Deities from myriad pantheons - the youthful and wizened alike - gather in celestial glades amid the boughs of the Amaranthalor. Tensions and allegations swirl as they debate which existential threats to confront next.
The oak-carved celestial doors groan wide as a frenzied disturbance whirls through - laughter like coyotes baying at the moon preceding the arrival of the primordial Trickster himself. Coyote's shaggy coat is crusted with the reddened soils and strange ichors of realms far-flung.
"Ah-huhuhu! Well now, if it is not this council of thou mightiest gods and manitos - called to ponder which speck of hunger next deserves thy grand attention!" The canid spirit's glinting eyes take in the deities' stony faces, wrinkling his muzzle in a vulpine grin.
Undeterred by their stony disdain, Coyote paces before the assembled daises on agile haunches, sweeping his forelimbs expansively.
"Listen here, all you who dwell above the Up-There! While thy debaters have chewed the same old bones, a ravenous new flame rages across the Down-Below realms like wildfire!"
He punctuates each word with increasing urgency and widening desperation.
"It has a name that scorches the very tongue - Novapura, the devouring flame that consumes ALL before it! This flame's great hunger cannot be sated, for it feasts upon the very forests, rivers, and even gods themselves!"
Dropping to all fours, Coyote howls an anguished, wavering cry - like the death-knell of a million silenced living beings.
"Its red road winds ever westward from the sunrise lands, leaving only husks and ashen shadows in its burning path! Your two-legged children's industries have slaughtered whole pantheons of our kin, oh Manitos! My own living, breathing bloodline--"
The ethereal silence is pierced by the booming impact of a haughty god's scepter striking Coyote's brow. The trickster's form ripples, momentarily destabilizing.
"Lies, as expected from thee, thou wretched Coyote!" Disdain drips from their pronouncement. "Thou weaves only chaos and delusions to vex us all. If any such calamity had..."
The grand doors yawn open once more, funereal smoke wafting in from parts unknown on cosmic zephyrs. Smothering the tail-end of the judgment with its charnel reek of genocide and ley-line offal. Those few young gods less paralyzed by arrogance trade uneasy looks.
The primordial spirit of the living wild knows when its warnings, however cloaked in paradox and jests, will be heeded - or ruthlessly ignored until far too late.
The gathered pantheons continue their heated deliberations, voices raised in rhetoric and accusation over which existential threat most endangers the cosmic balance. Their rancor is so pervasive that the mystic wellspring providing sustenance to even their immortal forms grows increasingly tainted.
From the hallowed Amaranth at the celestial glade's primordial center, hairline fractures spread across its mountainous bole. Like a sickness metastasizing through an infected body, the once vibrant, light-drinking arteries sludge with increasingly brackish ichor.
One by one, the radiant fruits gestating new godling essences wither with mournful finality along the lower boughs. Pale husks hang drained of sacred luminance as threads of decay steadily creep skyward amid the pantheons' heedless squabbling.
It is only when one of the tree's thickest, primeval limbs convulses like a massive coronary - splattering the gathered immortals with foul, corpsely runoff - that the council chambers fall unnaturally silent. Their petty conflicts momentarily set aside by the ominous implication.
From the echoing stillness, a lone figure strides forth - embers of rage bleeding from their eyes. It is the proud, implacable visage of Changing Woman, the venerated Navajo spirit of fertility, transcendence, and the uncompromising natural order.
Ichor spatters at her feet with each solemn step, leaving a trail of smoking crimson stains in her wake as she glares up at the Amaranth's grievous wounding. Her anguished roar shakes the celestial pillars with its righteous fury:
"Are you BLIND in your preening arrogance as the wellspring of all our divine bloodlines poisons to the root?! While you barter threats and revel in old slights, your precious child-beings commit ecocide most profane!"
More decay sloughs off in fetid, wet chunks as Changing Woman whirls to face the assembled immortals - her visions of Novapura's path of destruction seared into their minds with each harrowing word:
"Your Novapura crushes sacred groves beneath its insatiable mills! It chokes once wild rivers with the toxic slag of its industries! And in its infinite self-regard, it murders any spirit or god of this living Earth who dares stand against its reckless consumption!"
One last damning pronouncement rains down upon the stunned deities - a thunder-crack of desecrated truth they have no choice but to finally bear Witness:
"You have granted it power to unravel all we are, to consume its own creators - unless you who are sworn to uphold Balance itself can find the humility and resolve to help strangle this monster's birth!"
With those words, Changing Woman's smoldering form turns away, leaving the remainder of the Amaranth's amniotic boughs to steadily blight under the assembled powers' derelict gaze. The first peal of thunder from a realmshattering storm they yet refuse to heed.
