🌊 Jade Serpent Isles – Edge of the Serpent Root Grove
Storm clouds ripple like coils across the jade-hazed sky. The earth shivers with aftershocks from Feng Xian's dream-flame battle.
And from the sea cliffs, hooves and talons pound against the moss-slick stone.
Lan'Fei stands atop a bluff, her long braid lifted by the wind, her arm raised — calling to the three beasts behind her:
Velkyr, a six-limbed jungle cat with lightning stripes across his fur.
Mourn beak, a carrion falcon with eyes that see memory-fragments.
Grellth, a root-horned wyrm, silent and ghostly, draped in vines.
They do not snarl. They kneel.
Lan'Fei (softly):
"He calls them. Not like I do. Deeper. Older. Like something that remembers the first ember."
She places her hand on Grellth's head, and for a moment, her vision blurs — a flicker of the Reef, of flame buried in bone, of a serpent of fire whispering her name.
"Your bond is no accident, Beast born."
A voice not hers. A presence not of the jungle.
It is the Crown.
🐾 Through the Grove – Toward the Shrine
The Serpent root Kin still tend to the wounded. The Hollow-Touched have fled or dissolved. But something stirs deeper within the Grove's canopy.
Lan'Fei approaches, her beasts silent behind her.
Kin warriors part uneasily — some in reverence, others in fear. The beasts do not bow to anyone. Yet they lower their heads before Feng Xian.
Luo Fen narrows her eyes as the girl enters.
Luo Fen:
"You were not summoned."
Lan'Fei (without hesitation):
"No. But something summoned them. And they led me here."
Her eyes meet Feng Xian's. The flame in his soul reflects in hers — but where his burns, hers coils, wild and unknowable.
🔥 Feng Xian Stirs
His breathing steadies. The jade-pool glows anew.
And then… he speaks, still half within the Coil-Dream.
Feng Xian (faintly):
"You… you heard the whisper too."
Lan'Fei:
"I heard it in the wind. In the beasts' silence. In the tremor that cracked the sky."
A moment of silence.
Then the Serpent Oracle — ancient, serpent-bodied, voice like slithering silk — emerges from the shrine's coiled vines.
Oracle:
"Two flame bearers. One born in fang, the other in fire. But both hold a piece of the Crown's hunger."
"And the hunger… is waking."
Interlude: The Mark of Devouring
🕳 Location: The Catacrypt of Thir Hollow, Realm of the Hollow-Touched
Far beneath the surface of the world, where no light from moon nor sun has ever reached, there lies the Catacrypt of Thir Hollow — a labyrinth of bleeding stone, inverted altars, and void-glass obelisks pulsing with remembered screams.
Within its pulsing core chamber, a vast sigil of veins and ash spirals outward like a rotting flower.
There, cloaked in layered bandages of cursed silk, draped with bone-scribed relics, the High Hollow Priest kneels before a monolith.
High Hollow Priest Veyr'Nakul, Devourer of Echoes, Unmaker of Flame.
The air stills. A soul-thread breaks.
A shriek — distant, echoing — vibrates through the catacrypt.
Veyr'Nakul (in a voice that grinds like rusted blades):
"Writhe-Veil… gone. The Isle bleeds."
He lowers his skeletal hand onto the obsidian altar.
The altar drinks blood — not fresh, but remembered blood, flowing backward through time and pain.
A vision forms above it:
Feng Xian, standing amidst the jade flames of the Serpent root Grove, the Crown's voice coiling through his bones.
Lan'Fei at his side.
The beasts trembling.
The coil reawakening.
Veyr'Nakul exhales a breath that extinguishes ghost flame lanterns around him.
Veyr'Nakul:
"He wears the scent of the Seventh Flame.
He carries the mark of the Beast borne.
He stirs the Sea's Hunger."
He turns to the circle of Void bound Seers behind him — each eyeless, mouths stitched with truth-runes, their minds forever looped into the Coil's dreaming.
Veyr'Nakul (commanding):
"Brand him. Let all who walk with hollow hearts feel the Mark of Devouring upon him."
"He is named now. He is known.
And he shall be unmade."
🩸 The Mark Takes Form
Far away, unseen to Feng Xian, a shiver of void-light creeps across the sky.
On his back — faint and cold — a shape etches itself beneath his skin:
A coiling spiral, broken in four places, with a serpent devouring its own tail at the center.
Lan'Fei senses it.
The Oracle recoils.
Even the Grove murmurs.
Oracle:
"He has been Named... by the Hollow."
☠️ The Devouring Hand: Szuul of the Thousand Griefs
"He is not one thing, but every echo of death left unfinished."
— High Hollow Priest Veyr'Nakul
Name:
Szuul — known as "The Thousand Griefs", or simply "The Devouring Hand"
Race/Type:
Hollow-Touched Aberrant (formerly human; now a fused vessel of void grief and parasitic memory)
Appearance:
A towering figure shrouded in ceremonial wrappings, each strip etched with names of those he's consumed.
