#siarruk

The Blessed Echo

10 pts - 3 (Purify Area) = 7 pts

Siarruk watches mournfully the overreach of the Sea-Cleaving Pact and the Curse that ends it. She does not mourn the loss of lives but the loss of voices; never again will a living throat speak the language of the Cradle, the first language of mortals.

To a few departing souls therefore she binds a mission; they will come to the court of the King Irradiant in time, but their journey will last as long as the waters of the Qiergan River flow to the sea and return. Anyone who drinks of the river will have visions of the cursed dead; anyone who stands in its waters will know and speak a lost dialect of the Cradle-tongue for as long as they remain there.

Iron Pearls

7 pts - 2 (Create Race, collab. with Aatos and Tokhtamysh) = 5 pts

With a legacy preserved for the lost Tolinakka, Siarruk desires to repopulate, to introduce more forms of being to the world, to tread new paths. Out of fear of the curse or sheer whimsy no one can say, but her eye turns to the far north.

Deep in the sea, rare rays of moonlight pierce the water. Volcanic vents open up wide, and a single species of filter-feeding mollusc reacts as if waiting for this moment. Day by day they grow larger, beyond all reason, feeding on other creatures drawn in by the light and motion in an orgy of predation. In the course of twelve days they eat everything that comes near and grow masses of indigestible inside them. Pearls, pearls covered not just in nacre but speckled with iron. On the thirteenth day, thousands of clams open wide and die. The pearls begin to move on an invisible tide to the surface, and in the shallows of the northern sea they crack open like eggs.

A new people is born, the Thuva, the sea-trolls. Their bodies are like great seals, growing as long as two humans end-to-end, but their skin is knobbly and their backs covered by great shells banded in bone and iron. Their snouted faces bear jaws full of cutting teeth, their edges made of more iron. The ends of their tails are not flukes, but whiplike tendrils with astonishing strength and dexterity.

The Thuva are wanderers, taking after their celestial mother. Semiaquatic, they can slither onto land with the help of broad flippers and a strong tail, but must lay eggs in the waters of their birth. They instinctively sense the magnetic field of Akhu and bear awe and respect for Qorha, the great turtle of the north. Young Thuva stay close to Qorha or make pilgrimage to the northern coast of the eastern continent; farther ventures are typically reserved for adults.

When they swim near the surface, they flick their tails behind and beneath them, thick bodies narrowing to a whiplike cord layered with sensitive , and they can catch small fish from the shallows without even halting their motion; they are inveterate predators and obligate carnivores who live on the move.

The Thuva do not have families; they are born alone in the shallows, and traditionally are only met by their people when they reach the shore. Their greatest loves are not individuals, but places, and they live long enough to outlast most humans, as much as 300 years if they're lucky. Their most powerful social bonds are with fellow travelers, but Thuva have long memories and may revisit the homes of long-dead friends and speak to their inheritors as if nothing has changed.

Siarruk turn 5: 5 (remaining) + 1 (non-hoarding bonus) + 6 (roll) = 12 points

The lunar goddess is pleased for a time with the new-made human peoples, their exodus and the convolutions of their languages, but her attention wanders as she does. It turns to the wide open grasslands of the eastern continent, where the horizon stretches farther than the eye can see, and the Abhorrer of the Straight Path forms a plan.

Shape Land x3 (9):

Siarruk draws up a mountain range from the south of the continent, to catch the moisture and the dust of the ocean wind; in the inner lowlands dotted lakes form, and with her urging a vast swath of trees rises up from the earth. The new greenery reaches from the jungles around Zoreinak's horn-lake to the western hill-forests, its whole length lush with life.

CHI A ASH's blood-biting midges and flies spread through the forest, but so do great lift-moths, far fliers who in the middle stages of their life become like flat, undulating ribbons carried on the wind around the world before sprouting their full wings and returning to the trees of their birth. Lush vining plants with berries whose juice, properly extracted, brings calm and relieves exhaustion, grow from the southern jungles, expanding as far as the climate permits. Ravenous red hogs eat anything that falls to the forest floor; in turn, packs of tree-panthers descend to hunt them.

