Ahtziri

The Mother of Monsters

> "There is a monster within each of you. You will birth it or you will become it."
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## Domain(s)

***Monsters –*** The domain of monsters oversees that which is considered to be the antithesis of mortalkind and civilisation: things utterly alien and incomprehensible to the structure, order, and morality of mortalkind and nature at-large. It is the corruption and twisting of flesh into something bestial and primal, it is a terrible fecundity that breeds and breeds without ceasing, and it is the surrendering of social norms in favour of primal cruelty and reckless abandon--where reason is forsaken and only a twisted mockery of what once was remains. Though it is what mortalkind at large is not, it is not a construct that can be set apart from mortality and all its conditions: the greatest monsters are born of mortalkind’s convictions that they are right, and of their lusts and passions inflamed until all else falls away. To be monstrous, and thus to fall under the domain of Monsters, it is not enough to be primal or wild--monsters are grotesque and macabre mockeries of the sane, things that defy the natural order, taken to horrible extremes and born or twisted in flesh to match this ideological perversion.

Ahtziri is (or at least considers herself to be) the mother of all things monstrous, be they born or created, and her powers are concerned with the creation and manipulation of the monstrous. She is a goddess of exceptional fecundity, birthing many monsters herself with horrifying regularity and speed--and this propensity for creating life is something she can also bestow (or force) upon any sentient living being. In addition to birthing or allowing others to birth the monstrous, she is also able to twist flesh into a monstrous caricature of what it previously was, so long as it becomes something that the being considers to be monstrous (or causing their current form to match an already monstrous psychology). Ahtziri is, notably, a goddess of life--she possesses the capacity to facilitate the creation of living beings on a staggering scale, but this comes with the caveat that any life blessed by the Mother of Monsters is tainted, and destined to become a monster in ideology or in form (and quite often both).

## Forms

### The Mother

Ahtziri’s head is rarely human, often taking the form of an animal (or monster) based on her current mood and who she is interacting with. The only real constants are her wings (which may be made of scales or feathers or sinew, but are always present), having more breasts than is normal (three, in this aspect) and that she is always heavily pregnant. Her form is equal parts alluring and grotesque, and her flesh seems to writhe and pulse of its own accord even in the absence of stimulation. She possesses a long tail that begins as a furry appendage, then becomes sinewy and stringy, and finally ends in scales and the head of a serpent with uncountable rows of razor-sharp teeth.

### The Maiden

In this form, Ahtziri loses her obviously pregnant belly and the most monstrous of her features. She becomes cloaked in a gossamer veil of ecstatic beauty, the perfect imagine of fertility, but her third breast remains--and its areola and nipple become a closed eye. Her wings remain but her tail disappears, and eyes become soft and dewy. This form is designed to appeal primarily to those who are distinctly not monstrous, and to trick them into copulating with the Mother of Monsters--only for the deception to be revealed, the glamour shorn away, and for the child to be born. It is a personal favourite when Ahtziri interacts with the falsely pious, a wicked tool of deception to show them how monstrous they are within and how anything born of them shall look.

### True Form

Ahtziri’s true form is a monstrous, life-bearing creature so unfathomably alien and abhorrent to the fundamental rules of reality that merely the sight of her causes inescapable madness and perversion. She might not break the mind of a mortal *completely*, but it is guaranteed to be twisted and perverted to the extent that the person who once was most certainly no longer exists.

She is a towering mass of undulating and ceaseless flesh, various distinct forms of life emerging and changing all at once: she is the essence of every monster that ever was, every rule of sanity and decency broken in some way or another. Her true size is impossible to fully grasp, as is any semblance of shape--new life constantly forms within and from her, splitting off and tearing away into the night. She perpetually gives birth to untold horrors from various unknowable orifices, obscuring the sky with hordes of winged *things* and covering the ground with a ravening mass of flesh, tooth, and claw. Flesh that comes near her is immediately and irrevocably twisted, and it immediately betrays its previous owner: Ahtziri’s true form overtakes and subsumes life on a staggering scale, devouring it in order to birth new horrors from the memories contained within.

## Myth

"It was written in the Scrolls of Kur-nugia, long ago, that death is irreversible. That once a soul has reached its final resting place, the doors are barred and no return is ever possible--and this, for all we know, is still true now."

The hoarse, throaty voice of a man rang through the eerie silence like the peal of a clarion bell, and several shadow-draped figures turned their eyes to look at its source in unison. They came to rest upon a frail, tottering old man whose hands could only barely stop themselves from shaking at the mercy of a seemingly absent wind, knuckles white and bony from the exertion of holding on to a clay tablet as if it were the last hope for all that ever was and would be.

"... yes, death is irreversible once the soul has departed. But when the soul remains, safely ensconced within what remains of the husk of this world, there is a spark of possibility--so say the teachings of the Great Mother! That if our lives are stored here, they may be transmuted--changed--and that hope might continue, no matter how bleak it seems now. That we will be spared the endlessly grasping hands of the dead!"

