The Etra Anthology

29th of Gnielm, 334 EA

Peyr Myarsa, Illiara

Daakar moved beneath the swamp, and in their wake the earth swallowed up the petty humans above.

It was retributive, really, sating hunger to overlay their loss. The one who had learned the Aether’s word had gotten away, fled and abjured them as though they were not god here. The rest of these, the conservators, they were nothing. Fodder that had grown too proud, and so would be dragged out of the air they so preciously craved.

Daakar retreated in turn, deeper and deeper still beneath the heaving ground, leaving the parts of themselves that were the mephits to cavalcade over the stragglers. They would drown them, pull them down, break their bodies and promise to tear their profane city apart.

And still, that they had let that one slip through their fingers, it vexed them greatly. That creature was theirs to hold, theirs to drown. It was foul to them, to have lost even one.

They descended to an bygone place, a place that had once been their prison and had now become their domain, Old Myarsa. It was all sunken beneath Daakar now, save for an old wreck of a temple and the peaking facade of a few towers. The buildings were packed with clay, the streets lined with the bones of many generations of humans from the surface. Daakar was the only one who could feel this place anymore, the only one who truly knew what it contained. It was all theirs.

They remembered when the aether came to this world, the war and the panic of the Evenfall leading up to it. They remembered the feeling of tearing filling every fiber of their being as they writhed on the floor of the crystalline cell the Myarsan’s had relegated them to. They remembered waves and waves of indefinite madness, of reality itself rending.

Just as they were to fall into their fervent memories, they reached their destination. Coming from the center of Daakar’s lair, in a darkness so pure that it can only be achieved by moving through the packed sediment layer without disturbing it, radiated out a feeling of warmth. From there they felt their tendrils reaching, forming, spreading out into glorious voracity. They commanded such forces as the ground and the water and the trees which were life itself.

They wrapped their body, their true dao body, jealously around the source of this power. A scroll, buried by time and poor circumstance, on which was written the lost name of a god. And it was theirs, it was only theirs.