Callistus

“A man beckoning too deep into the night must beware that the night itself is not beckoned.” - An excerpt of the Vicar’s latest sermon Johnstown, c. 1783 WE PEN UPON THIS HERE NOTICE A PROCLAMATION THE WHICH GRAVITY DEMANDS GREAT ATTENTION A war of brute strength so foolishly waged against the demonic incursion has brought, and continues to bring upon our herds naught but loss and bloodshed, that even now God’s rain mingles amongst flesh and death persists to defile the ranks of the living. One cannot deny without slighting reason itself that our cause to be crowned victors in battle is deprived of all hope without providence to intervene, and this is made all the more vain by the reality that the only path afforded to us is shepherded by, and reliant on the pretentious likes of Azdromoth and his unsightly flock of heathens. Likewise, one cannot rightly seek salvation from Korvassa’s flame, only to invoke the very lords of Fire and turn upon God’s name. Fools alone resort to the insult of faith by vowing to the stolen light and the Fire so usurped by accursed dragonkin. Thus, we of the Aemesh in condemnation of both beastly threats do hereby enjoin upon the faithful left among mankind to converge at the side of our clerics to the woods of Johnstown beneath the coming half-moon, that in unison we may ask of God’s mercy and invoke a miraculous end to this sickness and those who inflict it alike poison unto blood. Let us pray in the way of our forefathers. Let His Light provide us sanctum. Let the only righteous flame prevail, and kindle this curse-rotted earth.

“Fearlessly shall we brave the will of Yulthar. Their blood shields us. Prescience and strength we shall conjoin.” ... “The truce is broken. Our vigil pales. The beasts cannot be kept at bay.” Beneath the clouds that gathered high, silence reigned. Where demons once overturned the ashen earth of Yulthar, there now stood culminations of undivided battle; rotting piles sown through an endless war waging for years amongst fiend and man. Blood of the old and young alike drenched the streets, and so none remained to nourish the blood-starved beast. The flesh-ailed city was at last brought to its end, cleansed and bled thoroughly of all its mortal filth; for beneath the clouds that gathered high, silence reigned, and the all-absorbing darkness of the abyss settled to preserve the old corpse. Abandoned by its people, darkbound Yulthar was home now only to the dead. The Exiles of Yulthar Long after the incursion, there spread staggering tales of a migrant people who, through their perfidy of both mental poise and honor, verged into uncomposed madness and absconded duty as one of a lost cause. The oathless relics of the Yultharan conglomerate converged later into blood-diversive tribes who wander from part to part through foreign land hardly reminiscent of their own, yearning for the unquenchable demon-hunt which still eats at them from within. “Pity those wanderers seeking the incite of death. Minds shattered, souls trapped in that damned city. Make no peace with vagabonds, for they know no oath.” The exiles of Yulthar is the name coined upon Yultharan migratory clans which not long before the city’s downfall came to wander foreign parts of Aeldin, and lately Arcas. The call of the hunt always beckoned, but wary of the fate of their old land, they instead took to prying at other parts of the earth in search of the beast-blood’s thrill. Their broken devotion to the cause of ancestry did not cease to wrest their doubts and wavering fears from within, invigorating madness amid reluctance and bringing out the hideous nature of Yulthar to light. This lends credence to the foul repute of dementia gleaned by the wandering folk across most land. This beast-borne contortion or madness indented upon the mind of all survivors coaxes into them a frenzy most comparable to shell-shock, at times inciting the brash warriors to strike unwisely but in manners which forbade all prediction. This arbitrary pattern assimilated even into their discourse and initially denied the Yultharans any chance for negotiation with the local rulers, until word of their intensity in battle swiftly spread and gave testimony to the vigor of this fluctuant people in all but reason and predictability. Synopsis - Origin The origin of Yulthar dates as far back as to the first convergence sworn by two Eastern clans of elves and men, whose conformity and despair at the face of periodical feuds within the region led them to decide upon the consolidation of two peoples under one banner, giving form in finality to the Gods-accursed lodge of Yulthar and the tragedy that soon followed in a city now deserted by beast and man. Prior to contemporary times and not long after the congregation, the chosen region of Yulthar unwittingly pit unsightly beasts against the Oyashiman colonials in continuous battle which frothed for centuries without forespeakable end, instigating the basal root of their culture to revolve upon ruthless ways honor-bound by blood, and thereby mold into one orientated through the life-long hunt braved by all Yultharans until the offset of beasts inevitably induced the remaining denizens toward the brink of decay. Many faltered to madness while others outlived their demise, but even those who did continue to reveal demented signs of their unescapable belonging to the old city, which immortally claims over their lives and fate. Present When the aged warriors wandered without aim from land to land and incised their decisive mark across the continents, the erstwhile Duke of Kaedrin cultivated an interest in their quaint way and invoked the few remnants of the Lodge to shore, where they now toil silently in fulfilment of an unfinished duty. The tribe which convoked on the mainland was led by Kenjin Taishi and Tetsuo, both with origins that date back to an old fishing village whence Yulthar was an infested conjecture point for all manner of Yokai.

