Testimonies Given, Judgments Prepared
The conch shell upon Avechna’s Peak echoed for many months with the words that mortals spoke in testimony. One by one they came, recounting memories, stories, hopes and regrets.
Some cursed the name of the Goddess Li-varili, relaying the losses they and Lusternia at large had so suffered in past years: the storms and rage that came with the forced and painful Awakening of Sister Sea; the lands flooded and the drowning of the innumerable unjustly dead; the sacrifices made, willingly or unwillingly, to raise the Curse of the Sunken Heart; the murder of a child; the fury of a pirate Captain and a mother; the Divine Themselves, made to suffer as the world rocked and bent under the rage of Li-varili and a false Keltari by Her side, until the Seal of Justice was utterly shattered and Lusternia was once more pitched into a race against time to bind the Soulless Kethuru through Ascension.
In opposition to them, other mortal voices lifted up to highlight the Lady of Lagoons’s own sufferings: the thousands of years bound in the Morokeche Seat; the trauma the Goddess felt in the unending aeons; the influences placed upon Her by the Soulless Illith; Her perceived betrayal by the Goddess Drocilla, who placed Her in the Seat, and by each of the other Elders She met since Her release from imprisonment. Some mortals offered up these traumas as the reason for why She should not be held accountable for Her actions, which killed so many. Others justified Her responses as reasonable ones to perceived attacks, as the loving actions of a doting Mother, and of a Lover spurned: if other Divine were permitted to act on Their own traumas and desires, why not Li-varili?
To those mortals who called Her cruel actions deserving of punishment, other mortals responded that She was capable of care and of compassion, and should be shown kindness. To those mortals who held up the loss of Spirit Sea as a further trauma to a Goddess who had already been hurt, other mortals responded that a child such as the Sea should be loved as she is, and not brought to waking as a means to vengeance. Some called for the Goddess to be destroyed or exiled, others called for Her to be healed, or made to forget, or to be claimed by the Wyrd or offered rest in Seralem. Some sought for mercy, empathy and time for Li-varili, while others cried that justice demanded She be shown no mercy, no freedom; the Seal of Justice was broken, after all. To some mortals, She had no choice but take each action She did; to others, She chose those actions all, and in so choosing, took up the responsibility and the consequences.
Each mortal spoke from their heart, some many times, their voices echoing with the sounds of the sea, lifting upwards to resound in the ears of the Divine, who listened to their testimonies and pondered.
And so the Elder Divine came together, the gathering of Their power saturating the reality of the First World itself. In a deliberately parched patch of the Divine Havens, the Elders convened to pass judgment on Li-varili, Lady of the Lagoons. She demanded one concession of the other Elders, that mortals, the very mortals who had spent months giving testimony for Her judgment, witness the decision through Her own eyes. So a crystal was sent through the veil of the Havens down onto Avechna’s Peak, to land in the barren fulcrux that had once been Ayridion’s. This crystal brought forth a simulacrum of the Divine gathering, enveloping the mortals in the sight and sound of the proceedings and the thoughts of the Goddess Li-varili Herself. So the great judgement of the age began.
