Spied via a glimpse through a bubble, the Prince of Blossoms arrived in a new realm. Stepping off a grassy suspended island, he planted his feet into sand. Sharp winds buffeted his hair and clothes and cold waters lapped at the shore behind him. This world was not welcoming nor comforting. From the first seconds of breathing its stale air to observe the washed out colors of its gray shores and bleached blue skies, this was not a welcoming realm indeed.

The Prince of Blossoms had the sense that he was quite low in relation to his placement on the world tree. It was becoming clear that this was where the detritus of the world tree gathered. The fallen leaves and broken branches as it were. This place certainly lacked the vibrancy of Irani, or even the slate marble realm that would one day be the City Divine.

There were no signs of the mortals that the Prince had spied, but he'd also been fishing for several decades. Their totem still stood on the beach though. The stone was crudely carved. There were impressions of great eyes and a toothy maw, but it was an impressionists recreation. The stone stood at a precarious angle, the unstable foundation of sand making it lean wildly to the left, in another few years it would collapse, a few decades more and it would sink into the sands entirely.

Behind the totem stretched out a flat gray sea. As the Prince watched the back of something massive broke through the surface and for a moment it looked like there was a huge slithering island, then it sank back into the dark waters. Clearly there were dangers in those seas. On the opposite side of the ocean stunted grasslands stretched out from the beach and stretched out far. In one direction there were black mountains, in another were river carved valleys, in another snowy plains. These lands looked like they did not fit together properly, it was like a jigsaw puzzle where someone had mashed together the pieces regardless of the images shown on the tiles.

There were no signs of the mortals that the Prince had spied through the bubble.

The Prince walked along the beach, keeping tabs on the location and presence of whatever it was that was swimming far out at sea but yet was large enough to appear so massive. The statue, he wondered, could have been for some ritual or could have been a depiction of the creature at sea or something else. Who knows? But what was interesting was that this didn't seem like a normal god-realm though. This was most likely some sort of sub-realm or something like the fishing hole, or the labyrinth of elements.

He continued walking along the beach, looking for potentially hidden secrets as he did. Under the scrutiny of his Enlightened Senses and Regal Insight, the god tended to notice a lot of things beyond even the large amount that his innate divine senses often revealed to him. If there were hidden things and secrets, he would be fairly good at ferreting them out.

He followed the beach for now, avoiding both the water and the lands deeper in and looked for signs of mortal, or anything else interesting and noteworthy.

Carefully examining the lands as he walked them, the Prince noticed a discordance. There were places where the texture or color of sand changed, or the type of grass growing became finer or coarser. These changes occurred intermittently, typically after long stretches, but not always. Leaning on divine senses to aide in his own observations, the Prince of Blossoms had the impression that this world was not a unified realm like all the others he'd visited previously. The edges had been softened by time, but they were still apparent. He had the sense that he was quite low on the world tree. Quite low indeed.

He was still cobbling together the pieces when a new clue literally dropped out of the sky. The appearance of this was clue was preceded by a great darkening as a vast shadow fell over the land. What fell from the sky was too great to be called a boulder, it were closer to saying that the sky had calcified and dropped from the heavens. Luckily as massive as the falling earth was, it was well on the far side of the land, but the sheer size of it made it clearly visible even from such a great distance. The falling earth landed and sent this place trembling to its core. Huge waves splashed up on the shore and behind the Prince where he'd originally arrived the totem finished its inevitable collapse.

Looking over to the sight of the crash, the Prince saw the world was now larger and stretched out further then it had previously. The new realm that had crashed down had added fields of cracked stone and a town that was now mostly rubble. Seeing this, many of the facts clicked together.

This place was not a proper realm. It was more like a graveyard for realms. A resting ground where fallen leaves and branches of the world tree gathered. These cast off bits lost worlds were no longer properly connected to the world tree, that was why this world felt washed out. Like fallen leaves or branches, they were no longer living and would rot away.

