Vescrutia: Legacy

Years ago...

Finding the trails of his awakening, Teralok gradually made his way through the scars in the range to the place where he was born. Breathing in the vibrations of his footsteps he quieted the area and read the intersection that was not only nostalgic but allowed mineral formations that he hadn't found elsewhere. These were primordial formations that were so raw it drew the picture of his birth in his mind, sliding down the mountainside it resonated with his feet, validating his thoughts and skipped to a halt as the sound changed to the tap of solid crystal. Like a scab it slathered the lowest part of the valley, bleak and lifeless, still his thoughts raced naively, going through all the cultivation knowledge that he had learned throughout his travels. So far he had only the chance to display his talent for destruction, but Teralok also had an ambition to heal. The gravel bounced at the edge of the scar as the young one traversed the crystal wound, excited, rejoicing at his return like little grasshoppers. Even standing still, probing the depths, an occasional pebble would pop out of place as the mountains resonated gently to every sound he made. He might have felt an emotion like embarrassment if he hadn't been so focused on trying to perceive any potential for another miracle like himself to occur. As he traced the old scar with his eyes guilt is the feeling that he began to feel about his birth, as this was only the beginning of a trail of destruction of his own choosing.

Teralok felt like the womb was a chasm filled with so much space that naten could no longer flow through it, space that crystallized and formed a darkness that couldn't be seen through. The air however had a much different quality. A gust of wind had filled the valley as the sun moved across the sky, and as it flowed through his hair he could sense the potency minerals from the same direction. Dust, it was always attracted to his hair but had learned how to tell the difference between good and bad dust from information like how it weighed down his hair, did it take or give his hair static, and it was the water especially that Teralok's hair could not get too much of, inadvertently. Teralok raised his head to the different mountaintops, his hair beginning to stand as the strands repelled each other vibrating silently. He was speaking to the mountains around him for the sources of what felt on the wind, as they told him he kept asking, their sources of moisture, heat, manure, like he was... hungry. Until he could feel the tops of the mountains that spoke to him, until he had been rooted in that spot for what seemed to be hours, until the ground told him the valleys he would walk to his destination. Walk through those valleys he did, like walking terraformer every step mulching the rock and minerals towing along nutrients in its wake. Solid magnesium turned to dust, nitrogen aerating the surface that was humming at a frequency that unsettled everything that it touched. A rolling earthquake, powerful enough to pulverize a deposit of iron, but local and steady enough to diffuse that shit for miles. Colloidal metals echoed like heartbeats and phosphorus bursted underground at the most devious intervals creating compounds that exponentially improved the nutritional value of the soil.

This was the path he took out of the mountains into valleys and hills to a cliffside that spread out of sight to both sides, almost like a dead end, but he could intensely feel the rigidity of the petrified wood beneath the layers of rock that covered it as he centered his weight to stand on its side. Walking up it sent huge tremors through the structure and gave him a picture that he had hard time putting together even putting his face against its side trying to verify before he got to the top. Even still the sight before him left him with tremendous awe. The petrified bark was risen up around a pit of geysers bursting regularly across a scene that every color a purpose in its scheme, crystals of all kinds had formed for miles and the only flora was the moss that clung to its sides. The water was drained by different tributaries and drained into a stream that went off into the distance through a hole in the bark.

Now…

No matter the flora he found, the minerals he fertilized with, or sunlight he refracted, he could not get the propagation of growth that he wanted in his garden. The flora that survived in the new environment were sturdy plants that could withstand harsh weathers but he went out of his way to find plants that would thrive in the ecosystem that he wanted to create, which was an environment in which any plant could grow exponentially more than in the wild. Teralok was failing miserably. Surrounding the entire rim of the petrified tree was a crystal border rising into a dome that didn't quite reach into the clouds but somehow always seem to have a cloud or two around it's peak. A river had sprang out from somewhere within the mountains and ran beside the cliffside, the very one he first climbed, and collected on the other side. The roots of this old tree had no doubt stretched into many water sources but Teralok had found the main one and decided he needed to damped the flow of water in the still pumping roots. The channels of water that were actively cooling the roots touched by magma he left untouched, by his hand. The pressure it created however he used fervently, for the speed and heat that the water escaped the geyser when he arrived would have killed all but the adverse fauna he found. To fix this he had structured specific panels of his sphere to differentiate the kinetic pressure of the water so that osmosis occurred naturally and spread throughout the entire structure. The fauna vacuumed oxygen and increased the pressure gradually creating a virtual lung that oxidized its environment just enough for nature to pulsate. It made his failure much more difficult to accept because the grass barely tickled his ankles, the saplings never bore any fruit, and even though Teralok allowed his foresight to include the local insects, these flowers did not produce pollen. It was frightening.

