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This is the story of how one of the most powerful warriors of all the planes ceased to be Kresh, The Blood Braided, and became Kresh, Guru of Entropy, Also known as "Kresh, the (en)Tropic Storm".
Open the accordions to see images that go with each part of the story as the tale explains this deck through metaphor.
When young and unwise, Kresh was obsessed with order. It wasn’t power through the death of other creatures that he sought, though onlookers would believe this to be the case. It was the unification of strength, the focus of energy, the oneness of the planes.
In his immaturity he believed this to be the single most important thing and, that there was only one means of achieving this end: unbridled growth through the vehicle that was himself, through his ability to consume and organize energy and power within. However, truth always prevails in the end.
Kresh's obsession with order and growth meant that whenever Kresh would meet his match, he would fall. He would fall far and hard, with an impact that would leave him starting again from square one.
Systems are an eb and flow from order, into chaos, and back out. Entropy is this breakdown, this dispersal of energy into chaos and complexity that can one day again become ordered, unified and simplified.
The universe and all open systems within it are constantly increasing in entropy. The true acceptance of this allows one to transcend, become the full beneficiary of, and one with, chaos and order. These truth's were beyond Kresh, however.
Kresh grew consuming chaos of the worlds through battling their planeswalker mages, absorbing whatever they threw at him, breaking it all down reorganizing its energy to turn it into his strength, which they rarely could withstand.
As he aged, moving from plane to plane and winning many great battles, a pattern began to emerge. He found that while order was achieved directly around him, chaos would always be waiting ahead of him, or inevitably emerge behind. This left him feeling defeated, even in his victories. And his loses had an even greater impact on him. How could he win against the all pervasive chaos?
Then, after a great battle, solitary and walking days deep in a forest on a world he had just liberated, Kresh came upon something that would change how he lived and died. In a small opening in the trees, on the forest floor lay something of pure wonder.
There lay a unicorn, an animal great even in the eyes of this bloody warrior who had seen worlds upon worlds and fought the most fantastic beasts. Great, not in size, but in the presence it held.
It looked almost asleep. Kresh, however, was no stranger to the smell, the sound, the feel of death, and he knew in the first moment witnessing it that it no longer lived. But death was not the only presence.
Growing from the freshly rotting body of the unicorn was a young tree.
He stood quietly, small amongst the great trees of the forest and observant of this extraordinary event.
What could be surprising is that it wasn't the dead unicorn that held his mind in awe, his body in stasis. Nor was it the tree already growing from this freshly dead animal, but the many fruit it bore. Completely motionless, he gazed on, his thoughts as still as the leaves in the windless forest around him. Still as the grass and clover around his feet. Still as the body of the mythical and rare animal in front of him, the tree growing from it with the many seed bearing fruit. He stared intently at the death which gave life, which gave promise of so much more life. He stood in trance. Frozen in time.
All was still. Until there was movement.
With a response quick as a warrior's would be, his eyes shifted to catch the source of the motion under the roots of the tree that grew from the belly of the dead unicorn. A hundreds maggots were beginning to consume its flesh. They were feeding, writhing, growing as he watched.
Then there was something else.
Along the edges of its body, everywhere it met the ground, white mushrooms pushed outward, growing while he looked onward. The fruiting bodies were moving and shifting as their mycelium reached into and fed on the body from underneath, through its contact with the earth. He just watched, his mind a blank page while this wonder of nature wrote a new story within him.
And soon after, as he looked on, wonder breaking through his hardened being, even more life began to emerge from this death. The body of the unicorn as well as the forest floor around it became a sea of movement. Small creatures began to emerge from the depths of the forest. Insects, rodents, birds, and beasts even larger. They fed on the maggots, the fungus, the fruit and even the body of the unicorn, which soon became a carcass.
Rather than feeling any emotion seeing what was once an aesthetically picturesque scene become ravaged and broken down into chaos, and disorder—something he had detested his whole life—Kresh stood in rapture. In awe. As this once great animal—a pure representative of order and all that he had stood for up until this moment—was broken apart, feeding thousands of small life forms, a great realization formed and grew in his mind.
A new understanding of life as he new it rapidly took shape. As quickly as the body of the unicorn transformed from a unified form into a broken down abundance of new life, his paradigm shifted from a place where chaos and order, complexity and simplicity, were at odds and doomed to fight in eternal conflict, to one where they were fused into a single, powerful and balanced whole.
In this moment, Kresh, the blood braided—the warrior of order, of syntropy—embraced chaos becoming one with entropy.
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A new being, transformed as the unicorn, he turned and began the long walk out of the woods. As he took his slow and deliberate strides, his hand, on its own accord, undid the belt that held Mage Slayer sheathed at his side and, dropped it. He didn't miss a step or question this voluntary movement. It made complete sense. With his new understanding of a greater whole where chaos and order were harmonized, something told him he wouldn't need it in the battles to come. _It could serve no one_, he thought.
This, however, was not completely true.
Within moments, a sudden fury of noise behind brought him to a stop and he turned to witness its source. He stared with surprise at what he saw, then with a cool acceptance as his his long time ally—his sword—was broken down by his new found teacher—Entropy—in the form of one hundred thousand small plant creatures.
The years of power stored in Mage Slayer—this tool that slew so many planeswalkers—now broke down into fragments of new life, surging in its waves of motion, and new power.
Through observing this occurring with something that had been such a part of him, his newly formed comprehension became strengthened, looming in his consciousness as large and as solidified as a mountain. When both chaos and order were at One, he saw, nothing was ever lost but changed form through its breakdown. And so, the gift he was given for enveloping power and energy inside himself could in fact be re-given, to the diversity and complexity of life, outside himself. And with this thought, the idea of **_self_** no longer had meaning for Kresh. He fed, and so he would then feed that which he could then again be fed by. Nature is regenerative and, through the breakdown of one thing far greater things could form.
So, in this moment Kresh ceased to be mentored by Entropy, but became the master. He ceased to exist as a warrior of sword and strength, and he became:
Harnessing the breakdown of life into new life to passively damage his opposition
Able to defeat his foes without one swing of the sword, he became at once nature's tool and nature's master; Kresh, Guru of Entropy.
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