1.19-Roads of Hod

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Only met a handful of Spinal Druids over the millenia. Help to reache versifier networks. Filaments made from parable silk, yarns made out of yarns. They help with traveling through the Mythosphere. Cut off from the linear flow of time, it's hard to get there if you aren’t humanoid in some way. Can’t take the ship. Gotta start at a legend mecca, swear a pilgrimage bond to an Apex Denier. Gaunt beings shrouded in cloaks of dust. Legend meccas dotted with their hovels, branches of yore reeds eternally wafting smoke. Between the boughs of soot, you kneel before the Denier. Then they touch your scalp with the mark of ashes. You don’t walk through the gate to the Mythosphere. With the mark of a Denier, you then visit the legend mecca Spinal Druid. They reach through your eyes and give a mystic tap to your vertebrae. Your backbone splits, one half here in the mundane world, the other a post in the realm of saga. Between the two lies the path to the Mythosphere.I have little practice with lorewalking myself. I don’t keep much of my history on the other side, stripped down to a bucolic runt. Social ideas, lineages, legends and tradition are given flesh and blood there. Hierarchies and destiny are as real as gravity.Step by step, compelled by pilgrimage, I walk in a meager caravan of other Observers. A Seeker leads the procession. Our protector and only thread here in the land of pre-destination.Night comes. Simple fires ward off the dark infested with beasts. One of my companions is taken. Food for the narrative. We weep as is expected. As is foretold.There are no planets in the Mythosphere. No stars, no galaxies. A never-ending plane upon which all things must be. The world obeys the rules of anecdote and allegory. I am guarded by the Periapt of Secrets. A fellow next to me, one of Destiny. Another, one of Luck.We approach our destination. A Well of Resolve. We draw the pure water with care in our wooden buckets. We return, the Druid soldering my backbone anew, my pailful of water now the most valuable thing in the Continuum. Hod. Pure, undirected Agency.