Alluvion

Alluvion is a character in The Wretched Rite.

Biography:
Humans create many Gods and Legends, they are very good at it. Almost every culture has at some point seen something they cannot explain, given it a name and then prayed to it for assistance and for some beings human prayers can be powerful indeed. Drawn by the lure of belief, ethereal creatures from other planes feed themselves on the psychic emanations and in doing so gain the form and (eventually) powers that are attributed to them. A well-fed God can call storms, smite unbelievers or just protect lonely shepherds on hills, its personality shaped by how people think it is supposed to act.

Of course in this day of science and skepticism there's a lot fewer prayers to go around and many of the big old gods are dying off, but not all gods feed off humans. While a spirit will do very well for itself with a handful of human followers, people are fickle and these spirits tend to be very short lived. Every unanswered prayer creates doubt and deprived of the extremely potent belief of humans that it has become accustomed to the metaphysical creature will quickly find itself without sustenance.

While humans undoubtedly create the most variety and most poweful spirits, hundreds of years of the wordless desires of fish will eventually form itself themselves a god too.

Alluvion is the anthropomorphic personification of a freshwater river somewhere deep in an isolated valley on Earth. Forming very slowly over millions of years from a mind little better than a fish itself to a conciousness at about the level of a human being from the steady flow of tiny desires from the fish, plants and crabs living in his ecosystem, he spends most of his days watching over these tiny animals and gaining sustenance by answering their prayers, creating a sudden sourceless splash to distract a hunting bird and allow its prey to escape or shifting a rock to hide a batch of freshly laid eggs from prying eyes in mating season as well as protecting it from invaders such as a group of beavers trying to assemble a dam upstream and cut off the flow of water.

The inhabitants of the tiny river are unlikely to mourn or even notice his disappearance, while fish are smarter than they might appear they are unlikely to note a sudden downturn of their collective luck. Alluvion on the other hand will miss them dearly as his only friends and the only other living creatures he has ever known.

If they are not reunited within the space of a couple of years he will gradually lose his physical form and starve to death.

Description:
Alluvion manifests as a column of flowing water expanding upwards from a sourceless puddle and bent into a vaguely serpentine S shape. He has one glowing yellow eye on either side of his head and no obvious mouth. A single row of spines move along his spine, emerging from the puddle at his base and flowing upwards until they hit where the back of his skull would be if he had one, where they sink back into the liquid and re-emerge where they started.

His arms are long and, when at rest, are usually dragged along the ground at his sides by their knuckles. Each hand has only three fingers joined by webbing which makes them all but useless for grasping or manipulating objects.

He usually stands at about the height of a grown man but this very vague measurement is all that is possible because his size fluctuates wildly depending on the time of day and temperature, appearing smaller during the day and when it is warmer and larger during night time and periods of coldness. In exceptionally hot climates he can shrink to about four foot, while in much colder areas he can rise to a maximum of nine.

Water constantly drips off him onto the floor, but vanishes into thin air mere seconds after detaching from his main body.

As he is the embodiment of a river that is situated in a valley far removed from any form of human habitation he is largely unaware of any aspects of human culture or civilisation, apart from a vague knowledge of their existence gleaned from other connected water sources, in fact he knows very little about anything that doesn't concern the flora and fauna that inhabit the ecosystem he embodies, though he is very inquisitive and (not usually having much else to do at home) will thoroughly investigate any new object or being that he encounters.

His personality is very much like that of a young child, generally benevolent and fond of plants and animals but with a tendency to cause large amounts of damage to his surroundings through simple ignorance and an undeveloped sense of right and wrong. He expresses a strong distaste for any violence that does not serve an obvious purpose and also dislikes seeing still water contained in any kind of object (though pipes are apparently ok as he regards them as like subterranean rivers) as well as open flames and salt.

Weapons/Abilities:
Alluvion is (sort of obviously) made of water which lends him a whole range of advantages and disadvantages. His fluid form makes it hard for physical weaponry to make much of a dent in him unless it is backed by extreme enough force to seperate large quantities of water from his body, orphaned droplets simply vanishing into thin air as soon as they hit the ground. He naturally regenerates water over time from the puddle at his base but this is too slow a process to quickly heal any losses above his natural evaporation and constant dripping. Very high temperatures can hurt him in the same way by either speeding up the evaporation process and slowly shrinking him to nothing or simply turning large parts of him directly into steam.

His resistance to physical blows also makes it much more difficult for him to manipulate objects. Things that he picks up generally fall through his clumsy fingers and then are actually held inside his palm by means of a kind of liquid suction. This understandably damages or melts electronics, food or other items that dislike being filled with liquid very quickly and means he takes a substantially longer time than most people to perform simple tasks such as operating door handles.

While he grows in cold temperatures, extreme cold does make him much more sluggish though he is incapable of freezing completely.

Alluvion can naturally sense the feelings and intentions of nearby wildlife and though the effect is greatly diminished on sentient beings he can generally gauge their current dominant emotion if he concentrates. He can also speak to and recieve responses from any other body of water, though whether they will be cooperative is another matter.