One species in particular she brings forth from the western hills: loggerheads, great beasts (three times as tall as a human, though they hunch at the shoulder) with long claws for digging and rodent-like gnawing teeth. In the autumn, when leaves fall away, they rip whole trees out of the earth and eat them from roots to crown.

In response to the depredations of the loggerheads, the trees grow long boughs; the vines, countless in number, twine between the branches, knitting the forest together. The loggerheads can uproot only the weakest and sickest trees; the rest are held up by the mass of the whole forest.

Thus human stragglers, fleeing the islands, come to find an infinite stretch of close-set trees, by which one could travel from sea to sea wlthout ever touching the ground; and they call it the Great Forest Road. For the time being, they will travel it with the seasons, plucking the fruits of the vine in summer and catching river- and lake-fish in winter.

Siarruk turn 4: 5 (starting) + 3 (roll) = 8 points

When the Blessed Returner first looked down on the world below, she found the Tolinakka beautiful in form and word; but her attention wanders as she does, and she has grown bored of the limitations of the first mortals. Now she searches the young world for fertile ground for a new race of travelers under the moon.

Create Race (3):

Anyone who creates a race this turn may include 3 points from Siarruk provided 1 or more of the following are true of the new race:

They have exceptionally fine vision at a distance.

They walk sideways like a crab, brachiate, or otherwise have unusual means of locomotion.

They have great powers of speech and song.

They leave their birthplaces young, but return to reproduce.

They clean themselves often with water or other substances.

Regardless of the above, their eyes will be beautiful to Siarruk in some way: very rounded, faceted, and/or having many colors.

Siarruk turn 9: 5 (leftover) + 1 (non-hoarding bonus) + 8 (roll) = 14 pts

Humans - travellers along the coast, exiles from the jungles of the Cardinal River, and intrepid explorers - have of late settled in the maze-lands of the southern continent. Their lives there are rough and short; the land is bereft of the cover they have learned to rely on, and food is hard to come by here. Sorrow and toil dominate their days.

Siarruk takes pity on these itinerant fools, and blesses one of their number, an expectant mother. Her child will be born with silver hair, a clear mark of greatness, the wisdom of youth in a young body; they name her Mpaden, Moon-Seeker.

Create Avatar: 7 pts

Mpaden shows great facility with the beasts of the maze-lands, charming turtles into her arms, and as she grows an idea sets into her head: she will tame the greatest beasts of all, and banish the fear from her people's hearts.

The monsters of the maze-lands, longmeer, are feared by the unprotected humans for their size and strength. Their crocodilian bodies and strong legs move swiftly over the tops of the ravines, while their meter-long necks and mouths full of teeth reach down into the brambles to pluck berries, eggs, and animals as large as young boars. They are viciously reactive and suspicious of newcomers, and are named also the killers of huntsmen. When Mpaden set out into the brush to tame a longmeer, her clan holds a funeral for her; her father whips himself with a braid of silver to mourn her foolishness.

Mpaden seeks out a mother longmeer in her nest, and at first is chased away, but she will not relent. Making camp in the barrens, she discovers a turtle in her bedroll, and spears it to death. She smears its blood and flesh on her body, and when she enters the nest the longmeer does not kill her, but licks the meat from her skin. She spends the night in its den, and leaves the next morning with two eggs cradled in her arms.

Command Avatar (Create Subrace): 2 pts

Mpaden raises the young longmeer from the egg, and they grow to follow her without question. The bonded pair of beasts become her mounts as she unites the clans of the maze-lands. Named Unna and Enna, they are the first of many, and Mpaden's people use their new mastery of longmeer to great advantage. In her middle age, Mpaden herself leads a band of raiders north, where they take treasures from the clans which once exiled her ancestors; but in the battle she is struck down by a stray spear. Her body is pinned to Unna's back, who bears her uncomplainingly home.

Her people prepare a great funeral for their founder, but Unna will not allow her body to be removed. When her father approaches, furious in grief, silver whip in hand, Mpaden's lifeless body raises an arm to take it from him - and Unna and Enna trot off into the night.