Discovered: The Corpselands

The Prince made some interesting realizations about this place, and seems to have a knack for finding lost and cast-off realms, niches of reality, and other non-mainstream places on the tree. And while one may have been content to leave this place as the graveyard it was, the fact of the matter was that underneath the surface there was traces of life here. For instance: whatever the heck was swimming around in the ocean for one thing. But the cloaked mortals too, and who knows what else. Where did such life come from and how did it survive? The Prince desired to find the answers to these questions.

Casting his divine senses outward, he attempted to detect traces of sentient mortal life. Failing anything immediate, he decided to head into the Corpselands. For now...toward the town and newly-fallen patch of land, taking note of everything he could inbetween his current location and that town far in the distance.

There were more answer the Prince wanted and he determined that he wouldn't find them by idly waiting. Leaving the security of a familiar place, the Prince of Blossoms struck out to properly explore the Corpselands and the secrets this realm held.

Travel would have been difficult for a less sure footed god. The ground of this world was cracked and rippled, which made sense if all the landscape arrived as violently as the place that that the Prince had witnessed. But it wasn't the landscape that the Prince was interested in, not wholly, it was the life that somehow existed here.

The plants growing in the Corpseland did not seem to be doing well. Many were entirely dead, those that were not were yellow, dry and sickly. Animals seemed to be rare, the few that the Prince happened across were small scurrying creatures, the handful of birds spied were scraggly. So how did something so vast live in the ocean? Questions upon questions.

Then the Prince of Blossoms' walking took him to the edge of this world. The he discovered a startingly realization. It did not drop off into Void as Irani did or Aeon. The soil and grass gave way, beyond it was inky black, but it was not nothing. A tentative poke found that the black beyond was solid. A great flat plain, not darkness per say as there was no light or dark beyond where the ground ended. It was... otherness. This truly was as low as one could get it seemed, beyond the edges of this world one left the protective canopy of the World Tree. What lay beyond was foreign and alien, there was no frame of reference. Even for a god, there were some things that were beyond knowing.

But if one could simply walk out and into... whatever lay out there. Did that mean something could wander in?

The Prince wandered the Corpselands, and really the more he wandered the more he wondered. The strange black border that lay beyond the Corpselands. It felt like he was at the very base of the tree, lower than even the roots, or perhaps to the side before the roots formed like the near-by outside of the trunk. Yes...that was probably more accurate. But what then was the water and ocean he saw that surrounded the place? Although it too didn't seem infinite. It was like...beyond a point the tree's influence simply stopped and the world became the Void.

And if he could wander out into the void, could things from without wander inside? But if so the tree would be teeming by now, yes? Which made him suspect the tree had some sort of defense mechanism against outside influences. Sort of like cells or antibodies in a living animal. The tree could probably easily determine its own "matter," like how cells don't attack the body but only foreign invaders. But HOW this played out the god was unsure off. And the tree probably was quite aware of one of its gods. But what about the outside void?

He wondered...how well could a god survive out in the Void? The tree obviously survived in the Void, but he suspected normal mortal life couldn't do too well out there. But gods were different, and in a way he was like a miniature tree. He had to at least try it out. If it turned out to be Harmful, the Prince would dismiss his "self" and re-form it back by the beach.

The Prince of Blossoms attempted to step out into the Void, walking on the dark flat surface.

Stepping off the world and beyond, the Prince found the black underfoot was firm. One step after the other carried him further and further from the familiar lands behind him. The difference between Here and There was immediate with the first step. Everything felt... strange, foreign. Unwelcoming. One did not recognize true disregard until one felt it. The World Tree had birthed everything upon its boughs. Some of it might seem strange or ugly, but it still had a sort of familiarity to it that spoke of shared origins. Stepping out from under the boughs of the tree... here nothing cared that the Prince was god. There was no natural deference or recognition to the divine. It felt cold here. Both physically and emotionally. Walking further, it felt like swimming out into deep waters. The Prince began to have the sense that he was not alone. That other things inhabited this formless darkness. Slithers of movement that rippled the air and stirred the ground. Some movement was tiny, like creeping little bugs, then there came a sense of movement so vast that left the Prince feeling like the bug, something so great that it dwarfed whatever it was he'd seen out in those gray waters.

