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3/28/2022 at 15:51
Anonymous
Everyone
Shattered Souls, Part IX: The Betrayed

The aftermath of Nalibhtavi's cruel massacre of the Djeirani bards was fraught with consternation and disappointment. Unlike those Elders who woke before Her, the Full One had left nothing behind save for the occasional broken heart and a prodigious helping of scorn, Her departure borne of entirely selfish motivations.

After Teclah's flamboyant assassination and subsequent escape, her whereabouts were unknown. The world over speculated what this could mean. How had the assassin vanished into thin air? The answer arose with the grating of moving stone, the conclusion of the assassin-bard's saga touching the mind of every sapient. An echo reiterative of Koduses' manifestation and Its ability to share freshly woven memories, insight was provided. Some time after her escape into an unused passage, Teclah emerged, flushed with success. However, to claim her rewards, the bard needed to return to the Theatre of Shadows to conclude the ceremonial gambit of the murders. Fleet of foot, she rushed through the corridors of the Undercity, before creeping into the amphitheatre when she drew near.

Hearing nothing, most importantly no guards waiting to capture her, the bard sashayed into the playhouse, ready to soak up the acclaim and infamy she earned. Instead, the marks of violence pulled her up short. Despite the lack of bodies, their remains returned to their family by Volundiel Ash'aji, and Haratos, Master of the Theater's attempts at cleaning up the blood, the signs of slaughter scarred the theatre's interior. The bard drifted slowly through the hauntingly quiet auditorium, stopping to look upon the scream-mutated faces of her troupe - interred evermore in gold.

Outwardly, she was as still as her murdered troupe. Inwardly, the air was soaked by the bedlam state of her mind: betrayal, anger, revenge. The wrathful trinity of her feelings was nearly an
evocation, or a silent scream, blared into the ether.

The ether answered.

Drawn by the emotions logging the air, perhaps finding kin in the reeling shock of betrayal, the essence left behind by the Replete's death manifested. It rose, a tenebrous silhouette peeling from the floor, and took on a Humanoid shape. Swaying like wheat stalks behind the preoccupied actress, it loomed larger and more behemothic until the whole auditorium was caught in its vast shadow. Too late, Teclah realized she was not alone. Though she got a considerable head start by the potency of her alacrity and tumbling, the Immortal quintessence that chased her through the Undercity was faster. It surged, a hungering wave cresting, before it splashed across Teclah Neri like a scribe's spilled inkwell.

With only an enervated sigh, another bard, endemic to Djeir and the Theatre of Shadows, fell by Divine mandate. The bard's infinitesimal numbers dwindled to nigh-extinction.

Niuri, the Betrayed, rose in her place. "I have suffered and endured. I have drifted, bodiless, destroyed, My essence shredded and dispersed across the ley." She announced to the world in a voice composed of fragmented whispers. "But I alone have plumbed the Source and returned. I alone bring with Me Revelation."

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 20th of Lleian, in the year 501 MA.

3/28/2022 at 16:38
Anonymous
Everyone
Shattered Souls, Part X: Revelation

Striding purposefully away from the Undercity, the Goddess manifested on the shores of the North Strand. Beside the remains of Jarrod She stood, invoking memories of Elder Time with both Her confident authority and the seeming innocuity of Her posture. She gathered adventurers from all Sapience to Her side, beseeching them to share with Her the memories She had sent forward that She may anchor Herself properly in time. While answers streamed forth, She revealed that the Elder Gods were projections of Herself, guises She wore while sifting through the immense volume of memories and information She obtained through the Source of Knowledge.

Once satisfied, and with arms outstretched, the Goddess reached towards the Dyisen-Ashtan Memoryscape, Her eyes closing as She began Her work. A hazy globe took shape at the borders of memory, a representation of the world before that the born-again Goddess took as Her artist's canvas. While She carried out Her esoteric conjuration, bridging the past with the present, She told a story.

In the beginning, before Time or Life or Death or Luck or Indulgence, before the elements or the world itself had formed, the Creator was born, along with His Twin, His Other. As the Creator shaped Creation and brought all things into being, the Other dwelt on one thing alone: Oblivion, and its inevitability should the Two cross paths.

For eternities uncountable the Other sought the Maker, seeking hungrily some clue or sign of His quarry in Its relentless traversal 'cross the cosmos, outside of Varian's universe. Varian was never satisfied with simply observing His Creation. Time and again, He reached forth His hand to alter it, twisting reality to His whim. His interference with the lives of Gods and mortals, His unending micro-management, would incur a terrible cost.

From Its position at the distant reaches of void space, outside of time and beyond Creation itself, the Other sensed it - predictable, repetitive motion on the Manifold ringing like a knell across the cosmos. It had found Him.