Day after day Teralok had his ear to the ground both literally and figuratively, tweaking his crystal panels to balance every stimulus of the outside atmosphere. The garden inside was more or less a closed system, continuing homeostasis in its cycle with the steady flow of Teraloks energy. This was particularly due to the runes he used to unify the forces of everything inside, a stability that Teralok himself fabricated. The pool of heated water below was churned and tugged into streams of steam, the condensing water above was cooled and dripping all by the disorderly technique of the warriors crystal alphabet. The cycle of water, earth, and naten in this system was accelerated to such unfathomable speeds, the decomposition speed alone was enough to degrade the very dna of anything couldn’t withstand the passage of such sustenance. Even Teralok himself had to take note of the increased conductivity as it took and more of his focus not only to monitor but to even affect the speed of the radiating particles, it was beginning to drain him dangerously.

The warrior would find it increasingly hard to move even though his body was becoming exponentially lighter by the second, because he was being drained of his nutrients. Even then it was only when the strain of the task became unmanageable that he came to realize his mistake. Managing to stand he came across his next issue, traveling from the center of his vampiric biome. Mere contact with the grass was enough to start the processes that fed the foliage it’s nutrients. It was like the blades of grass had roots taking in the air itself. Like little green tentacles every hair was like a hypodermic needle that multiplied to the billionth with every step. They were more akin to teeth than grass and introducing the first stimulus in what could have been hundreds or even thousands of generations they all wanted a piece of the most viable source of nutrition in the area.

A low rumble was loosed from his throat that groaned through his body until it hit the ground with a solid thud, flattening the ground around him until all the grasslings were smothered. He was disappointed, it seemed there was nothing he could to expedite the growth of his garden short of burying himself in it. The saplings turned to thick vines with thorny roots into ground, flowers around the border were now carnivorous, the bugs had long stopped traveling to them even though the ground border was semi permeable. Whether or not Teralok foresaw a problem with this development will be clear when he stepped outside, as of now he was clearing a path between him and that point. Technically in a bubble of vibrations he separated himself from the surface and almost glided to the wall of crystal that folded around him as he passed through with the same sound.

The scene outside could have been called a horticultural nightmare. As he looked around and revitalized himself with fresh minerals and nutrients he felt all but the most recent generations of plants in his terrarium. Multiple instances of pollen and seedlings traveling by bug or otherwise had found themselves germinating with the outside wildlife. There were bulbs and blossoms up and down the cliffside, rows of thorns in the open ones. The ancestors of the apex plants were clearly thriving on the unprepared wildlife. Neither the rocky cliffside nor arid heat perturbed them, the entropic system they came from tuning them to survive off mere sunlight and naten, carnivorous as they were.

The warrior, however, stood like a statue at the edge of the cliff. He was exhausted, and it felt like an era was over, he didn’t realize he missed the wind, the sounds of the earth, the natural warmth and naten that he wasn’t responsible for. The fact that he didn’t drop to his knees and spend a week literally underground, however amazing, was due to the terrarium he deemed to be a failure. If left alone it would become certain death for anything that traversed it’s boundary, and he even though he knew the insects wouldn’t survive the pollination, the stasis of his dome would evolve exponentially faster than anything on the other side and could find a different way to propagate. However, at this thought he closed his eyes and pondered at which threshold of his recovery would he be able to fix that problem.

Teralok hibernated there for more than a few moons, baking and revitalizing with every new day. He developed insight after watching his failure unfold but nature bloom before his eyes, the waxing and waning of the moon was not something he maintained in his terrarium. Which put into perspective his own relationship with it, one he often enjoyed. Sufficiently humbled, he uprooted his feet from the rock and lumbered over to the edge of the dome facing the desert. A rune of hardening appeared on his chest, glowing brighter as he approached the crystal panels. He was reluctant, did he actually want to protect this disaster, was it responsibility he felt for the environment around him that told him to be cautious. Teralok transferred the rune by placing his hands on the dome and it activated with another wave over it. It would read ‘Harden’ to anyone able to read or translate the language, and would disable any attempts to penetrate it by hardening in corresponding levels.

