10-13-2025, 07:45 PM
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He enjoys seeing what they do, when they’re free.
(It’s not really freedom, of course – it’s a pretend sort of autonomy, ushering them through this awful jungle, bloated with life and crafted to take and take and take from them, in every way.)
They move and stumble through the jungle, and one by one, they are consumed. He watches as one of his beastly creations feasts on flesh, vines curl about their legs and lungs and heart, as the leather-winged bats swam pick at whatever they can find. He laughs a little as one is taken apart by ants, enjoying how even some of the smallest creatures in his kingdom can take down these horses he has foisted into this land. Another is consumed by the earth, then one by fire.
One way or another, they end up at the river. Or, their bones do.
He had been a skeleton king, once. Reanimated in his wasteland, a slow knit of bone back to bone after having lain in a facsimile of death for years. It had taken too long for his flesh to regenerate.
He, in his endless kindness, will not make them wait half as long. Skeletons can break too easy.
He appears to them, finally. He stands before them on the other side of the river. He is always a strange thing to behold – almost plain, seeming nothing more than a finely-made stallion the color of storm clouds, the only decoration to him two dark orbs embedded on his chest. But there is something - the way the world seems to bend around him, a creation recognizing its maker. A looming, almost gleeful portent in the wine-dark eyes.
“If you want to be whole again,” he says, his voice amplified, booming through the forest with its promise of restoration, “just swim to me.”
His gaze falls on the river, whose movement stops abruptly. The surface becomes flat, the only movement left the darting of fish and the slow sway of plants as, for the first time, they learn what it is to be still. It has gone from impassable to inviting, the new stillness showing a gentle slope of silt.
(Never mind that you can’t see the bottom.)
“That should do it,” he says, and he waits.
OOC:
Congratulations, you have unlocked one (1) river!
You can now cross to Carnage – so it seems. But as you swim, the river keeps continually expanding – you never seem to get closer to him, but if you try to turn back, the shore seems as far away as Carnage’s side, so you eventually get tired and sink (or start swimming down, or are dragged down – whatever). The good news is, you’re a skeleton so you can’t drown! Once you make it to the bottom, you can walk the bottom surface, and you are slowly ‘remade’ back into your old self from random river materials (e.g. plant weeds become your mane). Your horse can finish morphing from river material golem into their old self in this journey as much as or little as you want.
Once you’re ‘rebuilt’, you’re pulled down into the earth/into blackness. And you wake up in a small (stall sized ish) little prison cell, no long underwater, but no idea where you are. There’s also Carnage’s ‘brand’ (a design of your choice) carved somewhere on your body.
As a reward for making it this far and bringing me so much joy with your wonderful posts:
- If you like, part of the rebuilding process can leave your character with any 0 or 1 space appearance trait. This is genetic and expressed.
- As another part of the rebuilding process, if you would like any expressed or carried traits to be re-rolled for possible upgrade/downgrade/mutation, let me know in an OOC note in your post what you would like rolled.
Round IV will be up no earlier than October 22 around 7 PM CST. likely later, again. I love you all.
If you have any questions feel free to DM me here or on Discord
c a r n a g e