For years the scouts of Oblivion sought Him, until success came under the boughs of the Greenwood, on a world known as Azhoa. There, the Creator fought the Outrider and slew him. Varian's triumph imbued Him with false confidence as other unseen scouts fled to report His presence. Invasion followed in force, and the armies of Oblivion poured into the universe from the void without.

Oblivion's Herald converged upon the Greenwood, shearing away the soul of the forest and all who dwelt therein. The Arboreans struggled to the last, crying out for Mother Life to save them. When She did not come, those few who survived chose to flee.

Towns and cities found themselves overrun by monstrous swarms of slime and decay, laying waste to all in their path. Aberrant void elementals polluted all the waters of all the worlds, every spring and river, stream and estuary, lake and pond, transformed to gelatinous sludge.

When much of Creation laid in desolation, ravaged by the forces of Oblivion, the Other's Avatar manifested. Only pockets of resistance still lingered, scattered and divided across the world. Leaderless. Hopeless. But, fought on they did.

Bringing to bear His powers of Creation to oppose Oblivion, Varian threw all He had at the Avatar, empowering Himself and His scant allies for a final battle. Exhausted but alive, the Creator cut down the Avatar, but despaired as He realised it was too late. The Other Itself had entered Varian's Creation, and the end had come.

Driven by a desperate need for survival and filled with a craven refusal to accept His fate, Varian spurned His purpose. He would not, as He knew He should, accept defeat and return to the Cycle of the cosmos that it may perpetuate the birth of new universes and countless fresh worlds.

Unto Himself He called all the essence He had spent in the act of Creation. The embattled Elder Gods howled and screamed in outrage as, One by One, Varian destroyed Them, syphoning the quintessence of Their existence into His own reserves of might. The Gambler, the Full One, the Magician, the Evergiving Earth, the Blacksmith, and the Keeper of the Close all fell. Strife, Malice, Chaos, Darkness, Civilisation, Sea, Dreams, War, Love, and Valour soon followed. Time, ever styling Itself as the Witness, looked on with unfathomable contempt before It too died, consumed in Varian's perfidious gambit.

Aggrieved by the death of their beloved Mother Life, the remnants of the Arborean people came together and did the unthinkable: made war. Imbued with the vestigial power of Elder Life, as one they sang, single voices becoming legion. Yanai's song of creation warped, twisted by grief and fathomless heartache, becoming not the awe-inspiring music of Life but a terrible verse bespeaking agony, pain, and promising revenge. At the Creator they directed their dreadful music, striking at Him with the sombre reprisal of a people betrayed.

The longer they sang, the more the cadence contorted. Their composition became a nihilist's love-song, its only purpose to devastate and destroy whom the trees warred against. Nothing of the once harmonious aria that it sprang from remained in its melody.

Varian responded in kind. Shocked into startled clarity by the Arborean paean, vengeance came swiftly from the palm of the Creators' hand. Fear drove Him to destroy them all, twig and root, nut and acorn. And so He did.

In His final moments, Varian knew He lacked the strength to defeat the Other, and, deep in the grip of His cowardice, He made another terrible choice. Suffused with all the power of the Elder Pantheon, He turned His eyes on what remained of His universe, His Creation, that which He was made to forge, and He devoured it, swallowing all the meagre life that remained, still fighting on against imminent doom.

So it was that in the end, Varian, not Oblivion, quelled the last remnants of mortal resistance. Varian, not Oblivion, wrought doom upon lives mortal and divine alike. Varian, not Oblivion, had perverted His purpose.

Ekeing all the strength He could muster from its death throes, He fled in terror, departing from His own Creation to depths unknown, away from the Other's reach.

Varian had lived, but His survival had come at an unimaginable cost. Varian had lived, and all He had made died. Varian had lived, and the encounter left Him doomed. Forever.

The story concluded, Niuri directed the sphere into a fixed position at the very edges of the memoryscape, what once was a radiant silver globe now consumed with slithering tendrils of oily black through which argent flickers strained to give off light.

Her voice rang out again in that chorus of fractured whispers. "Behold, Oblivion's Portent. Relive the End of the First World. Look upon the Creator's true self and understand the threat which faces this one."

Her work done, Her gift of memory given, Her revelation delivered, She turned Her thoughts to other pursuits. Resolve girded Her voice with Her next declamation, a burning promise of vengeance to come for Her Brothers Ivoln and Severn. "I have had a century to plot, Brothers. You will regret Your betrayal of Me. Long, You thought Me dead. Gone. I name Myself Your enemy, and I will not be silenced again."

While the world gasped in shock at the knowledge She had imparted, the Goddess cast aside the name given to Her by Severn. "Niuri is dead." She announced for all to hear. "And I am... Indelible." Niuri died for the second time, and in Her place rose Lexadhra, the Goddess of Memory and Legend. What agenda this Goddess portends remains to be seen, though flashes of the Elder Pantheon have already begun to show through in Her personality...

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 20th of Lleian, in the year 501 MA.