His right arm is grotesquely enlarged, made of calcified black marrow, with six jointed fingers like sickled blades — "the Devouring Hand."
A faceless helm formed of melted sorrow glass covers his head; behind it, flickers of faces—souls devoured—flash for an instant before vanishing.
He wears a shifting cloak formed from the grief of the dead: it weeps, clings, and sometimes whispers back in forgotten voices.
Chains of echo-bone drag behind him, ringing softly with each step.
Abilities:
🔥 Grief Brand Touch:
Any wound inflicted by Szuul's right hand brands the victim with a fragment of devoured memory. This curse can weaken spiritual flame and cause hallucinations or emotional collapse — feeling every grief Szuul has ever consumed.
🩸 Echo Consumption:
Szuul can consume the lingering essence of the dead, granting him momentary bursts of their skills, techniques, or knowledge. When he devours a beast or cultivator's soul, he echoes their last moments — and may even manifest their voice.
🕳️ Void-Step:
Through shadow or still water, Szuul may blink across space, leaving behind only a whisper of wailing grief. This renders him nearly impossible to track unless one can anchor their spirit.
🕷️ Lament Spawn:
Szuul may tear open his own ribcage to release a swarm of Lament Spawn — shadowy, serpentine leeches that cling to spiritual auras and erode inner focus or Qi.
Lore:
Once a war orphan, Szuul was found by the Hollow-Touched in the ruins of a shattered sect temple. He had survived for days by eating prayer scrolls and screaming into the dark.
Veyr'Nakul heard those screams — and shaped them into a vessel of silence.
Over the years, Szuul was forged into a walking reliquary of pain. For every enemy slain, he was forced to remember not the kill — but the suffering it caused.
He carries over nine hundred griefs, and his tenth hundredth has been marked:
"Feng Xian. Flame-Carrier. Crown-Woken.
I will carry your grief until nothing of you remains."
Personality:
Speaks rarely — his voice is raw, hollow, and sometimes not his own.
Follows orders from Veyr'Nakul without hesitation, but harbors his own twisted curiosity for beings like Feng Xian — those who still feel.
Holds a warped reverence for "true suffering." He sees in Feng Xian a grief not yet born, and wishes to birth it personally.
Signature Weapon:
Grief spike — a bone-forged glaive carried on his back, made from the spine of a Sea-Caller Oracle and tipped with obsidian stolen from the Pavilion's ruins long ago.
🌊 Scene: Whispers before the Grief
Location: The Jade Serpent Isles — Serpent root Grove and surrounding shallows
Lan'Fei
Lan'Fei stood on a high reef ledge, the sea breeze brushing through her wind-braided hair. Below, her bonded beast — the tusked azure Tide boar, Irka — snorted uneasily, scraping its hooves against coral-stone.
She narrowed her eyes. The waves were whispering.
Not the usual lullabies of the deep. These carried a raw tension — the primal memory of prey scenting a predator. Even the island gull-drakes had vanished into silence.
"He comes… the one who wears the cries of the lost," Irka rumbled softly, muzzle trembling.
Lan'Fei frowned, placing a hand over the Tide boar's flank.
"Not here yet. But something presses on the boundary — like a wave rising without wind."
Luo Fen
But now… something else stirred.
She opened her eyes.
The carved fangs that lined the grove began to weep red sap — rare, and sacred, a sign of spiritual imbalance.
A distant hiss echoed through the grove — not of wind or snake, but like grief dragging its nails across the spine of the land.
"This… is not a beast," she murmured. "This is grief… weaponized."
And deep below, the roots recoiled from something pressing against the world's skin.
The Serpent Oracle
Beneath the Isles, where the Chamber of Coil-Dreams flickered with bioluminescent glyphs and gliding eel-lights, the Serpent Oracle stirred from stillness.
She was ancient — scales turned opalescent from centuries of vision-gazing.
Her eyes rolled back as the waters dimmed.
"A presence not born of coil or scale.
A wound that walks… with fingers that feed…"
Her coils began to twitch in unreadable patterns — an ancient, silent alarm.
Then, to the acolytes gathered around her, she rasped with sudden clarity:
"The Isles must veil themselves.
The Hand of Grief seeks the Fire-Bound One."
Across the Isles
Beasts fled inland, gathering in unnatural herds, forming circles of watchful panic.
Coral song stones cracked, unable to resonate.
One Tide-Monk went mad, screaming only, "The whispers have fingers!"
Storm clouds gathered without wind, as if the sky braced itself.
And through it all, a single memory began to surface in the minds of the spiritually attuned:
A faceless figure, wrapped in sorrow, walking across the ocean's floor — with every step, a cry was heard from a soul lost long ago.