PART I

The Whale that Devoured the Stars

Long before the Whorl of Tyrth, there was a great cosmic whale that ate the stars as it swam through the galaxy. This divine beast was voracious, and no amount of stars could satiate its endless appetite. The Whale devoured every star until there were none left to eat. The night was dark and cold, and the whale grew very hungry. 

It slowly starved. 

The Whale grew thinner and thinner until it was too weak to swim in the currents of space any longer, and it fell... landing on Tyrth's surface as a great cosmic carcass. But the carcass which was sterile and cold soon began to fester. It became warm. A sickly sweet scent of rot enveloped it. Life sprung from its body - small creatures you cannot see with the naked eye... mushrooms... insects... even plants. The Fall Whale rotted and with it came the blessing of decomposition to the planet. Animals no longer turned to stone when they died. They decayed... they became softer and softer and where they died life would thrive. Plants would flourish, tiny animals would feed, and fungi would decorate the fallen. 

The carcass of the Fall Whale - still sentient - was so overjoyed by this turn of events that it finally rose from the place where it had first touched down on the planet - in the Vale of Mythra. It roamed the land in search of the fallen to return them to the soil. It had become a great God of Decay. Eventually, the stars even returned to the sky... no longer being devoured by the Whale. For the Fall Whale had a new home on Tyrth.

Part III

The Fall Whale & the Arcane Prison

The more Funeral Shrines that appeared across the vast realm of the Tyrth, the more the Fall Whale's rage burned. It felt that its sacred duty was being defiled. Instead of rotting in the ground, fowldyr were transformed into magic and absorbed by the Whorl of Tyrth. Fowldyr believed that this ritual allowed them to be reborn one day anew... to once again walk the wilds of the realm in a new body... a new mind... a new perspective.

 

The sight of the Shrine suddenly appearing on the hill even this deep into the mountains of the Vale of Mythra caused the anger to boil within the old Whale - it wasn’t merely a great offense… it was blasphemy. And gods knew just how to deal with blasphemers. The Fall Whale’s hatred festered within its hulking horrible body. The outrage blinded the Whale to reason, and as a second crack appeared on the Carved Moon, the old god snapped. It became a creature consumed by righteous hatred. The malice swirled around the Whale's body, bubbling and distorting until a miasma spilled forth from its carcass. The miasma spread out in all directions and with it came a terrible plague.

 

The Fall Whale, lost in its hostility, began lumbering forward in search of the tree... in search of the fowldyr. But the miasma that clung to the beast had an appalling effect on the life it came into contact with. It was a horrific distortion of the Fall Whale's dominion over decay... plants withered, birds fell out of the sky, and perfectly healthy people felt their skin rupture of slough off as the sickness took them. Everything the miasma came into contact with was afflicted with accelerated decomposition. A wave of death spread from the mad god in all directions.

 

The beast dragged its putrid body from town to town, felling everything in sight. Nothing could stand up to such a beast... nothing susceptible to decay that is. The screams echoed through the mountains, reaching the winged ears of a great fowldyr warrior.

 

The hero darted down the mountainside towards the cacophony and slid into the Fall Whale's path, summoning a crimson lance and striking the Whale with a loud crack as the spear collided with bone. The spear pierced the Whale's pale eye and it howled... but it didn't seem to howl from pain. I seemed as though it was bellowing with fury because this dyr stood before the great God of Decay and refused to rot like the rest of the birds and beasts around them. The dyr's very existence was an act of defiance, and it enraged the Whale. The Whale lunged towards the fowldyr hero and snapped its rotten jaws at the dyr. Their movements were a blur as the Whale thrashed repeatedly at the nimble dyr, and the hero summoned one magical red spear after another and hurled them at the beast. Each spear would briefly pin the mad god, but by the time the hero could summon another the Whale would rip free.

 

The hero realized this wasn't a battle he could win on his own... perhaps if he could summon enough spears he would be able to hold the Whale down and stop its march of destruction. Even if he had to stay here for the rest of time to hold the spears down he would do it... but how could he summon enough while the Whale kept lunging for him? While the Whale kept ripping its rotting body away from every spear that the fowldyr hero managed to land? He needed a distraction. Countless lives had already been stripped away in the wake of the Whale's rampage, and the toll would only grow larger.

 

Just then... it was as though the Artisan had cast its heavenly gaze upon the grisly scene... and used its divine influence to entice the Whale's gaze upwards... upwards... towards the hilltop.

 

In the Whale's furious thrashing its remaining eye caught a flash of white in the distance. The mad god glimpsed the unmistakable bone-white bark of a Shrine on the hilltop. The Whale wrenched its attention from the fowldyr hero and locked onto the Shrine made of those pale otherworldly roots. It threw it festering body in the direction of the hill. In what seemed like an instant the Whale had pulled itself onto the hilltop and clamped its enormous jaws around the holy temple. The stained glass windows of the Shrine shattered, and the roots stretched and began to snap as the Whale ripped them from the ground.

 

But these weren't just any roots... they were the vessel of a god...

 

The Arbiter appeared in the sky above the thrashing Whale.

 

The Arbiter!

 

That's it... the Arbiter was one of the Artisan's vassals, an underling god with powerful sealing magic at his disposal. The Artisan must have sent him... this was it. This was the key. The fowldyr gods had given the hero everything he needed to end this senseless destruction.

 

With the mad god distracted, the fowldyr hero used all of his power to summon as many crimson spears as he could muster and rained the glowing red weapons down on the Whale, impaling the god. He knew it wouldn't hold for long, he needed to act quickly. The hero raised his most precious of spears - the one that was his vessel... and he hurled it with all his might at the Arbiter. As the spear tore through the sky the fowldyr hero exhaled deeply... and dematerialized...

 

He reduced his body into pure swirling mana... and his incorporeal life force surged back inside his vessel. Back inside the spear that the Arbiter now held, raised above the mad god.

 

The Arbiter slammed the hero's vessel down into the Fall Whale's skull with all of his strength, and a great ring of magic spiraled out from the impact.

 

The Arbiter had sealed the hero inside his own vessel... and thus sealed all of the crimson spears forever in place. This final blow would ensure the magical array of spears could not be broken, and the fowldyr hero would be forever sealed in place with his prisoner. His consciousness now solely focused on maintaining the array of spears, and with the Arbiter's sealing power he was finally able to do so... indefinitely.

 

The Whale's rampage finally stopped. The beast could no longer move, and was forever frozen in time, like a butterfly preserved under pins.

 

The hero's sacrifice spared the Fall Whale’s life, allowing the cycle of life and decomposition to return to normal in the world. The plague stopped. The delicate balance of decay that the Fall Whale had originally blessed Tyrth with had returned to normal. As the surrounding area recovered from the event, an arcane prison was built around the macabre scene to make sure the fowldyr hero's sacrifice was not in vain. The Arcane Prison stands to this day... hidden somewhere deep in the forests of the Vale of Mythra. It shelters the array of crimson spears and locks the fowldyr hero and his ward in a harrowing tableau of what occurred that fateful day.

 

The Fall Whale's rampage happened so long ago that no living humans would have been alive at the time to witness it. Even some of the oldest living fowldyr can no longer remember what the great fowldyr hero looked like anymore... though there are some vague surviving depictions of him... namely the heraldic crest that appears throughout Tyrth that represents the sacrifice this hero made to save the world. They say the crest of the hero persisting hundreds of years past his disappearance from the world is how he is still able to draw the magic needed to maintain the array of spears to this day. As long as his symbol remains, he will be able to protect the realm of Tyrth of the plague that tried to destroy it.