Black Magus

Reina Featherfall.

***

A wonderful domain awaited me when I was transported away from the others. But I could not look at it. Not with the Elder Druid perched before me, appearing much younger and more feathered than she did in life. Yet, she retained every aspect of her long life. The ones that mattered, at least.

Her shell and her persona remained, but her innards were cast to the Under, enabling her spirit and soul to return to what was now before me. My Umbra Empress, accompanied by my baleful parents- undead shadows in their infancy and thus incapable of speech. The true blessing behind my curse. For now.

Regardless, they and the Elder Druid- I've elected to call her Myra- were my teachers. Alongside the others, of course. But unlike Etan, Iris, or anyone else's training, Myra began explicating the druidic arts that arose from my accursed blessing the moment I stepped foot in that wonderful place.

My blessing for the druidic arts, granted by the Owl, made me the Eldest Druid of Twilight. It was the same ability that birthed the miracle in the blighted woods, wherein violet, orange, and yellow flowers bloomed beneath the gilded rays of twilight. The darkened light birthed flora that fed off of pestilence and pollution. Their oft-leafless branches breathed smog and smoke while their roots absorbed toxins, turning them into sweet-scented flowers and spicy fruits that bloomed and ripened twice per day.

Those fruits, I came to learn, had strong psychedelic effects at most and mild euphoric effects at least, each lasting half a day. But, like everything concerning the Devil of the Fae, there were two sides to that leaf, for the primary power of twilight revolved around duality. As enlightening as those fruits were, they bore the risk of madness. And that was something we Undying Fiends were sensitive to.

Thus, I bit into that flesh as happily as I would any other time. But… how different that fruit seemed to taste. Spicier or… I couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I ate and ate more. And when I ran out, I searched and ate until my head began to pang and fan away to the skies, leaving a satiated husk dancing in a field of shifting lines and angular shapes that poured soundless words into the abyss.

I saw through those shifting shapes… everything, for I was all, and all was me. As small as the smallest things could be, I was. But smaller. So small I could stand before a towering wall made of the most archaic objects in the universe- insignificant blocks stacked in aberrant ways to make transparent blobs within larger blobs of various colors and shapes. They were eating. Secreting. Feeding atop the wall. And outside the wall; I could see that too. A sea of emptiness, wherein more blobs or colonies of them swam and wiggled for the sake of the hunt. Ceaselessly.

I felt through my dancing vessel… It- that which could not be described. Somehow, I gazed upon the wall and could feel It. And after reaching out; I felt It. Them. The Mother of Nature's first children, small and big. Blobs. Microbes. Creatures so small they could not be seen, yet wielding the strength to plague nations with pestilential rot. Entities that could amalgamate into colossal tyrants of the most prestigious groupings of blocks and blobs. I felt Them. And They felt me.

I heard, through those soundless words… sorrow. The song of the Mother and her Children and those who were not- the walls. I heard the Mother of Nature's Children connecting with the mother herself. I harmonized with it. Attuned with it in a way like never before, and so the Mother and her Children sang ever louder. Yet, I heard… other children. Children that were of the mother, but not. Lost, perhaps- Outsiders, I supposed..

I heard them singing as high as they could hope to with the lungs they didn't have. A mere whisper when compared to the Mother and her Children. But I heard them. And I heard their roots. Reaching healthily to the Mother's embrace to bind strongly and remain stronger.

I heard the Mother's withered branches, meant to support those outsiders, break under their combined weight and plummet to shatter in echoing booms.

I heard the whimpers of both the Mother and the outsiders lamenting the lost days of their connection; or, conversely, longing for one to form.

I heard them.

I felt it.

I saw everything.

Yet, I knew nothing; not how or why it happened, what was before, or how I could fix it. Yet, I obsessed over it; that was madness.

I needed no instruction from Myra. Or anyone, for that matter. But that too was a point of madness, for I had to learn from everyone.

I learned from Etan. Only so I could have more time to find the answers later. I put my all into my combat training, removing the roots of doubt, hesitation, and fear from my petrified heart.

I learned from Iris. Only so I could learn why the civilized species sought to destroy nature to create their machinations and, in turn, create a means to first reverse it; and then serve as their alternative.

