Veythra POV
The shaking drove every believer to the ground. Stone groaned, towers rattled, and spore storms howled through caverns and streets in a heartbeat. Caps burst, filling the air with choking clouds. Her rage ran through every mycelium thread that carried her name.
A transcendent priestess had been taken from her shrine.
Not just any priestess—one of her first true believers since she became the Mushroom Queen.
Once, she had not been that. Once, she had been clean and far away, a white crescent cut into the sky. Mortals had lifted their faces and whispered at a distance. Polite prayers. Distant needs. She had answered with tides and dreams. With soft, silver things.
And then there was the girl in the ruin.
The sky had burned. Temples cracked. The moonlight could not reach the caverns where the last Ther'vassi fled. Everyone else cursed her and turned their backs. Only one remained kneeling in the dark, knees in the mud, lips stained purple with mushroom juice.
"If your light cannot reach us," the girl whispered, voice raw from poison and weeping, "then fall. Sink. Grow with us down here."
She ate glowing caps and drank rot and offered every hallucination, every coughing breath, every heartbeat to the Moon. Not as she was, but as the girl needed her to be.
Veythra remembered the first time that faith touched her—sharp, desperate, laced with spores. It tasted like drowning and being kissed at the same time.
It would have been easy to let the girl die. To stay in the sky, pure and pale and alone.
Instead, she bent.
She let the prayers coat her, seep into her, drag her down through stone and bone until her light bloomed in fungal rings instead of in the heavens. The moon died by degrees. Mushrooms rose in her name. The girl called it salvation. Others called it corruption.
Now that same line of faith, that same poisoned devotion, had been stolen from her shrine under the reek of orchids.
She, an ancient god, had been played for a fool—twice over.
Veythra hurled herself against the veil to descend, but the rules held. Other gods barred her path, soft hands and iron grips. Their murmured rebukes only thickened her fury, brewing darker with every heartbeat she was forced to stay away.
This was a declaration of war.
The spore storms stilled. Mushrooms inhaled their own clouds, caps swelling, glowing in the dark like a thousand open eyes. Veythra pulled her power tight against herself, a queen rearranging her dress after screaming.
Very well, she thought. If I cannot go down, I will send the rot instead.
She ordered every matron in E'nathyr to find her most fanatical servants and the mortal perpetrator. Irxalthra, the Orchid Goddess, would pay for this offense; the weed would be torn from the garden, root and flower.
Any and every mortal who dared betray her—whether by their will or not—would pay the price for their faith. She had fallen from the sky for them once. She would not be made a fool of again.
Irxalthra POV
Irxalthra did not think of herself as evil. Attacks, kidnappings, assassinations—these were just tools. Every knife her believers raised was driven by vengeance and profit, by debts owed in blood. She was a huntress, once a druid who tended wild groves. Now she was a blood-blooming orchid, thriving in rot and ruin.
She remembered hands over her ears, her mother's voice whispering lullabies to drown out distant screams. Her mother had always stood between her and the world, a thin, stubborn shield. Irxalthra had promised, in the secret, fierce way children did, that one day she would protect her back.
She failed.
The last of the moon elves—her tribe of scarcely a thousand—vanished in a single drow raid. Smoke, steel, and spellfire had erased them in a night. Her mother died with them. By then, Veythra had already sunk from the sky and become the Mushroom Queen. When the moon elves died, so did the last tether that might have pulled the moon goddess back.
The sky had abandoned them. Their god had chosen the spores over the stars.
For decades, Irxalthra raided and hunted in the Underdeep. Dark elf caravans vanished. Isolated outposts woke to the sound of their own children screaming and then—nothing. She captured, she killed, she carved her warning into the tunnels.
It wasn't enough.
Every drow she cut down bled the wrong color, spoke the wrong names. No familiar laugh came back to her. No one called her by the childhood nickname her mother had used. Revenge filled graves, not the aching hollow where her people had been.
She wanted the moon elves back. Not statues. Not songs. People.
When she found the Ther'vassi necromancer's remains, half-buried in an old battlefield, she took it as a sign. The relics that clung to the bones reeked of soul-binding and transformation. She studied them the way a starving beast studies a locked pantry door.
She tore apart druidic transformation rites and stitched them together with necromancer theory. She learned how to coax flesh into new shapes, how to tell a body to remember a bloodline it had never carried.
The first time a bound dark elf opened her eyes with moon-pale irises, Irxalthra's breath caught. It wasn't her mother. It wasn't anyone she knew. But the face was close enough to hurt.
After that, she went all in.
She gathered what she could of her fallen tribe—ashes, bone shards, hair braided into old charms—and placed them into the Ther'vassi relics. She anchored souls where she could, fragments where she couldn't. The transformed moon elves that came out of her rituals were wrong, raw, unfinished… but they were seeds. Seeds for a future in which moon elves might walk again.
