Like others, I've been revisiting the cold open and the Dazharhaz retelling of how the Blooming came to be in Kahad. How Azgra's last war priest demands a blessing for the Conquerer during the orcish ritual honoring the dead, intending a cruel trap, and druid Agari Shadow replies: nothing could be easier. The blessing she gives is clever and factual - it honors things about Azgra that led to his fall, transforming what could have been forced worship into a moment of empowerment - but underneath that, it strikes me that Azgra's war priest simply does not understand the Old Path at all, and this is part of why nothing could be easier, and why his insult is so ineffectual. The Old Path honors the process of death as part of life, and as something that naturally happens - or should happen - to everyone: flesh becomes soil becomes life again. A god's body may decompose just as well as any other.
And to me, that is the source of the Blooming. Not Azgra's will or a final boon, or the moral significance of the druids giving him last rites, but the transformation of his power into something new, channeled through the Old Path's understanding of the bigger picture, bigger than any deed, any person, any oppressor, any god: the system of life and death and renewal of which everything is part. So yes, nothing could be easier: these last rites are a fundamental recognition that Azgra is mortal, and dead, and like all dead things, will be transformed in the cycles of the larger cosmos. Yes of course, we can add Azgra's corpse to the mulch and let the fact of his death fuel a better world. Nothing could be easier.
I don't think that the orcs repeating that particular blessing each year on Dazharhaz has any functional magical purpose to maintaining the barrowdell. I think the original was enough: the druidic magic of Agari blessing the Conquerer in that Farramh simply insta-composted his rancid power on the spot into an enormous amount of the best arcane fertilizer the land could have, and repeating the blessing each year is a just an affirmation of Azgra's failure, of the victorious resilience of the people he once tormented, and of the fact that the world was and is and will always be bigger than him or any Shaper.