The words seemed to pick up faint traces of some unidentifiable and bone-dry powder on the ground, little puffs and ringlets of the stuff just barely forming before settling once again into the dirt. The old man squinted in the dying light, somehow still suspended in the sky, and took a lurching step forwards so that he was just barely caught in the umbra of its looming shadow--within it, some semblance of strength seemed to return to him, and he rose himself a full inch taller than he had been to address the swaddled and huddled figures craning their necks to hang upon his every pontification.

"... there is a tree, said to have been grown by the Goddess, that does not take life but stores it within its many branches--a tree once so great it could have sheltered the world 'neath its boughs! Death... death is certain for us, now, and the shades of Kur are not long behind our heels. Even now they nip at us, and soon even shadow will not cloak us--so to it we shall travel, and to it we shall offer what little remains within our breasts. Perhaps, ere long, our sacrifice will placate the shades and something new will begin. Perhaps..." the words trailed off as whatever momentary strength the man had mustered left him with a shuddering cough, and in the half-light the air seemed dewy with a little ripple of his rapidly leaching life essence. He brought a hand up to his mouth and wiped away fresh, bright blood--and then he brought his quivering hand to the threadbare cloth of his tunic and feebly wiped it away as best as he could.

The plateau had not been that far away--but in the absence of light and wind and time it was impossible to say how long the six or seven survivors had walked. They had passed the ruins of wonders they'd thought would never cease in the sky, stone and metal streaking in patterns across a canvas of infinite depth. The sustension of the last rays of light had not yet passed, and they glittered like the promise of *something* against the infinite void that had already swallowed their source. They trickled into the extant ruins of the wonders that had been and bounced off of them, into the eyes of the crawling enclave of survivors, and traces of histories they'd never known were revealed to them: a roiling storm possessed of a motherly aspect; a glint of silver that contained another world; a half-remembered love so fierce it had almost burned everything around it to tears and ash. These things survived only in the twilight of existence, and were wholly unappreciated by their final observers--with the exception of one.

A great claw of withered and gnarled wood tore itself out of the ground, like the futile defiance of a shade not ready to embrace the eternity of the void. As the man approached it, his pulse quickened within his veins--and he coughed again, the tiny red droplets suspended in the air for just a moment before pulling themselves on invisible currents towards the shape in the background. The old man did not speak any more, merely continuing to walk, until his flesh sloughed off of his bones and slumped to the ground in a heaving, steaming pile. Then it, too, crawled towards the last bastion of hope until it dissolved away into a fine mist and nestled itself within the folds of the wood. Another joined him, and then another, and then another--and when they were done it shimmered and glistened with the fluids of life and a gentle rhythm began to flutter from within it. The wood pulsed and writhed, suddenly possessed of a strangely hale and vital aspect, before contracting--and then expanding, and contracting, as the ligneous gave way to the pulsing of flesh and sinew. As each pilgrim crawled ever-closer, the greedy hand of death snatched the breath of life from them until at last there were no witnesses or supplicants left. The writhing of the flesh-that-was-wood grew and grew, until its din suffocated even the silence.

*Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.*

The cry of a mother birthing a child pierced what remained of the world, and Ahtziri was born.

## Persona

Ahtziri is a capricious and melodramatic creature, who lives life to its extreme in every moment: she loves fiercely, despises utterly, and experiences rage with the entirety of her being. She flows from extreme to extreme without apparent rhyme or reason, in one moment drunk on her adoration for you and in the next a flurry of claws and teeth and sinew, rabidly attacking without concern for life or limb. After her mood swings, however, she forgets any lasting consequences of any of her fickle changes of character almost immediately--love gives way to hate, and fury is met with a gentle, nurturing side that longs only to be your mother and love you completely.

Ahtziri’s only true constant, above all else, is her maternal love for everything monstrous. She never loses her affection for all of her children, and many of her flights of fancy are motivated by that maternal love in one way or another, however unjustifiable it may seem. She considers herself the mother of a large and abstract family in a simultaneously sincere and twisted way--genuine maternal love exists, but there is also a motivation of possession and jealousy in her love that can lead her to express a certain cruelty towards her children if they evoke her spite (but she is never unable to forgive them completely).

## Creations

Abiktu - Wolf-like creatures with anywhere between six and ten legs, four eyes, two mouths, and batlike wings made of sinew. They are nocturnal predators that hunt in packs, and though currently small in number will soon be a menace to those travelling overland everywhere.

The Bizai'i - An enormous wurm that buries itself beneath the earth to chew upon rocks. It then excretes any ores it has swallowed atop a rocky carapace that grows from its chitinous plating. The Bizai'i is absolutely colossal in size, easily able to coil beneath an entire city (and possibly even its surrounding lands, depending on how big the city is). The Bizai'i also has an enormous stinger at the end of its body that secretes a wicked venom which induces petrification in its victims, and currently has no known antidote.