Walk into the deep parts of Garuda for long enough and you’ll feel her before you can name her.
Mother Nature has no body. She has no court of named deities, no temples built to her, and no name that anyone has ever pulled out of an older language to settle the question of what to call her. She is the force that keeps Tikor’s natural world in working order, and she does it through the only language she seems to need — Sacred Trees, weather, Etheric currents, and the way a forest goes silent at the exact moment that matters.
Some scholars argue she’s a remnant of Ishvana herself, a piece of the Creator that didn’t follow Ishvana into her final sacrifice. Others say she’s the Etherforce given a will. The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the divine seem content to let the question stay open. The gods who do know her give her wide berth.
She doesn’t take sides. She seeks balance, and that’s about as much agenda as she has. Live within the natural order and the land tends to give you what you need. Move against it and the response shows up however the land decides to send it — vines through a logging camp, weather that shouldn’t have arrived when it did, a sacred grove that simply refuses to be cut and nobody can explain why. Tikor’s history keeps a long ledger of her blessings, and an equally long ledger of her corrections.
Known manifestations
- The Great Somber Tree — The centerpiece of Emerald Nest, the oldest living tree on Tikor. The Karu say it’s the progenitor of all flora; the See’er say it’s what’s left of the World Tree. Both might be right.
- The Crescentshot Trees — Sentinels at the edge of sacred groves. Air-purifiers, soil-cleansers, and very hard to cut down. Loggers who try report axes that go missing and weather that goes against them.
- The Eternals — The towering ancients in Garuda’s deepest groves. Said to be the eldest offspring of the Great Somber Tree. Their wood is never harvested without long Soulcarver rites, and the rites are taken seriously.
- The Kahali Fog — The living mist that wraps the Great Kahali Rainforest. It decides who passes. People who arrive in good faith make it through. People who don’t, often don’t.
The Kahali Fog has been known to bend light and sound inside its folds. Sometimes time. Nobody who’s been deep inside it agrees on what they saw afterward, and most don’t try very hard to clear it up.