#divinity: blood

[dailyadventureprompts]

Thirsting Grail, Outergod of Wants and Wounds

Artsource

Adventure Hooks:

While travelling the party encounters a once famed surgeon who seeks their help in undertaking pilgrimage to the distant shrine of a death god. When pressed on her motivation, she reveals that through some curse or divine act of cruelty, those she operates on can never die, but also cannot heal. 

There is a tree that grows in the ruins of the old braon’s castle, said to have sprouted from the chopping block upon which he had his wife’s lovers executed. The tree grows no leaves, only flowers, and it’s said that if you make a tea from its blossoms, you will receive a vision of your one ture love.  Beings of woven thorn are said to guard the tree, but there are those who would pay desperately to drink of its boughs. 

A once peaceful kingdom dissolves into a generations long civil war, any hope of peace drowned beneath a tide of violence, ruination, and grievance that none can hope to escape.

Among the outergods there are none more eager to engage with mortals than the entity known as Thisting Grail. It is a thing of violence and appetite, and seems all too eager to lend its power to those most likely to misuse it, whether they sought it’s aid in the first place or not. 

Scholars and madmen have long debated the Grail’s motivations, what goal or ideology it is trying to achieve with the visions and often horrific miracles it bestows. In truth, Thirsting Grail has no goal beyond the pursuit of violence and longing, it is a means without an end, ready to lend itself to any cause that would make the world a bloodier, hungrier place. 

The god is formless, an ocean of boling blood that takes on the shape of whatever “vessel” its followers imagine for it, borrowing their cultural iconography and birthing itself anew each time. There are litanies of these avatars, hundreds more likely forgotten by history;  blood saints and baleful red stars and heart hungry blades. Perhaps because of blood’s ubiquity in ritual and occult practice the Grail’s influence can “seep” its way into the worship of other entities, divine or demonic, and it’s not unheard of for otherwise upstanding and dogmatic worshippers of banal gods to accidentally begin practising the grail’s bloody rites. 

Sanguimancy and other forms of blood magic are the most obvious of Thirsting Grail’s gifts, but it has other more esoteric offerings: smoke from sacrifices or incense mingled with the formless god’s essence can grant visions of desires made manifest, though often twisted through a disturbingly carnal (in both senses of the word) lens. All too often worshippers ( and the cult leaders that encourage them) see these visions as prophetic, leading to the outergod being sometimes called “the mother of truth”.  It can also manifest the objects of desire: succulent fruits, unearthly lovers, weapons of inordinate power, but there is something fundamentally wrong with these creations as they cannot grant true satisfaction, and often leave those that partake of them wanting more than when they started. 

Those who fall prey to Thirsting Grail’s influence can become warped as their own veins become polluted by the entity’s ichor: becoming feral creatures of endless cruelty and appetite, or having their wounds open wider and wider until there is nothing but wound remaining of their swollen flesh. Those so overtaken grow and warp and merge with others until new horrors are birthed from them, a permanent seedbed of 

Titles: Mother of truth, formless mother, font erubescent, the bloodstar.  Symbols: A red grail or fountain, cultural iconography stained with blood.  Signs:  Wounds that bleed but do not heal, plants overflowing or cracking open to expose their innards. Unsettling red dreams.  Worshippers: Those with bloodstained hands be they doctors, butchers, or murderers. Vampires, occultists, and other sanguiphiles. Instatiable gourmands and unfulfilled lovers.   

Inspiration:  I wear my influences on my sleeve with this one.  I’ve been turning the Elden Ring mythology over in my mind for some time partially because I think there’s a lot of fun ideas there but also because I felt like (in typical Fromsoft fashion) there wasn’t enough shown to really scratch my itch for discovery. 

The formless mother/bloodstar was chiefest among these elements: A killer aesthetic with lore that was a little too thin to use as inspiration. After a while that thinness turned into a feature, the idea of an eldritch entity of pain and violence that conformed to the needs of those who worshipped it, granting power to those who would go out and make the world more violent and painful.  I liked the idea that “mother of truth” was a misnomer, and that cultists would ascribe meaning and intent and iconography to a god that didn’t care one way or another. 

Another strong influence is the Grail from Cultist Simulator/Book of hours ( SERIOUSLY, play book of hours you fools), an eldritch entity/aspect of reality that presides over hungers and births be they literal or figurative.  The Blood + Mother connection was obvious here, but the Grail provided some more texture and esoteric aspects to fill out my version’s storytelling potential.

[dairyofateenagegirl]

black women as vampires

[inkskinned]

i keep thinking about how rfk said that autistic people "will never write a poem." i keep thinking about that, about if humanity is calculated on the back of old verse. how far we measure personhood is in baseball and stanza breaks.

i keep thinking - i have over 7k poems on here alone. language can be a special interest, after all. did you know the word autism comes almost direct from the greek word autos, meaning "self"? self-ism.

maybe he is right - i haven't really played baseball. i was a ballet dancer instead. and besides - my sister once accidentally hit me in the face with an aluminum bat. i'm not sure if the injury gives me half points. am i only a person in the dugout? hand in a mitt? swinging?

does softball count? does cricket? am i a person if i throw the ball to my dog. am i a person as long as the ball is in the air, or do i stop being a person as it rolls into the bushes. i took my girlfriend to fenway recently; was i a person in the sun, with my hands up, with the game laid out at my feet in a diamond. i felt like a person, but that was back in the summer, and i often feel my most person-like then.

