Verdant Beginnings
In the beginning of the world, it was barren. No plants or forests spanned the landscape, nothing grew from the soil. The goddess Verodicia was the one to change that. It was by her doing that things could grow, imprinting her essence into the seeds she planted, bringing up water from the rocks to feed them, even influencing the sun itself to shine its light down onto them, giving them the energy they needed to grow and bloom. But, as she learned, even gods must die, and the idea of leaving the world behind, and being unable to protect the vulnerable seedlings that she had planted, pained her dearly.
The Final Seed
It was at this that she discovered that, during all of her planting, she had missed but a single seed. Finding her time growing shorter by the second, she brought her last, hopeful seed to her lips, speaking but a word into it, and swallowing it as her last act before she was claimed by death. Her body, large as it was, provided nutrients for her children as it decomposed, the final, blessed seed growing larger, ripening throughout the winter, forming a protector within that could defend the forests that she painstakingly grew. And so it was, once spring dawned on the world, that the final seed burst, before any of the buds broke the soil. From the remnants stepped the Nature’s Prophet, Verodicia’s final gift to the world, defender of all places green and leafy, along with those who would ally themselves with him.
Woodland Protector
The Prophet was blessed with many powers, but the greatest of those was his foresight, inherited from the Goddess he grew from, allowing him to see just where he would be needed, to protect the woods he defended, and to attack those who would do harm to nature. He also inherited her powers of growth, able to sprout trees and saplings to trap his foes, and even to turn those same trees into treants, assaulting defilers with bark-hardened blows. With his foresight comes the ability to be wherever he his needed, appearing instantly amongst those woodlands that most need his protection, confounding his foes by appearing where they least expect him. And to those vilest of desecraters, the Prophet can bring down Verodicia’s wrath itself, channelling the powers of his dead goddess to strike them down where they stand, jumping from foe to foe in a chain of fury, before he leaves them to decompose and feed the very forests they sought to exploit.
A Goddess’s Return?
One curious thing to note, is the possibility of the Goddess Verodicia having been reborn. When interacting with the Nature’s Prophet, Kaolin, the Earth Spirit, talks about him as ‘My Prophet’. Could this mean that when the Goddess died, her essence travelled down into the earth, where it began to reshape itself, and then took the form of Kaolin, through his Jade Statue? It seems that only time will tell if Verodicia still lives on.