I learned from Blude. Only so I could learn how to accommodate those I invited to learn my ways and more, learn how to use the civilized people's obsession with metals and trinkets to my advantage.

I learned from Geri. Only so I could learn how the outsiders hunted so that the Children could elude or learn from them, turning the hunter into the hunted.

I learned from Freki. Only so I could learn how the civilized destroyed ecosystems for food, giving me the means to heal those lands and teach them ways to connect with the Mother's reaching hand. Or sever it entirely.

I learned from Wilson. Only so I could learn how to enhance life and death to make abominations and blessings for both the Mother and the outsiders.

I learned from Rickley. Only so I could instill the undeniable power of art into both the Mother and her Children; into both Mothers and their combined Children.

I learned from Leary. Only so I could teach the Mother how to strengthen her tools of warfare in ways that matched those beyond her purview; to remove the tendency for passive violence and convince her to take direct action.

I learned from Amun. Only so I could learn how to use the power of the enchanted crystals to give my Kitchens the edge in all realms. And to infuse them with whatever power my humanity would soon claim.

I learned from them all. All in exchange for my knowledge of the druidic arts and biochemical and biological processes; incomplete though that knowledge was, for I learned that I knew nothing as I tried to teach the Troupe what I thought I knew. So, in my free time, I studied and toiled and tried to learn how to use the Mother's creations for my ends. I took my wand of flesh and tried to understand. But it wasn't until I was made to catalyze the cadavers of a thousand creatures felled both above and below that understanding came.

Sentient creatures with varying ranges of power. Beasts. Feral, divine, and magical alike. I dissected and studied those creatures, not my druids and poachers, to complete my knowledge of biology. I studied their DNA, sequenced their genes and sought ways to both improve and impede their biological functions. I created systems that mimicked the natural actions of these creatures and dissimilar creatures as well.

Those bountiful efforts rewarded me with basins of biomass to crystallize and store to use when Myra finally dragged me into the cosmic void to weave my world. A pestilential expanse of Duskwoods on the surface only. A hollow shell to be filled wholly through my efforts in learning architecture through yet more visions. Infrastructure, as Amun called it. Made not with stone and metal but with bone and flesh.

Beneath the surface of that world, carved with endless caverns, I filled pits and chambers alike with bodies and chunks to be processed into their constituent parts and fed into yet more vats. A vat for hearts, a pit for stomachs, a pool for blood, a basin for skin, and yet more for bones, hair and nails, mucus, or any other fluid or part, no matter how big or small. Fed again were those pits into chambers, vats, and sacks meant to repurpose what the living no longer needed. Hearts continued their function as pumps; elbows and knees as levers and hinges; ribs and spines for arches and columns; crystallized blood and radiant nerves for paint and luminescence. Yet, that was just the foundational infrastructure. The biomass was intended for better things. FleshTech, as it were. Scrying devices made from eyes. Those… computer things, from brains. Healing pods and gestation chambers from uteruses. Entire factories, in reality. Vast complexes that could intake biomass and semi-autonomously produce whatever me or my little garden of Flesh Children needed.

Indeed, those machinations were only my world's essentials, as my daily feasts soon beheld visions of the Mother of Nature taking the hand of the Father of Evolution to create a new Child. A child who would create singular cities as tall as mountains, made to house the Mother's Children and the Outsiders in harmony for eons. Yet, like before, I only understood once I made one for myself. Deep in the core of my world was my arcology of flesh; my Flesh Kitchen, wherein I was dubbed an Eldritch Environmental Engineer and made to return to my bounty of flesh. For it was then time live according to my title.

While the Owl blessed me, I was cursed by the Devil of the Fae. That left my powers of the Twilight Grove corrupted. It was the same ability that I saw- committed in the Feathered Grove. Wherein the bodies of those I felled condensed and crystallized in a long staff held by my tainted hands. The wickedness within me birthed a branch of flora that fed on life. Their oft-fleshy stems grew warts and cysts while their roots absorbed biomass, turning them into seed crystals and prongs embedded into the handles of druidic tools.

