Animus Ex Nihilo - A God Quest

Your deal with the Harsh Mountain still fresh, you resolved to get to your part of it with urgency and vigour. It would not do if the other spirit thought you were dallying, lest they regrated making this offer in the first place. Thus, you found yourself mostly in the mountains for a good few seasons, giving blessings of health to all and even more to those who prayed to you under the directions of your shamans, focusing your efforts on the dying and their kin. Here in the mountains, they still brought the dead to the wilderness and while you had never sensed the Devourer coming for these bodies, the lingering undead certainly did. It filled you with a deep revulsion to see this constant desecration. Either the ravens and wolves would tear the bodies of the dead apart, or the unliving would come and raise them as one of their own. Unfortunately, the old rites were hard to break, especially with no river available to carry the dead to the sea. Your blessings did reach a few people and while few yet saw the sense in giving the ashes into your care, they at least began to cremate more of their dead. It would like take much more effort to spread your burial rites into the Mountain Village, let alone the small and even more remote mining village.

The remaining village that Harsh Mountain had his followers found was nestled into a deep valley in the high mountains, where even the mountain spirits control was light at best. In the summer, they were trading the material that had given Silver Cliff its name with the Mountain Village, but in winter, they were cut off entirely from the world. Then they survived on what they had stored away in the fall, and the milk and meat of the goats and oxen they kept. Here, your burial rites were the most ill-fitting, as the only brooks that existed in the valley at all ended in a lake, not the sea, yet here it was that you had the most success with your efforts. In the harsh cold of the deep winter, the few shamans of yours that had come to the village had taken to caring for the sick and the dying as much as they could. Oddly enough, their teachings were greeted with open arms.

The people there had a wisdom that burying the dead in the wrong fashion would risk to turn the dead into unliving that would then lurk in the lake and brooks to turn the water into poison or drag the unwary into the water. Like most of the Mountain People, they tended to bring their dead onto the mountain tops in the summer, but in winter, the mountains were so full of snow that they could barely leave the deepest parts of the valley, let alone bring the dead to the high slopes. Instead, they had taken to burning them in a special oven and to then scatter the ashes on the mountains in the spring. Your shamans immediately made a connection to you, though they were not certain if you would be so vengeful as to poison the waters if your rites were not followed. None the less, you rapidly gained worshippers in Silver Cliff and there was even talk about having the oven that burned the dead sanctified by your shamans in the future.


Your efforts to heal the people of the Mountain Village on the other hand were much more successful. As Harsh Mountain had hinted at, his people were commonly beset by a wasting disease that laid them low with bowel cramps and then had them wither away. Even though the frequency with which it happened was strange, the sickness itself was easy enough to cure and the rituals that asked for your assistance spread nearly as fast as the disease itself. Soon enough, a small shrine had been build near the lake of the Mountain Village and the people came regularly, making offerings of food and herbs, but also carved figurines of fish, boats and what they assumed your physical form to look like. The shamans were quite pleased with these offerings and quite a few of them were brough back to the shrine of the Bay Village as decorations. It helped that the Walking Mountain had begun on its task and while the path it had carved had only reached to the Forest Villages so far, it still helped the trade between the Sea People and the Mountain People immensely.


But while you tended to the living of the mountains, you also kept a close watch to the unliving. Unlike the last time that you hunted them, they were easy to find as long as you took the time to cast out your senses. Without the Devourer directing them, they wandered aimlessly through the mountains. Sometimes they gathered to larger groups, or formed them when they managed to overwhelm an unwary group of travellers, but by and large they were no great danger to the villages. Yet. If left unchecked, their number would grow and so you hunted them whenever you could and wherever you could find them. You snuffed them out with the lightest movement of your power and each time you did, it became a little bit easier, a little bit more routine. Soon enough, you barely had to pay attention to it anymore. You simply flew over the mountains and tried to sense them and every speck of the power of death you found, you ripped straight from their rotting husks. A few seasons later, they were all gone. A few would emerge now and then from the Blighted Lands, the lifeless hills of dirt where once a village stood, but they preferred to stay within the area that resonated with their nature instead of venturing out and tormenting the living, leaving the mountains safe once more.


For now, at least. The thought came to you time and time again as you cleansed the land from the unliving. They could return. The Devourer could just make more. Or it could think up another trick, another way of attack. When you had killed the bird made from carrion, what had you truly won? Skerhogis was still out there, likely feasting on the bodies of some unwary people where your protection was not reaching. How much longer until the next attack? Would you be ready to repel the next one too? The people had prayed for you to fight the beast almost from the day it had shown itself to you and so far, you had done little to do so. Were you strong enough to take it on? Your control over the dead had improved by leaps and bounds. And yet. There was this sliver of doubt that it was still not enough. That the beast had grown in power too and you were still to weak to put an end to it. But you had allies and it was alone.

Before you had made a conscious choice about the matter, you had already begun to gather the creatures of the ocean in your reef and to grant slivers of your power to them. It was not much, but maybe it would be enough to tip things in your favour in a crucial moment. You had to find its lair at least. See where the monster was hiding and plotting in between your encounters. To the north you swam through the waters, making sure your presence was concealed in the waters as you moved, casting out your own senses to feel for Skerhogis' essence. You still remember the vision you had received so many lifetimes ago of islands, but you were also certain that they had been close to the land and so you staid close to the shore, waiting for the land to split apart. For a while, there was nothing but normal coast and when you peeked out of the waters, you saw only sparse forests and reindeer filled grasslands. On the sea though, you began to feel a cold creeping over the water and sure enough, entire mountains of ice could be found drifting further out in the sea. The stench of the Devourers mastery of death was absent from them, but there was no question that these were his work. The ice brimmed with power that kept it cold and solid even though the summer sun was beating on it. Was this another attack or just Skerhogis' way of defending its home? You did not intend to tip the creature off that you were approaching and so you took your distance from the ice again, swimming northwards where you could spot more of them on the horizon.

When you reached them though, it became clear that they were not floating blocks of ice. Once this place must have been a set of islands, so close to the western coast that you might have been able to walk to them during low tide. Curiously enough, there was also land to the east, stretching into the distance. Now though, these islands were covered in jagged spikes of ice, which ranged in colour from a clear white to a deep blue that was almost black. Some of them curved oddly like the ribs of a titanic best, others just slabs of ice strewn around with no clear purpose. Of the islands themselves, nearly nothing was still visible, except for a few spots of blackened earth in between the ice. The raw potential bound in all this ice was staggering and you grimly wondered how the Devourer had gathered it all. On its purpose you could only wonder, and yet you coveted it immediately, the essence of death in you calling to the self-same power bound in this place. Another part of you was sickened by it though, the sea around you seeming sluggish and hostile as the essences of ice and death crowded out the sea that usually resonated with your mere presence. It was like the reef, you slowly realized. A place where the Devourer could gather strength and where its control was amplified, while everyone daring to approach it would be weakened. Not a lair, but a stronghold.

How do you proceed?

[] Leave. It is too risky to attack Skerhogis where they prepared the ground for battle.

[] Gather your allies and draw out the Devourer to kill it.
-[] Walking Mountain (slow, landbound)
-[] Sky Child
-[] Hegnevus the Boat Guider unavaible; would be unable to fight in hostile environment

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AN: Well, you found out what the Devourer has been up to in its spare time.