, usually striking them with awe or fear.

Qolth - ???

The hidden masters of Jednost, guiding the fates of the planet from the shadows. The numbers of the Qolth are impossible to properly quantify, since members of their species do not have distinct bodies. Instead, their natural state is that of a thick light blue fluid binding together a network of primitive organs, invisible to the naked eye. A sufficiently complex network becomes capable of controlling its liquid form to move around, and potentially split it into smaller entities, which may in turn recombine again. Because of this state of constant flux, individual Qolth-shards do not have minds or personalities of their own, and act as a collective intelligence that shares all its skills and memories. Thanks to their fluid shape, the Qolth can enter the bodies of organic beings, including humans, and control them like puppets by interfacing with their synaptic systems - an ability that may have been instrumental to the growth of their distant civilization.

Population: circa 830 million total.

---

Planet Name and Description: Jednost is the second planet from its star, a yellow dwarf somewhat cooler and fainter than the Sun, and the only one in its system to have a dense native atmosphere. A relatively small, light ball of rock with rich subterranean aquifers, but little unfrozen surface water, it is a bleak world of muted colours and endless tundra. While a biosphere existed even before the arrival of human colonists, it had always been pale and anemic, with even the tropical regions rarely supporting anything more than scraggly shrubland haunted by elusive crawling animals, the rare towering spindly-legged behemoths and immense swarms of harmless, but very irritating gnats. The vast frozen poles and boundless expanses of dry wasteland leave little space inhabitable without ample terraforming efforts, and so most of the human population is clustered in metropolitan centers about the equatorial band, where Jednost’s chilly climate is at the very least endurable the year round. The planet has one diminutive moon dubbed Strelka, an ungainly meteoroid which somehow found itself trapped in the planet’s feeble gravity well.

History: The alien structures hidden in the bowels of Jednost's moon suggest that the planet's true history began long before the Gateway first opened onto its system. What that history might have been, however, is hopelessly lost to human knowledge. Perhaps the planet did not always bear life, and its current state is the end result of a terraforming process started millennia ago; perhaps its skies have been the site of battles between tremendous empires now forgotten by the universe; none of that is known. What is know is that the colony ship Vitus Bering emerged into its pale star's light three hundred years ago, and within weeks its crew had laid the foundations of Ermagrad, which would go on to become the greatest city built on its soil by human hands.

Although life on the newly christened Jednost could hardly be called idyllic, between its merciless winters and melancholy summers, the planet was not actively hostile to its settlers, and so, little by little, scrubland belts were cleared, frozen bogs were drained, tundra strider migrations were contained, trillions of gnats were exterminated. Ermagrad expanded, then it was joined by Sztrelckie, then by Czeragrad, and many others to follow. Despite rapid demographic growth, the fledgling colony's population had a long way to go yet before it began to outstrip the habitable land and natural resources at its disposal, and thus territorial disputes rarely were grounds for conflict. The flipside of this was that the wide stretches of wildland between the rising cities caused them to grow increasingly isolated from each other politically as well as geographically, with every effort to establish a formal global government ending in failure, but in spite of this, for a good Earth century and a half life was good.

And it would have stayed that way, had it not been for the moon.

The early people of Jednost were an adventurous lot, and it was only natural that in time they should have turned to the rest of their sparse system, most of which had only been afforded a few cursory scans before the Vitus Bering made planetfall. The planet's only apparent natural satellite was an obvious starting point, and an expedition was outfitted to scout its modest surface and probe its geological composition for any useful deposits. There was nothing particularly complex about the venture, and everything went smoothly, until a sampling drill found an unexpectedly yielding point in a crater bed and struck a smooth, dense surface below.

Unbeknownst to Jednost's human population, the orbit-locked meteoroid they had come to know as Strelka was in truth only a skin-deep camouflage for a Qolth Worldship. The aliens were not native to the system, but the massive vessel, gargantuan by the Qolth's more compact standards, had been stranded there for possibly millennia after suffering irreparable damage to its FTL drive and gone into stasis to preserve its core-mind. Awoken by its security systems due to the humans' intrusion, the Qolth did not reveal itself, but dispatched its Nuval constructs to pose as the only occupants of a lost observation station, obfuscating the true size of the installation. The Nuval presented themselves as eager to cooperate with Jednost's people and share "their" technology, which by far exceeded its human counterpart in sophistication, for mutual benefit, and after a brief hesitation their offer was accepted.