am i more of a person because of the sheer number of things i've written? does quality matter, or is it quantity? i used to write entire books every summer in high school - i wasn't doing well. i felt the least like-a-person back then. but then - does any person feel human in high school?

in the library, ink on my skin, i feel personhood shutter at the edges of myself. actually, writing feels blissfully like not being myself. it feels birdlike; escaping into creation so my body dissolves and i survive only by muscle memory. i am not there, i am writing.

but who can deny the falconlike focus of warsan shire, the tenderness of mary oliver, the sheer skill of amanda gorman. those are poets. they are certainly human. you could line them up with the way their words have influenced us and measure their literary shadows like wings.

perhaps it was very assumptive of me to want to be a poet rather than "a [ label ] poet." i wanted the work to fill itself in, rather than be stained by what i am. i do not write in despite of my neurodivergence, i am just neurodivergent and writing.

does the poem have to be in english or can i send it through my palms into the coat of my dog. does the poem have to make sense. does the poem have to love you back.

if i break a glass, will the poem appear naturally? or is the act of breaking the glass human-enough. the shards of my life glittering out beneath me - do i have to write the poem, or is it self-evident in the pile of glass splinters? i cannot grasp this world the way other people can. regardless, i endeavor to touch - even the mess - very gently.

i broke my toenail against my coffee table recently. i released a bug outdoors. i made coffee. i walked my dog.

i didn't write a poem about any of these things.

something else, then. existing without humanity.

[zephyrbug]

Temple of wires and veins🩸🏛️📺

Lil gift piece to @leidensygdom of their warforged/aasimar character Argyros!! Kinda an experimental piece cause I thought it would be fun to make the divine robot a marble statue in a temple? idk I had a vision and just had fun with it haha

[shisasan]

I’ll only unravel for hands that know how to hold me.

🜍 ⟡ ⟢

[saintsylestine]

Sanguinius by Rice

[anetherealpoetess]

tbh characters like galadriel are more important now than ever. there's morfydd clark saying that every time she's played a human woman, shame has been at the heart of the character, but there is no shame in galadriel.

galadriel turning her back on the ethereal light of elven heaven to hunt down and savage a demigod with her dead brother's dagger, only to accidentally fall in love with that demigod isn't the fragile, guilt-laden journey we're used to seeing women undertake.

it's unapologetic. it's defiant. it's staring into the storm and deciding you have the right to step forward into that tempest. (a decision men have made time and time again in story and in song while women are rarely given the opportunity.) she's not watching the rings of power from a distance. she's the heart of the show, her delirious appetite to kill sauron the only reason the story even exists in the first place. and yes, for those knowingly or unknowingly anxious about women, it's a hard watch. that's exactly why they should watch it.

i love galadriel. i hope she never takes her hand off the hilt of her sword. i hope she never learns shame.

[peanutheaddd]

ouuufgh this pen is awesome

[transrevolutions]

going back in time to introduce dante alighieri to anti-carceral theory, resulting in vast changes to the divine comedy and deeply altering the course of history forever.

[kattsblog]

Beelzebubs Divine Punishment

[stormbornwitch]

Now is the time of change; of storms; of destruction; of breaking down barriers and old ways of doing things.

To make it through this time, you must be like water and change as well.

Like streams, rivers, the ocean, rain, hail, sleet, snow, or ice, you must change your form to suit your conditions.

Do not hold on to material things, status, or position. These things will be dashed against the rocky shore like crashing waves.

I feel this in my bones and in my blood. I hear it in the screaming wind as the storm rages outside.

It is going to get worse before it gets better. You must adapt and try to help as many people as you can.

[carabiner-pansy]

sorry this fella is a lil graphic but i had some vents to art out :’)

[melljam]

ptj has been loving platinum blonde recently

[yesdramas]

Deng Wei as Su Yishui LOVE OF THE DIVINE TREE 仙台有树 — 2025, dir. Yin Tao   

[bluebirds-stuff]

Tang bo return au inspired by ge's and azu1as Tangchung arranged marriage au

Something Something happens and chung myung ends up needing to be (faked) married for a short awhile so the tang family offers the hand of a distant tang cousin who's been making waves in the cultivation world and getting stronger during the last 3 years (*note that this is after cm is 21 ) who seems to REALLY hate the demonic cult and the great sects who won't meet each other until the wedding day

Now on the outsider pov we have people up and down making sure everything is doing good on said wedding night , and it is ..... except for the fact that said wedding grooms seem to be late for THEIR OWN WEDDING

Thankfully the mount hua disciplines see their youngest coming, not so Thankfully he's coming covered in blood dragging a (dead or unconscious ? ) demonic cult member and all of you are worrying about the poor groom who doesn't deserve to be tied down to this heart attack inducing menace ,except the groom ALSO Shows up covered in blood dragging a (also dead or unconscious ?! ) body without a care in the world, then all of you see your youngest FREEZE at the site of him as if he saw the dead coming back to life he did

And the tang groom freezes too and whispers in awe and confusion " taoist hyung-nime!? "

The crazy bastards proceed to drop the bodies and launch at each other with desperation

And all of you are hit with a horrible gut feeling that this isn't going to be a "fake" wedding after all .

[gravedigg]

A pearl, prized from the flesh, greedy fingers digging at the pit.

Something was stolen from you, and you are left hollow.

Jean-Baptiste Julien Royer from Divine the Blood, for @nullshocked