Ikselam/PetrifiedForest
Contents
The Petrified Forest Spirit Court
Long ago, there was a great forest in the Southeast, teeming with life and ruled by a court of wood and water spirits. The Grandfather Tree that ruled the court was wise and compassionate, and so when earth spirits arrived in the valley, fleeing the destruction of their home by an enraged Exalted, it gladly allowed them to become part of the forest court. In order to satisfy the earth spirits' need for order and law, a pact was made and carved into the cliff face that looked over the entrance to the valley, there to be preserved forevermore.
For many years, the spirits of the earth lived together with those of the forest. But as the seasons passed, the forest changed, becoming slower and dryer. The lush vegetation gave way to hardy shrubs and trees; the springs and streams slowly dried up. Many of the old forest spirits faded away or drifted off to other places. Those that remained were subject to a strange transformation, gradually becoming more and more stonelike. The old Grandfather tree's bark hardened into pebbles, its twigs and shoots calcifying until they were delicate webs of crystal and stone, and no longer bore leaves. The tree spirits' smooth brown skin became like rough sandstone, their liquid eyes hardening into emeralds and amethysts and jade as their trees' wood was transformed into translucent stone. The water-serpents dried up into little snakes whose scales were tiny water-polished stones. The change took many decades, and many of the spirits did not even notice that they had been changed.
Those who did suspected that the standing stones who had begged asylum so long ago were to blame, but when they consulted the ancient agreement graven into the cliff, they found that everything that had happened had done so according to the terms of the pact. When an avalanche sent great boulders tumbling into the valley and smashed the petrified Grandfather Tree to bits, many spirits became angry and stormed onto the hill, to demand an accounting from the five megaliths. They were directed to consult the writing on the cliff, and found that, indeed, according to the oaths that had been sworn, they were now to be ruled by the stones, and so it has been ever since.
The valley is now a place of browns and greys, cracked streambeds snaking between the crumbling stone pillars that were once trees. Spirits of sand and erosion travel through the air, their whistles and moans echoing off the stark cliff faces and rock formations that have long since had all traces of soil scoured from them. The spirits and elementals that populate this place are unsettling to behold, seeming strange parodies of wood and water spirits carved from living rock. The words of the ancient pact that governs them can still be seen on the cliff face. Every year during the months of Earth, shamans from the nearby villages trek through the petrified forest to make sacrifices to the standing stones which loom over the rest of the valley, set in a circle on top of their hill, for the words on the cliff state that if the mortals that live near the court do not make the proper obeisances, a terrible doom will befall them.
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The Standing Stones
These five powerful elementals rule the Petrified Forest. They are brooding, unfriendly spirits, speaking only to the most illustrious and respectful visitors to their domain. Their days and nights are spent plotting silently amongst themselves. Sometimes the deep rumble of their thoughts vibrates the groud up to a mile away, and when they grow angry, huge tremors shake the earth, burying those who displease them under rockslides, or swallowing them up in huge fissures in the ground.
Although the megaliths are cunning plotters, they are bound to each other by oaths much less mutable than the ones they caused to be carved into the cliff face long ago, and always pool their powers together to achieve their goals. Their plans are never short-term, often taking years or even entire human lifetimes to unfold, but they are so subtle and well-conceived that they have never failed. What their truly long-term goals may be is unknown, but almost certainly involves revenge upon whatever forgotten Solar Exalted exiled them from their home so long ago.
The standing stones are each thousands of years old, and possess great power. Even though they never leave their physical forms or even move perceptibly, they command absolute obedience from the rest of the petrified forest spirits, and if pressed can employ incredible powers of their own, calling earthquakes, sensing the thoughts of anyone who stands upon the earth for miles around, causing the landscape itself to shift and deform, or even transmuting living flesh to cold, lifeless stone.
Caryatids
The various nymphs of the forest have been transformed into earth spirits, resembling statues of beautiful young women and men carved out of sandstone and marble, their hair and eyes glittering with flakes of quartz and tiny gemstones, their lithe bodies ornamented with strings and chains of precious jewels. Their movements, while still graceful, are deliberate and slow, and when they speak their words come equally slowly, and sound hollow and distant.
These spirits are bound to the petrified remains of their trees, and are unable to move far away from them without tremendous expenditure of their willpower and essence reserves. They are often kind to visitors, especially those who have the patience to listen to their melancholy stories of times long past, before they were turned to stone. However, anyone who threatens harm to their trees will become the target of their undying hatred.
Avalanche Spirits
These twin spirits, contrary to the usual stereotypes of earth spirits, are playful and energetic. They can often be seen or heard frolicking about canyon walls and cliffs, amusing themselves by skipping pebbles down rock faces, or playing tenpins and marbles with rocks they have collected. Although they rarely act in an overtly malicious fashion, their games can get very hazardous for any mortals involved, since their idea of good fun involves causing visitors to be caught in rockslides, or leading them on a merry chase until someone falls into a sinkhole or over a cliff.