A lone warrior salutes the departing Duke

“Furthermore, Carthage Fenn must be destroyed.”

“By decree of the enshadowed, thou shall not be granted passage.” Far to the darklit reaches and hyperborean depths of a cold land abandoned by sunlight, impending evil awaited birth by sacrilege at the hand of an occult tribe abound old woods, accosted by defiant devil-flames cultivating even within the taigan frost. Nearer to the provenance of this sabbath, inaudible chantry could be heard below the earth, where hideous shrieks made clear by shifts in the wind deposed one clear phrase; The second child will soon be born.

unfortunately the piece can only be as good as the general community behind it allows. the voidal people can’t even rightly use the tools at their disposal, so what makes you think hurling fuel to the fire makes it better?

It’s sad to see the promising concept of immortality, prevalent already as it is in the scape of implemented lore, being swung around like a plaything and pitifully reduced to a corpse without import or signifance by nature to the overarching narrative. I am of the ideal that eternlization must at its worse expose the aspiring mortal to clearly defined and resolute methods of contingency, and five consecutive deaths being requisite to any actual consequence is never the way to go about it. I can’t picture someone actually going through the effort of hunting an already biologically immortal entity, which stands by itself in the subject world as an already prodigious feat, five different times in tedious repetition just to impose death, and that alone is not to mention the fallible technicality of victimized Archon going on hiatus at their last life to outrun being stapled or killed. I am not stuck-up or adverse to ideas that don’t align with my personal beliefs, but I think you guys rushed it through and did not take your times thinking out these flaws. Good luck.

