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They were the People before they took on the mark of the gray ash and paid homage to the silent place of still stone and dry air. People that had come to that ashen field fertile with the presence of death. There was quiet. black as the night sky and still shadows that pooled in the crevices of the stone.
Death was a specter that hid in the ash and dwelt in the bones laid out to rest in the quiet. Mothers came to weep for their children, fathers came to stand in solitude and sons and daughters came to stand together one last time with the memories of parents that had left them. They took the ash made of the countless dead stretching in a endless chain from the youngest babe taken away by cruel disease, the young man in the prime of their life struck down by the venom of a hideous serpent, to the oldest couple that died together in their sleep. The Dead's dreams melting away as their thoughts drifted from their bodies, leaving their hearts to slow and their brains to cool, as they were consumed by gentle darkness.
All, be they old or young, strong or weak, fit or obese, male or female, came to know the black oblivion that nestled in the fields of ash. And the People felt it as well, that shadow of time that comes to claim all and they went there to mark themselves with the ash and perform rituals of grieving. None knows who was the first to go the ashen place where the air was still and the sounds of the world grew dim and dull.
None know who was the first to rest their feet on the black earth cracked and broken like their hearts and feel a connection with the soil beneath their feet. Who felt in that bleak wind the touch of a loved one as they left the world of fire and storms, hard earth
, and liquid water for one of smooth shadows and velvet sleep.
No one knows who was the first to grab up the ash and paint themselves with it as they sat in the field and just thought. No raw outpouring of emotion, only a not so remorseful introspection of the turning of life and that time when the wheel must stop. That moment when limbs turn to stone and once bright eyes lose all luster.
Some slain by the insidious enemy within eating away at their vitality while another might have the red fluids of life, crimson and gleaming spill, out to water the dry earth as they were beaten and torn by brutal weapons. Death by the searing fire of a forest gone mad or the erosion of flesh that came with sickness that took root deep in the heart of their being. All deaths be they violent and bloody or peaceful and quiet came to gather here as one.
The shades of the dead blended together in the ash and when that first mourner marked themselves with scrawls of gray and drew random patterns with no true thought. Only a desire to make some kind of connection with what had passed. They found a comfort cold as their hearts had become in marking themselves with the ash.
Consolation in rubbing in the remains of destruction on their skin and for a time feeling like they could reach out and be a part of that distant place where the dead go. Solace in the feeling of the rough grains of ash touching their flesh and providing the illusion of contact with the dead. The scent of bone ground to dust by flame entering the nostrils and filling their lungs with the essence of death in its purest form. All blood and bone, meat and tendon, organs and nerves consumed by the roaring fire and reduced to the most primal form of matter after all is devoured and stripped away.
The matter that once symbolised the virtue of life in its full thriving glory is incinerated in a great snarling configuration. There is only the gray ash and once the first marks themselves with the dust of broken and shattered bones rent by flame, others will come and they in turn shall bring others until all the People come to perform rites and rituals
To connect with the dead through the medium of their ash.
Some begin to dance with no particular form or reason, their feet battering the black ground as their soles are burnt by the simmering heat that still resides in the fields of ash. They sing songs of sorrow and hymns of pain, terrible and grating on the first verse, that die down and still to quiet peace by the final note.
The People will come again and again to the Fields of Ash and there they will mark themselves with the soil. And then they shall dance and sing nonsense songs of wild grief that will drown the air with sadness as they purge themselves of pain. A presence will grow there as memories are stacked one by one as the building blocks for something greater than just the grief of one walling couple or stoic son.
A force that is infused into the ash and baked into the stone. It is death that grows here
, born of the imaginations of a thousand minds wild and mad with thoughts of what this place
means and what it represents to those that come here.
The People with each act of piety and studied observance have began to give rise to a new,
greater, force here than one just locked in their minds. A force of the black oblivion that has
power and
control over the world they live in.
A force that has sat silent and undisturbed
, till one day it make the decision not to slay and reap as Death can so easily do but reach out and instead reaffirms life by inspiring the People that come to paint upon their face a mask of age and old time. So that they may become one in truth with the feeling of decay and entropy that claims those they love.
The People perform the Rites
, guided by the Presence which now has
will and
intent and when next they come they give a name to this Presence. They declare with it's Ash that they are no longer the People. They were now named in honor of the Ash Fields.
Thus was born the Kut and the Force of Mind and Thought that would become their Black God of Ash.
