Razing Arberiss

 

The Flight

  "Gada Kiore," the Earth Mother calls, rage infusing her. Within a breath, a giant dragon appears over her, brown scales gleaming with earth's fire, green eyes reflecting the Mother's rage. She lands next to the woman, who is barely the size of her nose, and folds her wings. The Mother lifts her hand, curls her fingers, and a staff appears in her palm, one made from a gnarled tree branch topped by a nondescript chunk of basalt.   Gada Kiore bends down, and the Mother climbs her scales to sit where her neck meets her skull. The dragon rises, her wings flaring out, the wind they create ruffling the ashen ground below. She jumped into the air, then hovers.   The Mother raises the staff. A pulse of power erupts from the basalt, spanning the entirety of Arberiss. The melancholy bell atop the Bell Mound rings four times, a thunderous warning, a promise. Another pulse, and the magic infusing the demesnes shatter.   The divine have no defense against what is to come.   Ga Kiore flies to the west, the basalt trailing magic that falls like the heaviest rock to the ground. Everything it touches bursts apart, catches flame, collaspes, under the volcanic rage. Lava swallows buildings and forests and they burn, and rivers and lakes dry from the heat. The animals are sent to the twilight mists--but only the animals.   The deities themselves burn. They twist and shout and proclaim innocence, but their outer shells disintegrate, destroyed by their inner evilness, and their spirits fly to an Abyss to gather energy and reform. Their adherents watch as they fall apart, terrified, before the Mother returns them to Elthessera to tell their fellow followers that their deity fell to the wrath of the Creator.   All that remains is glowing lava that turns to black stone.  

 

The Recompense

  Gada Kiore turns north, and the Mother's rage coats the demesnes, following the same pattern. Then east, then south; no deity nor their home is safe, for the dragon flies with flames beneath her wings, as fast as lava erupts from a volcano.   Within moments, the bright, ethereal Arberiss, home to thousands of deities, becomes a smoking, blackened land. A brilliant bit of light here, there, is seen in the distance, but the punishment is allotted to nearly all sylfaodolon who have let vile thought and deed overrun their better natures.   On Elthessera, religious orders crumble as their congregations flee to the few deities who weathered the Mother's wrath and remained whole. There are too few, and the orders cannot absorb the influx of people. Adherents drift away, anchorless, uncertain how to feel, what to believe.   But the Earth Mother sees, and tells them that it is better to know the temperament of the sylfaodolon they follow, than to continue as if they were wholesome and good. She tells them the divine will reform a shell and return to them. Hopefully they rethink their deeds and their resentments, and choose a better path to tread.   Then, after reforming, they can return to their demesne and rebuild their glory anew.   If they fail to alter their paths, Arberiss will remain a lava-drenched land, unhealed, until they succeed.