@6slyboy6 Finished reading the IC yesterday but today's been a bit busy so had no chance to come on. Will produce a post soon!
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Daethyrd sat absolutely still, watching the mighty beast as it swallowed a cow whole. He had been watching it now for a few days, trying to understand its behavior and habits as well as glean an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Eventually he decided that if he was going to gain its back he would need something to tie it up with so he could hold on, and so he gathered vines and made a sturdy rope and then he climbed a great clay spire and lay in wait for the beast.
When it passed below, he swung the vine rope and threw it at it, hoping to catch its tail. However he missed miserably and the great beast noticed him. It growled and then gave off a mighty roar, and it circled around the spire a few times, and then it kicked off into the air and dashed towards the vall. Daethyrs cursed and called for Gul-Tir. The molf erupted from some trees and flew towards his master, but the beast was already upon Daethyrd who swung his spear, realized that it was useless, and leapt from the spire. As he leapt the beast's powerful tail caught him on the shoulder and Daethyrd grunted in pain, his graceful leap turning into a mad descent. Luckily however his molf caught him, though Daethyrd winced in pain as the protrusions on its back cut him up.
Brandishing his sling in his undamaged arm, he placed a stone into it (gritting his teeth despite the pain) and he swung it as the molf dashed about in the air and struck the beast on the head. It simply bounced off and appeared to leave no damage whatsoever. The beast looked at the two for a few moments before turning away and dashing off. Adrenaline rushing through him, Daethyrd egged Gul-Tir on and the molf leapt after its first father.
The land rushed behind them as they accelerated after the powerful beast, and the rain whipped Daethyrd's face like never before. It felt like he was being pelted with thousands of sling stones. And then a putrid smell hit him and he gagged. By this time the beast had disappeared into the fog and rain, though his molf was still following its scent despite the terrible stench. The pain growing too great to bear, Daethyrd brought his molf earthward and crawled under a tree. He rubbed at his bottom and the back of his legs, which were cut up from landing on Gul-Tir, and then felt his tear-inducingly painful shoulder and realized that there was some kind of shard stuck in there. He closed his eyes and picked it out, and when he looked at it he saw that it was a small spike from the beast's tail.
Grunting, and glad that his shoulder was not broken, he lay back and closed his eyes. However, before he could settle into a healing sleep something stinking and putrid landed on his head and he gagged and thrashed to get it off. Even after he had gotten the black stuff off he could feel his skin reacting badly and he pulled himself up and into the rain so it could wash it all away. As he looked around he realized that the black stuff was everywhere on the ground where there had once been grass or fruits in the trees. A rabbit in the distance sniffed at some of it and Daethyrd saw it attempt to eat it, only for it to fall down dead maybe ten minutes after. A wild goat licked at the stuff and nibbled at it, but quickly spat it out and went off to find something better. Only worms and other creatures usually attracted to rot seemed to benefit from this whole affair, and Daethyrd saw the disgusting things everywhere he looked.
As he returned to camp to recover, Daethyrd noticed that the rot was everywhere, and everywhere there were dead animals. After a few days, they were dead, rotting, disease-ridden corpses that added to the stench. Normally the rain would have acted to cleanse things like this, but the enormous volume of rot only meant that the rain descended and mixed with it and made it all worse. Perhaps a week later, Daethyrd came across a small camp and asked its people for food and lodgings. A number of them stared at him and his molf, and then invited him to stay. "Rest a while," a woman with a waxen baby tied to her chest told him, "and we will wake you up when food is ready."
What woke him up was not food being ready, but the barking of Gul-Tir and attempts to tie his arms up. As he came to, he found that he was being carried towards a great fire and that Gul-Tir was struggling with maybe three hunters who were trying to put him down. Roaring and foiling the attempts to tie his arms up, Daethyrd scattered the strange people and ran at the hunters bare-handed. Two of them yelped in shock and dashed off, but the third turned on Daethyrd and stabbed at the vall's thigh. He grunted in pain as the spear pierced his flesh and buried itself deep, but then thwacked his opponent on the side of the head and sent him reeling. Then the battered vall leapt onto Gul-Tir and spurred him into the air. Daethyrd spared one look back, and found that the weird pale people of the camp were stood staring at him with glazed over and hungry eyes. It sent a shiver down his spine.