Looking back the god of blossoms could see where he'd left from. The Corpselands had felt washed out and unwelcoming, but now standing out in this... otherness, that bit of solidity on the horizon and its light looked like a warm, welcoming golden glow. It felt like home. Out here in the dark there was a perpetually growing sensation of wrongness. That the Prince should not be here. Even for a god, the things beyond the World Tree were beyond understanding.

Those sensations of movement had also grown. The shapeless space around him stirred more purposefully. Like it had noted something new in its environment. The Prince suddenly had an uncomfortable image of the watering hole. The idea of a fishing lure bobbing in the water, waiting to be swallowed up by the things deeper in the water.

The Prince stopped then, and hesitated to go further. He felt he was on the verge of discovering something no god had ever known before. Hell...he probably already had discovered it just by being here! But once he felt a presence larger than even the thing that was in the waters back in the corpselands, he knew he had to stop and retreat for now. At least until he was much, much stronger. Apparently, there were things outside the tree that dwarfed even young gods, and in a rare moment he began to feel a mild twinge of fear. But it was a composed and controlled fear, but he knew he needed to fall back and now.

And so the Prince turned around and headed back to the beacon of Light in the darkness that was the Corpselands and the tree. He could explore this void later, but he felt too much like a fish out of water here.

The Prince returns back to the Corpselands, and uses his senses and godpower senses to keep tabs on his surroundings and try to avoid any surprise dangers on his way back.

Returning with some small degree of urgency, the walk back to the Corpselands felt longer than it had taken to reach it. Every step there was a growing sense of anxiety, that things beyond the Prince's ken were shadowing his steps. It was with palpable relief that he crossed back onto solid soil and back to the lands were the whims of the World Tree dictated form and function.

Behind the Prince something shapeless and unformed squirmed in that inky void, then it squirmed across the barrier and into the Corpselands proper. What came across was impossible to describe, it defied the traditional senses that the World Tree had provided the Prince. This thing was utterly alien, it came across more as a sensation of wrongness. Even its mere presence made the ground blacken and air ripple. Its presence sent of wave of prickling sensation across the Prince, as though the first layers of his skin were been scoured away by this abominations presence. (-1 HP)

But as creature crawled beneath the boughs of the World Tree its shape transformed. It became encased in a wet leathery hide and clutching and grasping tentacles reached out from its writhing bulk. The thing was still monstrous, but its mere presence was no longer having a deleterious effect on its surroundings. This was a young and healthy World Tree and at this invasion from the Beyond it had transformed the offending beast into something more palatable for the World Tree. It was still monstrous and alien and likely quite dangerous, but it was now contained.

This shed sudden insight into the thing beneath the waves and other signs of life. Those beasts that had crept into these fallen lands were monstrosities with no place within the World Tree, but they had been contained. It was like a healthy immune system which had rendered them no threat to the World Tree itself. Now, to other beings, that was a different matter.

The new arrived horror reared back on a pale worm-like body and its new tentacle limbs reached out hungrily towards the Prince of Blossoms. Those tendrils were clumsy and fumbling, the creature was still getting used to its new shape, but they posed a threat if they managed to grasp the god.

It now began to make sense to the Prince. He was still a bit unsure about the cloaked mortals he had seen in the glimpse from the fishing hole, but certainly the other weird things and life that seemed to find its way here mysteriously now began to make sense. They were invaders from the outside, technically, albeit ones the tree forced into physicality and thus depowered enough to prevent them from harming it. Still...these gross abominations had no place here, and the thing before him especially offended the tree and the god alike as its unholy presence twisted space and blackened the very soil.

The Prince's aura instinctively flared and flexed as the thing's presence sapped at his strength, his divine power restoring that strength as his vital energy began to surge suddenly!


