A Brief History of a Beast

As floodwaters lay over a dead and drowning home and as the dirt of a grave lays over a cold and motionless casket, so darkness laid over the land like a beast over the endless landscape of carcasses. The lightless beast was Death, birthed by the Sin of Dem: his ambition and his pride. The land itself was a desolation, and so complete was the Destruction of that final flash of red light with its infinite horrors that not even rot remain to claim its rule over the inhabitants of the dead planes or remove the morbidity of the scene.

No thoughts remained to appreciate the absolute eeriness of the scene or the evilness of what had happened. Good and bad were gone, replaced by the idiot motions of eternity. Perhaps they laughed at the futility of life and of conscious movement, that frail thing that was fated to end in a lack of movement. A lack of meaning. Reabsorbed and consumed into the still and stupid void of time, the great Nothing, never to reemerge again. The laughter was mirthless, mindless, ceaseless. and a mockery like the reassuringly grinning statue of an angel, wings outspread, far below the cold stars and thousands of miles from the bone-colored moon. What was the seraph smiling at? Why, it was the only thing left standing before a Temple. Its blind, idiot eyes had no pupils. Perhaps they fell upon the collapsed and sun-dried forms of ancient priests before an altar, their prayers futile. Perhaps they fell upon a host of intruding beasts, their battle meaningless. Perhaps they fell upon the young and valiant warriors, their weapons useless.

But everything would be okay now. The priests thought their lives were worth praying for. The warriors thought their lives were worth fighting for. The beasts thought their lives were worth invading for, but in the end, weren't their lives worthless? Nature sowed with a generous hand. There were nations in the loins of every one of those fallen young men and states in those of the old. Yet, all of them valued their lives more than rubies. They had lost theirs at the speed of scarlet light and now remained completely unaware of that fact. Millions of rubies lost forever and not a one to mourn it. The seraph smiled on. Callousness without malicious intent, without cruelty. Laughing.

Yet, life remained. Forces remained: A thousand minds in one; the father and the mother of life; The eternal seeds; Immortality and perfection that fashioned mortality in an imperfect version of its image like a scene copied poorly by a soiled mirror. They watched the Sin. They watched the Death. They watched the stillness.

But mercy said no.

[EXP: 557 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

The dawn threw the world of woodland demons, who had died fleeing the light of AVALON, into a new state of reform. Nobody remembered anything. They'd simply been dropped into the world with nothing but their language skills and whatever objects were on their bodies and around them. It was as though some plague had hit.

Indeed, when a group of the spirits of the southern woods looked around, they beheld many creatures, and only one out of four of them stood up to watch the sun burst over the horizon in resplendent glory. It was the first light they had ever seen, as far as they knew. Some of them were larger. Some of them were smaller, but they were all confused and looking for answers and leadership.

The clever provided the answers. The strong provided the leadership. Such was decided almost automatically among the primitive beings who quickly formed a small tribe among themselves.

But before anyone could be assigned, indeed, mere moments after the dawn, a minor crisis took place.

[ EXP: 205 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

In the midst of the confusion that was the mass waking-up of the world, a clan of demons awoke. They were surprisingly heterogenous, composed all in all of a peculiar species species known as Yvalos Hyenas, or hellhyenas more colloquially. Though their appearance suggested them as some sort of spotted variant of hellhound, they were actually more closely related to the rarer hellcats. The latter species had diverged from the hyenas eons ago when it was said that their common ancestor had two sons, one of which decided to go off on his own as the other decided to form a clan.

It was more than a mere story. Though all species of hellcats, that is, the lions, the leopards, and the monstrous lynxes, hated hyenas with a prejudice and a vicious fervor, on the rare occasion their familial ties would show in the form of a beast of mixed heritage: a leucrota.

Of course, nobody now remembered such a beast, but it was said to eventually grow bigger than both of its parents, displaying a short of hybrid vigor in the traits of agility, bloodlust, and ferociousness, though those stereotypes may have mainly come about through the forbidden nature of its parent's love and thus its very existence.

[ EXP: 243 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

The first to approach the scene was the de facto leader of the current group of creatures.

Even after the dawn, those nature spirits with a pack instinct had formed themselves into clans and tribes of various descriptions. The hyenas who awoke together had done so in hostility and out of instinct. Out of the battle, this scarred veteran emerged, having proven her mastery over her sisters. They knew her as "One-Ear" or "Old One-Ear", after the injury she had sustained before the Dawn. Nobody knew her real name and nobody really cared. Such was the way of brutes.

She strode up to the snarling infant, lone ear pointed forward until she was able to nudge the cub with her scarred muzzle. The others circled behind her, not necessarily because they were afraid of the child, but because of its odd appearance. "Her tail..." another, Cookie, spoke up.

Cookie had already established herself as the "madwoman" of the group, though the others listened to her because if nothing else she was interesting.

One-Ear shifted her eyes and noticed the appendage. Its length stretched out, extending the cub by a little over a third. "Oh," the matriarch said flatly before she bit it to the proper length.

[ EXP: 246 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

The history of the little white cub was only remarkable because of her profoundly adversarial nature. Like many things remarkable, Cookie assigned her a spot in her stories. The child was sired by none other than Vosht, the inventor of all perverse things, or Kaupe, the father of ghosts. It really depended on the day, as sometimes the two gods were the same hyena.

And Iskra provided very little reason for them to doubt her supposed paternity. She refused to recognize her low rank in the clan. If prey was felled, she was the first and fastest eater. If there was a fight between any two parties or among three or more, she inevitably put herself into the fray. If a couple sought solitude to procreate, she gave them no peace or privacy.

Why? Nobody in the clan really thought about these things very deeply, and they especially didn't try to reason it out after Cookie's explanation. She was a demon among demons. That's simply the way it was, and they tolerated her presence even as they discouraged her actions with snaps of hostility.

[ EXP: 212 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

If there was a raid on a human village, she was the foremost and the leader. If there was any act of trouble or disruption of the status quo, there was usually none other than Iskra at the source of it.

But such things had to come to an end eventually. It was sometime after One-Ear and Cookie had a vast and deep argument between them that the Prophet decided to exile herself. This was unusual in that One-Ear had been a fairly wise, steady, and kind matriarch as far as hyena demons went. She had survived the production of many progeny and she had a quiet strength about herself that most of the others besides Cookie and Iskra were obliged to respect. Cookie, however, started into a rather violent set of seizures one day and when she awoke it was always with news of some terrible doom coming their way. The land that the clan had settled in was rich, abundant with prey, and relatively peaceful and quiet. One Ear didn't really care to move. Cookie was obligated to by her violent visions.

So One Ear remained to fight, and a third of the clan exiled themselves with Cookie.

[ EXP: 219 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

Checkpoint 2