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Muddling with lore — Pantheon members, Okeanos, Justicar of the Seas

And an exceptional amount of comma abuse and run on sentences.

The tale of Okeanos like most Justicars begins with Faust, the World Scribe, as you see in the beginning the world and the dark tapestry above and beyond it were empty save for the untamed elements and the supposed anomalies that are the djinn, it was into this world that the Justicars, deities penned by the Scribe, were born, created in their mothers image and each assigned a separate domain and task, designed with the purpose of an ideal order to the world. Since these times Justicars have relinquished their power or been slain, some have risen from the mortal races to fill their places, and some still remain hidden. The Justicar of the Sea is no such alicorn, as with her element she has endured the turning of centuries to millennia.

She has witnessed the disappearance of the Scribe, lived through the wars against the Tartarians that shook the old alicorn empire to it’s core and cast down the ancient order of the world, she has seen the sun and the moon given new rulers, ages of myth, and the rise and fall of heroes. Still she endures, facing the turning of ages with patience only found in the element that would slowly grind away the mountains til the sea swallows all.

However this mare lives in a constant state of flux within her own mind, once she was like a kindly mother, a great provider who was charged with taming the waters of the world, a great task given their expanse… One that would test her daily to the point that she dreamed of children to both assist her and share the waves with. For you see in the years before Faust’s disappearance, as with many of the Justicars, Okeanos had commissioned her creator with the construction of a race, her own children as it were, much as her brother Sirocco had the zebra, or Cumulus and Nimbus had the gryphons and pegasi to assist them in their duties and fill a great emptiness in their hearts — as well as the world, this race would be the kelpie. As with the other Justicars they would be forged in the image of their patron deity.

But unlike her brothers and sisters, Okeanos’s children were not complete when the day came that the Scribe vanished from the world. They remained half formed sketches, vague notes, and cryptic phrases within her workshop and mostly forgotten. A simple thing to do truthfully as the disappearance of the justicars’ regal mother took place around the same time as the Neverwere escaped their containment in Tartarus.

The Neverwere, for references sake, were the creations of the World Scribe that didn’t have a place in the world. Be it their designs not fitting in quite right yet, the ideas behind them being unfinished, or perhaps something so simple as their time to exist just hadn’t come yet in the grand scheme of things. They were finished however, and placed in containment in Tartarus, the great vault. Nopony is quite sure of how they escaped, or why, perhaps it was greed or jealousy of the world above that wasn’t theirs or simply wasn’t ready for them, all that is known is that their arrival threw the old empire into chaos.

As is to be expected the alicorns favored law and order above most things, and under the Scribe they had built a shining world based around these things. The Neverwere by contrast were creatures of chaos, not necessarily bad of course, but chaos which time hadn’t come, as such the alicorns sought to return them to their containment, and in such a great struggle broke out. The Neverwere fall into many categories via race, dreamweavers, demons, nightmares, windigos, the fey ponies, the flutter ponies of whom they and their justicar who had supposedly been transformed into the changeling race when they asserted that love was a pointless emotion, there were many, many more, including… The kelpie who went unfinished.

We wont get into the stories of the war, sufficed to say that it saw the death of many justicars and their children races as well as the destruction of several species of the Neverwere as well. It was however, during this time that Okeanos, alone in her element and under such pressure from the Tartarians that she couldn’t keep the seas tamed for her brothers and sisters, sought out Faust’s workshop. Within the crystal halls beneath ceilings engraved with stars and lined in silver she located the notes for the race that would have been hers; and with the leftover ink from the Scribe’s tools, set about finishing that task which her creator had left undone.

The Keeper of the Ocean Waves however was not a scribe, and what she created on that day would leave a dark smear on an already dark page in history. The creatures that Okeanos made were not the helpers she had wanted, she brought into this world a breed of Neverwere that saw no creature, save her, as a friend. Ravenous, cruel beasts possessing little more than animalistic cunning that stalked the waters of the world preying on both sides of the conflict with ruthless efficiency. She was devastated by this fact, Okeanos had always tried to be a life-giver, as the sea is to the remote fishing village; however now she had unleashed a plague upon the world that would make the seas inhospitable to anything with the most basic sense of self preservation.

Worse still due to their tendency to attack anything that wasn’t her, the chances of her children’s survival no matter what side won the conflict were slim at best. She spent days in solitude contemplating on what the future would bring, knowing that she had to act. Okeanos could not bring herself to destroy her children could she? Hm. But she also couldn’t bare to think of the innocent lives that sparing them might jeopardize. However: ‘What mother could stand by and watch her children be snuffed out?’ She reasoned within the confines of her lair at the bottom of the great oceans. Days blurred into weeks and depression slowly took hold until eventually, and with time running out she was forced to make a choice, Okeanos acted.

The Mother of Kelpies gathered to her all the magic she could find within the briny depths, and wove a great spell beneath the full moon. Into herself she took all the worse traits of her children, the things that made them into boogeymen that lurked in the murky waters. The pain was unimaginable, worse than the bite of any Tartarian blade, and the giant mare nearly lost control of the energy several times before completing the ritual. And in that single moment Okeanos had had given hope to her children. In truth perhaps she hadn’t removed all their bad tendencies, they still seemed to have a taste for meat and fish, but the monsters in their souls had been shattered — if only the same could be said for her.

In her gambit to free them, she had damned herself. The gentle mother now played host to a beast in her heart — As the tides rose with the coming of night and it’s moon, she would become increasing monstrous, twisting into a malevolent creature that haunted the seas, only to return to her kinder self with the new dawn. In short Okeanos became the true embodiment of the seas on that day, capable of bringing prosperity and life, but just as likely to drag it to a watery grave — which she proved thoroughly in the latter days of that ancient conflict which helped to drive the justicar into seeking the children that she had longed for.

So it was that she became as she is to date. Okeanos, Mother of Kelpies, Keeper of the Sea, Boon & Bane of the Sailor, the Cruel Mistress, the Life-Giving Mother of the Waves.

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Posted previously at: 2017-08-21T23:11:02 | Posted previously by: Blissey1