As they flew through the fog and rain and stench, his stomach growling and eyes heavy and very suddenly cold and dizzy, he wondered what had brought about this terrible rot. But no answer was forthcoming. Later in the day Gul-Tir hunted down a great reindeer and brought it to him. Daethyrd noticed immediately that the reindeer was very thin and had clearly already been half dead of starvation before Gul-Tir caught it. He opened it up and cleaned its innars, noticing that it had eaten some of the rot and that had already been eating at it from inside. He cleaned it out, ensuring none was left, and then both he and Gul-Tir dug into the raw meat.
Some days later they passed through the ruins of another camp and Daethyrd was shocked to find the remains of little children and women in it. Their corpses were maybe a week old. Searching the camp, he found that the camp's stores had been hurriedly emptied out. The camp had been a victim of a food raid. Given what Daethyrd had seen of the rot so far, this seemed hardly surprising. He stood over the corpses for a long time, a deep frown etched onto his face. Then he sighed and buried them all, and then he spoke the decree the Land had given to him and all the vall of middle Be'r-Jaz:
"The Land your Home, demands Justice.
Honor the Land,
Honor its creatures,
Cultivate balance,
Create harmony.
Do not hurt and do not mistreat,
Only with justice.
Do not transgress.
Do kindness to who do kindness,
Withhold from who do not.
Fulfill your duty,
Shun who shun it.
Take not another's due,
Allot to each their due.
Ask after the blood of kin,
The price of blood is blood,
The price of a hurt is a like hurt.
And forgiveness is good."
He looked over the graves for a few moments and then turned and jumped onto Gul-Tir. "The price of blood is blood," he repeated, and the molf mewled slightly before setting off. When he arrived at his home camp things had changed. He found that a black-haired vall named Gildrik, one of the hunting pack leaders and a terrifying warrior, had now gained mastery over the people due to the food shortages. He allotted food arbitrarily and had a number of people from different camps, alongside people who opposed him generally, locked up in sturdy wooden cages. Some, who he decreed would die, were thrown into holes in the ground and weighed down with a rock, then the rain water filled up the hole and they perished.
All of this had come about due to the sudden lack of food, and Gildrik led great hunting packs - not five or ten individuals, but up to forty or fifty - on great raids of other camps and came back with more prisoners and food. Gildrik himself wore a great necklace with the fingers of all those he had bested in combat, and his hide armour was decorated with the ribs of his foes. When times grew very tough they brought some of the prisoners out and slaughtered them and ate them. When Daethyrd saw all this it made his stomach turn, and he expressed his anger and disapproval to Gildrik. The other warrior only laughed.
"What is this Daethyrd! I thought you of all people would approve of this. Isn't this what we always wanted? Hunting, fighting, the thrill of the chase, besting all who defy us, GLORY. My name and the names of my faithful and bloodied warriors are whispered by all middelvalls. They fear our coming when we come and they know that we are the masters. And in time even the southerners will be cowed by us, and the Queen-Mother will come to know her mistake and she will make us, not them, the honored ones!" But Daethyrd only shook his head.
"You are killing and slaughtering our own people wantonly, this is not the way of the Land. We are warriors for the protection of the people, it is not our purpose to kill and slaughter just for the thrill of it. There is no glory in forsaking our duties." But Gildrik only scoffed.