yes but unironically

“The Wrath of the Beast is an undying flame, kindled by blood of the Heathen.” In a time long predating the incursion of mortal-kind into occult knowledges and forbidden lore, the collective of humanity championed a grasp over primeval instinct and established an equity with the inborn Shadow that made men, men. Throughout this age instinct alone arbitrated the senses of the mortal man, who by design was a being formed through both sentience and primitive beasthood. But with progression came the age of apostasy, and the contravention of sorcerers who first ventured into the pit of the ancient world in vain pursuit of power, who by so doing incised a mortal stain upon the living concord and the darkness that bound them therein. Thus, Sin was born, conscience was made, and the Beast was riven from its bosom. In their liberation decadent men and spirits staked claims over Godhood, forming in falsity covenants alike those of Xan and the Ascended, whereas perfidious Aenguls extorted veneration and usurped the natural way of Man. The Beast was revoked. Without it, Order was lost, and a great line severed progeny from ancestry. All was washed beneath a tide of falsehood, and newfound ethics and morals ruled in place, casting an artificial dark upon primeval instinct. But the Beast still lives on, only fallow within every true-born mortal. By Assimilation, the lost will be born again, wont to cleanse the land of its growing rot. “Thus, man was made unto flesh, and flesh twice-over unto beast. By the shadows in our blood, The New World shall be mended.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqXPW0oBKgg “The Ailing Child is born, whose blood defiles the earth. Are we left no other choice, than to raze it all to ash?” With the enaction of sacrilege at the sacred grounds of the riverside chapel, an apotheosis of great wrath and darkness roused from the death of sleep, and the scourge of the ailing beast soon took root in the Gods-accursed hamlet of Johnstown. Once, a maiden with pledged claim to virginity harbored an unwanted thing deep within her womb, and with what condensed into fear at the time came despair, where she turned to the local priests of the village to ask of them a cleansing of her mortal defilement. When the woman made known her predicament to the vicarage, a pact was soon forged and another broken, for the ignorant scholars had conceded to her wish and unwittingly ventured upon the immortal sins of feticide and God-slaughter. The scholars of the Aemesh caved in to her sinful wish, and so began preaching their foreign form of exorcism to deliver the child stillborn, faced with death. Fate itself did not requite in kind, however, when the caste staked upon this mortal sacrilege, for it was a great beast that had usurped the virgin as it’s mother-surrogate by parasitic incursion, and the rapid growth that ensued was only symbolic of it’s beastly origin. Before they could realize the gravity of what they had truly imposed against all that was human and divine, the Beast-child was bequeathed a life through their sin, and without disparity massacred men and beasts alike in the most hideous of manners, enacting in turn to their sacrilege an inhuman desecration that later came to be coined the Precipitation of Blood. For what their cantations had evoked was of no mortal provenance, but heinous sin in the scape of a God-child, through whom depravity was woven into corporeal being by rites that date back to the forbidden age where the Larian Wretch had usurped secrets of the blood in order to coax a beast that was always existent within Man. Thus it was that the First of Kin, Karzelak, so-called God-child was reborn into the world by a sacrilege of flesh and great-blood, heralding a new age defined by decadence and false Godhood. The body of an unnamed faceless priest involved in the late sacrilege can be witnessed upturned and hanging as a centre-piece of the altar of Johnstown’s chapel, a retributive omen contrived at the hand of the beast. The priest’s entrails appear to spill, and dark viscera pools below at the bloodstained wood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM Indexium Lupus, vol ii, on the palliation of the beast, M. Horst writes; “... those anguishing under beasthood traverse the earth at the break of midnight, intimating beasts in all manner of conduct and prowling by upturned sepulchures until sunrise. On the matter of their identification we have dealt thoroughly and at length, and assure that to the end of recognition one ought to distinguish these fiend by the following marks: they are of distinctly olive-complexion, their visions are feeble, their tongues are dry, their eyes drier, and they are wholly famished of saliva; but they are more than ever starved for bloods like the vampiric broods of Belvitz, and their limbs are afflicted by numerous ulcerations from lengthy falls. Let it be known however that the ailment, as any other plague in this world, is not without remedy, for it is at the very root a mere variant of dissipation in the sin of gluttony, a farther stage of inhuman indulgence cursed unto men should they subject themselves under the reign of primeval instinct and liken themselves in that fashion to lesser, foolishly desirous beasts. This we exorcise by first opening a vein and dissipating the blood to the degree of fainting, and ministering to the patient an alternative and healthier source of sustenance. After this, let them be basked in wine so that they may rediscover revelry in mortal delights, and then holy water for several days, and by purgatory measure infuse the hiera from colocynth twice or thrice. Once absolved by cleansing let them imbibe the theriac of serpentine venoms, and administer the following: wormwood after purging; epithymus, dodder of thyme, acrid vinegar as a beverage, poley, squills, slender birthwort; phlebotomy and cataplasms. When the parasitic ailment is already thoroughly formed into the body, rub the nostrils with fisstech prior to sleep.”

