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yubishines) wrote2015-12-22 06:48 pm
yubishines) wrote2015-12-22 06:48 pm
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Instead of other writing, got to thinking about 13th Age and what I'd play if I didn't have Shrike. Wrote most of this inside my head while on a walk.
Demontouched are rare enough. How they come about is simple: Something comes out from the abyss or is called out deliberately, and it marries a mortal. Sometimes it stays long enough to raise its progeny. (When they do, they don't make terrible parents. Devils have a much better understanding of mortal nature than their counterparts.) Sometimes the genes stay dormant for generations, and then two apparently-mundane people wind up with a child who has embers for eyes and hooves that won't fit the shoes they got in the baby shower. That can get awkward to explain to friends and family.
Alternately, someone gets a little too close to a hellhole, spends a little too long immersed in the wrong kind of magic, and they -- or their future children -- are permanently altered. Chaotic irradiation is not well-understood and there haven't been many opportunities to study it in a controlled environment. Still, it happens.
Aasimar are rarer, and are created much the same way. Surprisingly, just as many of them grow up with their otherworldly parent sticking around as do tieflings. What throws the statistics off are the immaculate births, or the foundling "holy ones" left in village squares or on spinster's doorsteps. It's hard to know if these are also cases of parental abandonment, or if they were simply... willed into being by some higher force.
It's fortunate that they're generally born with an instilled sense of morality and rightness. Otherwise, the Dragon Empire would be, well, slightly more precarious than usual.
There is one exception to the above.
There is a temple on the hill.
Whatever god it was built in service to has been long forgotten. Weeds have grown in the cracks between the tiles; the roof has fallen in; birds make nests in the eaves which, depending on where you hail from, is either an omen of impending death or a sign of good fortune to come. The general depredations of time have weathered away at the iconography. Any scholar who stepped foot in the temple would have their work cut out for them to figure out just what was being worshipped here, and nobody larger than a badger has stepped foot in here for a very long time.
When the storm breaks, with the wind beating in what's left of the windows and stripping leaves off the trees that have grown up around the temple walls, it becomes evident that soon, nobody will step foot in there any more.
There is very little of value inside the temple. Any precious metal or ceremonial weaponry has long been carried off by light-fingered adventurers. There is a handful of trinkets, either too worthless or too cumbersome to be worth taking, but the most interesting remnant lies inside a casket in the basement. Wrapped in a dusty cloth, sealed in an ironwood box, are the bones of a saint.
While their name has been as forgotten as their god, one can reasonably assume that the saint had been a pretty ordinary person in life, someone who did the best they could the best they knew how, someone who tried to leave the world a better place than they found it. Whatever the truth, they are about to make one more impact on the world, as the following -- maybe, possibly -- would not have occurred without their mortal remains:
Lightning strikes the tree closest to the temple. Its branches smoke. The sap at the heart of the tree churns, bubbles, boils in an instant, and under the pressure, the trunk explodes.
Bereft of its support, the crown of the tree drops into what's left of the temple roof. This proves to be the final straw, and everything -- tree, roof, windows, floor tiles, abandoned birds' nests -- collapses into the basement and smashes onto the reliquary within. As the storm wears on, the clay soil of the hillside sloughs off into the exposed room, coating everything it touches in a clinging layer of grayish mud.
Time passes. The storm ends. The sun rises.
Then it sets, and rises again. This is not an act of deliberate Creation, to happen overnight with a visitation and a voice saying, "Fear not!" Things need to percolate. The fragmentary shreds of belief and scraps of magic that have seeped into the building foundations are doing their work.
On the third sunrise, at last, there is movement. First a hesitant rustling, and then something begins to dig itself out of the wreckage -- if not with superhuman strength, then with the infinite patience that can only come from something that was inanimate for hundreds of years.
Following some vague memory of personhood (mixed up with cluttered, clattering images of a foundation being poured, scaffolding being put up, paint being scraped over its bricks...), it extracts the cloth that wrapped the ironwood box from the wreckage and fastens it around its waist in a makeshift skirt. It'll do for now.
It is more or less humanoid, in that it has two arms that end in hands, two legs that it stands upright on, a head that swivels around and looks at its surroundings in curiosity. But even in poor light, it will not be mistaken for human. Most of it is covered in an off-white layer of clay threaded with seams of amber, but it's clear that its body is composed of everything that made up the temple: Stone, glass, ceramic, splinters of wood. Bones.
Most alarmingly, where its face should be is a smooth, egg-shaped cavity.