The Prince then turned to face the abomination, and his aura flared violently while his eyes suddenly began to glow a furious white. His entire personal demeanor suddenly shifted, and became something beautiful and terrible to behold, like the dawn. Like a treacherous sea. Like the foundations of the Earth turned angry.

"I see now, that my curiosity was misplaced. You things from the void beyond are impure and foul. I call upon my divine authority as the son of the Tree of Life, and declare you unclean! Undeserving of even normal existence! Let your impurity turn against you, hindering your every effort while your twisting foulness consumes you from within. Only death or your retreat into the void shall free you from my wrath!" he Prince cried out, his voice unnaturally deep yet paradoxically airy, sinister and darkly beautiful.

Note: He kind of looks like dark-mode Queen Galadriel right now.

And it was then that, for the first time, the Prince used his most awful power on another. something far more terrible than even manifest-tier plants and vines tearing into it and consuming its flesh. Such a thing would be a mercy, honestly.

The writhing worm-like creature, if it had any ability to understand the Prince's condemnation, did not reply. Flailing its tentacles and dripping goo from its pale body, it reared up twice the height of the prince. But the creature was certainly something considered unclean for the World Tree. The Prince of Blossoms raised a hand and exuded his power to purify. The newborn horror suddenly writhed and contorted in on itself, then exploded in a spray of viscous ooze and fleshy chunks.

This creature was only newly born, it had hardly even had the time to learn how to use its new appendages, hardly a threat. But evidently these creatures could creep into the Corpselands freely. While the World Tree contained them, transforming them in a way so that their mere presence.

Knowing this, this land of falling and decaying realms took on new sinister overtones. It was like a forest with a thick bed of fallen leaves, in those decaying heaps all manner of insects sprang up. Here the fallen leaves were dying chunks of worlds and the insects were other worldly horrors.

OOC: That's fair enough. The power, like all god powers and like gods in general, acts as much narratively as they do literally.

The Prince's singed flesh immediately regenerated to its normal pristine condition, while he turned his dread gaze upon the tentacled horror. He flinched a bit as it exploded though, surprised by the magnitude of his own power. He wasn't actually expecting this to happen, although the end result was fine with him. He never used his power to retract purity before and thus, enact banes although this worked beyond his expectations. Although he used his floral affinity so much it had slipped his mind that this too was a manifest-tier ability of his, so it made sense it was explosively successful. Literally.

Looking at the bits of viscera that were splattered on the ground, the Prince muttered aloud, "Oh most honored parent of mine, blessed tree of life, I offer this kill to you in your honor." he said as he swept a hand, and used his purification powers to literally burn away all the grime and bits of exploded flesh. It vaporized into clean misty smoke that drifted upward a bit and vanished.

He turned and looked out at the Corpselands, and pondered as the sinister overtones of the place struck him. This place was dangerous, in its own way. Although in another sense it was marvelous, for it meant the tree's attention here was strong as its "immune system defenses" were quite active. And it pleased him to know that he was walking here freely, under the scrutiny of his parent, fully accepted and "legitimate" to the place. He did wonder, however, if there'd ever some a time in the far future when the tree's defenses would weaken, and he and other gods would have to step in and help purge invading entities on its behalf? He hoped never to see the tree ever become so weak, for that would mean his parent would be ailing. But he pushed such thoughts to the back of his mind, as the tree was young and vivacious now in the present.

The Prince turned and headed deeper into the Corpselands. He wondered if there were signs somewhere of those cloaked mortals be had seen in the vision from the fishing hole? And if they were friendly or at least amenable mortals who could be interacted with or perhaps who could even become worshippers and followers or something, or if they were impure entities he needed to purge and whose lives he needed to sacrifice as a gift to his tree-parent, like a child giving a favored teacher a fresh red apple as a gift?

The Prince heads deeper into the Corpselands, and searches for signs of sentient mortal life.

The Prince continues...