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Endless Blue – Week 53 – The Dark Secrets of the Endless Blue   Leave a comment


Apocalypse: The Dark Secrets of the Endless Blue

Belied by the placid waters of the world oceans, there have been hints that some strange things are going on beneath the surface of Elqua.  The acute and the visionary may have possibly felt the foreshadowing twinge of wrongness that permeates the seas of the Cerulean Epoch with the coming of the Indigo.  Kingmakers and tyrants alike have tried to reshape the world to their own liking, but none will ever come close as the secret the Big Blue Marble hides.

It begins with the disillusioned, and ends with displaced.  The vocal few that yelled their despite against the world’s status quo were the soothsayers.  The truth being, the Godless had it both right and wrong, and in the end both Seamus Lorwynn and his detractors are both vindicated as they are victimized.

The piscean races, the lives of the masses of the Known World whose toil and tribulations formed such great civilizations, did not evolve from anything native to Elqua.  Olyhydra and the other gods decided to claim the Endless Blue as their own, populate the tiny blue speck in the multiverse with species from their domain, of their own choosing.  The clues were there for the observant.  The strange chimeric shape of the piscean form was never the result of the slow evolutionary process, but the kludged together workings of miracle and deific will.  The bone structure of the piscean tail, long repeating pattern of connecting vertebra until the tip instead of fused leg bones, was one of the many tip-offs.

But to claim this coveted gem and its expansive oceans, the invading gods needed to dispose of the true native heirs of the pristine seascape — the Icht.  They were the native grown life, the Source’s children, the inheritors of the vast seas and breaking waves.  But the gods destroyed them in preference of their false races, and the impassive shell of the Source stood silent as it slowly cracked.

The Kraken discovered this in their dealings with the anathematic Elsewhere.  That is how the previously uncooperative species learned to work together — they focused on the invading species of piscean.  The same strange elder gods that gaze unblinking from the nether shadows into the waters of Elqua were the ones that supported the Kraken Occupation.  To cement this, the entities of Elsewere gave the Kraken the artifact known as Khantusk to unify a species that otherwise would never work in unison.  The Kraken that unified the Kraken Empire used the granted powers of Khantusk to overcome the territorial and solitary mindset of his cephalopodic kind, for without it, the inherent mistrust for others of their own kind would have kept the squid entangled in their petty territorial squabbles.

The means by which the entities from Elsewhere accomplished this is the Maelstrom.  Its unending, wavering course across the planet was never random, but guided by the eyes of the vitriolic shadows.  The Maelstrom scoured the sea floor, tearing up the silt and sand, digging, searching for the tools Elsewhere needed to expel these invading creatures from the realm they deeply coveted and utterly reviled.  But who are these Elsewhere entities?  They are the surviving shadow of the Icth, the negative counterparts that were orphaned in the Elsewhere when the invading gods struck their puissant counterparts.

But the Kraken were never meant to succeed.  The Shadows only meant for the Kraken to weaken the morale and defenses of the piscean races, not subjugate them totally.  Once dominant, the Kraken reverted to their petty, jealous ways and began plotting against each other instead of furthering the ambitions of the Shadows.  Eventually their dark benefactors tired of their foolish behavior, and once their true objective was reached abandoned the squid to degeneration and submission.  Done with their puppets, the Shadow Icht damned them so that they could never turn on their eldritch gods.

The degenerated Kraken, now called the Ceph, were scapegoats the Shadows could manipulate to take the brunt of most anything that was wrong with Elquan life.  Under this cover, the Shadows were able to release their true solution to the usurpation of the Elquan oceans — they let loose the Indigo.

The Indigo was to be the harbinger of destruction, the final wiping of the board of the infestation of piscean life into an ecology of which they were not part.  But that itself is not the full purpose of the vicious, viscous substance.  It sought out the homunculus, the animated dead, the risen flesh given movement by the Resurrectionists.  The tendrils of black water seek out these vessels, as each one is a tiny fracture in the Law of Life, and through that crack the Shadow Icht of Elsewhere have a sliver of possibility in crossing over to the Fluid Nations.

The blind Kraken in the Undertow foresaw the fall of the Kraken empire, and willingly threw herself into the gyre.  There, hidden, sequestered, laid the eggs that are the final generation of the Kraken species.  Nestled there in stasis, they await awakening to renew the species.  Among her progeny lay one of the two Krakonian Orbs, the one that peers into the future.  Trapped as she is, the fragile, maddened mind of the Kraken obsessively peers into the thick mucal depths of the eye and searches frantically for the day her kind returns to the waters above, to seek justice or vengeance against the usury inflicted upon their race by the Shadows of the Icht.

Despite the eradication of the native sentience, the world of Elqua is fighting back against the encroaching Black Water.  This is the recent appearance of the Kelpygmies, animate plant matter, given animus — though by no intent of their own — by the Resurrectionists.  Their dabbling into the motive force of life gave the Source the opportunity to sneak through the planar barricades created by the gods and impart a bit of itself into the kelp forests.  When any Resurrectionist golem or homunculus is slain, the animating shade is cast back into the Elsewhere and sealed there.  However, that momentary link between the excommunicating shade and the mirror world allows the Source to impart a small sip of its divinity to the mortal realm,  There, it seeks out the most primal of areas, still mostly untouched by the hands of pisceans, and imbues the nature with sentience and mobility.  It seems despite the off-handed slaughter of the Icht and invasion of alien species, the Source still clings to the water world that has welled up around it.  It seems vastness bent on keeping the world whole and healthy, perhaps in the hopes that another indigenous form of life will one day make the leap from savage to sapient.

And so it ends…
The Cerulean Age is over, cut short by the Indigo.
It is the Age of Black Water, the Indigo Epoch.
The Endless Blue forever claimed as the Endless Black. 



Posted December 31, 2010 by William James Cuffe in Endless Blue Campaign Setting

Tagged with apocalypse, art, Endless Black, endless blue, rpg, writing

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