A long time ago on the edge of an abyss, there existed many endless world's, unique, undisturbed, whole, but most importantly, separate. These world's spied on one another from their rifts of reality. Like islands in a sea they never touched directly, but several times the inhabitants made 'boats' and crossed the chasm between worlds. These boats usually consisted of reality rending portals, or actual boats that sailed the tides of the multiverse.
These worlds were many, separate, and also highly unique. Each possessing and shaping a different form of mystical energy that is best called magic. Not every system of magic can lead its users to godly heights, but those that can reach those heights never stop reaching. They alway believe there to be another step, another layer, and they always, always do everything they can to gain more power.
Although several attempts to wage full scale invasion were ultimately thwarted, the wariness of their otherworldly neighbors invading gripped the people of the varied lands. This mild fear permated the worlds, seeping into the very earth and sky turning them bleek and listless. It drew in calamity like a moth to a flame. Now my dear friends the term cosmic horror seems a little grandiose to me, but for this specific calamity it seems apt.
The calamity that arrived was what they called The Watcher. It lived in the void reveling in its darkness and the madness of power, but it never did anything. It was passive, seeming to only watch. The worlds had never out right feared the monster of the void dubbing it The Watcher. Believing it contained or maybe even a benevolent entity. Well in a moment of half clarity The Watcher decided to do more than watch. It was as easy as idle thought, a mere question, a brief flex of power, and the worlds were nothing but tatters.
With no way to go back, and regretting their destruction the calamity grabbed the fading cores of the former worlds and twisted them together. The worlds collapsed into one, colliding, shattering eons of history and knowledge. These varied world's began to meld and bleed together to make up for missing pieces, becoming much more than they ever could have been alone.
These worlds began to form something new.
In the smoldering chaos The Watcher peeled all of the magic out of the new singular universe. Stretching, pulling, and bending the energies The Watcher began to create something new, for the first time in its existence. Slowly letting an idea take proper shape The Watcher turned the crashing and roiling magics into Threads. Letting one thread spool out for every system of magic, the being of darkness and death began to break or rather split the Threads. Once, then twice, and then dozens of times. Then The Watcher recombined the broken Threads with other broken Threads creating new ones. The threads made a unique tapestry, one of life, love, and loathing. Of death and fire. Of pestilence and pain.
Of hope.
This tapestry was… Well,it would be like if you went out and bought a nice pair of pants. These were good pants, nay dare I say, great pants and you love them dearly. Yet despite your love of them as pants you had a feeling they would make better socks. You make the abomination sock, and decide to make some new pants, since you ruined your old pair. You sow three of your favorite shirts together. Which technically count as pants now, but also as an affront to most sapient beings. After seeing how lovely your pants and socks are you decide that making a whole outfit in this style would be best. You then sow all the pieces together and are left with something that could be loosely called a onesie. Or as I like to say an eldritch abomination, but tomato tomatoe.
However in the case of the tapestry, the threads didn’t remain an abomination, they came to life. They moved ever shifting, becoming more together than they ever were apart. New threads were created, old ones shifted into something new, while others were cannibalized being completely consumed. The entire time The Watcher was struggling to create a guiding force for the entire universe. It could be thought of as another Thread but it interlocked the collected unconscious of all the inhabitants of the former worlds The Watcher could find. It grew from Thread to a tapestry of its own. Then The Watcher overlaid both tapestries with the fundamental fabric of the new universe. Meaning that as the universe expanded, collapsed, and was reborn so too would the tapestry of magic.
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As this new universe began its first cycle, The Watcher’s lucidity slipped and the cosmic horror forgot all about what it had just done and settled in to watch a new universe unfold.
Fast forward a few billion years, and you'll find the body of a boy who wanted nothing more than to live a life of adventure and magic. The body of a boy from another world, the body of Leon. Leon is, well, dead, like extra super dead so what happens to those that have died on Fracture? Most of the time nothing, they end up vanishing, back into everything making the world’s threads more vibrant. There is the rare occasion that a deity will encapsulate the mind of the worshiper and whisk the dead servant away to their specific afterlife, but only the extra devout get that honor. Leon, however, didn't do either of those things, but rather a third option.
He unknowingly used his unfulfilled desires to anchor his mind to the physical. Leon held on for a month and a day before he had unconsciously gathered enough energy to let him linger. What greeted him when he first opened his ghost eyes was the sight of his dead body exactly as it had been when he died. Not knowing that what he was seeing was just the imprint of his own death upon his psyche, Leon rushed his corpse trying to possess it. The instant Leon made contact with the imprint it vanished and all he managed to do was fly into a tree. Quite literally.
Leon was unknowingly fighting to possess the body of an elder oak of the Lost Woods. This elder was almost ready to evolve into an actual monster and there was no way it would let some pipsqueak ghost ruin that. So the elder suppressed Leon's conscious mind completely leaving him a near mindless ghost, and then stuffed Leon into an acorn. Letting the acorn fall from its branches, separating Leon from itself completely. The elder thought it had handled that quite nicely, and mentally patted itself on the back for a job well done. When it was really quite the opposite.
From there his acorn was picked up, whisked away, fought over, lost in the scuffle, found again, eaten whole by accident, and subsequently shit out several days later in a very different part of the forest, in a small clearing near a creek. From there the acorn did what acorns do as it began to root itself in dirt and pull in energy from the sun. This is what finally made Leon stir. He wanted more energy and the plant gladly supplied, unfortunately this was the equivalent of a feast to Leon causing him to go into a food coma.
If Leon had stayed aware he would have found his mental faculties rapid decline, and might have tried to escape from the acorn. But he didn’t and easily fell asleep.
It was another month before he finally got used to the energy and began thinking again, though with the power of a plant brain this time. Meaning that he was unfairly limited mentally. It's an unfortunate limitation on ghosts, but their mental capacity is only as strong as their host. There were some ways around this, but it was already too late for Leon. So inhabiting a plant with no brain Leon couldn't even decide to leave its host. However, the power that the plant drew in, was enough for Leon's ghostly and human instincts to take over. The plant began to change rapidly, growing in a stump instead of a sapling. Leon's branches interwoven and tangled to form the head and upper body of a plant-person. It looked like Leon was doing a handstand of sorts.
The plant Leon finally was able to exert enough force to uproot his plant body, and begin to seek out his dying desire to get strong. Leon's new form looked quite different from, well anything else really. His head was a log with a mess of roots for hair, the eyes were just round holes in the stump with a faint glow of green in the center. A third hole represented his mouth, and while it didn't glow it did make him look surprised all the time. Branches, twigs, leaves, and vines made up Leon's arms and upper torso, but from the ribs down he was all ghost. Transparent blue vapor, that was concentrated spirit essence, formed his ghostly tail. He was proportionate to a human, but only about thirty centimeters tall.
If Leon had the mental capabilities, he would have been ecstatic that he could fly now, but all he really felt was a desire to float up to the canopy and absorb some better sunlight. From idiot farm-boy, to dead-boy, and then into ghost-plant-boy Leon was beginning to benefit from his encounter with the aväk crystalisk. For without that he never would have died and become a rare monster variant known as a Mourning Wood.