"I am not killing or slaughtering wantonly. We do what is necessary to survive. If we do not raid and take what we need with the strength of our arms, then another people will strike at us and humiliate and debase us, and they will steal our food and do to us as we have done to others. If we do not do what is necessary to maintain our strength, then we will fall by the wayside and be destroyed. These are terrible and shifting times, and it is just in such times that the fruit of glory awaits the glorious to pick it." Daethyrd's eyes narrowed and then a grin grew on his face. Seeing this, Gildrik also grinned. "See! I knew you would like it!"
"So you go off with your men, you fall upon their camps, you best their warriors and slaughter their women and children, and you take any food they have, and whoever remains you take with you as prisoners?" He asked Gildrik. The black-haired middelvall nodded.
"We don't take everyone who survives," Gildrik said, "but otherwise yes. You will be my right-hand man Daethyrd. We will raid further than ever before and everyone will know to fear us!" Daethyrd stood up and nodded, and he looked around at the gathered people and raised his spear. There were a few cheers at this display. Daethyrd grinned.
"The price of blood is blood!" He roared, and his eyes flashed and he turned on Gildrik with sudden speed and fury, and before anyone knew what was happening the black-haired middelvall had a spear in his throat.
A shocked roar went up, hunters leapt towards Gildrik in the vain hope of saving him while others leapt at Daethyrd. The middelvall brandished a sharpened bone knife and shoved it into the eye of the closest warrior, before barely dodging a stab from a spear. Daethyrd gripped the offending weapon and threw its wielder over his shoulder before stabbing the helpless vall with his own weapon. There was a cold, wild gleam in Daethyrd's eyes, and he moved with a grace of form and calmness he had never felt before. Spears seemed to slip by him without doing any harm, and his knife or spear seemed to find the vulnerabilities of his enemies with great ease. It was all over in minutes, and when it was done he felt suddenly exhausted.
People were huddled against trees in their dens, staring in horror at the terrible scene and the one who had been responsible for it. Daethyrd looked with glazed eyes at the scene of the execution. Some thirty warr- murderers lay dead, their blood everywhere. He brought a blood hand to his face and breathed, and then he spoke in a calm, loud voice. "The price of a hurt is to undo it or suffer like it, and death which cannot be undone is paid with death. This is Justice." He looked around him sternly. "Know that the Land your god is a just and kind god, and know also that I am its executioner. And I will strike you down with great vengeance and furious punishment for your transgressions, and you will know the full glory of the Land only then when retribution is due and the hour has grown late."
And Daethyrd then walked into the darkness and stench of the night, leaving the people of Gildrik behind.
When the Rot came Ya-Shuur did not first perceive it as a Rot, but as a great shockwave that spread across the island and darkened it. It was the product of disharmony and would produce only disharmony, so much Ya-Shuur could sense. And then he could smell it and he saw how fruits on trees were suddenly decaying and rotting, becoming a source of poison and death rather than nutrition and life. This disturbed Ya-Shuur and he walked on, finding that not only fruits were affected by this Rot, but vegetables like carrots, and even the cocoa beans from which the sudi-shrib was made shrivelled up and died.
With the once beautiful bean in his hand, Ya-Shuur rose and looked back and forth from it hesitantly. His lips quivered ever so slightly and his hands shook, and then he let the rotten bean fall from his hand and he dragged his feet away. As he walked and the weight of what had occurred fell on him, his face grew relaxed and eyes blank. He took a deep breath, walked, and observed.
Fruits, vegetables, and seeds were rotting and dying. Their death meant that over the next few weeks many frugivores began to die off. Many of these were birds and small mammals, and some reptiles. The sudden complete destruction of their whole food source had a particularly drastic effect and the deterioration was swift and immediately noticeable, especially for someone as attuned to Be'r-Jaz as Ya-Shuur. The balance had been disrupted and a catastrophic fallout appeared imminent.
This state of affairs also affected the island's new inhabitants, the vall, since their diet consisted largely of animals dependent on creatures that were now swiftly perishing due to the eradication of their foodsource, and this meant that competition for food among the vall grew more desperate and disputes over food often broke out into violent hostilities. Some even took to raiding each other's camps to get at the scarce food.