It was a foul, abhorrent ability, according to the signed words of my umbral mother and father. Yet, I felt it to be pure, an ability I saw worth in once I remembered the many battlefields, massacre sites, or mass graves scattered across the lands and imagined them cleared within minutes. Therein was my chosen duty- a task I took upon myself. To assist the Mother of Nature while giving me affluence to the civilized folk: Reina's Cleanup Crew. Countered, as all things were, by the Life Centers, wherein the most critical of wounds could be healed without risk and body parts could be regrown with a little time. My businesses, as they were called; things that required little more than planning and preparation. Unlike my appointed duties.

The undying mind behind the NoxNet, Simion Lumbarde, was that duty. As Iris was his caretaker for his machine aspects, I was the caretaker for the fleshy bits of him that remained. An Augmentator and a Mutator, we respectively were. Administrators, the two of us. Friends, the three of us.

We each had domains in Simion's hidden void. Hers was a house of ceramic and steel; mine was of flesh and bone. She had hands, and later machine animals, to aid in her work with Simion. I had no such tools. Thus I worked. I created.

In my Flesh Kitchen, I eagerly toiled and tinkered with the poachers who ravaged Redagh. But before I could finally meld them with my pits and chambers of bio-materials and genetic templates, I had to research and design the perfect method with which to design my perfect children. Thus, I made Templates for each brood I would create; a framework of six Seeds that grouped the biological functions of an organism into easily manageable blocks. In each seed, the genes of countless animals were to be tailored to allow that brood to thrive in the environment in which they were born. Or, they could be as genetic data and later be combined with other seeds to make the various Castes.

Each Caste, adapted for a specific purpose, combined characteristics of an ant, bee, or wasp colony with those of the civilized species to make up 26 castes per brood, and each brood would begin here in my Flesh Kitchen.

Each brood's genesis would start with a wise rock imbued with my powers of flesh. Taken by the Flesh Kitchen, it would form the beating heart of a new child. Their birth would be on the surface amidst a bounty of biomass, and they would sample, harvest, and oft-feast, increasing the size of their heart until it reached a critical mass, wherein the wise rock's matured will would begin pulling them toward an ecological dead zone. And then they'd die.

They die in a grand explosion of gore, ejecting the innards of my child and their concentrated biomass across the land to have it coalesce and take the form of a new Flesh Kitchen, wherein she would be reborn as its Brood Queen. This Brood and the one that would come after were different, however. They were and would be born from my world in Eotrom. Thus, they would have abilities other broods would not. All else was the same, however.

As with every child of every brood, their Frame was the first Seed to be designed. It was the general structure, be it the skeleton or lack thereof. Chitinous or mineral-bound exoskeletons or invertebrates were just as capable as any other body type; and there was the need for more… formless children to be born in some places. But they would not be found in my first brood. No, the Template of the Caretaker's Brood was given an orcish frame to give each Caste solidity and support and make them grow up to be big and strong boys and girls.

The Mind was the second Seed, consisting of either the brain of a once-living creature or a brain made anew. The former allowed for more or less the same preferences and temperaments of the individual in life; minus their memories. The latter allowed for the fine-tuning of the mind and persona. To that end, I used a human persona for Simion's caretaker to make him feel more at ease.

That was built upon by the Peripheral Seed. The nerves and sensory organs or whatever was responsible for sensory input, be it light, vibrations, and heat, to magic, life, and souls. For this, I used the Elven genetic template for their senses to give them mana sight, night vision, and overall higher perceptive abilities. Of course, the other side to that was heightened nerves, granting a small boost to dexterity and agility. However, the efficiency of such things depended largely on the following Seed.

The Drives were not just the musculature but the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive functions as well. Every bodily function meant to keep the Child alive. And so it was that I gifted them with the drives of a dwarf to give them a curiously robust physicality paired with a nice, thick beard.

The other Seeds of the Templates were the Arms, of which this brood had none. Their role was one of companionship and medicinal witchcraft. There was simply no need for exotic weapons or defenses. Unlike the final Seed.

My first brood's Supplements included a mutation for an ovipositor in select Caste members. A highly efficient ovipositor that used biomass to lay and hatch disposable, non-sentient drones to assist in their endeavors. So too did they have tiny moth-like antennae in their eyebrows meant to connect them mentally to the rest of the Caretaker's brood. A Brood my first daughter, Aloura, couldn't wait to gestate and birth by the hundreds.

So, like any good mother, I sent her off to grow, for I had some growing to do as well.