Outside 48: Hotter than Inside

[Rebonack]

[Secluded Desert- Wrattleham]

The mobile city approaches! Cresting the ridge, they'll have a good view of the angel and her heavenly garden. The creature is huge beyond reason, nearly three hundred meters even if the tail isn't taken into consideration. Not quite on the scale of the Really Big Crab, sure. But still really big! 'Dragon' is probably the first word that springs to mind when viewing the creature. Or, well, the second word. The first word being her name echoing relentlessly inside their skull. The massive beast has a body shape that is at once feline and cervine, a pair of massive horns stretching from the back of her head to form an elliptical ring, a blazing star burning bright between them. Just below the horns are irregular branching antlers like the limbs of a tree. She has wings in place of ears, though small. Or at least small compared to the enormous sets growing from her shoulders and hips. Leaves adorn the wings in place of pinions, glittering gold and emerald in her incandescent radiance.

She crouches in the midst of her garden, which is steadily growing around her, great tail curled along her body like a resting cat. A few minutes after Wrattleham begins trundling toward her, she reaches out with one of her massive forewings and draws in the earth with one of her pinions. No doubt those currently enraptured by the sight of the angel will assume that whatever Yezekiel just did must have been something ineffably holy.

It's possible to muster up the Will needed to pull ones eyes away from the angel. It might be easier to do if one notices that the others who have been standing there transfixed for the longest are beginning to... change.

Little things at first. Patches of scales in obsidian black or rusty fire-agate brown. Points of starlight. New limbs trying to form. Deep black eyes ringed with stellar fire. Branch-like horns. Twiggy antlers. Leafy feathers.

They are pulled along specific motifs. Dragon. Star. Glass. Tree.

Only a fortunate few, though, will find these new features manifesting in places that make sense. To most they will be chaotic, mismatched, useless, or even detrimental.

The more Yezekiel grows inside the mind, the more they will become obsessed with the Saint of Perseverance. To venerate her. To pray to her. To sacrifice to her. To learn more of her. To become more like her. To see her purposes and plans fulfilled, even if they have no idea what those might be. Deranged cultists are imaginative, you see. Who needs to know what your patron actually wants when you can just guess and carry out rituals of your own creation in her name?

Hopefully a few, slightly more sane individuals will win out here. Otherwise the mobile city may well become a mobile cult.