A pilgriming man of holy cloth is soon apprised on his path through the earth of the posture so bravely seized by the Church, in whom he had once seen a severed and sedentary people with idle hands and lesser regard for worldly affairs. With greater respect thus, he ensures a letter is penned that conveys a concurrent stance by the Vicarage in this regard, and makes known also his desire to soon establish covenant with the body in mutual interest of their inclusive faith (be it only for the period of this war).

“Dawn draws as men are called to feast Fire fades as darkness begets the beast When flesh and blood become as one with wine, Damned are They who in sin intertwine.” Beneath a great shadow risen by cries and tales of hideous daemons assailing the land, the darkness of an infantile thing long deprived of humanity awakens in the cradle of a hamlet. “Rise, Karzełek, first of your kin. Rise, arm of horror, to mirror the fiend suffused in Man.” Borne by sin and that heinous scourge aflame within the putrid human soul, the beast naturally feasts upon such corruptions and dines on the abominable among mortals in order to suffice an intrinsic hatred. At this early time of growth greater focus is given by the sickly creature towards devouring nearby beasts of wood and at staggering rates disrupting the primitive course of nature and it’s fauna, thereby possibly exhorting the attention of nearby druidic herds. Wood-hunters tasked to root out the heart of this evil and retrieve it’s head had met as expected with great failure, but report that the beast whose origin is not entirely known senses deeply for the demise of its parent, slaughtered at birth at its own hand, and so holds all men responsible for the blood there shed. It is heard to cry in the quiet, uttering words believed to be the last spoken by it’s mother prior to death in blurred lines among pleas and calls for help. Most assets of the ego thought possessed by a child are here plainly manifest; hatred, jealousy, curiosity, but also vengeful afflictions that bend toward bestial partiality, and those instincts are pointed in the highest degree towards the objects of its vengeance, namely humans and the sickness they harbor so deep. With the sprouting ego of this grieving newborn there is also a growth of morbid desires and wants of a pleasure which can only be sufficed by the mother, but who is now dead, hence there is in recompense aroused within the little child a feeling of deprivation and hatred toward Man.

Perspective of the Vicarage on Mortal Divinity and Greater Lores ”I have seen the ichors of humanity, where great darkness lurks in vain– where Godheads groan and whisper, without presence, thought or name.” WHEN Vicar Viedrick first established the principles of divine evolution and ascent upon the base subservient plane of mortal-kind, and proclaimed that the root and onset of variant states assorted under the appellations of madness or delusion serve in reality to designate untapped wells and potentials within the fragile human husk, largely condemning to it’s carriers as it is, and concerned chiefly with the primordial instinct, it was not then grasped what far-reaching concussion this abhorred and feared realization would pose on the comprehension of mortalities and divinities to the human collective in general, and the Aemeshite conglomerate in specific. For this realization has so expanded in its implications that its most basal exertions have now reached beyond a mere select range of physiological afflictions. It has in fact guided a group of scholars toward an until-then unfounded understanding of the perceived limit of mankind; a new perspective was initiated which describes those afflictions in vague but gainful detail, and there is provided not only a base understanding of the afflictions of delusion and the origins of ailment but the prodigious by-product resultant of this defective mind as thoroughly conveyed in the lores of philosophy and Canonist myth alike. Conjecture of the Mortal and Divine, Anatomy Occultus On Flesh and the Mortal Coil As rightly taught and believed among relevant scholars, flesh to men is comparative to the essence of spirit usurped by the likes of the Ascended in order to alleviate mortality, for flesh stands in the same relation to the mortal coil as the essence does to the soul, and they are both equally liable to a cryptic process of unshackling that lends them way to transcend inborn earthly limits. It is only natural and thus understood in this analysis that the essence is the fluid holy medium to those who ascend by soul or spirit, as the seal to mortality, and it’s removal results – again, naturally – in an injury or flexure to the soul unseen to the mere eye owing to its manifestation only in a spiritual scope (and little are the means by which one can look through this scope). Similarly, by contemporary rituals and sacred technique the transcendence through the corporeal coil (the flesh) rather than soul or spirit was in all attempted cases antecedent to a truly hideous and unaccountable physical mutilation of flesh by infliction of grave scars, crippled and twisted limbs, with partial sentience and times instinctive function impaired or deformed, originating from the corporeal wounds, or else the coil was unable to handle the thorough brunt of unshackling and the transcended being as a result suffers this in a manner more apparent in the mortal scope (bodily distortion). On Blood and Sacred Presence The Scholarship, which had its first true provenance in Aemesh, had been steadily on course of study through the centuries with the purpose of attaining further knowledges on the compositions of mankind and their origins in relation to God – in whose image and possibly anatomy the form of Man owes its root – while also extensively dissecting the human body via undefiled (holy) arcane methods in search of an alternate means or medium to aid or inspirit the Mortal Coil through itself either by infusions of foreign blood or an identical sacred presence so that transcendence may be achieved with the least possible harm of function or lasting injury to the individual and their flesh. Revolutionary results have recompensed these noble efforts, as the holy creation of the [redacted] plainly indicates, and injury was minimized and made transitory through allowing transcension to be achieved in short-lived bursts, enabling otherwise mortal men to assume corporeal divinity while mutations reversibly take place. This was made possible at first through the transfusion of blood imbued by preternatural presence as established by [redacted]. Several [redacted] exist however who roam freely and without mortal restraints, whose corporeal injuries and thereby divinity are permanent and irreversible as a result of prior trials which ended in failure. In their case divinity is achieved at the cost of variable sanities and sentience.

