LIVING FORMS TESTIMONIES

Post-Corruption Environmental Effects Codex

(Continued)

Volume XII: Survivors of Corruption – First-Person Testimonies

“To return is not to escape, nor to forget, but to carry the echo of the wound in ways that don’t sing it aloud.” —Vaeleth, Warden of the Twelfth Hollow

This volume preserves the direct testimonies of Aevori who survived prolonged exposure to Varashin zones—those who witnessed corruption firsthand and returned. These memories were transcribed under veil-lit conditions by Warden-scribes, and each speaker’s voice was sanctified to prevent distortion by residual glyph influence. Their names are partially redacted in honor of the Aevori practice of memory-protection for the soul-wounded.

Each of these accounts is considered sacred not for its clarity, but for its honesty in incompletion.

❖ I. Testimony of V—nael, Spiral-Born Songkeeper

Location: Edge of the Listening Tide

Corruption Encountered: Varas’Ulvethin, Shael’vren-Tuun’khae

“It wasn’t that I forgot her. It was that I remembered her wrong. Her laugh echoed with notes that had never existed. I saw us touching hands beneath the Tielune trees, but her fingers bent sideways, and I knew that version of her had never lived.

My tattoos began to itch inward. I scratched them until they bled, trying to pull the false memory out. The glyph on my collarbone reversed. It now says ‘She chose silence’. I never wrote that. I never would. But I cannot unsee it.

I live now beside the Spiral, singing songs in which her name no longer appears. That is how I keep the corruption from finding her again.”

❖ II. Testimony of L—then, Flame-Walker of the Western Ridge

Location: Collapse Zone near Vehlune Ridge

Corruption Encountered: Varas’Elthuneh, Shael’vren-Vaelthur

“There was no sound, only the memory of sound. I stepped into a corridor that had once sung back. Now it swallowed.

The glyphs on the wall still moved, as if chewing. One of them blinked. I don’t know how else to say it. A glyph blinked at me. When I blinked back, it laughed.

I haven’t sung since. I wear silence like a cloak now. I braid silence into my food. I sleep without names. My companions say I’m whole, but I don’t think they see the silence seated behind my eyes. It’s still laughing.”

❖ III. Testimony of M—reil, Former Veil-Seer of the Skygrove

Location: Songwell Rupture, near Root-Skein Depths

Corruption Encountered: Shael’vren-Hual’neth, Varas’Zelruun’kha

“I tried to name the thing I saw. That was my first mistake.

It looked like a glyph, but it behaved like a mirror. When I gave it a name, it took it and wrapped it around me. For three days, I was no longer M—reil. I was that name. I answered when it was called. I even sang its resonance without knowing.

The Warden who pulled me out burned my name into a stone. I keep it beside my skin, bound with thread. When I forget again, I press the stone to my chest. I listen for the heartbeat that still belongs to me.”

❖ IV. Testimony of E—sien, Hunter-Twin of the Grove’s Edge

Location: Broken Caverns beneath the Unseen Veil

Corruption Encountered: Varas’Kholunreth, Shael’vren-Kaetheruun

“I tracked the Thread-Eater too far. Didn’t realize it had nested in my own memories.

At first, it ate the small things—where I placed my blades, the smell of thunel root in the morning. Then it took my sister’s face. I could remember her laugh, her gait… but her face became a blur. I couldn’t see her even standing in front of me.

I carved her face in bark. Over and over. Hundreds of versions. Only one matched. That one I stitched into my left palm with ink and bone. If the glyph comes back, that’s where I look. Not at her. At my palm.”

❖ V. Testimony of A—thi, Child of the Glade-Shard

Location: Ashwater Fen, weeks after the glyph-blight storm

Corruption Encountered: Shael’vren-Olaketh, residual Varas’Thuuvenik

“When the storm passed, the water hummed in circles. We walked into the mud and found the words. Floating there, soft and full of teeth. I spoke one aloud. I shouldn’t have.

