The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
When the gods spoke, the witch doctor listened.
It came as an ominous drop in the stomach, the whisper of a primal fear understood but rarely felt, and she in her swampy grotto read the portents with anxious fascination. Birds on the wing flew southwest as one; even the beasts that inhabited Tinea's marshes and peat bogs fell silent. The world itself drew in a tremulous breath. The sun lingered long overhead, a scorching eye of divine judgment.
The tension broke loose with a sundering of the world. The weight in her gut bloomed into an unearthly rumbling that shook far greater things than the moorings of her nerves. Swamp waters shivered their affright as silversides flashed like shiny bullets out of the shallows and serpents, rats, and worms alike fled their earthy abodes in a sprawling, writhing mass. The witch doctor hobbled out to her clearing and peered northeast as the quake rolled on like an endless peal of distant thunder. She saw nothing, but understood all the same.
The gods were restless and wrathful; their rage smote the mighty Veneror Peak as a reminder of their great and terrible power.
This was doubtless a problem for the heathens beyond the swamp, with their scheming and their meddling. The Ilati were above such petty trifles, and surely Vespera would not smite her chosen children on the day the Elder went to pay his respects. She turned back toward her hovel, the vertebrae woven into her mane rattling against one another, and paused as a pall of realization swept over her mind.
Turhan.
Seldom had a horse with 3 good legs and a questionable pair of lungs made such short work of the distance between Tinea Swamp and the vaunted Veneror Peak. Nothing could be done to romanticize the journey: the witch doctor maintained a pace that, while inexhaustible, looked to the outside observer to be about as smooth as the earthquake that had motivated her hence.
Nevertheless, sweat slicked her shaggy coat with salty foam by the time she arrived, and little cuts had opened up along her lips and cheeks where the serrated teeth protruding from her skull-mask had jarred against flesh while running, dampening her face with thin smears of blood..
The thunder she'd felt in the swamp had not prepared her for what she found upon arrival. Great swaths of land had been pushed aside and reordered at the gods' selfish whim, and great furrows had been thrown up along the slopes of the great peak like tilled earth in a colossus' garden. Lush greenery even sprouted from the furrows with an unnatural sort of fecundity, greedily rooted into the sacred soils
Breathing deeply of the thick wrongness on the air through her mask's slitted nostrils, she tracked her Elder's overpoweringly familiar scent through the wreckage until she glimpsed a tangled, hairy carpet peeping out from a loosely-stacked pile of rubble.
"Kenkéknem!" she barked between shallow, exhausted breaths, telekinetically flinging the smaller stones away even as she shuffled awkwardly to the old stallion's aid. "You no die now, old man." Grunting against her own fatigue and the weight of the stones entrapping him, the shaggy mare bent to with a will, time passing only by the mantra breathed from bloody and tooth-caged lips.
"Vespela, safe you keep um...safe you keep you chile..."
The Witch Doctor
there are no grotesques in nature
there are no grotesques in nature
@Turhan @Random Events