In their materialized forms, these spirits appear as a young boy and girl, obviously siblings. Both have the same rough brown skin and black eyes, and unkempt heads of coarse sun-bleached hair. They wear short pants and ponchos of what looks like roughspun hemp. Their spindly limbs and round faces usually sport a thick coat of dirt and dust, as well as numerous scrapes and bruises. The only force capable of getting them to hold still, or pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds at a time, is the circle of megaliths which rules the petrified forest. They obviously regard the forbidding earth elementals as particularly stern and terrifying parental figures, and try to avoid their attention as much as possible.
The Dry Spring
The spring which once lay at the center of the forest has long since gone dry; all that remains is a depression of cracked clay with a hole in the center. Below the hole is a small, dark cavern. The water spirit that lives there is only a shadow of its former self, unable even to speak unless a sound is made in its cavern. Then, its whispers can be heard in the echoes that bounce off the walls of the cave. It alone of all the forest spirits managed to resist the transformation into rock, though that resistance cost it terribly. It hates the megaliths, blaming them for its current shriveled impotence, and dreams of one day driving them from the valley.
The spring spirit's cavern, like the megaliths' hill, is a Demesne.
Streambed Snakes
The water snakes which lived in the streams and brooks have been transformed into stone serpents which preside over dry streambeds. They vary greatly in size, none exceeding ten feet long, but all of them are scaled in innumerable tiny jade bits. At the end of each season, they shed their skins, leaving behind a snake-shaped collection of the minuscule jewels. The snakes' skins are made up of a different color of jade during each season.
These elementals can often be noticed by the disturbance they make on the ground as they burrow through the sand and clay, but they are skittish and usually flee from unfamiliar creatures. If caught, though, they can attack with their fangs, which carry a deadly poison that turns the victim's heart and lungs to stone.
Streambed snakes are not very intelligent, but they are curious, and will often follow any visitors to their streambeds, fleeing as soon as the traveler notices them but quickly returning. Anything of interest that the visitor drops, especially precious stones of any kind, is likely to be swallowed whole and carried off while they are not watching, to be deposited in the secret underground cache that each snake maintains.
Erosion Spirits
These air spirits are artists, patiently sculpting rock outcroppings into formations of fluid beauty. They are also possessed of a bizarre sense of humor, and enjoy practical jokes. Due to their nature, these jokes aren't always recognizable as such. One of the pranks that they find most amusing is the one that was suggested to them by the circle of standing stones: over the years, the air spirits carefully wore away at the writing on the cliff, gradually altering the wording of the agreement that governs the spirits of the valley until the pact that was once intended to limit the megaliths' influence grants them sovereignity over an increasingly large area.
Petrified Lizard
Only a short distance from the pact that is carved into the cliff face, one can behold a truly wondrous sight. The rock has worn away, revealing the skeleton of a great tyrant lizard somehow embedded in the cliff, the exposed bones themselves turned rock-hard. What is even more miraculous than the appearance of this oddity, however, is that the ghost of the lizard still haunts the skeleton, and speaks to anyone brave enough to place their hand upon the petrified skull.
The ghost-lizard is surprisingly scholarly and urbane, gladly conversing at length with people of learning. The words it speaks in their minds are wise and illuminating, and it hints that its knowledge extends back as far as the First Age itself. However, it always declines to reveal its most astounding secrets unless the person agrees to a bargain. The tyrant lizard has been imprisoned in the cliff for incalculable eons, it says, and it wishes nothing more than to see for itself the new shape that the world has taken. To that end, it requests that it be allowed to enter the person's dreams, so that it can travel with them and see what they see. Although the deal seems benign, there is a strange hunger in the ghost-lizard's urbane words that makes living beings uncomfortable, and none has ever agreed.
The lizard does indeed wish to see the world beyond its petrified tomb. However, what it misses even more than being able to travel the land in search of new learning is the thrill of the hunt, the smell of its prey's fear as it stalks them, the taste of their blood as it crunches their bones in its powerful, dagger-toothed jaws. Because it is now a ghost, and incapable of affecting the physical world due to the strange circumstances surrounding its imprisonment in the rock face, the only place that the tyrant lizard can stalk its prey is in dreams. If someone agrees to admit the lizard into their sleeping mind, they will shortly find that their every dream is haunted by the macabre image of the lizard's grinning, eyeless skull and bleached skeleton, never overtly threatening but always lurking unsettlingly just on the edge of perception. Their dreams will be plagued by a feeling of being watched and followed. Over the course of months or even years, they will experience more and more nightmares, focused around an ill-defined fear of being watched by the dead lizard. These nightmares of being watched will turn to nightmares of being chased, then of being hunted. If the victim does not go insane or commit suicide to escape the terrifying dream-visions, he or she will one night find themselves in a dream which ends with them being being eaten alive by the tyrant lizard, and their companions will awake to find them dead.
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