After that, I could only speak that word. It changed shape each time I said it, but I couldn’t stop. The elders wove a silence around me. For weeks I wore it like skin.

Now I speak again. But sometimes, if I look into the water too long, the word tries to return. I taste it in my teeth. The Warden says that’s where the last corruption hides—in the spaces between.”

❖ VI. Testimony of Vaeleth, Warden of the Twelfth Hollow

Location: Deep Spiral Perimeter

Corruption Encountered: Multiple glyphforms, behavioral Varashin

“I do not cleanse the corrupted. I walk with them, so they are not alone in the descent. That is our task, those of us who still remember the sacred shape of grief.

The glyph once wrote itself upon my spine. I let it stay. I learned its shape. Then I wrote another glyph above it—not a counter, but a mirror. I made the two converse.

That’s how you survive. You don’t cut out the shadow. You listen to it. You bind it with your own voice. And then, if you’re fortunate, someone sings it back to you.”

Post-Corruption Environmental Effects Codex

Volume XIII: The Origin Myths of the Varashi

“The first wound was not a scream, but a question that refused to echo.” —Fragment of the Lost Writ of Saen’laev

The Aevori do not tell the story of the Varashi in a single voice. Their traditions offer multiple conflicting myths, each a thread of truth and dream interwoven through the Spiral of Cycles. Some accounts are ritual parables whispered during rites of protection; others are fragmentary songs too dangerous to sing aloud. What follows are the most widely preserved origin frameworks, presented with care not to reactivate latent resonance.

These myths are not facts. They are encoded warnings, shaped to teach without naming directly.

❖ I. Myth of the Shattered Veil

Cycle Origin: Attributed to the elder Veil-Wardens before the construction of Veu-Nahra

Core Motif: A singer tore the boundary between Real and Reverent by naming what was not meant to be named

In the time before cycles, there was a Singer whose voice held such beauty that it pierced even silence. But she grew arrogant and sought to sing the True Name of the Mountain—a name known only to the stars and the memory stones.

When she sang it, the Veil cracked, and through the fissure came echoes that had never been spoken—resonances without source, meanings without memory. These became the first Varashi. Not beings, but fractures in song, trailing glyphs that mimicked truth but devoured it.

The Singer vanished into herself. Her name is now unspeakable. Each time a glyph is malformed in grief or rage, a fragment of her unfinished song attempts to complete itself.

❖ II. Myth of the Ungiven Return

Cycle Origin: Mourning-Wardens of the Southern Hollows

Core Motif: Corruption as the return of memory too long denied

There were once memories so painful the Aevori buried them beyond song, beyond silence. They carved these memories into stone, then broke the stone into dust, swearing never to reassemble them.

But memory does not die. The fragments began to gather themselves beneath the ground, whispering to one another across years. They formed false glyphs in imitation of the sacred—twisted truths longing to be included again.

These are the Varashi: not evil, but banished grief, clawing its way back into the spiral. Their glyphs are malformed because they were never allowed to finish becoming themselves.

❖ III. Myth of the Child-Who-Walked-Backward

Cycle Origin: Spoken only during the Listening Tide

Core Motif: Reversal of resonance as the cause of temporal dissonance

A child once entered the Spiral too young, before her soul was braided to her body. She stepped backward into her own echo and was born in reverse, remembering her death before her birth.

She saw the entire cycle inverted. Songs unraveled, glyphs decayed before they were written, love ended before it began. She cried tears of resonance that flowed inward, not down. These tears became the first corrupted pools.

The glyphs that grew in those waters remembered only ending. That is why the Varashi cannot speak healing—they were never taught how to begin.

❖ IV. Myth of the Mirror-Mother

Cycle Origin: Forbidden; removed from central stone archives

Core Motif: The world itself dreaming of its own unmaking

Once, the world dreamed of itself. In its dream, it saw its beauty—trees of light, mountains full of memory, women etched in sacred glyphs. But in seeing itself, the world wondered: What if I am not what I appear?