There was something deeply unjust in all of this, Ya-Shuur thought. The longer he observed, the more certain he grew that this cloud that covered the island and brought imbalance and destruction, this stenchful Rot, was not a natural occurrence by any means. It seemed to him to be supernatural, a deliberate attempt to disturb the harmony he sought to protect. Someone was disrupting his duty, punishing the entire island for no clear or just reason. For the land itself had done no wrong, and neither had the fruits and vegetables and seeds, nor had the birds and other creatures that were now starving to death, and neither had the animals that depended on those. And though the vall had yet to fully understand justice and become part of the island's balance, Ya-Shuur had seen no great collective crime from them that justified such a vast collective punishment. And punishment without justice was null and void.
The Great Shepherd raised his herding stick. "I am the Land." He said simply, and brought it down. An imperceivable shockwave rippled across the island. And there was justice.
When Ya-Shuur first walked among the vall of central Be'r-Jaz they were not very impressed. They were a race familiar with the full glory of true gods, and this long-haired hillman with a beard that was far too big and bushy, and who smelled like he had never bathed (which was true!), was just not what they had expected the great god known as Be'r-Jaz to look like. With his gnarled herding stick and ancient poncho, which were downright primitive compared to their proper hide clothing and armor as well as their perfectly straight spears, the demigod seemed like a stunted vall whose teeth had never grown enough to become sharp and whose ears were awkward and unshapely and who had... goat horns on his head?
They looked at Daethyrd and the others who had told them about the god, and even they were a bit lost for words. When they had first seen the god he had seemed far more fearsome and awe-inspiring. Daethyrd, being rebellious and stubborn, refused to acknowledge that he might have made a mistake and glorified Ya-Shuur intensely. This surprised Ya-Shuur since he had been very reluctant to do so before. The demigod guessed that it had something to do with sticking to his guns.
In any case, these vall had heard the teachings that Daethyrd and his hunting pack had brought back with them and they were of those who counted themselves as worshippers of the Land, so they practised kindness and sought to honor all creatures. And so they gave Ya-Shuur the benefit of the doubt.
Now Ya-Shuur taught them how to harness the power of the natural world so that both nature and vallkind benefitted. He taught them how to herd goats and how to use certain big-beaked fishing birds (like the cormorant) to fish instead of the tiring and violent spearfishing technique they had been taught. He brought them a number of cats, and these preyed on creatures that harmed the valls' foodstocks and homes and generally kept their encampment cleaner. He also brought them a number of molves and showed them how they could aid them in goat herding as well as in hunting.
Ya-Shuur showed them that the molves, being huge, were also good mounts on both land and air (since they could fly). In addition to all this, the presence of molves in the encampment provided exceptional protection against both dangerous animals or hostile valls. While the molves were superherders and vastly outmatched the experimental herding wolf Ya-Shuur had tamed before, the herding wolf was still of use and so he presented it to the vall too. As Ya-Shuur had also domesticated cows and these were a great source of meat, he gifted a number to the vall and showed them how to care for them.
In addition to this, Ya-Shuur showed them how to milk goats and how to create the fermented goatmilk drink called gim-sa, and he showed them how to sweeten it with butterwort honey to create butterwort gim-sa, or how to sweeten it with redgrass to create redgrass gim-sa. He did not show them how to make the sudi-shrib however as that was special to his heart and he had committed to only ever present it to those who were his guests, as his way of honoring them.
Despite all these things that he taught the vall of central Be'r-Jaz in the time that he walked among them, there was one vall who was unsatisfied. The rowdy Daethyrd followed Ya-Shuur around as he travelled from camp to camp, giving gifts and teaching. "I am not an animaller!" He would declare, "I am a fighter. A hunter!" Despite this, it had not stopped him from taking on a molf. "I am a fighter!" He snapped angrily when Ya-Shuur pressed him about this, "this molf is like a spear or a sling, but better. I would be a lousy warrior if I did not make ue of good weapons." Ya-Shuur told him that animals were not objects, and the vall said he'd think about that. Then he continued complaining.
