In the celestial realm, far beyond the mortal plane, lies a sacred grove known as The Amaranthalor, or Incubation Glade. This mystical place is where the essences of celestial beings are nurtured and grown until they are ready to take their physical form in the world below. The Glade is a place of pure wonder, filled with a soft, ethereal light that seems to emanate from the very air itself.
At the center of the Glade stands the Celestial Tree, a towering, majestic entity that serves as the focal point of the incubation process. Its branches stretch out in every direction, each one bearing countless celestial fruits that pulse with the life essences of the beings within.
As Aeliana and Thornrick's essences arrive in the Incubation Glade, they are greeted by the sight of countless other celestial beings in various stages of gestation. Some hang like ripe fruit from the branches of the Celestial Tree, their essences glowing softly within translucent, pod-like structures. Others float freely through the air, their forms shimmering and shifting as they continue to grow and develop.
The deity presiding over the Incubation Glade is none other than Heket, the Egyptian goddess of fertility and childbirth. She is a powerful and ancient being, revered for her ability to breathe life into the celestial essences that come under her care.
As Heket approaches the newly arrived essences of Aeliana and Thornrick, her eyes widen in surprise. She immediately senses that something is different about these two, and as she examines them more closely, she realizes that they are not like the other celestial beings in her charge.
"Twins," Heket murmurs, her voice tinged with a mixture of wonder and disapproval. "How strange to see two essences so closely entwined. And what's this? A touch of humanity within their celestial cores?"
Her face twists into a scowl as she contemplates the implications of this discovery. "What depraved celestial would dare to mingle their essence with that of a mortal?" she spits, her words dripping with disdain. "Have they no respect for the purity of our kind?"
Despite her misgivings, Heket knows that it is her duty to nurture and care for all celestial essences that come under her charge, regardless of their origins. With a wave of her hand, she directs Aeliana and Thornrick's essences towards a pair of empty pods hanging from a sturdy branch of the Celestial Tree.
As the essences settle into their pods, Heket can't help but feel a sense of unease. She knows that these twin celestials, with their human heritage, will face challenges and prejudices that their pure-blooded kin will never know. And yet, she senses a strength and resilience within them that gives her hope for their future.
"Grow strong, little ones," she whispers, her voice softening as she watches the pods begin to glow with the light of the growing essences within. "For the path ahead of you will be fraught with trials and tribulations. But know that you have the power within you to overcome any obstacle, to forge your own destiny in the face of adversity."
As Heket tends to the other celestial essences in the Glade, she keeps a watchful eye on Aeliana and Thornrick's pods, marveling at the speed and vitality of their growth. She knows that they will be ready to take their physical form far sooner than any of the other beings in her charge, and she can only wonder at the incredible destiny that awaits them in the mortal world below.
In the centermost glade surrounding the Amaranthalor's monumentally-thick bole, midwife Heket keeps her patient, eons-long vigil. Her fertility rituals coax forth bud after bud of feycotton softness, each one cradling the embryonic spark of a new psychic essence.
One bud in particular shudders and darkens as it engorges, leeching the vibrancy of the surrounding blooms. Its surface corrupts to a mottled, diseased purple as it rapidly achieves unnatural dimensions - easily thrice the size of the others.
With a grotesque tearing, the bud bursts like a gravid pustule, the petals peeling back in ragged, fleshy strips. A rancid, sweetly septic reek saturates the air. At the epicenter lies a throbbing, wet mass of tendrils and protruding obsidian shards like fangs.
The hideous tangle convulses, the shards grinding together as it slowly coagulates and resolves into a vaguely humanoid shape. First a clawed, distended abdomen, then knots of pulsing viscera twisting upwards into a torso and skull-like visage. finally, emaciated limbs tipped with talon-nails complete the horrific metamorphosis.
The newborn godling unleashes a deafening, drawn-out shriek - the howling birth-cry of a cosmic parasite clawing free of the womb that carried it. Its multiple maws rasp and gnash in a sickening chorus as pinprick crimson eyes flicker open, starving already.
Heket cringes back, her usual beatific presence overwhelmed by shocked revulsion. She forces her gaze towards the blighted creation, croaking an enchantment to imbue it with form and intellect.
"Foul, twisted seedling..." she intones, tendrils of power wrapping around the hunger-god's tormented psyche. "By what perversity of existence did you come to infest my beloved Amaranthalor's hallowed garden?"
"I am Marrengath," it answers in a rasping multitude of voices. "The obliterating Maw. The Endless Famine. I have no origin but the negation at the end of all things, when all matter ceases eternal consumption..."
