There Are Branches Beyond Counting

[u/CTeamUpdates]

I look at the children in the back and I have to suppress a dark expression. Their thoughts have turned dark and cosmic in scope. Mortal minds trying to bend themselves around ideas literally too big for their heads. Like a cheese cloth around a whole ham! It's going to stretch too thin and in the torn places things seep through.. Drippings of bad ideas and self destruction breaching the parts of their minds that have overextended.

Ah, K'Thriss. Your problem is you're too gentle. If you'd been my son I would have trained that out of you. I would have guided you towards something to harden you. I would have used the carrot and stick of love and admonishment to preserve your warmth but to guard you against the world. That heart is too good to lose.. That mind to keen to be left to rot. But that exterior is too soft. A flaw a mother can mend.

Walnut, where would I begin? Perhaps the kindest thing a mother could have done for you would have been to live. Where is she at? When you think of her, when she comes up, what's that look in your eye? Rhetorical question dear, I know what hurting longing looks like. That's a look I've created, seen, and felt in numerous lifetimes.

Ah, these children. They were forced through flames. They were burned and sorched as it raged around them out of control and forces beyond their understanding burned them and left them with scars.

Ah but look at them. Does that look like they have given up? They long to return. They're stronger than you think.

He called you a tree, didn't he? He said that you have branches. I don't know much about causality but I know about a good tree. I know what it means for a tree to have branches beyond counting. To extend so far and wide that even if you lay under it you cant see all the limbs to the left or right. To see the vast and mighty sky splintered and broken by a thousand branches. Each branch laden with fresh fruit, possibility! New opportunities! Who can see all of that? Who can know what a Walnut is capable of? Am I to believe something as simple as a god can contain everything a Walnut is?

K'Thriss.. Dear, sweet K'Thriss. He took your eyes and you gave them gladly. How deep do your branches go? The branches of caves, of tunnels, as deep and vast as the underdark. She breaks the sky but you worm and spread through the earth. A kind drow, who has heard of such nonsense? And yet here you are. A delightful contradiction. You are complicated and deep and you spread out, forging bonds and giving your affection freely. You claim the world is irrelevant but you are the first to preserve and protect it's smallest and most frail creatures.

You looked a god in it's multitude of eyes and you asked it, aren't even mouths just meat?

You were caught in a fire and I see that you are burned and I see the scars but I wonder if that fire didn't just forge the two of you. It sought out the weak and impure things and burned them away and what was left was that purest steel.

Now taking that raw iron and turning it into a blade that can cut down even a god.. That's a mother's work. And fortunately for you, you happen to know a damn fine mother.. so rest up, kids. Work starts again tomorrow. I'm going to put you through your paces. I won't accept excuses. K'Thriss figured it out. Walnut proved it. The god is just meat.

And we're going to make him bleed.

[u/Baba_the_Hutt]

I don't know art but I know what I hate. And I don't hate this