Violet Flower - Hopefully the Only Lore Post
Introduction
I'm in the Antarctic Adventure Jam (Link Here) and I've started outlining my claimed region for filling and designing an adventure around. As part of that, I decided to write a bit of lore that frames the rest of the adventure. Here it is! I've also got a distinct section on my blog (you can see it in the navigation bar above this post) that will collate all my writing for this on one big page. Check that page every so often; I plan to put stuff there that isn't worthy of being a blog post.
Violet Flower
When the Great Flower was but a bud, there was a man named Malachite. Malachite could see the future, all that would be and all that was in the would-be's he could see. He sat on the tip of the Great Flower's bud and looked at the void, all that was beyond the Great Flower, a swirling abyssal black mist of unpotential. A voice spoke to him then, a choir of sounds that never harmonized but did anyway, just this once.
A rockslide: "Leap into the mist, child. That bud will wither and die as all flowers do. Your raising it is meaningless." Malachite thought, thinking through ten thousand would-be's in the thin space between one moment and the next. "Is my raising it not meaning enough? I'll be here to guide it to the next life."
The harsh bray of a donkey with a broken leg: "Come, boy! Nothing you can do with your face of stone and a rock-hands will make a difference! What use is trying to nurture something whose end will bring the world's people a suffering greater than all their joy?" Malachite caressed his stone face with his rock hand. He remember-predicted the joy of ten thousand babies' first steps, and their tranquil satisfactions at the end of a life well lived. He weighed these against the withering of the Great Flower. "You're wrong. I will see it out myself."
The tear-choked voice of a child: "Why would you consign us to suffer so?" Malachite's stone face cracked, and as he spoke boulders tumbled from between his lips. "I'm..." A pause here, and Malachite's whole being rumbled. The void reached out with greedy teeth that gazed upon apprehension and eyes that tasted doubt. "...not quite sure". As he crumbled, a single jade-green tear dribbled from Malachite's eroding stony eye and landed on the Great Flower's bud with a plop.
And the void knew rain for the first time.
The Great Flower grew, then, battered by crumbling Malachite Who Mourns What He Made and nurtured by his tears in turn. The petals of the Great Flower unfurled and all of creation lay gently on them. Bits of Malachite Who Mourns What He Made buried themselves among the flower's petals, rock hands on each corner to keep it open until the end of days. The jade-green tears of the Mourner became a great ocean that surrounded the flower.
And What of the Void?
It wails, far beyond the ocean of tears, and waits for an end that it knows is coming close. Its servants walk the flower petals, sowing destruction and forgotten magic to bring about the Withering. Chief among them the Hydra, whose legion of raging warriors threaten to cast the pieces of Malachite Who Mourns What He Made into the ocean and raze the flower petals to ash.
In the cleft of two petals lie the Face of Malachite Who Mourns What He Made, broken into 11 shards. The Hydra desires them, that they may reconstruct the Mourner's face and use him to predict the Withering. And so the ocean swells and forms a bay in the cleft between two petals. It is around this bay in which this tale is told and, on a day quite like today and in a land like ours but warmer, our tales begin.