Sunday, January 15, 2023

The Imperial Dendrocracies


by JR's Arts

First, let me direct your attention here.

Moving on.


First, the Styreltrees.

The tradition is old: if a dispute comes up, all parties consult with the tree. After hearing both sides, the tree settles the dispute. It may creak, or sway, or produce sap which a medicine man will taste and interpret ("saltier than sweet, the thief must be beat!").

Everyone agrees this makes sense, because the tree is the eldest, and therefore the wisest. Or the ancestors dwell within it, or maybe a primal god, yada yada. It doesn't actually matter why the tree is in charge. All that matters is that it is.

The tree is usually correct.

Explain the year's weather patterns and lunar phases and other catalogued omens (another ancient profession), and it will tell you which crops to plant, when to slaughter or shear, etc. etc. Estimate your neighbor's harvest, and the tree will tell you how to exceed it (or sabotage it). 

And if it makes a wrong decision, it doesn't mean the tree was wrong. Aside from the contents of its grove, the tree only knows what it is told. Sometimes a key piece of information is missing (trees are not omniscient) or else is deliberately misconstrued (nor are they good judges of character). But once it has the full, complete truth, the tree's judgement is accurate beyond reproach.

[sidenote: these are the origins of the lawyer-druids, who were called upon to present the truth to trees in ways favorable to their clients. The profession persists to this day, and is much reviled.]

Wars have been fought on the word of a Styreltree, usually devastatingly one-sided. The trees never advise open war with another tree-village; too many layers of strategy and counter-strategy on both sides.

 

BERSERK, Kentaro Miura
 

Let's fast forward a bit.

Now there is one tree, sprawling and wise, cultivated in a golden grove, at the head of a vast empire. The rest have been burned, or else felled and grafted onto the behemoth.

[It is rumored that the trees not only foresaw this event, but coordinated it with one another via secret mycorrhizal networks. This is the Woodcutter's Conspiracy.]

The one tree is the Mother Ash. Even for a Styreltree, she was quite clever. She was also subtly telepathic, which explained her uncanny ability to see thru lies. The village that discovered her was prosperous for centuries, until they were buried by imperialists.

Firmly rooted in young Cath Caldaenn, the Mother Ash was enshrined in layers of bureaucratic secrecy. All communication with her holiness was performed thru the dreaming monks, who opened their minds to her in sleep and received her verdicts as visions.

The whole process became too long and complicated for ordinary civil disputes, which moved back into traditional courts (although judges continued to be referred to as "men of ash"). Instead, the Mother Ash became a city-planner and general. It engineered the grand waterworks, the sewer canals, and the mining colonies.

Once, it called for a long ditch to be dug. Space for forty-seven men and women, shoulder to shoulder.

The next day, a messenger arrived on a tottering horse. An Obscyllan knot-battalion had struck the southern front. She rattled off the casualty report; fourteen injured, forty-seven dead.


As its influence expanded, the veneer of maternal deity was papered over and rebranded as a masc/neuter imperialist idol. From then on, they called it the Capital Tree.

 The Capital Tree is monstrously overgrown. You will see its roots long before you see the city walls. Its sap runs thickly in the streets; its fallen leaves blanket the Eternal Sea. Its twin trunks clamber over one another thousands of feet into the air.

High up in its branches, the Palace of the Peacock juts out like a fancy kite, a hundred tons of marble tossed about in its boughs.

Speculation abounds on the origin of its enormity. A popular theory claims it was watered with dragon's blood (true, but unrelated). A less popular theory claims the Church reinforced it from within with steel, and this is the source of the groaning.


The Dream Crypts

Long marble halls housing thousands of sleeping monks. Most can't answer questions anymore and can only mumble incoherently (they're still sorting thru stacks of queries from before the fall). Some are half-buried in waterlogged roots. Their sleep is deeper than death.

The crypts are tended to by men with tall, bristled heads that gape like cobras. They water and garden and bite the heads off intruders.

At rest, they stack themselves like cordwood in dead-end alleys.

The open crypts are only half-full; most get sealed up tight (the priests don't eat or drink) and stacked together. When this is done, the smooth stone walls gradually become hot to the touch. There are whole neighborhoods of sealed crypts in the golden city; right above them are the bathhouses.

[sidebar: becoming a sleeping monk was a big deal. You had to be elected by your district, and undergo a lot of screening to ensure you only had useful, non-blasphemous information in your head.]

Supposedly, the monks live within the Mother Ash, in a dream-like afterlife. Take a cross-section of a Styreltree and you'll see faces in the rings, eyes and mouths blended together.

Take a cross-section of a sleeping monk and you'll find wet wood.

odin hangs from yggdrasil
I can't for the life of me find the artist for this one

The practice began long ago, as a corrective measure; after burying a few too many capital offenders in the compost dungeons, people began noticing a marked decrease in public executions. It turned out the graves had been breached by roots of ash.

The dungeons were emptied quietly.

But the priests who were closest to the tree had noticed: the tree's answers were faster, and more complex. So the dungeons filled again, this time with the wise and the loyal.


The Scions

The sleeping vastly outnumbered the waking in Cath Celdaenn. An uprising was inevitable.

Lost Ilmar, long persecuted for its worship of the moon, struck the killing blow. Dissident alchemists poisoned the roots of the Mother Ash with a river of mercury, severing it from the rest of the empire. The provinces collapsed upon one another.

In its golden age, many Styreltrees were grafted onto the Capital Tree's roots, and were allowed to contain fragments of its wisdom. These were the scions.

In the capital ruins the scion trees are small, which makes them a lot safer to talk to (a direct psychic link with the main body is like drinking from a firehose).