What followed was the slow but inexorable subjugation of Jednost to the shadowy will of the core-mind. Using its Nuval proxies, as well as infested agents and cunningly trapped technological gifts, the Qolth spread hypnotic media, subtle doses of mind-altering drugs and seeds of cultural engineering throughout every level of the planetside cities, quietly conditioning their people to unknowingly follow its hidden commands. Within one Earth century, the previously isolationist metropoles had been unified into the Global Union, and the Nuval were much acclaimed for their crucial mediation work. To all evidence, the colony has entered its golden age; but the ugly truth is that it has become little more than contented livestock for the Qolth. Over the course of their silent invasion, the aliens have developed a taste for parasitizing human hosts, impersonating them throughout their lives in what their impersonal minds perceive as an amusing sort of play-acting all while slowly consuming them from within to multiply. Now that the Gateway has reopened, they cast their ravenous eyeless gaze at it, hungering for new materials to restore their derelict ship - and new bodies to devour.

Culture and Society: Even though there has been no real focused attempt to preserve a traditional spirit, Jednost appears to be stuck in the zeitgeist of late pre-collapse Earth, to the point that cultural variations on the joke “you can take the muscovite out of Moscow, but not Moscow out of the muscovite” have become an immortal cliché that has found its way even into scholarly discourse. An atmosphere of comfortable apathy reigns over the planet’s drab metal cities, a sort of placid pessimism that is at the same time jaded and satisfied by things staying exactly as they have been for the last few decades. People waking up to the same gray sky as every other day of their lives will wistfully ponder the lack of any change for better or worse, and in a brief moment of clarity may even wonder whether perhaps something different should happen one day while they reach for the mostly empty bottle of liquor on the kitchen sill - before the narcotics kick in, and the germs of hope are imperceptibly smothered under a chemical shroud.

Such a state of detachement, breeding a weary conformism, plays to the advantage of the Qolth, who maintain it by every possible means at their disposal. Virtually every aspect of Jednostan life bears the mark of their invisible hand, from imperceptible doses of mind-affecting substances in running water and food products, to Nuval patrolling the streets on nondescript official business while irradiating bystanders with their cowing neuro-wave emissions. Most entertainment media has long been supplanted by kaleidograms, projections of abstract, yet mesmerizing permutations of coloured shapes and shades, accompanied by soothing music and heavy amounts of subliminal induction. Even something as innocuous as news broadcasts is styled in ways that would appear garish and uncanny to those not used to them.

To facilitate the distribution of those subtle poisons, the Qolth-controlled state has fostered overall conditions of egalitarian, technologically-ensured comfort. Work is never lacking, pays neither too little nor too much, and is always just demanding enough that you don’t want to think about much at the end of the day. The market is neither so free to be anarchic, nor so restrictive as to be too daunting to aspiring entrepreneurs. Habitation blocks are never too luxurious, but rarely are they leaper mole-infested hellholes either. In a word, everything is so painfully average that people cannot but be reluctantly satisfied with it.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and even the most painstakingly designed prison has its leaks. Under the surface, there are a few sparse groups of people - the observant, the paranoid, the idealistic, the stray souls damaged by illegal drugs harder than those peddled by the Qolth - who suspect that something is off about their world. Derided by the public, leerily watched by security forces, and occasionally busted by Qolth infiltrators, they are few and by and large unable to organize, but their mere existence is a persistent thorn in the side of the alien-imposed order.

---

Governance and Politics: The Jednost Global Union is ostensibly the next in the ranks of the multitude of electoral democracies from humanity’s past. Every so often, advertising screens on the streets are flooded with smiling, curated faces and pithy slogans over many-coloured backgrounds, and people will vote for a few of them to represent their city to the assembly of the MirDuma. More rarely, but still regularly, the faces will get bigger and the slogans even more emphatic, a sign that the Global Presidential election is at hand. Any differences between the half-dozen parties are mired in bureaucratic language, and in practice come down to colours in the statistics graphs, so that choosing among them is for most a matter of habit and it takes a not inconsiderable effort to start a genuine argument about politics.

In truth, things are simultaneously more complex than this and chillingly simple. While elected officials are invariably human, there are a great many Nuval embedded in high positions within the government apparatus, and it is through their hands that power really flows. However assembly debates may end, whatever resolutions the presidential cabinet may set down, the transcripts and documents always disappear into the folds of a faceless figure’s robes, with the assurance that everything will be implemented as necessary. The rare few times that someone bothers to check, they will be presented with exhaustive but impenetrable accounts of something being put into practice. Behind these appearances, the Nuval covertly perform the bidding of the Qolth core-mind, which governs as the Union’s indisputed secret ruler.

