Behemoths

Will · Geplaatst: 24 Feb 2024 14:12

A creature the size of a fortress and made up of equal parts batrachian nightmare and simian brute batters down the wall of an ancient city, its defenders powerless to even slow the beast’s advance. It crushes the buildings and besieged populace in a rage; when its fury is spent, it digs a hollow in the city center and lays its enormous bulk down to sleep for months, before awakening to rampage again. A hideous mockery of a man stalks his prey across Spira, devouring their strength and growing stronger, the prototype for every predator to ever walk the face of the earth. A beshelled, piscine titan floats about the Western seas, until it grows hungry, at which time it devours whole ships and island populations in a feeding frenzy, turning the sea red with the blood of its prey. These are behemoths, discarded by the ancient world-makers who created them, immortal half-formed prototypes of the later life that would walk the face of Spira, often cast into the Wyld by the First Age Solar Tenchi, and now massive threats to anything that crosses their paths.

Properly, behemoths are the by blows of a Spira that never happened, and include living mountains which prowl continents, an adamic man of clay meant to be the progenitor of the human race, and strange blind worms the length of a Guild caravan with a thousand heads. Each of these creatures is nearly indestructible, and its motives and drives are nonsensical or incomprehensible to mortal or Tenchi. As it is difficult for the average person to inquire into the origins of the walking nightmare devouring their family or destroying their city, the word “behemoth” is often also misapplied to living nightmares from the Wyld, or monstrous entities which fit no other description, such as the ghosts of behemoths slain by Solar Tenchi in the First Age; strange, city-sized automata buried deep under the earth and prowling ancient caverns where the sun has never shone; First Age war-machines built by the Solar Tenchi and which no modern mind can comprehend or stop; and ancient cannibal gods cast out of Heaven with the overthrow of the enemies of the gods.

The sheer killing power and near-invulnerability of a behemoth gives even the most potent Tenchi pause, and head-to-head clashes often end in the destruction of whatever chose to stand in the face of these ancient terrors. The clever often try to redirect the behemoth, rather than actually confront it, but even this is difficult, because many behemoths operate on a scale in which humanity is a mere trifle. Would an Tenchi notice if a bee tried to turn him away from a hive, after all? Even the behemoths which are man-sized or smaller, of which there are a handful, are incredibly dangerous, with potent defenses and the same near unbreakable will and flesh.