DIOGENI

In the land of Tellice, nature breathes. It ebbs and flows, chaos rules as animals hunt each other for survival in the brutal cycle of life.

However, at one point humans grew to a point above the chaos and established their order, their rules and their cultures under the direction of Laus and Sors, the great Diogeni. 
For a long time they remembered what it meant to work with the land, but over time, they took resources without giving anything in return and the cycle of nature weakened.

 

Eventually humans found uses for deistones, taking power directly from nature itself, using it to create spells and forging it into corrupted constructs, movement without life, shells of energy performing tasks for the whims of man.

 

As deistones are taken from the land, the area around it dies, soil becomes infertile, plants blacken and die, and the deistream can no longer pass through the area.

As the deistream is forced out of some areas large flows of it overwhelm another, and if an animal happens to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time a surge can pass through it, empowering it and forcing it to change. It grows sentient, it's muscles grow, it becomes capable of speech and other great feats, and it becomes attuned to the flow of the deistream.

As their minds grow stronger they find they can dominate the weaker minds around them, they can manipulate nature and the flow of the chaos and bend it to their will. They become champions of nature. They are the Diogeni.

 

Stories of their origin often tell that they are guardians of that which is good, that they are noble defenders of the land, but each of them has their own choices to make. Most do choose to defend the homes that gave them power, others find their own goals in life.

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They can communicate with each other via birds and sometimes through the deistream itself if they are like-minded. However, their power over the deistream weakens for every other Diogeni in their region and so they tend to stay as far apart from each other as they can.