SHARDSTONE IDOLS
For the many millenia life on Akara has existed, there has been no sign of gods or other supernatural forces. The sun did rise, the massive moon called Sayun changed phases, and many mysterious things besides have happened; however, these events were sublimated into Akaran mysticism where they have long since been treated as lessons to be studied, not powers to be feared. Those that are keen know that the rituals, ceremonies, the altered states of consciousness, the drugs and teas and potions, the dances and holidays and taboos — these are tools for a society to use to keep itself healthy and stable, the foundational tenets of Akaran virtue.
Then came shardstones, and with them shardstone idols, and so mysticism has changed forevermore.
Before the advent of shardstones, the idols Akarans made for their mysticisms were powerful symbols but nothing more. These idols were carved not into the likenesses of “gods” — a concept foreign to the Akaran mindset — but instead into abstract shapes that represent the various symbols Akarans dub virtuous. Stargazers etched constellations into steles; Ruminators adorned images of the brain with chains of bronze, copper, and tin; Hanyi sculpted from bare stone the many tattooed cruelties they emblazoned onto their faces, hands, and feet.
Imagine now what would happen if these symbols, loaded as they were with the force of will of countless Akarans, were painstakingly bloodcut out of shardstone. Imagine how the ideals, beliefs, and unfettered wishes of mystics in their darkened towers carved into crimson every desire they and their communities ever did hold. With the elemental force that is Idea at the left hand, the occult hand, so potent and raw, the only outcome was the creation of powerful objects every bit as terrible as the legendary artifacts of the long lost Zenith People
In Tarnak now do shardstone cults thrive. Those with the talent and the will walk the streets of the Dust District, wait in abandoned homes throughout the Aristan’s District, skulk through the Charred and Serpent’s Slums, their idols at the ready. They find sojourners, lepers, broken warriors, diseased nomads, orphans, widows and widowers, each of whom is desperate for any kind of aid, miserable in their search for Tarnak’s radiant promises of a coming Crimson Age, and upon them do they bestow blessings.
Diseases disappear. Bellies are made full. Wells have their waters unpoisoned; animals have the feral sickness stripped from their flesh. In this way, the shardstone cults become a power bloc. Those who are saved rightfully see the cultists as saviors, and they offer blood to the shardstone idols, partake in rituals wherein their force of will is harvested by the collective and aimed as curses that bring misfortune upon the cult’s enemies.
Even those among the three classical Akaran Mysticisms — the aforementioned Hanyi, Ruminators, and Stargazers — have taken up this work. In Kanuma is it said that great installations of shardstone are being idolcut, and that the red constellations so rising will allow them to control the fate of the entire world. In the depths of the Cataclysm-wracked savannahs do Hanyi leave shardstone idols in the shapes of dangers so that those who would suffer these cruelties instead find sanctuary in the place of doom. Ruminators in Tarnak add shard-links to their meditation chains, and through these they mine the currents of causality for what will be and what has been.
Dawns, the Era of Idols. These powers galvanize the many desperates and in that act the powers of shardstones grow ever more. No longer do any behold a world where mysticism is lesson for community; instead, it has become supernatural strength, the very definition of transcendence. With the Cataclysm making Akarans all the more dangerous by pressing their backs hard against the wall that is extinction, so do these shardstone cults promise to grow extreme, and in that extremism none can guess the horrors that are to come in the shadows of the festival of miracles now taking place.