After some time of hearing the vall's complaints, Ya-Shuur finally turned to him. "What is it that you seek, Daethyrd?" He questioned. The vall looked at the great horned god with a deep frown.
"I..." he seemed to remember something and his features hardened. "I want glory. I want all those white-haired rotters to speak my name in awe, knowing that, in all their purity, they could never match up to me." Ya-Shuur looked at him and then nodded.
"Do you remember that great beast that so terrified you when you came to hunt me?" He asked, and the vall nodded. "Go and find it. Gain its back. You will have glory." Daethyrd gulped at Ya-Shuur's words, his eyes wide, and Ya-Shuur noticed. "Don't think glory is a sweet fruit that you can pick and eat. Glory is only for those who endure hardship and feast on patience." At these words the fear seemed to leave Daethyrd's eyes and it was replaced by determination.
"I will attain it." He said simply, and departed. Ya-Shuur turned and continued his walking, and when he spoke he told people of the great glory to be had from finding and mastering the great beast Zer-Du...
Riding his molf (who Ya-Shuur had named Gul-Tir because Daethyrd kept calling him "molf"), the vall made for the place he had last seen the great beast: the Cave of Light. Since many valls had been making the journey to and from the cave a number of paths had formed and Daethyrd followed one of these. The rain was incessant, but unlike before when Daethyrd would have had to beware dangerous animals like bears or wolves, the journey was now relatively dull since Gul-Tir was enough to ward off any threats.
Gul-Tir could have hunted for him too, but Daethyrd was a warrior and a hunter and he took pride in eating only what he caught. He was no animaller! He would never herd goats or raise cows, or use birds to fish! With his spear in his grip and his sling at his hip he killed and he ate. And when he grew thirsty he did not need to lap at goatmilk! The streams and rivers of the world were all his, and he needed nothing beyond them.
They crossed worshippers heading towards the Cave every now and then, but after a number of days they had arrived and Daethyrd got to scouting the area and searching for any marks left by the great beast. Near the cave mouth there were clear marks from where it had leapt and crashed into the earth before them, and just above there were claw marks in the rock. He touched the marks and sniffed at them, but the rain had washed away any smell and he cursed quietly. He noticed that Gul-Tir was staring at him curiously, but he ignored him as he made his way up the rock and sniffed at the claw marks. There was nothing here either.
Descending, he found that Gul-Tir was now sniffing at where the beast had left the great marks in the ground, and after a few moments it raised its head, barked, and wagged its long, dangerous tail. Daethyrd raised an eyebrow, wondering what this meant. The molf turned away from him and barked again, then took a few steps away. Daethyrd's eyes widened and he realized that it was about to leap off. It had caught the scent! Quickly he jumped onto its back and the molf was off! Daethyrd grinned to himself and patted the molf. "Some spear..."
@Ascendant Immortality isn't vital to my species, it just seemed logical for beings that are made of pure magic. As for relying heavily on magic, it's fairly minimal at the moment - they're made of it and consume it to continue living. Wielding magic is not something they currently do.
As for it not magic not being introduced, I think it's safe to assume it exists somehow in the game universe? If it doesn't exist I'll make a new sheet.
As for it not magic not being introduced, I think it's safe to assume it exists somehow in the game universe? If it doesn't exist I'll make a new sheet.
It's quite strange for an island to be completely flat I think, will wait on further details. Since sly mentioned that it's somewhat like Japanese jungles I imagine there are hills at the very least
@6slyboy6 Sorry, for some reason my browser wasn't working even though there was internet connection. And I spent so long looking for pictures for the race I want that it slowed my responsiveness here.
This is the map position I'd like:
This is the map position I'd like:
As there are a number of animal-based species, I am changing my submission from the goat people to an elf-like species of some kind. I'm going to work on the sheet now
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