Its name is Ajar, or, The Sound of Wind Whistling Through A Door Left Ajar, and it has no fucking idea what it's doing here.
Demontouched are rare enough. How they come about is simple: Something comes out from the abyss or is called out deliberately, and it marries a mortal. Sometimes it stays long enough to raise its progeny. (When they do, they don't make terrible parents. Devils have a much better understanding of mortal nature than their counterparts.) Sometimes the genes stay dormant for generations, and then two apparently-mundane people wind up with a child who has embers for eyes and hooves that won't fit the shoes they got in the baby shower. That can get awkward to explain to friends and family.
Alternately, someone gets a little too close to a hellhole, spends a little too long immersed in the wrong kind of magic, and they -- or their future children -- are permanently altered. Chaotic irradiation is not well-understood and there haven't been many opportunities to study it in a controlled environment. Still, it happens.
Aasimar are rarer, and are created much the same way. Surprisingly, just as many of them grow up with their otherworldly parent sticking around as do tieflings. What throws the statistics off are the immaculate births, or the foundling "holy ones" left in village squares or on spinster's doorsteps. It's hard to know if these are also cases of parental abandonment, or if they were simply... willed into being by some higher force.
It's fortunate that they're generally born with an instilled sense of morality and rightness. Otherwise, the Dragon Empire would be, well, slightly more precarious than usual.
There is one exception to the above.
There is a temple on the hill.
Whatever god it was built in service to has been long forgotten. Weeds have grown in the cracks between the tiles; the roof has fallen in; birds make nests in the eaves which, depending on where you hail from, is either an omen of impending death or a sign of good fortune to come. The general depredations of time have weathered away at the iconography. Any scholar who stepped foot in the temple would have their work cut out for them to figure out just what was being worshipped here, and nobody larger than a badger has stepped foot in here for a very long time.
When the storm breaks, with the wind beating in what's left of the windows and stripping leaves off the trees that have grown up around the temple walls, it becomes evident that soon, nobody will step foot in there any more.
There is very little of value inside the temple. Any precious metal or ceremonial weaponry has long been carried off by light-fingered adventurers. There is a handful of trinkets, either too worthless or too cumbersome to be worth taking, but the most interesting remnant lies inside a casket in the basement. Wrapped in a dusty cloth, sealed in an ironwood box, are the bones of a saint.
While their name has been as forgotten as their god, one can reasonably assume that the saint had been a pretty ordinary person in life, someone who did the best they could the best they knew how, someone who tried to leave the world a better place than they found it. Whatever the truth, they are about to make one more impact on the world, as the following -- maybe, possibly -- would not have occurred without their mortal remains:
Lightning strikes the tree closest to the temple. Its branches smoke. The sap at the heart of the tree churns, bubbles, boils in an instant, and under the pressure, the trunk explodes.
Bereft of its support, the crown of the tree drops into what's left of the temple roof. This proves to be the final straw, and everything -- tree, roof, windows, floor tiles, abandoned birds' nests -- collapses into the basement and smashes onto the reliquary within. As the storm wears on, the clay soil of the hillside sloughs off into the exposed room, coating everything it touches in a clinging layer of grayish mud.
Time passes. The storm ends. The sun rises.
Then it sets, and rises again. This is not an act of deliberate Creation, to happen overnight with a visitation and a voice saying, "Fear not!" Things need to percolate. The fragmentary shreds of belief and scraps of magic that have seeped into the building foundations are doing their work.
On the third sunrise, at last, there is movement. First a hesitant rustling, and then something begins to dig itself out of the wreckage -- if not with superhuman strength, then with the infinite patience that can only come from something that was inanimate for hundreds of years.
Following some vague memory of personhood (mixed up with cluttered, clattering images of a foundation being poured, scaffolding being put up, paint being scraped over its bricks...), it extracts the cloth that wrapped the ironwood box from the wreckage and fastens it around its waist in a makeshift skirt. It'll do for now.
It is more or less humanoid, in that it has two arms that end in hands, two legs that it stands upright on, a head that swivels around and looks at its surroundings in curiosity. But even in poor light, it will not be mistaken for human. Most of it is covered in an off-white layer of clay threaded with seams of amber, but it's clear that its body is composed of everything that made up the temple: Stone, glass, ceramic, splinters of wood. Bones.
Most alarmingly, where its face should be is a smooth, egg-shaped cavity.
Its name is Ajar, or, The Sound of Wind Whistling Through A Door Left Ajar, and it has no fucking idea what it's doing here.