Technology Overview: Over the last century, the Qolth have successfully stifled independent scientific advancement on Jednost, replacing it with a controlled feed of scraps of their own technology through the Nuval. While carefully kept in check to prevent the human population from becoming too well-equipped to control, this infusion has allowed the colony to master numerous designs and principles previously thought too laborious to implement in practice, including fusion energy, magnetic levitation, plasma-based tools and weapons and stimulants powerful enough to temporarily rejuvenate the body. While this has propelled Jednost far beyond the levels of development and production achieved on Earth, giving its cities the appearance of a futuristic (if largely monochrome) dream, technology that radically modifies the human body has been persistently kept out of reach, as the Qolth fear it would prevent them from successfully infesting their hosts.

Military Overview: With no obvious enemies, either internal or external, the Global Union’s military mostly exists as an outlet for people looking for a sense of purpose, adventure or heroism in their lives. Thus, appearances are favoured over functionality: soldiers wear brightly coloured armour, ships and tanks are fitted with dazzling decorative lights and stereo systems, and camaraderie takes precedence over discipline. That said, dismissing Jednost’s forces as goofy and ineffectual would be a lethal mistake. However lax and boisterous, their troops carry redoubtable powered armour and destructive plasma weaponry, and are filled to their ears with performance-enhancing serums and combat stimulants giving them invincible, if almost suicidal, bravery, while their ships, though gaudy and few in number, are mounted with mighty defenses and artillery of alien design.

The most fearsome assets the Union can bring to bear, however, are the Qolth’s hidden aces in the hole. Those include the enigmatic Blackstar Initiative clone unit, monstrous war-bred Nuval strains and their own Worldship, which, though partly decayed over its long stasis, may be able to single-handedly match a small warfleet in battle.

Through the Gateways: Humanity [Closed]

Jednost Global Union

Jednost Global Union

Government Form: Representative democracy de jure, xeno-caste autocracy de facto.

Demographics:

Humans - 92 %

The human population of Jednost is descended from colonists of prevalently Slavic origin, and despite centuries of change and adaptation to a new planet, in many of them traces of distinctive ethnic features are still visible to the attentive socio-historian. The relatively low gravity of their planet has left them noticeably taller and lither than their Earth-born ancestors.

Nuval - 8 %

Believed to be the only sapient non-human inhabitants of Jednost, the Nuval are in truth biomechanical artificial beings created by their secretive masters, the Qolth, to serve as figureheads and mouthpieces in communicating with humanity. Nuval do not reproduce by natural means, but are formed of synthetic flesh vat-grown over a cybernetic framework inlaid with intricate systems to give them spectacular abilities. Their bodies, usually draped in ample sumptuous robes, have broadly humanoid four-armed torsos over flat, sluglike abdomens. Their heads are narrow and featureless, and their hands have each four extremely flexible fingers, capable of rotating at virtually any angle. To compensate for their lack of legs, they move with the help of magnetic levitation systems and retractable spider-like mechanical limbs built into their frames. The Nuval’s construction gives them many redoubtable tools built into their very bodies, ranging from weapons to holographic projectors, but most terrible of all are the neurowave transmitters that allow them to subtly manipulate the emotions of those around them, usually striking them with awe or fear.

Qolth - ???

The hidden masters of Jednost, guiding the fates of the planet from the shadows. The numbers of the Qolth are impossible to properly quantify, since members of their species do not have distinct bodies. Instead, their natural state is that of a thick light blue fluid binding together a network of primitive organs, invisible to the naked eye. A sufficiently complex network becomes capable of controlling its liquid form to move around, and potentially split it into smaller entities, which may in turn recombine again. Because of this state of constant flux, individual Qolth-shards do not have minds or personalities of their own, and act as a collective intelligence that shares all its skills and memories. Thanks to their fluid shape, the Qolth can enter the bodies of organic beings, including humans, and control them like puppets by interfacing with their synaptic systems - an ability that may have been instrumental to the growth of their distant civilization.

Population: circa 830 million total.

---

Planet Name and Description: Jednost is the second planet from its star, a yellow dwarf somewhat cooler and fainter than the Sun, and the only one in its system to have a dense native atmosphere. A relatively small, light ball of rock with rich subterranean aquifers, but little unfrozen surface water, it is a bleak world of muted colours and endless tundra. While a biosphere existed even before the arrival of human colonists, it had always been pale and anemic, with even the tropical regions rarely supporting anything more than scraggly shrubland haunted by elusive crawling animals, the rare towering spindly-legged behemoths and immense swarms of harmless, but very irritating gnats. The vast frozen poles and boundless expanses of dry wasteland leave little space inhabitable without ample terraforming efforts, and so most of the human population is clustered in metropolitan centers about the equatorial band, where Jednost’s chilly climate is at the very least endurable the year round. The planet has one diminutive moon dubbed Strelka, an ungainly meteoroid which somehow found itself trapped in the planet’s feeble gravity well.