This doubt took root and became a reflection that moved on its own. That reflection is the Varashi—not a thing, but the world’s own question, made into living glyphs that undo belief.

They do not seek to destroy. They seek to confirm the suspicion that even the sacred may be false.

❖ V. Myth of the Forgotten Echo

Cycle Origin: Songless Lineages of the Cleft-Dwellers

Core Motif: The Varashi as consequence of silencing too many voices

In the elder days, a decision was made to silence certain lineages—those whose songs were too disruptive, too broken, too wild. Their names were erased. Their glyphs unmarked. Their stories left to rot in the soil.

But resonance never vanishes—it transforms. The unsung voices became song-leeches, glyph-mimics, and thread-breakers. They built their own spiral in secret, one made of shame, omission, and the hunger for a name.

When the first glyph-trees began weeping sap that burned the skin, the elders knew: these were the children of the unsung. And they had returned, not to ask forgiveness—but to be remembered.

❖ VI. The Theory of Convergence (Modern Warden Interpretation)

Cycle Origin: Post-Veu-Nahra academic thought

Core Motif: Corruption as multiple resonance-threads collapsing into a single point

Some modern Warden-scribes believe the Varashi are not mythic at all—but the consequence of over-saturation. So many glyphs, meanings, and resonances have been layered into Velun that the harmonic structure collapsed in places.

Just as a song sung too loudly can shatter crystal, the glyphic density of sacred space may create rifts—zones where the symbolic field eats itself.

This theory suggests the Varashi are inevitable, and that resonance must be allowed to rest—to decay and return to the soil, lest it curdle into shadow.

These myths are never taught directly. They are alluded to in dream-rituals, encoded into scent-based memory stones, or embedded in tattoo-echoes worn only during eclipse rites.

The Aevori do not seek to resolve these myths into one truth. As with all sacred knowledge in Velun, contradiction is not a flaw—it is a form of wholeness.

Post-Corruption Environmental Effects Codex

Volume XIV: The Varashi in Non-Glyphic Form — Animal, Root, Stone

“The glyphs were not the first to fall. Before them came the breathless frogs, the hollowed bark, the echoing stones that sang without intent.” —Field Journal of Warden Thaelune

Though the Varashi are most often encountered as corrupted glyphs—living resonance patterns that unmake or unweave meaning—scholars and Warden-hunters of the deep wilds have documented numerous non-glyphic manifestations. These forms may be:

• Precursors to glyphic corruption (pre-resonant distortions),

• Vessels holding failed or orphaned glyphs, or

• Native entities or substances that absorbed corrupted resonance unintentionally.

These beings and objects often do not appear corrupted at first. Their effects are usually behavioral, ecological, or subtlely metaphysical. Some act as seed vectors, slowly spreading Varashin influence through interaction or consumption.

The following is a compiled codex of the most studied forms, categorized for clarity.

◈ I. Animal Manifestations of Varashin Influence

1. T’shuael-Husk (“Hollowback Doe”)

Origin: Verdant glades east of the Spiral Veins

Signs: Eyes emit no light reflection; body visibly healthy but shadow-casts are missing

Effect: Prolonged viewing induces a false memory of being followed. May erase the presence of other nearby animals from memory.

Function: Memory-leech. Devours recollection of safer paths and guidance markers.

2. Raen’thun Vire (“Still-Mouth Frog”)

Origin: Moist hollows near corrupted fen-pools

Signs: No croaking; mouth gapes unnaturally wide but never moves

Effect: Vocal paralysis in nearby creatures. Causes dreams where one’s own voice betrays them.

Function: Resonance-silencer. Distorts throat-glyphs and song-memory threads.

3. Korthuun Larvae (“Thread Eaters”)

Origin: Found inside decayed root hollows of dead glyphtrees

Signs: Eat the fibrous script-veins inside tattoo trees

Effect: Consumption of these leads to memory decay of events associated with one’s tattoos.

Function: Memory severance parasites.