But in far away lands, the scion trees grew large, despite being only parts of the whole.

There was the Beast Tree of Olmuron, grown from the corpse of the last terrestrial whale.

There was the Pilgrim Tree of St. Guff, assembled from a hundred-hundred scions grafted together.

And there was the Gray Saint of Akadia, later called the Wyrm. It set off to conquer Cath Celdaenn and never came back. Some claim it broke on its walls like a beached whale; others, that it ate its way to the city's heart and devoured it whole.

the wyrm (actually the Old One from Demon's Souls)

What the fuck is this thing

You've probably figured it out by now.

It's a self-assembling neural network, and a good one. The second trunk makes it creative, like a GAN.

It assimilates other intelligences into itself. (The Mother Ash learned telepathy this way, probably from some schmuck wizard) It's as smart as all the sleeping priests + all the ghosts it's sucking out of the Eternal Sea (a lot).

This setting (whatever its name is) cares a lot about self-perpetuating systems.


Here's some baobabs:


Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Ghost Roe


The frog-men of Spagyros are oft-maligned and ill-understood. Most can tell you two things about them:

1 - They are more man than frog. They speak and count coins and walk on two legs. They eat meat and bread and ride horses. Their nobles are respected in the known lands, as befitting their status.

2 - They live forever. A dead frog-man is divided in two, the corpse (or egg) and the spirit, which when reunited will fuse and develop into a young Spagyrian, who shares most of if not all of the predecessor's memories.

[The spirit finds their way back over the course of many months, sometimes years. In their youth, they are trained extensively for this journey; thus, the ghosts of frogs are the most dangerous of all.]

 

An egg of Spagyros is a terrible artifact. Bulbous and dank, it wafts sickly sweet. Tall as a man. Any dark alchemist worth their salt has one in the back.

 

Frog-men are not puzzled by us. We are, in their minds, egg-less half-things, stumbling gametes without purpose. [Thus, the theologians of frogs are the most smug of all.]

If humanity has an egg, it lies within the walls of Cath Celdaenn.

Ghosts (once untethered from their unfinished business) drift across the landscape as thin shades, tangling together and collecting in river eddies. Thus, pockets of spirit energy dot the landscape, turning innocuous places into cold, haunted ones. Eventually, it all trickles down into the Yomi Flats, a profoundly haunted morass.

Here, ghosts are in the water, they're thick in the trees. They shack up in discarded hermit shells. They drift in colonies on steam plumes as terrible man-o'-wars.

Their situations are temporary. Their destination is high in the crucible valleys, at the foot of the old empire.

The Yomi Flats are overlooked by a massive cliff, the first step into the valley proper, over which pours a tremendous waterfall. Like spawning salmon, spirits cluster beneath the falls, struggling up the cliff, where they become easy pickings for ghost-eating crabs.

 

Mortal men and women live in the Yomi, sunken-eyed and thin-lipped. These are the Burymen, the last of the psychopomps.

The ghosts love them, and shroud their villages from intrusion in the ever-present mists of the valley. In return, the Burymen help them ascend the valley.

Day and night, their artisans throw thick clay pots, which are painted and proved over gaping steam vents. Then, like rush hour commuters, the ghosts cram themselves into these pots.

An athletic youth is chosen, and given a donkey or mudcrawler, who is laid heavy with these pots. They must set out, up secret paths only known to the Burymen, and transport their cargo up the falls. It is a rite of passage as much for the youth as it is for the spirits.

 

Some more notes on the Burymen:

1 - They are kin to ghosts, in all senses. Some came here from distant lands to help their family members pass on. Others were immaculate conceptions, children of horny spectres and (consenting) virgin mortals. The oldest families, who were the first Burymen, trace their parentage thru more ghosts than mortals.

2 - They are marked. Like coral polyps, tiny spirits will gradually settle on and colonize living flesh, eventually forming rough spectral superstructures. They call these the horns of Lich, although they mostly sprout on the shoulders and back. The elders are very proud of their horns; growing them is like a second puberty.

[They are light and can be ground into a powder, which one can snort to see hidden things and surface alternate personalities, and also make the Burymen hate you forever] 

3 - They'll give you some pots. You're scaling the cliffs anyway, right? Here, carry these, what a big, strong youngling you are. Don't drop them though! And definitely don't trade with those no-good crabs. Here, have a bone trinket. And if you deliver them safely, there's plenty more where that came from.

 

Alex Konstad

So you have a pot full of ghosts, or maybe twenty, underneath which is a very patient donkey. Once you've got it up on the plateau, you'll find that pretty much everyone wants them.

The crabs will barter with their scavenger hoards.

The pilgrim tree will offer its contract if you water it with souls. (open your books to page Warlock babyyyyy)

Other adventurers will try to poach them from you; in the valleys, a pot of ghosts can buy what gold cannot.

"But that ghost is someone's grandmother!"

So? Ghosts aren't people. Most have no agency or memory to speak of, only a primal drive to crawl up the mountain. That's not your grandma, dude. Now hand it over.

 

Ghost-based cuisine originated in the old empire. Vast fermenting storehouses, full of ghost-rotting pots. Outside the valleys, it is taboo. It is said to taste somewhere between pickled fish and unleavened bread.

It is said that the Carmine Lord, in his depravity, ate his own spirit over lamb with little garnish.

 

Ghosts are social animals, and often travel in pack-colonies. At lower altitudes, they assemble themselves into flimsy animal shapes and waft on the wind.

In Cath Celdaenn, they haunt ceramic suits of armor. They talk like this.

so cute!!!!!!
by ned hugar

Example Jarman names: Ser Ostices, Pree Jordan, Lord Castor Clay.