eumenides_blog (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} eumenides_blog) wrote,@ 2007-08-15 12:45:00 |
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Teaser Text: The Dreams Of Ruin
Policy failure, government corruption, fetal abnormalities, rapidly metastasizing cancers, destructive storms, foodchain collapse -- these are the uncontrollable tragedies of our world, the hand of random mischance exposed. Or at least that is how it appears to those whose perspective is limited to a single narrative arc.
Seen from an extrahistorical perspective, however, it is clear that these phenomenon and many others are essentially interrelated and neither independent nor benign. Like viral cancers, their cause is a disease so subtle and so difficult to perceive from within the Sensual World that it generally goes undetected. In the case of these human, social and ecological failures, they causative agent is an ailment of worlds known as the Dreams of Ruin.
The Dreams Themselves
In their first stages, the Dreams appear as a regional or global run of misfortune. They take root in slums, shantytowns, prisons and asylums, where the despair of the inhabitants does something akin to preparing the soil for them.
In places where the Dreams have taken root, that which is bad can happen more often than would seem statistically proper, and such things often feed other ill developments perhaps more often than one might expect. At this stage, the Dreams are like the mycelia of a metaphysical fungal bloom, penetrating every part of the infected area. It is at this stage that the Executors prefer to remedy the infestation, and certain combinations of occult activity and community development can eradicate the Dreams before they bear their fruiting structures, the trees of woe and the puppets of hate.
The Trees of Woe
Where the dreams of ruin have grown too long in the soil of misery, they fruit into the trees of woe. These tall, stately trees erupt from the very soil of the land where the dreams have taken hold. Straight and evil, like a twisted, soot-covered ash, these trees are quite invisible to the humans around them. They have an aura not unlike the Illusion of Memory around; to the eyes of the observer, they are natural, they have always been there, they are beyond notice even when they choose to grow in the middle of the street or the front room of a house.
The Trees of Woe are suitable for suicide by hanging, for lynching and crucifixion, for the burial of sacrifices and secret murders at their roots, and every other unwholesome thing that might perpetuate them. Where they grow, these things will occur, and the trees will conceal them, and grow taller and stronger.
After three years of this unpleasant self-cultivation, the trees bear fruit, in the form of great white corpse-flowers, from which waft the pollen that will spread the Dreams throughout the Sensual World and, it is presumed, across the Great Void. Luckily for the Lords of All, while these plants first flower only three years after they appear, they bloom but every thirteenth year thereafter, so they rarely fruit twice.
Puppets of Ruin
Where the trees have grown long enough to bear fruit at least once, the Puppets of Ruin can be found tending them. It is believed they are some sort of occult symbiote that is bound to the trees, but it is also possible they are some sort of alternate form of the plant’s flowers or fruit. These faceless footsoldiers resemble articulated wooden artist’s models, and spring from the bones and blood of those who die among those gloomy orchards. Though they do not rise directly, but the puppets are connected through the power of Guede to the corrupted soil the Dreams have taken root in.
While they are at first few and furtive, as the orchard of the trees of woe thickens and darkens, the Puppets begin to rove more openly. As guardians of the orchards of ruin, the puppets are murderers. Alone, they are furtive killers, in groups, terrifying raiders. Where they prosper, men are driven out, and those places soon become the abode of puppets only. The puppets are as the falling leaves of the Trees of Woe, smothering out all things not of them and perpetuating their own habitat of gloom. The Puppets are quite visible and terrifying for mortals to behold, though they exude a certain social anaesthetic that prevents large-scale responses to their existence.
The Dreams of Ruin
Policy failure, government corruption, fetal abnormalities, rapidly metastasizing cancers, destructive storms, foodchain collapse -- these are the uncontrollable tragedies of our world, the hand of random mischance exposed. Or at least that is how it appears to those whose perspective is limited to a single narrative arc.
Seen from an extrahistorical perspective, however, it is clear that these phenomenon and many others are essentially interrelated and neither independent nor benign. Like viral cancers, their cause is a disease so subtle and so difficult to perceive from within the Sensual World that it generally goes undetected. In the case of these human, social and ecological failures, they causative agent is an ailment of worlds known as the Dreams of Ruin.
The Dreams Themselves
In their first stages, the Dreams appear as a regional or global run of misfortune. They take root in slums, shantytowns, prisons and asylums, where the despair of the inhabitants does something akin to preparing the soil for them.
In places where the Dreams have taken root, that which is bad can happen more often than would seem statistically proper, and such things often feed other ill developments perhaps more often than one might expect. At this stage, the Dreams are like the mycelia of a metaphysical fungal bloom, penetrating every part of the infected area. It is at this stage that the Executors prefer to remedy the infestation, and certain combinations of occult activity and community development can eradicate the Dreams before they bear their fruiting structures, the trees of woe and the puppets of hate.
The Trees of Woe
Where the dreams of ruin have grown too long in the soil of misery, they fruit into the trees of woe. These tall, stately trees erupt from the very soil of the land where the dreams have taken hold. Straight and evil, like a twisted, soot-covered ash, these trees are quite invisible to the humans around them. They have an aura not unlike the Illusion of Memory around; to the eyes of the observer, they are natural, they have always been there, they are beyond notice even when they choose to grow in the middle of the street or the front room of a house.
The Trees of Woe are suitable for suicide by hanging, for lynching and crucifixion, for the burial of sacrifices and secret murders at their roots, and every other unwholesome thing that might perpetuate them. Where they grow, these things will occur, and the trees will conceal them, and grow taller and stronger.
After three years of this unpleasant self-cultivation, the trees bear fruit, in the form of great white corpse-flowers, from which waft the pollen that will spread the Dreams throughout the Sensual World and, it is presumed, across the Great Void. Luckily for the Lords of All, while these plants first flower only three years after they appear, they bloom but every thirteenth year thereafter, so they rarely fruit twice.
Puppets of Ruin
Where the trees have grown long enough to bear fruit at least once, the Puppets of Ruin can be found tending them. It is believed they are some sort of occult symbiote that is bound to the trees, but it is also possible they are some sort of alternate form of the plant’s flowers or fruit. These faceless footsoldiers resemble articulated wooden artist’s models, and spring from the bones and blood of those who die among those gloomy orchards. Though they do not rise directly, but the puppets are connected through the power of Guede to the corrupted soil the Dreams have taken root in.
While they are at first few and furtive, as the orchard of the trees of woe thickens and darkens, the Puppets begin to rove more openly. As guardians of the orchards of ruin, the puppets are murderers. Alone, they are furtive killers, in groups, terrifying raiders. Where they prosper, men are driven out, and those places soon become the abode of puppets only. The puppets are as the falling leaves of the Trees of Woe, smothering out all things not of them and perpetuating their own habitat of gloom. The Puppets are quite visible and terrifying for mortals to behold, though they exude a certain social anaesthetic that prevents large-scale responses to their existence.