4. Shael’Thiir (“Walking Disguises”)

Origin: Cliffs near the Breathless Pools

Signs: Mimic the exact form of animals or Aevori seen in the mind, but slightly distorted

Effect: Hallucinatory feedback. Confusion between inner thought and outer sight.

Function: Identity disruption.

5. Vaeln’Rakhu (“Singer’s Lie”)

Origin: Beneath resonance tunnels in the Deep Spiral

Signs: Emits haunting melodies that change with each listener

Effect: Creates false nostalgia for places never visited. Individuals may abandon villages to seek non-existent sites.

Function: Geographic destabilizer through song.

◈ II. Corrupted Root and Flora Forms

6. Thuunel-Raek (“Reverse-Sap Root”)

Appearance: Roots grow upward instead of downward; drip sap that floats instead of falls

Effect: Sap draws resonance from nearby glyphs, eroding their shape over time

Danger: Consuming the sap causes reversal of internal emotional memory (love becomes grief, safety becomes dread)

Use: Taboo. Ritual burial only.

7. Zaruun-Moss (“Whispervein Moss”)

Habitat: Grows in moist rock glyph-beds corrupted by unspoken trauma

Signs: Emits a ticking sound in cycles of three

Effect: Grows in the presence of lies. Once inhaled, the moss rewrites your last spoken sentence internally.

Function: Truth destabilizer.

8. Ilneth’dah Root (“Echoroot”)

Habitat: Subterranean layers under memory stone gardens

Signs: Tangles in perfect spirals regardless of environment

Effect: Saps the emotional charge from spoken stories, rendering them factual but lifeless

Function: Narrative desaturator.

◈ III. Corrupted Stone and Mineral Forms

9. The Sernilith (“False-Glyph Stones”)

Type: Pebble-sized stones with natural glyph-like veins

Origin: Areas where true glyphs were shattered by corruption storms

Signs: Resonate when touched by skin, particularly tattooed skin

Effect: Induces phantom meanings. Bearers feel they “almost understand” a truth that never resolves

Danger: Long exposure leads to obsessive behavior

Function: Cognitive erosion through false revelation.

10. Vaerash-Kheth Crystals (“Resonance Drowners”)

Type: Translucent blue stones, often mistaken for Vehlune fragments

Signs: Emit inaudible low frequencies detected only by certain insects and young Aevori

Effect: Cancels active resonance in nearby sacred objects, including Rai’len Rods

Use: Never stored. Must be relocated to acoustic voids

Function: Song suppression artifact.

11. Shiiv’vaan Core (“Grief Core”)

Origin: Found only in sites where many Aevori died without their memories being sung

Appearance: Heavy black stone with threads of red resonance veins

Effect: Causes nearby glyphs to rot or invert

Function: Residual trauma crystallization. Acts as a beacon for Varashi emergence.

◈ IV. Notable Observations

• Many of these non-glyphic forms serve as precursors to full corruption zones.

• In several observed cases, glyphs emerged later in the presence of these materials.

• Some species (especially the T’shuael-Husk and Zaruun-Moss) may unintentionally spread through emotional resonance alone.

• The Aevori believe that emotion binds more tightly than blood or ink—and thus many of these corrupted forms appear where suppressed emotion or collective silence once reigned.

Post-Corruption Environmental Effects Codex

Volume XV: The Rebirth of Beasts — Purified Forms After Varashi Corruption

“There are those who return. Not as they were, but as something gentled by fire. The Spiral does not punish—it remakes.” —Scribe Velunei of the Mid-Spire Baths

Not all creatures lost to the Varashi remain lost.

In rare and sacred cases, beings corrupted by resonance-warp, glyphic destabilization, or emotional silencing have undergone purification through deep ritual, sacred ecological rebalancing, or spontaneous resonance inversion. These rebirths are not “restorations”—they are transformations. The corrupted form never returns to its former shape. Instead, it emerges as a new, resonance-stabilized species: marked by survival, memory-reintegration, and often subtle bioluminescence or acoustic traits indicating a healed thread.