History: The alien structures hidden in the bowels of Jednost's moon suggest that the planet's true history began long before the Gateway first opened onto its system. What that history might have been, however, is hopelessly lost to human knowledge. Perhaps the planet did not always bear life, and its current state is the end result of a terraforming process started millennia ago; perhaps its skies have been the site of battles between tremendous empires now forgotten by the universe; none of that is known. What is know is that the colony ship Vitus Bering emerged into its pale star's light three hundred years ago, and within weeks its crew had laid the foundations of Ermagrad, which would go on to become the greatest city built on its soil by human hands.

Although life on the newly christened Jednost could hardly be called idyllic, between its merciless winters and melancholy summers, the planet was not actively hostile to its settlers, and so, little by little, scrubland belts were cleared, frozen bogs were drained, tundra strider migrations were contained, trillions of gnats were exterminated. Ermagrad expanded, then it was joined by Sztrelckie, then by Czeragrad, and many others to follow. Despite rapid demographic growth, the fledgling colony's population had a long way to go yet before it began to outstrip the habitable land and natural resources at its disposal, and thus territorial disputes rarely were grounds for conflict. The flipside of this was that the wide stretches of wildland between the rising cities caused them to grow increasingly isolated from each other politically as well as geographically, with every effort to establish a formal global government ending in failure, but in spite of this, for a good Earth century and a half life was good.

And it would have stayed that way, had it not been for the moon.

The early people of Jednost were an adventurous lot, and it was only natural that in time they should have turned to the rest of their sparse system, most of which had only been afforded a few cursory scans before the Vitus Bering made planetfall. The planet's only apparent natural satellite was an obvious starting point, and an expedition was outfitted to scout its modest surface and probe its geological composition for any useful deposits. There was nothing particularly complex about the venture, and everything went smoothly, until a sampling drill found an unexpectedly yielding point in a crater bed and struck a smooth, dense surface below.

Unbeknownst to Jednost's human population, the orbit-locked meteoroid they had come to know as Strelka was in truth only a skin-deep camouflage for a Qolth Worldship. The aliens were not native to the system, but the massive vessel, gargantuan by the Qolth's more compact standards, had been stranded there for possibly millennia after suffering irreparable damage to its FTL drive and gone into stasis to preserve its core-mind. Awoken by its security systems due to the humans' intrusion, the Qolth did not reveal itself, but dispatched its Nuval constructs to pose as the only occupants of a lost observation station, obfuscating the true size of the installation. The Nuval presented themselves as eager to cooperate with Jednost's people and share "their" technology, which by far exceeded its human counterpart in sophistication, for mutual benefit, and after a brief hesitation their offer was accepted.

What followed was the slow but inexorable subjugation of Jednost to the shadowy will of the core-mind. Using its Nuval proxies, as well as infested agents and cunningly trapped technological gifts, the Qolth spread hypnotic media, subtle doses of mind-altering drugs and seeds of cultural engineering throughout every level of the planetside cities, quietly conditioning their people to unknowingly follow its hidden commands. Within one Earth century, the previously isolationist metropoles had been unified into the Global Union, and the Nuval were much acclaimed for their crucial mediation work. To all evidence, the colony has entered its golden age; but the ugly truth is that it has become little more than contented livestock for the Qolth. Over the course of their silent invasion, the aliens have developed a taste for parasitizing human hosts, impersonating them throughout their lives in what their impersonal minds perceive as an amusing sort of play-acting all while slowly consuming them from within to multiply. Now that the Gateway has reopened, they cast their ravenous eyeless gaze at it, hungering for new materials to restore their derelict ship - and new bodies to devour.

Culture and Society: Even though there has been no real focused attempt to preserve a traditional spirit, Jednost appears to be stuck in the zeitgeist of late pre-collapse Earth, to the point that cultural variations on the joke “you can take the muscovite out of Moscow, but not Moscow out of the muscovite” have become an immortal cliché that has found its way even into scholarly discourse. An atmosphere of comfortable apathy reigns over the planet’s drab metal cities, a sort of placid pessimism that is at the same time jaded and satisfied by things staying exactly as they have been for the last few decades. People waking up to the same gray sky as every other day of their lives will wistfully ponder the lack of any change for better or worse, and in a brief moment of clarity may even wonder whether perhaps something different should happen one day while they reach for the mostly empty bottle of liquor on the kitchen sill - before the narcotics kick in, and the germs of hope are imperceptibly smothered under a chemical shroud.