There was a seconds hesitation when Teralok thought of physically hiding the relatively enormous structure but he excused the thought since it was beside a desert of such magnitude. One that he had barely gotten a glimpse of so far since he had come through the mountains. Taking a running leap from the cliffside he landed past the moat in a plume of wet sand and after taking a few sticky steps he loosed a slow chuckle that only bothered the sand at the edge of the swamp. Teralok collapsed into it like a couch he hadn’t seen in a long time, arms spread wide squeezing the wet muck closer until he disappeared beneath the surface.

Traveling the desert beneath its surface had its benefits and its consequences, he hadn’t delved into the bowl of this creation but plenty of creatures traversed the tiny particles looking for homes and food. There was one particular sand worm that seemed determined to make him a part of his diet. The battle went on for a while as Teralok tried to avoid the conflict altogether, sand would burst into the air as he repelled the creature and then a corresponding silence while he tried to escape the creature stealthily. It was their very natures the brought them to conflict over and over, the warrior dislodging the matter around him to move and the worms blind appetite could not avoid each other. No matter how much he avoided making sound or even communication of any kind it was like the creature was intimately tied to where each grain of sand was located.

Teralok had no reason to kill the creature, and he had already been swallowed multiple times. It was a revolting but intimate experience. Teralok’s skin was of the same grit as the sand around him, as he wasn’t in fear for his life he didn’t feel a need to don anything more formidable. The problem was the warrior could feed the worm sand over and over and it still would keep trying to eat him for some reason. It was becoming somewhat of a ritual, once during a particularly long stint in the same stomach, becoming quite fond of the hard headed creature when he heard peculiar noise that he wasn’t accustomed to. Territorial as they were he had only seen the one and he knew they were territorial because any noise he tried to mimic only ended in violence.

As he sat there insulating himself with yet another layer of sand, the worm responded in kind with the same high pitched ringing that was accompanied with the bubbling of the sand in the stomach. This was accompanied by the jolt of momentum in said direction of the noise, the huge creature had found something else to be interested in. Before long there was another one, close, so close in fact that the was constricted as they writhed together. The sound had repeated until they found each other at which point it was replaced with a rhythmic clicking. This went on for quite a while, even while the distance grew the clicking was still heard in the background. This told him a few things but one in particular was how they communicated nonviolently. Where they had gathered he could figure when he left, how to stay out was what he was still working on. The tactic he chose to explore next, was a series of clicks.

Having lost track of the time that passed he wouldn’t be surprised by how many moons were out when he finally saw the sky. He finally configured the right combinations of violent and non violent piercing clicks and whistles to get the beast to understand that he couldn’t keep him there forever and should never attempt it again. It was an amazing interaction in which he realized the beast was beginning to grow stronger because of the warriors presence. The creature responded to his Seismic Voice a little more strangely however. Any sound other than digestion coming from its stomach must have been confusing, but Teralok would never have guessed it would begin twisting and turning in the manner it did. It was now undoubtedly aware of the warriors survival. He had been observing the creatures biology for so long he had fallen into a meditative state. Swallowing insects, rocks, and swathes of differently colored sands the warrior had catalogued the creatures diet. It was the sand in particular that allowed Teralok to have such an intimate relationship with this creatures metabolism.

Achieving a meditative state while fighting off digestion in a healthy sand worms stomach would have been far from an easy task for any being less durable than Teralok. Still it was more akin to getting acquainted with a sandstorm than a walk in the park. He was only alive because he could also metabolize the very sand for the naten inside. The only problem with this was the average amount that was in each grain was completely negligible for Teralok to consider actively adding to his stock… except for in conditions like these. Stuck in the desert cornered by a native beast on a mission of peace and homeostasis.

During the times when the stomach was calm is when he would take into account the volume of sand in proportion to the naten he felt besides the beasts. It would have been difficult to tell with tumultuous waves of sand eroding everything in constant vortex of digestion that more than half the sand the beast ingested broke down into pure naten. Teralok’s interest had first been peaked when he noticed the amount of sand drastically reduced without any movement of the creatures bowels, this began immediate speculation about whether this organic creature had his same ability. However the tables kept turning as he began reserving those grains of sand himself blindly trying to avoid fatigue and starvation amidst the draining climate.

It was only after achieving virtual symbiosis that Teralok was able to convene with the what he could only perceive as naten glass before the worm digested it completely. Furthermore it was all the warrior could do to back up the few threats he knew the creature could perceive. Still he felt a sliver of guilt as he used the energy available to build the grains of sand to obstructive sizes. Crystals formed flying through the air, salt, bismuth, quartz, the most random ingredients began knocking around inside the beast stomach even clinging to the walls. Before long the beast began to retch, knocking loose and spewing the hardened contents onto the sand right next to Teralok.