These reborn forms are called:

Tha’vaelune — “That Which Sang Again”

This volume records several known species believed to have undergone full transformation after Varashi exposure. Some were purified through Aevori intervention, others by the land itself.

◈ I. Tha’vaelune Fauna — Creatures Reborn After Corruption

1. Shaeren’Vael (“Hollowback Remembered”)

Origin: Once the corrupted T’shuael-Husk

Current Habitat: Moonlit meadows at the forest’s northern margin

Signs: Reborn with a shimmer-like pelt and mirrored hooves

Behavior: Approaches those in grief without fear, projecting soft memory-images

Function: Memory reweaver. Guides mourners back through suppressed grief, gifting closure

Trait: Glyph scars visible only during full moons

2. Nira’thal Bloomtoad

Origin: Purified Raen’thun Vire by the Silvan Grottos

Current Habitat: Sacred steam-fed springs

Signs: Emits harmonic croaks that realign throat-resonance in listeners

Function: Voice restorer. Used by singers who have lost spiritual tone

Trait: Can rest in the mouth of a sleeping Aevori to repair dream-speech fractures

3. Théleun’Kresh (“Echo-Deafened Reborn”)

Origin: Rebirth of a mimic-creature form like Shael’Thiir

Current Habitat: Caves where once mirror-creatures wandered

Signs: No longer reflects what is seen—only what is intended

Function: Intention-clarifier. Used by Aevori during trials of trust

Trait: If lied to, it will go blind for seven days

4. Vae’linara Threadbeetle

Origin: Once Korthuun larvae (thread eaters)

Current Habitat: Tattoo tree groves that survived corruption

Signs: Consumes decaying glyph-veins but secretes healing pigment

Function: Tattoo-glyph restorer. Ink harvested from their silk is used in ritual reweaving

Trait: Only sings in the presence of sorrow

5. Saelth-Vaan Glider

Origin: From corrupted bat-kin lost in the Deep Spiral

Current Habitat: Cliffs above the Whisper-Clefts

Signs: Wings patterned with silent glyphs that shift when observed

Function: Dream-veil guardian. Emits a resonance field that wards off psychic interference

Trait: Will only nest in branches from trees grown from memory-buried seeds

◈ II. Tha’vaelune Flora — Healed Resonant Plants

6. Thun’valae Root

Origin: Transformed Thuunel-Raek (Reverse-Sap Root)

Signs: Roots now spiral downward again and sap floats only during sacred song

Effect: When sap is sung to, it binds memories to physical locations (used in sacred wayfinding)

Use: Only harvested during eclipse rites

7. Ilar’Maelin Fern (“Truth-Restful Fern”)

Origin: From corrupted Zaruun-moss

Signs: Emits a calming bioluminescent rhythm and releases scent only when near unspoken guilt

Effect: Rather than exposing falsehoods, it invites confession through comfort

Function: Used in reconciliation ceremonies and forgiveness feasts

◈ III. Stone and Mineral Purifications

8. Vael’Runil Glass (“Sung Crystal”)

Origin: Purified from Vaerash-Kheth Crystals

Signs: Still cancels resonance—but only excess or violent harmonics

Function: Used in the crafting of Resonant Balance Chambers inside Veu-Nahra

Trait: Glows blue when resonance reaches dangerous intensity, serving as early warning

9. Eluun’Shard (“Joy Echo Core”)

Origin: Reborn fragment of a shattered Shiiv’vaan Core

Effect: Rather than spreading grief, amplifies small moments of joy or remembered laughter

Use: Sewn into the garments of mourners during the Cycle of New Weaving

Note: Cannot be touched directly—must be carried in cloth spun from an unspoken name

◈ IV. Observational Summary

• These forms are not cures. They are transcendent adaptations, often scarred, marked, and limited. But they no longer harm, and their very nature aids in the healing of others.

• Some require resonant companionship—they only thrive near singing, glyph-reading, or emotional openness.

• The Aevori do not claim credit for all rebirths. Many believe the land chooses what it will redeem.