[f4M] The Last of the Endless Plains [Bronze Age-inspired]

It was the year 630 since the last Great Tree of the Endless Plains died.
The Old Gods have long faded into myths and tales; chieftains, high kings, and warlords ruled these lands now. In the mighty city of Ežer a new king arose, with a lust for power previously unmatched and unheard off. King Dosta burned all who stood against him - one by one, the city states along the coast fell under his rule.

Finally, he set out his armies to the East, vying for control over the more tribes in the Endless Plains. In Pabni, the biggest town within the Endless Plains, the tribes resisted, though they were crushed by King Dosta and their settlements were burned to the ground.

Eradi was among the few who escaped. Her home burned, and her people hunted. And so began her travels; she would travel East, fleeing the armies of King Dosta, across the vast grasslands, further than any of her tribe had ever dared to travel. She carried little: a bone knife, a half-empty waterskin, and the names of the dead, which she repeated to herself each night so she would not forget them.

The grass here grew taller than she had ever seen before, taller than her waist, gone gold and brittle with the turning season. It hissed when the wind moved through it, like her grandmother used to describe the sounds of the Great Western Sea, though no one in three generations of her line had ever seen the sea. She crossed a river, called the God's Vein in the tales the elders spun around the fire, or at least she hoped it would be this river. It would bring her closer to the edge of the world, where she'd hope to find their Gods, hidden away from those who came from the south after the Great Trees died.

Days passed, then weeks, and the grass began to change beneath her feet.
The gold gave way to green-grey, and then the green-grey gave way to something coarser, something that no longer hissed but rattled. The tall grass thinned first, retreating into low hummocks and scattered tufts, and the earth between them grew harder, darker, threaded with lichen the color of dried blood.

She had noticed the birds changing, too - the larks that had followed her for a week, diving and calling from the grass, thinned out and vanished, replaced by silent grey shapes that wheeled high overhead and never came down. Then the insects went quiet. Then, one morning, she woke to find frost silvering the inside of her cloak, though it was not yet the season for it, not by the count of moons her mother had taught her.

The God's Vein - if it was the God's Vein - grew narrower the further she followed it, until it was less a river than a stream of dark glass cutting through stone, and she had to break the skin of ice at its edges each morning to fill her waterskin.

The trees, what few there had been, scraggly things bent low by wind, the last stubborn cousins of the Great Trees that had once shaded the holy places of the Endless Plains, disappeared entirely. In their place came stone: grey shoulders of it breaking up through the earth, and moss growing thick and cushioned in the hollows between.

She did not know the word for this place. Her people had no word for it - or if they had, they never told Eradi. The wind here did not hiss. It cut. Sharply. She pulled her cloak tighter, and she wondered if the Gods her elders spoke off had fled here because no king, however hungry, would think to follow.

It began in her fingers. A dull ache that sharpened, then dulled again into nothing. The shivering came next, and for a while it worked. But the wave broke and did not come again. The shivering slowed, then stuttered, then stopped altogether. Her thoughts had gone strange. They no longer arrived one after another in the orderly way thoughts were supposed to. They arrived sideways, in pieces, and she found herself talking to the dead and finding the space where reality should be full of static. Pabni, she thought, and then could not remember why the word mattered, only that it did, only that she owed it something.

She was warm.
This was the last clear thought she had. A small part of her knew that it was a lie, but the knowing was very far away now, a voice calling from the God's Vein, and she was so tired, and the moss looked soft, red and gold and deep green...

The wind moved over her, through the coarse dead grass, over the stones breaking up the earth, and it made no distinction between the girl and the moss and the frost-silvered ground, and it went on cutting across the plains the way it had for ten thousands of years before her.

If he did not find her, she would have died that night.

---

Hiya!

So! This is a bit of a different one.
Prehistoric, and quite open-ended. In my head I've built a little world right on the brink of the Bronze Age, and that's where I want to play today!

I obviously want to play Eradi, but who will you play?
Well, that's up for discussion. Everyone who wants to GM moves to the front row instantly, but I'm also open to you just playing one character. The easiest would probably be a man from a different tribe, a tribe that has lived in the Tundra for generations, and stumbled across Eradi just before she could die.

And as always, names are just there as placeholders and can be changed to whatever you like 😌

Third Person and Discord is a must.