Shaker

"Dread Lord who will conquer the realms with the power of ROCK!" - Making Up Adventurers, Cohost, 2024

"Time is relative," the saying goes.

And it really is. Mayfly species like humans or halflings or kender, they come and go in the blink of an eye in comparison to some of the more long lived peoples. The elves, for instance. They live a good little while, several thousand years, and their relative perception of time is obviously different. But it's still tied up in years, in months, in days and nights. It's fast time. The Dweller Beneath isn't concerned with that kind of time. She operates on a different scale. Deep time. Geologic time. The time it takes to take solid rock, bend and mold it like soft clay with heat and pressure.

The runes she placed in the bones of the earth were cut into the living stone over one hundred million years ago, and have been doing their slow, unstoppable work ever since, miles and miles below the sunlit surface. Shaping. Pulling. Changing the course of tectonic plates, pulling stone down into the furnaces of the earth, thrusting it back up in new configurations, new places. Molding the earth into the shape the Dweller sees fit to make it, one slow inch at a time.

There won't be any grand resistance by the surface nations. They won't unite to defeat her, undo her work. There will be no brave band of desperate heroes at the eleventh hour, because the work is the work of ages, indistinguishable from "nature" in it's slow, unstoppable course. If any of the short-lived people of the light can even survive in the world she's made when she can finally emerge. She had already won before the first elf sang to their first witchwood tree. She only needs to wait. Wait with the patience of the mountain. The patience of a stone.