#worldbuildt

[jellisdraws]

Revelation - The Final Chapter

And so the Wildlings come to the crux of their adventure. Four years in the making, hundreds of sessions later, the mystery unravels, the world is revealed.

The lifeblood of a god pools before you, spooling out the memories and knowledge of a cosmic scale.

Murin’s wound, the excised knowledge of the greatest civilization to grace Asterta’s long history spilling forth, moments of discovery and honing of fact and truth, of principles and physical laws, of the depths and breadths a mind can expand to, millions of moments of ingenuity, creativity, creation, solution and exploration, the limitless power of the mind and those capable of making their imaginings real, all play out in grand succession.

You see it all, revelation after revelation, each more dire than the last.

You watch the death of Rhiannon at the hands of Lolth and Khalishira, wielding the tools of Death Dealer, reconstitution an impossibility- her power and her corpse claimed by the final wastes.

You watch the conflagration of War between Noctuln and Solra spurred on by the death of the moon goddess. You see how no one was able to escape the conflict, no one emerged untouched.

You see balance returned at the hands of Resha, ending an age of devastating war.

You see redress in the creation of the Veil by the pantheon, the divine gate to keep Asterta, the material plane and her sister planes safe from the machinations of the divine and profane.

You see generation of heroes striking down, imprisoning and reforming the last ancient evils and righting wrongs. The growth of the Pantheon.

You see the veil, refracting and rebounding the ambient energy of Asterta, the birth of those linked indelibly to that power, the rise of the arcane.

You watch the rise of the super society of the Veilborn around the peoples of Asterta, the steady uplift of generations, the rise of the Septarchs, their pursuit of arcane mysteries the world had never conceived of.

You watch the Septarchs make advancements, make mistakes, make their choices, fight against the machinations of despots and demons. You watch them confront Death Dealer over the creation of the Heart. You see the moment their gaze turns outward.

You watch, with horrible irony the events that unfold next. The long years of theory crafting rituals of binding no being could break, of creating pocket dimensions to imprison the greatest foes they could scarcely conceive of. Of creating impenetrable and unyielding edifices of stone that could withstand not only damage but eons of time. You watch the rise of the portal network and the super highways and flying cities. You watch the Veilborn Scion grow ever more removed from the fervor of the Septarchs. The closing of his thoughts to the hive mind of the Veilborn, and their desire to uplift and protect the world and peoples that bore them.

All of the fragments of memories you have carried throughout your lives begin to fall into place. You watch as the ritual begins, Tulqar and her cadre enacting its final preparations, connecting Asterta to far reaches of the dark tapestry- to the final wastes beyond the Veil, beyond the divine realms of the gods.

You watch as a deity, dead and nearly forgotten, reformed into an nascent evil, indelibly linked to the fate of Asterta takes notice and is pulled, screaming into a reality that breaks by very contact with it. You watch the chains of energy lashing it, bending it, breaking it to the purpose of the Veilborn.

Proof of concept, Deus noblis servé.

You watch the arrival of the Veilborn Scion, Horon’s attack on the entity. The breaking of the ritual, the battle where he withered half of Tulqars body. The unleashing of terrible magics as the being broke its bindings and from it and the portal poured forth unknowable horrors not meant for this reality.

You watch their battle tear apart the city, and Horon’s eventual defeat of the entity. You watch the first confrontation of the Septarchs and their leader. You watch hubris clash with hubris. As the ripples of this betrayal radiated out across the Veilborn society, you watch the fury of the Veilborn against Horon be matched only by their determination to repeat the ritual.

You watch Horon’s one man war begin. Who could resist the Veilborn Scion of time? You watch the genocide. You watch the Septarchs failures, their plans, the desperation. You watch the sundering play out as the world fractured under the weight of this conflict.

You watch the fall of Throm Zar and the rise of the new god of death.

You watch the creation of the Septarchs final gambit, their final hope. The fracturing of their souls into new vessels, into aetherium cores meant to be placed into Warforged constructs. You watch each of the Septarchs divest themselves of their souls, and their deaths at the hands of Horon and the seven bonds. You watch Quarl gearturn, Veilborn Septarch of eternity, killed before he can finish his preparations in his labs benath the Telas basin. You watch Horon take pity on the trapped souls of his onetime friends… and abandon them to their prison.

You watch the world collapse, thousands of refugees, ancestral lands abandoned. War, famine, disease, the horrible aftershocks of the genocide of the Veilborn. You watch the rise of doomsday cults seeking an end at the hands of the great being who destroyed the greatest Veilborn city in a single night. You see them clamoring for their absent lord to bring an end to the suffering of a world.

You watch Horon approach the god of knowledge with an idea, to protect the world, to undo some of the damage, and to prevent the repetition of hubris. Excision. Horon would unname the Veilborn, cut their memory free from Murin and suture the wound, ensuring that none would ever know of their truth and ensure no one could follow in their footsteps and threaten the world with such devastation again. You watch Murin agree.

You watch a lone Veilborn man, possibly the last, starving, full of hate, find the resting place of a twice fallen god where it putrefied and was consumed by the worms and maggots of a far distant reality. You watch him eat the dead gods flesh. Hunger never ceasing, you watch him eat. And eat and eat, his hatred and the dead gods hatred becoming one. Hatred of the ones who bound it, hatred of the ones who caused this, hatred of the ones who killed it, hatred of all of existence. You watch as he becomes one with the carrion, one with the rot and worms. You see the formation of Wrglth Nhegal the worm hunger, as it delves deep into the depths unending to gestate and grow his swarm. No longer star spawn but core spawn. You watch as its attention turns outward just like that of the Septarchs it so despises.

An age forgotten, a people destroyed, a world shattered and rebuilt shattered again. A world in a new age of progress.

You watch every moment and decision that lead to you- The children of Telas falls, and Irdenspire to be burdened with a conflict and power and responsibility almost too great to fathom. This thing is so much bigger than all of you, and yet you are the fulcrum on which the world rests. You will decide the future and it will be on your shoulders which the consequences rest no matter how it plays out. It will be your responsibility to do whatever you think is right.

The god of knowledge lays before you, bleeding golden blood. What will you do?

[jellisdraws]

The Woven Knot Archive in the Heart of Avalis.

The Archive is one of the oldest and best preserved libraries on Caloran, primarily due to the vigilance of its protectors and the inscrutability of its contents. The archive is a massive accounting of history, including texts, inventories, geneologies, records, timelines, all timelessly preserved among the woven and knotted threads of Quipu.

(DM note on origins: Quipu- or Khipu- is an Incan/Mezo-American system of recording information involving different colored threads knotted in various ways. The form of record keeping has been discovered to have been used among several cultures that inhabited the Central Andes in South America. )

The concept is something that absolutely enamors me, and I really wanted to find a way to reflect it in one of the ancient cultures of my world. A nearly forgotten/lost way of knowing, overlooked in the great purges of knowledge during the Sundering.