“Why didst thou rein thyself, to shackles of great detention? Why hast thou allured thyself, into the lair of the Great Serpent? Why hast thou drawn unto thyself, thyself?” “Assimilate thy beast and bathe in flesh, Cleanse thyself of mortal blood.” Deep along the shores of a folk-deprived hamlet, symbolic nightmares appended by dreaded sensations take to depleting the mental – and thereby, to an extent, physical - health of a specific bloodline of people following what is thought by their elders to be the cyclic return of an old and far-flung breed of man-fiends wont on upbringing ruin and consternation upon the land, preying on beasts and men alike without true distinction. Unable to physically cut long distances, the monster in the beginning derives its first inception and arrival on Arcaesan mainland from a mother-surrogate through the twisted form of Krekavac, where on the sixth month it rends the womb open and gorges the fresh corpse dry to suffice its carnal wants. In this early phase of suckling the child-beast, a mere husk to a far older beast, experiences already a kind of inhuman pleasure, for he apparently establishes the indulgence principle and the bestial instinct and considers that the former is primarily rooted in the latter, bringing to rise at once the more primordial nature of it’s true form . In well-thought precaution thus, it is greatly advised to those who hold their own safety and that of others at high regard that they let not the beast achieve that state of euphoria in the first place (lest it irreversibly degenerate and set itself upon the land), but instead deter it’s regression by slitting the throat of suspected impregnated womenfolk – who at that time serve as a potential catalyst to the parasitic beast – and imposing thereby an early end to the nearing scourge.

”You shall be taken into consideration. Seek out Johnstown, and call to the pilgriming counsul of Aemesh. The whispers will rightly guide you, where the trials may prove your worth.” ((Discord is Callistus#6280))

An old man recalled a decadent folktale, one not yet forgotten to his people “... But if the aide of God were not conjured, although greatly pled, and limp was his right hand to the pleas sung without reutrn, may the Sun thereby be devoured; that in its wane, the dark may reign.”

”You shall be taken into consideration. Seek out Johnstown, and call to the pilgriming counsul of Aemesh. The whispers will rightly guide you, where the trials may prove your worth.” ((Discord is Callistus#6280))