Weirdly early patreon lore doodle, kinda confusing but yeah!
I am starting a job in July so I wanted to focus on making sure the month was spent with me getting to grips with the ever clogging schedule
Job, plus school, plus TESOL certification, its gonna get busy and I am gonna need time to figure out what my schedule will be lookin like
but since that one is done time to upload uh the prior one? Also drawn in uh, June...

Anywho,

Lets talk about this guy!

Rilïm is one of the 4 Balãr that was involved in "That Which Shattered the Bridge" and has a history both in fighting the powerful bal Godomer and burying it by quite literally rotting the reality around it to turn into an unbreakable, broken slag. They have only been drawn once before in a doodle some 4 years old at this point so they ahve seen a lot of overhauls to fit into the newer canon, but their basic ideas go

So Rilïm finds peace in watching dead things rot

Rilïm has found its home along the myriad swamps, marshes, and wetlands of the Tepid southeast of North America in the American plane as it is quite interested in maybe not life or death, but how death begits life. It's something that it understands but enjoys seeing in action. It is known to manifest and be seen wandering over a vast area, visiting the sites of the dead and rotted and just... watching. Often it will speed up that rot to save its time through its own powerful resonance and, generally thats what it's content to do. Dead drekir, dead animals of all sorts from crabs and gnats to dire gators and celestial leviathans. Trees and plants of all sorts! Be it a body or rotting fish in the back of a villages storehouse. If it rots, it will often seek it out and enjoy the show! Of course though it can't be in multiple places at once, or at least prefers kindly to not do that. So if its watching something rot here, it can't be there. Though it will manifest at will. It is known to crawl from the rotten material it which is to observe and/or from any rotting material, though if lacking all of that it will just crawl from anything.

Can't stop a good folk from watching the dead folk

Though other times, if its next target is within 200 miles, it will meander on over the old fashioned way, one cockroach leg after another. Moving generally at a leisurely pace of about 10 miles per hour

As to its interactions with the still living

It tends to not mind nor really actively communicate nor explain itself to the living. Its singularly focused on watching the rot on the spot and will not give a hot nod to a lot of gawking drekir.

But if its not messed with, it won't mess with anyone else. Animals tend to get the idea and keep clear of it and the drekir of this large region such as the Blaclaw, the Southern Preachers, The Jacka, The Juna, and other drekir peoples learn the hard way to not mess with it

As if you wanna piss this thing off, all you have to do is be annoying and distracting.

Touching or trying to directly interact with it, making a lot of noise by barking and yelling, bringing too much visual distraction about it, etc. If a drek does bother it It will not let them live. It tends to rot things fast and a drek averting its gaze to address them often means it missed the show it was carefully rotting away.

And now said poor drek is now gonna be the new show!.. oh no.

It tends to kill those who bother it via rapid live putrefaction, often melting and pretty quickly killing the victim by rotting its internal organs to a horrifying speed. Its maybe not a painful nor prolonged way to die, but there are definitely overall better ways to die then getting the gaze of an annoyed Rilïm

But generally you have to try to get its attention

As its pretty damn focused. Minimizing noise and fast movement is generally the best call if you see Rilïm while walking about in the swamp is to

1) See it

2) Turn around reasonably quietly

3) Leave.

As long as you are reasonably quiet, not jumping around or making a racket or throwing rocks at Rilïm it will not bother you. Just don't get close to it, and leave the area and once you're a reasonable distance away you should be fine. That does get more complicated when it manifests in say, a village storehouse but its not so unforgiving as to kill a drek walking into the storehouse to fetch breakfast as long as, again

1) See it

2) Turn around, a jumpscared yelp is probably fine

3) Leave.

So while absolutely freaky to have Rilïm appear in the middle of your village, its mostly a game of quietly vacating and camping somewhere else for a day till it leaves. It can also manifest very inconveniently in situations such as out of the dead animal a group of hunters just killed! Or out of the body of a recently killed drek, etc. Which, again the same rule has to be followed, don't rudely bother it, it won't rudely rot your insides out

As for the local impact on the many drekir cultures it has interacted with

1st generation drekir in most cases generally only had to make the mistake of yelping in fear at Rilïm to learn why you don't bark at Rilïm or try to worship it. It doesn't want that and will let you know very quickly about it.

But having to live in a place with it tends to be, while inconvenient, very workable and most drekir communities learn and teach the proper series of actions pragmatically. If Rilïm is seen, keep it low, keep it down and leave, its not unforgiving

A lot of the peoples of this region of the DragonScape associate it with, very understandably, as some sort of death god which. Yeah fair!


The Blaclaw see it as something of a soul harvester, the one who takes the souls of the dead into their view of the afterlife which they refer to as the Yanyalln which mostly just ascribes Rilïm as something of a "ferryman" in a sense

The Preachers see it as a Judge, associating its manifestation as a case of that dead creature or person having a bit more scrutiny applied to them at the gates of the higher rings of heaven. Its for reasons like this that they go through their snake rituals in order to try and cleanse souls of prior sin.

Usually if Rilïm is comin on someone the hope is that they see all the sins that person had done but, that that had done their snake whispering and would be free to travel away to heaven. While its impossible to say what the result of that judgement was, interrupting it is a one way trip out of heaven.

The Jacka Associate it with a host of different demons and monsters in their cosmology, as one of the more powerful ones. They associate it with a prepulse human at first, arguing that they were turned to drekir but this being was ravenous and cursed to devour rot forever. And they see it as a demon or monster to be avoided. Often covering the deceased with totems and charms as means of keeping it away, as well as by burning the dead as soon as possible with fragrant woods and flowers

amongst other practices of other cultures

As for the human colonial efforts that fell apart in the region in the 2060s, attempts by the African Union to settle the region were met with very gruesome ends to the humans and colonial drekir who did not at all respect Rilïms simple implied request.

during the aftermath of Jallhers stand 30 years after that, Rilïm began to mainfest across the Center of the Americas targeting outposts and erasing them from the map, leaving nothing other than a gruesome compost

So yeah, Rilïm!

Just let them do their thing and you will be A OK!