The godling fixes Heket with its swarm of scarlet pinholes, thousands of dusky mouths opening and closing in never-ending hunger pangs.
"...and I have come to eat the universe alive."
As the malformed godling's gnashing chorus of hunger reverberates through the blighted glade, Heket recoils in horror. Maternal instinct warping to primal revulsion, she knows this abhorrent seedling cannot be allowed to infest her sacred nursery arboretum any longer.
Twisting the strands of life-giving energy she previously channeled, Heket weaves a searing counterweave of banishing emerald fire. It courses over her form in scintillating, coruscating arcs as she fixes Marrengath in her baleful stare.
"Rakhkarta phulaktera ZIL NOQOD!" The frog-headed goddess bellows the eldritch syllables in an ear-splitting croak, spraying virulent green flame from her serrated maw.
The incandescent deluge washes over the deformed godling, seeming to scour and disintegrate its layers of flayed, distended flesh. Hunks of smoldering necrotic matter slough off in dripping sheets, exposing the pulsating, tumor-pocked form beneath. Marrengath convulses in their midst, unleashing a deafening psychic shriek across all frequencies of existence.
Yet the unholy mass of innumerable panged maws and grasping tendrils endures the exorcism, Heket's birthing magicks now twisted to unmake her own profane creation. Its baleful, pinprick eyes lock with hers in a sick parody of newborn imprinting.
"Foolish sow..." the twisted chorusing voices rasp in raucous unison. "Your petty magicks cannot...unmake...what has awoken!"
With a thunderous crack like a collapsing singularity, the verdant banishment flames implode in a rush of unbirth around the hunger-god's form. Where once smoldering, cauterized pieces sloughed off, now varicose mouths split open weeping black ichor. A dozen oozing stalks studded with teeth bulge forth in grotesque overcompensation from the being's malformed trunk.
"I have...always been!" it shrieks in ecstatic, agonized birthing throes. "The hollow need preceding all things! Watch as I eat away your pathetic paradise..."
Newborn from the celestial tumor draining the Amaranthalor's lifeblood, the scabrous bulk of Marrengath's ravenous forms gnashes and slobbers in a chilling facsimile of perverted birth. But before the hunger god's aberrant manifestation can fully coalesce, towering Izanagi strides forth across the defiled glade.
The Primordial Father clutches his fatefully forged Sword of Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, which in ages past purged the infernal Underworld. Its sublime edge burns with the fires of order and creation as Izanagi raises the legendary blade on high.
"Wretched hunger-skrith!" the founding deity's timeless voice thunders in rebuke. "Your fetid, siredan existence goes against all natural law and balance. Thou must be rent asunder and cast into outer nothingness before thy gnawing, gluttonous taint undoes the fabric of all I have wrought!"
So saying, Izanagi brings his ensorcelled blade down in an extinction blaze of cosmic power...
The blighted grounds of the Amaranthalor quake and split asunder as Izanagi brings the full, purging force of his Sword of Totsuka-no-Tsurugi down upon Marrengath's gnashing, scabrous bulk. The primordial blade's edge blazes with searing white annihilation as it cleanses the celestial glade of the hunger god's unnatural pestilence.
Marrengath unleashes a deafening psychic scream of agony and outrage as his innumerable, rasping maws and fetid stalks begin disintegrating under Izanagi's purging onslaught. Putrid sheets of diseased flesh slough off in smoldering heaps, stripping away each necrotic layer only to reveal another matryoshka doll's worth of blasphemous anatomy pulsating beneath.
"Thou art an obscene rift torn in the world-fabric!" the Primordial Father's thunderous rebuke echoes across realities, shaking the celestial branches. "A cancerous hunger that would consume all until the cosmos itself thirsts for oblivion!"
Smoke and embers of annihilated evil swirl in Izanagi's immense wake as he calmly advances, swinging the sublime edge in wide arcs to further sunder Marrengath's rapidly unraveling forms down to their obscene seed.
"For the sin of thy rapacious, gluttonous yearning to extinguish all of creation's celestial fires, I damn thee to Oblivion's Maw - a lightless, infinite void where even true emptiness offers no surcease from perpetual starvation!"
Unleashing one final extinction wave from his holy blade, Izanagi bids the last raveled, sub-molecular essence of the hunger abomination to unravel and scatter across the cosmogonic continuum. What few ululating screams and final blasphemies Marrengath can utter are forever silenced as his screeds and scraps are purged into interstitial states of absolute nothingness.
Where once the Amaranthalor's sanctity lay befouled by the obscene seedling of eternal gluttony, all that remains is the pyre-ashes of Izanagi's cleanbeats.Ritual smudging and cosmic renewal can finally commence.