The Moon-Seeker remains a rider in the night. She becomes a legend among the longmeer-people, who are named the Denni. In moonlight she can be seen roaming the earth, always far from the road, but her eternal mounts' steps are sure. With a whip of silver hair she chastises poachers and despoilers, but a few claim to have met her in the wilderness and been invited to ride beside her on Enna. These few invariably return changed, gifted with the tongues of beasts.

Advance Civilization: 5 pts

In the next hundred years, the Denni set themselves apart not only as raiders of the jungle-peoples but as consummate scouts and survivors on meerback. They forge new trade routes on the continent they learn to call Akhon, from the maze-lands and the southernmost peninsula to the Cursed Sea. In time they come to regard themselves as separate from island- and tree-borne humanity; they are generally shorter and squatter, with their close bonds with the longmeer, practice of self-flagellation and blood baptism, and skill with necromancy setting them apart.

Siarruk turn 6: 3 (remaining) + 2 (non-hoarding bonus) + 5 (roll) = 10 points

Siarruk busies herself in secret conversation with Kirrik, and exchanges secrets of the earth from which her body was formed. With 3 points from Kirrik and 3 of her own, she uses Shape Land x2 (6) to raise a sunken continent-in-potentia from the southern oceans. Long stretches of cold earth are vitiated by powerful volcanism.

Habitable land now stretches further south in the so-called Risen Continent than anywhere else on Akhu, if "habitable" applies here. The islands here are home to hardy breeds: deep-diving sea-cattle, parasitic water-worms that live in long senescence between hosts, species of birds that cross the seas in search of tundra lichens, and more. Cold mountains and inland ice sheets touch the warmer land around volcanic hotspots; opportunity for those who can find it. Minerals and chemicals found nowhere else develop in the harsh conditions; the western cliffs glow with strange stone lights.

A grand volcano, called Metanokh, rises higher than any other mountain in the island range, ever-active and pulsing with cthonic might. This land is one unfinished; its potential remains, the volcanoes shifting and land rising and falling. (Kirrik reserves the right to make finishes and changes to the layout of the archipelago.)

Turning her mind to the air over the earth, Siarruk makes two shifts in its paths.

Shape Climate x2 (4): First, she raises a great wind in the west of the southern continent. The long desert coast whips up into year-round dust storms, carving valleys into the sand that shift day by day. Rich aeolian dust blows out over the ocean, settling on faraway shores. Siarruk herself guides the winds with a careful hand; mystics and death-workers who visit the desert claim that the voices of the dead can be heard in each storm, lifting spirits up to the moon's path.

Second, she brings down rains in the north of the new archipelago. Westerly winds are caught by the moisture of warm, volcanic oceans; air escaping the islands is drawn back south again into unpredictable vortex downpours. The rain nurtures a huge kelp forest which grows even above the surface of the water, snaring boats and feeding foragers.

A kingly hoard of dust and rock once collected in the eternal tread of the world-shaper Kirrik. When this hoard, which is called Akhu, was struck out of its path by the hand of the heavens, vast swathes of matter were cast out into the abyss. This was the bride-price of the world. But there is a realm for those who pass beyond, and the court of the King Irradiant receives the grave goods of mortals; why not also of worlds?

So, for time unnumbered (rocks do not keep time), the impact-spoor drifted idly among the stars. In the course of centuries the dust of Akhu recollected itself; with every passage through the far side of the sky and every hand that traded it among the court of stars, it remembered, and drew closer together.

Siarruk, who will be called Abhorrer of the Straight Path, Peregrine Sister, Mistress of Ablutions, Many-Faced Coin, Blessed Returner, and more, was born from this remembrance. In a flash, she clothed herself in the accreted moon-treasure, and when next she passed out of the harsh light of the sun she stole out of the court of the dead, whispering falsehoods to the passing spirits and making long the ways of her watchers. She hid for six months in the space behind Akhu before the King Irradiant discovered her disappearance; what words passed between them none can say, but she kept the secrets of His realm, and now she dances among the paths of the sky, guiding the dead to him on infinite roads.