These are 2 example Awakenings to the Thyrsus path
Shamans don’t just crawl before they walk. They fall before they crawl, from the narrow beam of the axis mundi. They can slip over to either side or both at the same time.
Living things grow vast, so that a Thyrsus’ heart feels like the monster at the heart of an arterial maze. Spirits babble and strike him the moment they know they can reach him.
He doesn’t need to be near nature. Even concrete whispers. His office sits in an Art Deco masterpiece, so it sings while he works as an architect. He writes it off to inspiration or the rats — the building’s 85 years old, so generations have bred in the walls, becoming a subspecies unto themselves.
Nothing helps him work like his office, his soul’s womb. He sleeps better in there on his cot than in his apartment.
She’s a naturalist, counting snakes and frogs in the field. She maps watersheds. For her, life is a vast library of cross-referenced predator and prey, catalogued by aquifer. Recording what she sees starts to seem redundant. The information’s there for anyone to see. They just need to get a little muddy. If they won’t do it, they don’t deserve to know
First they babble, then they scream.
He stops sleeping at home. He’s a permanent resident of his office; now the rats don’t fear him when he walks the halls or examines copper and tin details on the roof. Sometimes the rats lead him to where he needs to go, to shapes and patterns that inspire entire cityscapes.
He designs ever-stranger buildings, but he stopped taking contracts months (years?) ago. Rats and work and food are all he needs. The last part’s a chore, but the rats will provide. He found a forgotten greenhouse with edible plants, and caught and ate a rat — it told him to in its high-pitched, raspy voice.
She walks into the woods with a week of food, figuring she’ll head back to town for supplies. That never happens; she forages and eats the frogs she used to count for a living. The wilderness spreads beyond every step. It simplifies her, removing human artifice. The swamp ruins her clothes.
Someone steals her car. A storm takes her tent. It leaves her naked, but still human — more human because she experiences night chills, hunger, and exhaustion like she’s never felt before. But sun and cleansing rain please her as nothing ever has, and she experiences the ecstasy of survival.
They stand on the edge of the Primal Wild.
They’ve started listening to the Singing Stone, but it’s time for them to plunge in and return.
One day he looks out the window and sees his cityscape, covered in moss and vines, filled with rats as big as men and women.
She walks away from a wave of cold onto a path crushed by the huge hooves of extinct megafauna. She crawls out of the woods onto bare rock. A megalocerous freezes — it sees its predator.
The rats crown him with a copper circlet, covered in flowers. He eats their raw children: their sacrifices. He smears a sigil of rule in their blood. She runs down the beast, stronger and faster than any human, but claims humanity from the bones she turns to spears and the hide that fashions clothes and shelter.
Her name is the chop marks of her stone hand-axe on prey bones. They return to the world, but never truly leave the Primal Wild. He’ll always be the Rat King. She’ll always know the secrets of the forest.