Dying had never frightened dark elves. They were raised to expect it: raiding, dueling, sacrificing, dying. What they feared was change—waking up in a body that was no longer theirs, under a sky they had never seen, called by a name that wasn't their own.
As Irxalthra's work spread through the Underdeep, so did the stories.
Parents hissed warnings into pointed ears. "If you don't behave, the blood-blooming orchid will take you. She'll plant you in someone else's skin."
Fear was a kind of worship too. It came to her in shivers and prayers, in whispered threats and desperate bargains. It tasted better than silence, but it still didn't fill the hollow.
Her revenge was a mountain of bones, and yet she remained alone.
The revelation came to her while she knelt in a circle of orchids grown from stolen blood, hands raw from carving runes into stone. Light that was not moonlight, not mushroom-glow, brushed her cheek.
The Sun Goddess spoke.
Not in words at first, but in understanding: faith could be harnessed, shaped, directed. Fear and hope, guilt and gratitude—they were all currents that could be gathered into a single, blazing river.
Only then did the voice put it plainly, warm and distant:
You can keep hunting in the dark forever, the Sun murmured, or you can step higher and make the dark come to you. This is how you turn stories into power. This is how you become a god.
Irxalthra lifted her head, breath shaking. For the first time since the raid, since the screaming, since the ash, she felt something that was not just grief wearing anger's mask.
It was a possibility.
Here's how I'd expand it while keeping your lore and mood, just pushing deeper into her memories and feelings.
Selithrae POV
Aevyrion was a madman.
Selithrae drank mycelbrew steeped with her own memories and watched the army he was building. The brew slid cold down her dead throat, bitter and sharp. Below her balcony, frost wights stood in uneven lines, a gathering of resentment in mismatched armor.
He was a talented madman, though. Aevyrion could command armies like they were an extra limb. One gesture, and the wights shuffled, straightened, lifted rusted blades. She did not rest. Undead did not need sleep, but she could have shut down, gone still, let numbness take her. Instead she kept drinking and grinding her worry beads into her palm.
Tonight's mycelbrew tasted of dragonfire and snow. It dragged her back.
In the age of dragons, moon elves had already grown few. They were the children of silver nights, not steel and engines. When the Ther'vassi war machine finally turned on them, they survived only by calling down eternal winter. It froze dragon wings and shattered supply lines, yes—but it also froze fields, gnawed on children's bones, hollowed out their strength year by year. Survival became waiting to die more slowly.
When the drow raiders came, there was nothing left to pay with.
Selithrae died.
She remembered the cold more than the pain. The way her last prayer to the Moon dissolved in silence. No answer, no light, no voice. Just the sound of steel and the hiss of spellfire devouring the last of her people.
The souls of the moon elves were supposed to be entrusted to the Orchid Goddess. That was the contract. The old ties were gone: the Moon had fallen, the Mushroom Queen had sunk into rot and spores. Malvek had suggested that the Orchid goddess could take them while making the contract.
Selithrae was simply waiting now for the merchant to act as intermediary, to bridge what gods could no longer touch directly. He had looked surprised when they made the contract. She still didn't know why. Perhaps he could not understand why she would trust a new, sharp-edged goddess with her people instead of the one who had once ruled their sky.
She, high priestess of the Moon, knew exactly what had become of Veythra. Even thinking the name sent a chill down her already-cold spine. Poisonous faith had dragged the Moon Goddess from the sky and remade her as the Mushroom Queen. When the last true moon elves died, Veythra's old face died with them. There was nothing left to pull her back.
Selithrae had woken in resentment.
She opened her eyes in a world where humans looted Ther'vassi remains like crows picking a corpse. They pried open tombs, sold relics, melted history for coin. Her first breath as a frost wight was a scream that never left her lips.
Eternal winter answered instead.
It flared outward before she thought to stop it. The northern forests where moon elves once lived hardened into tundra in a single moment. Trees that had clung to life through centuries of ruin cracked under the sudden, absolute cold. Rivers turned to stone. Whatever scraps of life had crawled back after the dragons and the war were frozen mid-breath.
She regretted it.
Odd, for an undead to feel regret. But the mycelbrew in her hand carried that moment pressed into its flesh: the humans' panic as the blizzard swallowed them, the crunch of ice, the brief, vicious satisfaction, the hollow that followed.
These recipes kept more than taste. They bottled choices and the emotions that came with them, brewed so she could drink them again and again.
Below, Aevyrion laughed as he corrected a formation, voice bright and eager even among the dead. He loved war. She could see it in the way he moved, in the way he smiled at the thought of battle. She hated what war had done to her people, and still she was about to march another army into it.
She tightened the worry beads in her hand.
Right before the battle began, she would hand the souls of the moon elves to a blood-blooming goddess rather than to the Mushroom Queen who had let them die.
If that was another mistake, it would join the rest, floating in her cup.