Such a state of detachement, breeding a weary conformism, plays to the advantage of the Qolth, who maintain it by every possible means at their disposal. Virtually every aspect of Jednostan life bears the mark of their invisible hand, from imperceptible doses of mind-affecting substances in running water and food products, to Nuval patrolling the streets on nondescript official business while irradiating bystanders with their cowing neuro-wave emissions. Most entertainment media has long been supplanted by kaleidograms, projections of abstract, yet mesmerizing permutations of coloured shapes and shades, accompanied by soothing music and heavy amounts of subliminal induction. Even something as innocuous as news broadcasts is styled in ways that would appear garish and uncanny to those not used to them.

To facilitate the distribution of those subtle poisons, the Qolth-controlled state has fostered overall conditions of egalitarian, technologically-ensured comfort. Work is never lacking, pays neither too little nor too much, and is always just demanding enough that you don’t want to think about much at the end of the day. The market is neither so free to be anarchic, nor so restrictive as to be too daunting to aspiring entrepreneurs. Habitation blocks are never too luxurious, but rarely are they leaper mole-infested hellholes either. In a word, everything is so painfully average that people cannot but be reluctantly satisfied with it.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and even the most painstakingly designed prison has its leaks. Under the surface, there are a few sparse groups of people - the observant, the paranoid, the idealistic, the stray souls damaged by illegal drugs harder than those peddled by the Qolth - who suspect that something is off about their world. Derided by the public, leerily watched by security forces, and occasionally busted by Qolth infiltrators, they are few and by and large unable to organize, but their mere existence is a persistent thorn in the side of the alien-imposed order.

---

Governance and Politics: The Jednost Global Union is ostensibly the next in the ranks of the multitude of electoral democracies from humanity’s past. Every so often, advertising screens on the streets are flooded with smiling, curated faces and pithy slogans over many-coloured backgrounds, and people will vote for a few of them to represent their city to the assembly of the MirDuma. More rarely, but still regularly, the faces will get bigger and the slogans even more emphatic, a sign that the Global Presidential election is at hand. Any differences between the half-dozen parties are mired in bureaucratic language, and in practice come down to colours in the statistics graphs, so that choosing among them is for most a matter of habit and it takes a not inconsiderable effort to start a genuine argument about politics.

In truth, things are simultaneously more complex than this and chillingly simple. While elected officials are invariably human, there are a great many Nuval embedded in high positions within the government apparatus, and it is through their hands that power really flows. However assembly debates may end, whatever resolutions the presidential cabinet may set down, the transcripts and documents always disappear into the folds of a faceless figure’s robes, with the assurance that everything will be implemented as necessary. The rare few times that someone bothers to check, they will be presented with exhaustive but impenetrable accounts of something being put into practice. Behind these appearances, the Nuval covertly perform the bidding of the Qolth core-mind, which governs as the Union’s indisputed secret ruler.

Technology Overview: Over the last century, the Qolth have successfully stifled independent scientific advancement on Jednost, replacing it with a controlled feed of scraps of their own technology through the Nuval. While carefully kept in check to prevent the human population from becoming too well-equipped to control, this infusion has allowed the colony to master numerous designs and principles previously thought too laborious to implement in practice, including fusion energy, magnetic levitation, plasma-based tools and weapons and stimulants powerful enough to temporarily rejuvenate the body. While this has propelled Jednost far beyond the levels of development and production achieved on Earth, giving its cities the appearance of a futuristic (if largely monochrome) dream, technology that radically modifies the human body has been persistently kept out of reach, as the Qolth fear it would prevent them from successfully infesting their hosts.

Military Overview: With no obvious enemies, either internal or external, the Global Union’s military mostly exists as an outlet for people looking for a sense of purpose, adventure or heroism in their lives. Thus, appearances are favoured over functionality: soldiers wear brightly coloured armour, ships and tanks are fitted with dazzling decorative lights and stereo systems, and camaraderie takes precedence over discipline. That said, dismissing Jednost’s forces as goofy and ineffectual would be a lethal mistake. However lax and boisterous, their troops carry redoubtable powered armour and destructive plasma weaponry, and are filled to their ears with performance-enhancing serums and combat stimulants giving them invincible, if almost suicidal, bravery, while their ships, though gaudy and few in number, are mounted with mighty defenses and artillery of alien design.

The most fearsome assets the Union can bring to bear, however, are the Qolth’s hidden aces in the hole. Those include the enigmatic Blackstar Initiative clone unit, monstrous war-bred Nuval strains and their own Worldship, which, though partly decayed over its long stasis, may be able to single-handedly match a small warfleet in battle.