#a pity i cannot really spin this as being the doing of Ainko but ah well ig they are dormant for this turn

[dawn-of-worlds]

What's the word, man?

(t5, Zoreinak has 0+3+2d6->7=10 points)

An abomination had come to dwell upon the world.

Its form was short yet gangly, its limbs jointed like insect legs yet soft to the touch, its body crowned with a bulbous head and two huge, staring eyes. It was much like a bird in nature, preferring to perch high in the trees, flee at the least sign of danger, and sing in their strange plosive voices.

For they sang: endlessly and pointlessly, a soft background la-dee-dah that lulled them into witless peace. Some flaw in their brains would ascribe the greatest import and significance to useless platitudes if they arrived in form of song; and so they sang, and ate, and slept, and died, rotting on the branch and accomplishing little of note. Ambition slumbered within them, but they had no reason to act on it.

Zoreinak, short of temper in the years after Ainko's birth, thus unleashed a terrible curse. They chose words in the human language (for in that day, humans all spoke a single language) that recurred again and again in their pointless murmurs: words like 'love' and 'peace' and 'promise'.

How were these words cursed? To speak them would be to invite harm: always to the speaker, and to the listener oft as well. Misfortune might befall all who heard the words, illness might spread among them, or the speaker's heart might simply burst in their chest.

The Quiet Years that followed were a time of fear and death. Some fled, some refused to speak, many did both. A horde of silent exodi populated the lands round the inner sea: a generation hence, each would come to puzzle out language once again. Some, now strangers to one another, would clash in time, and finally amount to something.

Thus victorious, Zoreinak gored the world in triumph, creating a great lake of fire with one antler and a great lake of water with the other, both encircled by tall sharp peaks.

And the First Human Language, with its words of power that all by now had forgotten the meaning of? It still slumbered, carried by secretive word-witches, inscribed on slabs on the island where humanity arose, and of course known to the gods themselves.

(3 pt. corrupt 'city' to create the cursed words as a sort of proto-magic system, 2x 3 pt. shape land to create a large freshwater lake surrounded by forest in the northeast and a volcanically active area along the southwestern coast, 1 pt left)