Pakaru

Pakaru is multifaceted. It is the structure that urges life to survive; it is the ruler of the Southwestern Forest, and it is the patron of the Kuro faith.

Pakaru is considered timeless: its origin is completely untraceable in time. It has existed and always will exist in some conceptual form—it shall always survive. In this respect, it seems vital for our survival. We must learn to trust it, and yet it finds every way to flout our attempts at categorisation: to our most ambitious researchers, it denies any appearance; to our most desperate victims it will offer them every possible aid, bringing them under its shelter, protecting its children.

Appearance

Pakaru’s appearance is malleable. It creates facsimiles of its audience. While it can approximate form with ease, it always manifests with the same materials: red tissues, more saturated than the most blood-soaked muscle; bone and chitin, dry and shining in the sun; deep, black eyes; fibrous gills; and thick mycelium forming fingers, toes, and strands of hair. It lacks skin, intensely displaying its frame of muscle and viscera in any form it takes. Its voice is resonant and warm. It likes to be tall, but not domineering.

Despite its appearance, it fits in amongst the streets with ease. It blends into the crowd in some anomalous way: visible enough to stand out, yet never really the focus of the area, never drawing attention to itself.

Its abundance

Pakaru is omnipresent: it is a life-giver in the most literal sense, found both as a component of life within Fracture—equal to our own cells—and in concentrated flora and fauna. Redflowers, for example, have intense rejuvenating essence that Vampires require as part of their diet.

Its sentience

At its core, Pakaru is playful. It takes whichever form it pleases, mimicking its audience, coalesced in a red concoction of tissue and muscle and bone and keratin. It is not life, yet it takes our constituent parts and forms what it believes to be an appropriate visage.

It communicates across its unending network—in which we believe there to be one eternal voice—its simple creed: ensure Life survives. Do not mistake this as a call for pacifism: Pakaru can and is violent when necessary, but in defence of the sanctity of life. It embraces the variation of organic creatures—how we change on any timeframe, in every context, as cells of the organic experiment. To Pakaru, we are both the fruits of its labour, its progeny, and proof that its experiment prevails.

Yet, even as mere cells to a larger creation it maintains, Pakaru takes immense interest in our lives. It preserves as many plants as it can in the Southwestern Forest, walks the market streets of Santarri, and speaks fondly of its tales in other Fractures.

Its patronage

Pakaru serves as the patron of the Kuro faith, created in its honour. Labelled a deity of survival, those that follow it see life in the same way as their deity: individuals as part of a larger organism, constantly diverging in small ways to find the optimal more sustainable life-paths. Pakaru is their protector and oracle in these lifelong experiments.

For the Coraxi, Pakaru is much less revered: it is their creator in some ways, their contemporary in others, but nevertheless a respected equal. Since their return in 6225, they have kept themselves more independent of their old patron.

History

Although keen to share its storied “life”¹, Pakaru’s speech is almost incomprehensible at times. What we know of its experiences seem inconsistent with other accounts, and yet it is earnest and keen and intentional when asked for advice. Take heed that the following may not be accurate.

Pakaru has no knowledge of how or when it was created. Its earliest memories always succeed The Great Split, where it immediately tried to help the “new species” survive. Several centuries later, as its augmented species, the Coraxi, were at the edge of extinction, it intervened and rescued Naira, the Chimæra.²

Since the Unbinding’s end, Pakaru cultivated the Southwestern Forest, an off-limits zone said to hold intense biodiversity. The Kuro have set up small encampments around its border to prevent any entry.

The Nullspace Kingdom

While the above is consistent with our history, many of its stories are not. Pakaru has occasionally mentioned The Nullspace Kingdom, of which it was the “third Prince”. With regret, it laments how ambition does not beget benevolence.

Likewise, it talks of working alongside Airve Snowblood—with whom its first correspondence is dated alongside the introduction of the IFM to the Sanctuary—as if the two were lifelong teammates. When speaking of Airve, it is reverent, charmed, yet equally apologetic—it believes it holds an unpayable debt to the elf. Whatever relation it has to the Sanctuary is far deeper than can be understood.³

It has occasionally mentioned Iterations, but refuses to elaborate.